How Hard Is Too Hard?

I really don't have anything much to talk about today, or nothing most people reading are likely to be interested in, anyway. More like actively annoyed by, I would guess. I left a comment on one of Tipa's posts the other day, to the effect that I'd rather write about AI than gaming most days and I'll add now that I'd rather write about music than either.

When I do write about games here, which I think is still easily the majority of the time, it tends not to be about MMORPGs. Belghast has a thought piece up today that goes some way towards explaining why that might be. 

The idea that MMO developers pay too much attention to the hardcore is far from new, of course. I remember discussions and arguments about it often on blogs like Spouse Aggro and Hardcore Casual, well before I had a blog of my own and I've been blogging since 2011. 

Has it gotten worse, I wonder? I'm not sure. It's easy to forget the pattern of these things.

There was a long period, measured in years, when there seemed to be more complaints within the blogosphere about MMORPGs getting easier than the other way around. The hardcore perspective back then seemed to be that they were fighting a mostly-losing battle against the dumbing-down of the genre, with filthy casuals swarming over the battlements to parade up and down the castle walls, showing off their vanity pets and fancy mounts, rather than learning their rotations and parsing their DPS like real players should.

All of that got muddled up with the Free-to-Play revolution, too, the theory being that if you let anyone in without proving they owned a credit card and were willing to use it, the whole thing would fall apart. Of course, at the same time, the exact same people were complaining bitterly that the F2P hordes were all-too-willing to whip out their credit cards to buy power and advantage in the cash shop...

None of it made much sense then and it makes even less with the benefit of hindsight. But of course, we all see things through our own lens or from the inside of our own silos. Assuming you can see anything out of a silo, that is, which would, were it true, break the metaphor.

Scopique points out in the comment thread to Belghast's post that "there’s the potential that such not-so-hardcore MMOs exist, but they aren’t on your radar for one reason or another". This is a very valid observation, one made all too rarely in my opinion, as we all tend to write as though our experience is somehow universal, something of which I'm as guilty as anyone.

Kay of Kay Talks Games, another blog I believe I picked up in last year's Blaugust (Or possibly an earlier one...) and still read with enjoyment, even though I rarely find cause to mention it here, wrote a very good piece about the problem a while ago. I've been meaning to say something about it ever since but haven't found the opportunity until today

The post is called Gaming Bubbles, which is self-explanatory and I found it particularly interesting since it comes from someone who knows of the genre but generally doesn't play many MMORPGs. I found it particularly telling that she says, of Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, "Those games have accumulated 26 million and 23 million players, respectively, yet I never really hear about them online unless it’s someone bringing up how disastrous the Fallout 76 launch was."

It's all too easy to assume everyone else is talking abut the same issues we focus on but it's long been my impression that, in what we loosely and not entirely accurately call "the West", very few self-identifying gamers would be able to name more than a handful of MMORPGs, let alone claim to have played any of them. (And if they had, it would inevitably be World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.)

If you cast the net outside the self-proclaimed "gaming community", I'd bet the question would be met with a blank stare. Both the movie and the infamous South Park episode were so long ago now, I doubt many non-gamers remember WoW exists.

In that context, whether the developers' assumed focus on the hardcore part of the audience is misguided or merely an act of increasingly desperate self-preservation becomes much harder to judge. It's very tempting to think that, were the barriers to entry lowered and the obsession with endgame abandoned, currently uninterested casual gamers would come flocking in but I suspect the result might be somewhat less heart-warming. Or commercially desirable.

There might be little or no increase in interest from the casuals but some of the disgruntled hardcore might leave. Probably for one of the gazillion games that likes to describe itself as "Souls-like". The success of Dark Souls certainly added some fuel to the hardcore argument that everyone wants challenging content as well as giving those who actually do somewhere to go to find it.

One MMORPG company that gets - often grudging - approval these days for being able to hold and serve an audience is Daybreak, particularly in relation to EverQuest, which is still objectively successful, albeit on a small scale, after more than a quarter of a century. It's also frequently cited as a benchmark for difficulty in the genre, even if it isn't anything like as difficult as it once was. 

I don't play much EQ these days but I do play EverQuest II and there you can see the devs trying to balance on a slack rope over a ravine as they attempt to appease the voluble and volatile hardcore, the people who presumably pay most of their bills, while trying to ameliorate the situation for the softer-core crafters, decorators and general casuals, who pay the rest. With the game almost certainly teetering on a financial knife-edge, they really can't afford to piss off any significant demographic to the point where money stops changing hands.

To a greater or lesser extent, I imagine many MMO companies are in similar situations. That explains some of the decision-making, although I also think that game devs en masse are almost bound to be more hardcore than the overwhelming majority of their potential customers. It would be hard for them not to be, really. Wilhelm makes that point in some detail in Bel's comment thread.

And, as has been demonstrated countless times, developers think the broad mass of players in their games are going to find content easier than they do. Also proved by experience is the way the cutting edge of the playerbase will always either find new content too easy or work out some way to trivialize it the developers never imagined.

