Changes part 4: Gameplay

At first glance the gameplay of a typical MMORPG, from Everquest in 1999 to World of Warcraft in 2006 hasn't changed much. It still follows the same basic rules that are so brilliantly parodied in Progressquest: You go out, slay monsters, find loot, come back to the city to sell the loot and buy things, go out and slay more monsters, level up, see new zones and new monsters, and get ever more powerful. But what has changed a lot since then is amount of direction the game is likely to give you, and the degree of freedom you have to tackle challenges.

Gameplay in Everquest was based generally on social aspects. The game didn't tell you where to go next, you had to get this information from other players. Once you arrived at a new place, you had to group with other players to beat monsters. Soloing was not an option, because once you passed the lowest levels, the lowest level monster that would still give any experience points to you would be too hard to kill solo, unless you had chosen one of a few special "solo-enabled" classes, like druid or necromancer. This game design was voluntary, a philosophy called "The Vision", that massively multiplayer games had to make people play together, whether they wanted or not.

Surprisingly that turned out to be highly unpopular with the majority of players. People did not want to have to rely on other players to get information about the game, and to gain experience. The information part was quickly outsourced to websites, where you could look up the information you wanted, instead of having to appear like a n00b when asking other players in-game. On forced grouping not much could be done, but the few solo-enabled classes were more popular and numerous than any group-reliant class.

World of Warcraft revolutionized the genre by adding a quest system that was designed to guide players through the game without them having to ask other players for advice on where to go next. Previously quests had be an optional extra, minor tasks with minor rewards you could do or leave as you wanted. In WoW the quest system is the heart of the gameplay. It not only directs you into the different interesting corners of the zone you are in, thus dispersing the player population over a wide area, but it also sends you on to the next zone once you have outleveled the zone you are in. Information given about the quest has become a lot more precise, and you can actually solve most quests just with the information given. That hasn't prevented players too lazy to do minor searching in the game from frequenting third-party websites like Thottbot with spoiler information, but these sites aren't strictly necessary any more.

At the same time World of Warcraft and many other modern games abandoned the concept of forced grouping. WoW has gone further than most other games, in making it possible for a player to solo all the way up to the level cap in a time which isn't any longer than if the player was playing in groups. There is still "group only" content, elite quests and instanced dungeons, but they are optional, and clearly labeled. If you want, you can group, and you are rewarded with better items than you could gain soloing. But if you don't want, you can still reach level 60. *At* level 60 you're pretty much lost if you don't want to group with other players, but the fabled "end game" is in fact only a minor part of the content created for World of Warcraft, and you can always make a new character and solo the leveling game again.

There is no doubt that the ability to solo a MMORPG is here to stay, even if it seems counterintuitive to the massively multiplayer concept. Recent games that were not quite so successful, and that had not quite enough solo content, quickly retracted from their position and all promised to offer more solo content due to market pressure. No game yet has dared to eliminate groups and raids altogether, and I don't think that would be a good idea. People enjoy the freedom of choice, the option to play in different modes, depending on their available time and social mood.

The advantages of giving players more information inside the game aren't quite as recognized. The WoW quest system, while widely admired, is pretty unique, and the secret of its success not well understood. Even in WoW you don't get all the information you need about the game in the game. If you are looking for a specific sword or other piece of equipment, you still need to consult other players or third-party websites. There is no "sage" NPC you could ask for advice in the game. But that is something which might well arrive in the future of MMORPGs.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:19 AM Permanent Link