Ever since signing up for Legends of Zork, the sort-of free (unless you want to blow a huge wad on micro-transactions) browser “RPG” for a two-day test drive, I continue to get e-mail reports on how my main character is doing. I guess before I stopped logging in, I flagged her for grouping, so now the game automatically puts me into a group every day, where she goes on statistically-generated adventures, gathering loot and advancing in levels, all without a shred of my input.
This is fun… how?
That got me thinking of another ultra-casual RPG that I tried out a couple months ago, Facebook’s D&D Tiny Adventures. On the surface, it’s a genius idea, to allow players to advance through classic D&D modules in a real-time format. Except that, other than equipping your character with gear and choosing the quest, you have absolutely no input on the gameplay. It just… plays itself. I could only do that for a week or so, half-heartedly logging back in to see if my Pally died or not, and having no feelings on the matter either way.
Rog wrote a short article I completely agree with: “Poor Challenge = Poor Gameplay”. In it, he pinpoints a major flaw of the current trend of games getting easier and more casual. Examples like I stated above might even be termed “ultra-casual”, where you don’t necessarily have to be in the same room with the game in order to progress. Is that the future of gaming? Gah, I hope not.
I cut my teeth in gaming on the Atari 2600, whose games all had the same nihilistic maxim — you play until you inevitably die. Few games had win conditions, they just got more and more difficult until your hands cramped in agony and the TV laughed at you. Most of these games were casual in the respect of the learning curve; when all you have is a joystick and one button, how complex is it going to be? Anyone could pick up one of these games and get the gist of it within seconds, but mastering some of the titles (or at least, getting good enough to last for lengthy periods of time) took quite a while. It was casual to pick up, but the games’ designers certainly started piling up barriers of challenge as you played, to the point where it pressed you to try hard and overcome serious obstacles. A gaming curve, if you will.
My philosophy of games that appeal to me haven’t changed since then, really. I hate playing games that make me feel stupid trying to learn their overly complex nature (Eve Online, for example) — I want to start playing a title and get the gist of it within minutes, if that. The barrier of entry should be low, friendly and welcoming. But after a while, I do need challenges. I need the developers to ramp up the difficulty, to push my skills in overcoming obstacles, and if that means eventually coming to a point where I can no longer progress because I’m not good enough, then I’ll live with it. I don’t need a game that plays itself, I need a game that plays me.
I can’t imagine how hard it is for MMO devs to work on the difficulty curve of their games, because each player is a unique variable. Some aren’t going to learn squat and will only use auto-attack up to max level; some will write their doctoral thesis on the raiding end game. You don’t want to alienate either by making it too hard or too easy, since that loses subscription dollars, so you make a little end game for column A, a little for B, for C and so on. I wasn’t always pleased I never saw some of the highest raiding content in WoW, just to see it, but I was okay with the fact that it was there above me — at least there was the feeling that I hadn’t “done it all”, that the game had a few challenges left in store.
It is disturbing to consider if devs just give up on making games difficult at all, figure all we instant-coffee society consumers want and demand is for our characters to get virtually strong by doing the least amount of effort available, and make titles that reward us for overcoming nothing.
Indeed. The problem is that we often get piss easy and unchallenging gameplay to cater to the very lowest common denominator of player skill.
Their only solution seems to be to add a hard or heroic mode, that soon everyone and his daughter plays or has to play, as everything else is meaningless, no loot, no challenge, basically nothing.
Increasingly different level design that learnt players new tricks and tactics were once a cornerstone of game design.
Nowadays we have piss easy MMOs that often have players who got along brainlessly suddenly hit a very solid brick wall, that of a modest challenge that they did not encounter before.
Gameplay suffers from this, whole areas are repetitive and boring to play.
I also do not consider the optional achievements for doing a raid encounter in WoW in this or that way to be good game design or the solution to please everyone, it is clumsy and uninspiring.
Is the problem that tiny adventures is easy, that it’s random, or that there’s so little interaction, do you think? (I think it’s all three, but it’s the lack of interaction that makes it boring, not the lack of difficulty.)
I remember seeing someone say once that players didn’t want real difficulty — it’s frustrating to be stuck on a game and unable to advance, especially an MMO — what they wanted was the illusion of difficulty.
I’m not sure about that, really.
Personally I’m wondering if the MMO fad is over and all the shift to casual stuff is just trying to keep the numbers up. I mean, WoW made its first 10 million subs off of being pretty challenging. It made its last 1 million off of being easy. What explains such a major shift in strategy?
That’s one thing that people have never discussed— what if MMOs, WoW in particular, is a bubble waiting to get popped? If this stage of mass ennui is just a precursor to MMOs shrinking down to its natural base (nerds with a lot of time on their hands and obsessive tendencies).
@ spinks: I’d say it’s the lack of interaction that troubles me most. The game isn’t easy in one sense… there’s a large random element and it’s easy to fail encounters or (less easy but still possible to fail) whole adventures. The game’s biggest weakness in my view is the paucity of gameplay options – there aren’t many interesting choices for the player to make.
@ Toxic: The subscription numbers don’t support your hypothesis; MMOs are more popular today than they have ever been. There’s no evidence that MMOs are a bubble waiting to be popped – just an industry caught in an early design rut wherein most companies are trying to replicate the wild success of a single example of the genre.
Foolsage: Housing prices were the highest they’ve ever been before they weren’t anymore. Probably you are right, but given the relative lack of real data, and the difficulty sorting it in a useful way if we did have it, means raw sub numbers aren’t much proof one way or another.
We say 11 million subscribers, but we know that the majority of WoW players are Chinese guys who pay by the hour. There’s maybe 5 million accounts in the Western World paying monthly.
And then how many of those 5 million are gold farmers?
How many of those 5 million are duplicate accounts owned by one person?
But I’m getting sidetracked.
Point is, I think its fairly reasonable to take these efforts to make the game more palatable to more people as evidence that there is a great deal of worry in the industry about how to retain customers that are getting antsy. This is not the behavior of people who are seeing hordes of new players coming into the game. And apparently “better content” was not the solution they arrived at.
Tiny Adventures does have some more personal interaction once you get to generation 6 (yeah, lots of time investment). You can then select when to use your special ability, some of which have benefits that you’d miss if used right away at the beginning of an adventure (such as removing a stat penalty).
At level 10 in Tiny Adventures, you unlock your second class power, by the way. That adds yet a bit more interaction. It’s also worth noting that you can set up potions to be used automatically, but you can also use them manually during adventures, so that’s a bit more interaction there. Overall though there’s little to do, and the player has minimal control over the character.
Erm, that’s generation 10, not level 10. Oh, and the first class power comes at generation 3, not generation 6.
To me it sounds like questioning action movies for not having a deep interesting plot.
Entertainment does not always come from challenges or difficulty, it really bears consideration from a business perspective.
Gonna pull a cop-out here and say games need to be both easy and challenging at the same time.
When first starting the game, and for all the major parts of the game, it should be fairly easy so the gamer isn’t discouraged and actually feels like they get to participate in most areas of the game (being excluded from a part of something you’re paying for due to difficulty, or because you haven’t found a warded piece of gear that only drops randomly, is pretty lame).
However, there should be aspects of the game that are incredibly difficult and really challenge players, both individually and as groups, not only to cater to the hardcore players but to actually have some sort of achievement in the game that is unique to those willing to really put forth the effort of accomplishing them.
@Radishlaw: Then it should be called what it is, electronic entertainment or whatever.
It’s not a game if it does not present a challenge.