As Muspel says in the same thread, multiple difficulty settings are always an option. EQII has done a great job of that by literally making every new dungeon come in several flavors, with the same content available for solo and two grades of group, if not raids too. 

That's a welcome approach that I certainly appreciate but it does tend to push players even deeper into their own, ever smaller silos. While it's true that every motorist is also a pedestrian, it's not always true that every raider is a soloist, so not everyone is going to appreciate the effort that's been made to satisfy all tastes.

I don't have a solution for any of this. I don't think anyone does. If they did, they'd presumably be running the biggest, most popular MMORPG out there right now. 

And maybe they are, at that. Looping back to the idea that we don't really look far outside our own comfort zones, I'm occasionally reminded that almost no-one I read ever blogs about some of the biggest MMOs, like Old School Runescape or whichever version of Lineage is in favor these days. For all I know, someone in one of those may be thinking of all of this as a solved problem already.

I kind of doubt it, though. I suspect it falls under the rubric “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Abraham Lincoln used to get the credit for saying that, which would mean the problem has been around for quite a while, but these days it seems to be accepted that it was first said by John Lydgate, who died in 1451, so we've known about it for a lot longer.

And I fear we're probably stuck with it.

Here's One I Didn't Make Earlier : EQ2, EverQuest

Just when I thought I was almost ready for the arrival of Kunark Ascending Niami Denmother popped up a "quick warning" that the crafting questline in the forthcoming expansion presupposes you will have completed the erstwhile "crafter's epic", Earring of the Solstice.

This celebrated and somewhat feared quest was added to the game back in February 2008 and I can't say with any certainty whether I ever did it or not. You'd think with it being such a landmark in any EQ2 player's crafting career that I'd know but after all this time it's all a bit muddled and for good reason.

The EQ2 Solstice Earring was created as a call-back to the original EverQuest crafting "epic", the magnificently-named "Protection of the Cabbage". I very definitely did that one, which didn't in fact require any crafting at all, or at least not by the player who completed it, since every one of the nine required components is tradeable. I bought all of mine apart from the ones Mrs Bhagpuss made for me.

When the quest was re-imagined for EQ2 that shortcut was partially removed. All of the equivalent items are No Trade. Since any character in EQ2 can max out only a single tradeskill that would appear to make the quest an impossibility to complete, which is where the Commission System comes in.

Everything happens at once!

The Commission System allows a crafter to make an item and have it deposited on creation directly into the inventory of another player. You both have to be in the same virtual physical space, standing next to each other, with a UI window open between you. It's the very essence of MMO gameplay, condensed down to a mechanic.

When EQ2 was a busier game than it is today it was commonplace to hear people asking  on the trading or crafting or auction channels for crafters willing to make some (or often nearly all) of the required items "on commission". My Berserker, who has also always been a max-level Weaponsmith, has taken the Bell to Mara a few times in order to knock up a quick Mistletoe Cutting Sickle for someone.

I've also helped Mrs Bhagpuss get the earring on more than one character and helped guildmates to do the same, back in the day when there were other people in our guild who still played. Consequently I'm really not sure whether I ever did the whole thing myself or not. (Edit: I checked; I didn't.)

Spoiler Alert - The Necro didn't do it.

If I did, though, it would very definitely have been on my Necromancer and once-maxed Sage on Test, not on my Berserker on Skyfire (née Freeport). I know that for certain because she's the only character I have who ever ground her way through the lengthy and tedious process of gaining the required faction with the Sarnaks of Bathezid's Watch.

Whereas the original EQ version was gated only by EQ's arduous, time-consuming and nail-bitingly tense crafting process itself, something entirely avoidable if you had sufficient platinum pieces to spray around, the EQ2 quest is a genuine Epic. It comes in five parts, all of which require a daunting amount of running around, foraging, crafting, currying favor and generally fulfilling the kind of busywork requirements that put some people off MMOs for life.

Yesterday's post touched on the predilection of MMO developers to cater to a supposed "hardcore" of players willing to put in the time and effort, making them worthy of attention. EQ2 started with very much that attitude, only to be forced to row back from it when the hardcore audience failed to show up and the casuals jumped ship en masse for what was then seen as the very much more casual-friendly World of Warcraft.

I swear I'm gonna kill that kid...

From Scott Hartsman's appearance until John Smedley's departure the story of EQ2 has been one of a game continually trying to broaden its appeal by removing barriers to entry. From F2P to quest markers on the map, the direction of travel has always pointed towards inclusivity and ease of access.

With the consolidation of new ownership under Columbus Nova and new management under Russel Shanks, that longstanding trend has not just halted, it's been thrown into reverse. The coming expansion, like the last, will eschew quest markers. It also comes, for the first time I can remember, with a basket of pre-reqs for any character hoping to complete either of the Signature questlines, Adventure or Tradeskill.

DBG has clearly abandoned all hope of attracting any significant number of new players. They've been playing the nostalgia card for a while now and the imminent return to Kunark, along with the revisiting of the Epic adventure and crafting questlines that came with the first Kunark expansion is another expression of the belief that the future of Norrath lies in its past.

At this stage it surely makes commercial sense. If there are any new players curious to try EQ2 - and there's always a trickle of those - they are beyond amply served already by the generous F2P offer and the overwhelming breadth and depth of extremely casual-friendly content it contains. Those fresh players aren't going to need or want any paid-for expansions for a good while so it's entirely understandable that the focus on selling and selling up for the three tiers of digital download coming in a couple of weeks is on the committed, experienced core.

Donkey, donkey, don't you stop.

And in truth I'm in two minds about all this. I wasn't expecting to have to do pre-course reading let alone to take an exam but then I really have been meaning to do To Speak Like A Dragon for a decade now, yet I always found some excuse to dodge actually doing it. Ditto the final (so far) part of A Gathering Obsession, which I didn't have to do for Kunark Ascending but ended up doing anyway because all the prep-work put me in the right frame of mind.

My Berserker can now speak Draconic and has a pack pony that can gather rare and holiday harvests. That is undeniably satisfying and very materially contributes to his development as a character. I can't say I'm looking forward to doing the lengthy series of quests in Kunark that will eventually net him the Earing of the Solstice, but I am very sure that I'll be glad to have the earring in the end and to have the quest tucked neatly in the "Completed" chapter of my journal.

Perhaps the thing to remember is that this isn't a race. There's no timer running. The "pre" in pre-req doesn't mean pre-launch. This expansion is here to last us all a year at least. There's nothing that's needed that can't be picked away at, casually, over time.

So, my Weaponsmith will be starting out to do the crafting epic he probably should have finished years ago but he's going to take his time about it. First he has to finish the Greenmist Heritage Quest and that's going to take a while. One thing is for certain - I'm not about to find myself short of things to do this Autumn.

I guess, when you come down to it, there's a little hardcore in us all. It just takes more bringing out in some than others.

I Know When I'm Not Welcome : AQ3D

I haven't played much AdventureQuest 3D since it went into Open Beta. Indeed, I haven't played much AQ3D at all so far, just dabbled. Any impressions I have of the game come from the first three levels, although it should be emphasized that this an MMO where Level 13 apparently counts as "end game".

As I've attempted to explain in previous posts, the cheerful, child-friendly cartoon visuals belie the steep leveling curve and unforgiving difficulty setting of this decidely un-casual MMO. It wasn't until I read this post on Artix Entertainment's website today, however, that I realized just exactly what kind of a truly elitist, hardcore game AQ3D is setting out to be.

In getting on for two decades of playing MMOs I can't recall ever seeing any developer talk down to all but their hardcore players in such an un-nuanced way. I thought Yoshi P from Square Enix was a tough customer but he's a pussycat compared to this.

Indeed, the last time I can recall anything even approaching this level of passive-aggressive disdain directed at the customer would be when Abashi (or was it Absor?) repeatedly referred to players who pushed back against the EQ grind as "bottom-feeders".

The linked post has to be read in full to appreciate just how dismissive the underlying ethos appears to be towards the more casual or, perhaps, just less obsessive player but here are a few choice quotes:

They are jumping in and trying to coast on the coat tails of their stronger team members

 They are taking up a valuable seat on the team that could be filled by someone level and gear appropriate

You might think it's not fair to only allow top level players access to the hard to earn gear. You're wrong.

The higher level players have worked hard, gotten to or near the level cap and played through much of the game's content that is still waiting for you lower level players

This, bear in mind, is in the context of players of a game in Open Beta, who are trying to see and enjoy a limited-duration Halloween event. Granted it's only one part of that event, a dungeon wing "balanced for five level +13 plus members to tackle with some difficulty" but even so the solution is harshly exclusive rather than warmly inclusive.

Where most modern MMOs would use scaling, mentoring, smart loot or one of the many non-divisive methods developed over the past two decades to allow friends to play with friends regardless of the level of their characters or time in the game, Artix Entertainment has found a much simpler method of dealing with those pesky coat-tail grabbers. Level-lock them out.

As I think I said before, if you're one of those bitter vets, yearning for the days when it was uphill to the dungeon both ways in the snow, when low-levels knew their place was watching you strut around the bank in your high-level gear, well, there's no need to wait for Brad McQuaid to bring back the good old days - AQ3D is ready for you right now.

None of which suggests AQ3D is going to be a bad game or even a bad MMO. It just isn't going to be the MMO I thought it might be. And probably not one for me.

Maybe it's time to write this one off. Leave it for the hardcore. The players who have "worked hard" at playing a video game. Perhaps I should just get out of their way and go somewhere I might feel more welcome. I might take another look at Villagers and Heroes for that elusive cross-platform MMO fix.

Passive aggressive? Me? Well, who started it?