Great article. I totally agree with the majority of it. If you were to chart the number one thing I bitched about in the podcasts, it was the newbie experience and the lack of instruction on so many game mechanics. The devs were just too lazy and relied too much on the internet as the game's "instruction manual" instead of through in game quests or explanations from npc's. I was probably at the uppper echelon of "serious" players at one time, and there were still things I didn't understand at times.

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Hmm, it can be frustrating certainly, but EQ2 is far more ambitious and provides far more possibility for the player willing to delve into that complexity.

What I am trying to say - the complexity and feel that there is so much more around the corner for me to try and understand is an acutal draw for me.

To put this in perspective - I have grown a distaste for the blatantly obvious, cookie cutter, hand holding game design. He quotes a design philosophy of blizzard - "easy to learn, hard to master". What this philosphy should state is "straightforward and obvious". I am sorry, but that does not create a grand, immersive experience for me. I am in fact sick of this type of design being equated with polish.

Remember when npc's had to be hailed to learn if they had anything for you? The experience was raw and emphasized exploration and immersion. It is sad but true that the more straightforward MMO's become the less immersive they are as well and the less they evoke childhood feelings of grandeur and vastness. I despise areas that place the content on railroad tracks that he upholds as the standard of game design. What is wrong with entering a city vast and raw with multiple possibilities? How I level to 30 may be totally different than 20 other players - not the same pathway of the blatantly obvious - railroad tracks of quest content and railroad tracks of geography.

Now we have games where the leveling is so fast that all items and content pre end-game is devalued. Count me in the minority that says it all sucks.

Complexity deep down is something I really want to see from a game, EQ2 does have it in a lot of areas. Not explaining the basics to a new player though is not a good game design to me, playing Planetside that is a complex game in the way command ranks and multiple units work together (although to be fair I normally just grab a rifle and dive in), the training missions they give at the start in return for some hard to earn XP I think are a brilliant idea as by the end of it you know how to play the game, all that is left is to enjoy it.

Thinking about it, if I'm a Guardian, why are there no missions/quests etc to train me in the class I'm supposed to be good at? It makes sense from a role playing perspective to me.

Also on the complexity I'm not sure where they are intending to go with the game, are they faithfully recreating an early AD&D game where in effect the combat goes down to luck of a dice and everything else has been decided beforehand with gear choices? Or do they want there to be games within games the player needs to master?

Really not sure on that point, the auto attack debate is the classic example of it, its an obscure mechanic (how can I get a swing of my weapon with a combat art within a swing of my weapon of the auto attack?) but they neither want to show it on the standard interface (I'd use the animation if it tracked it - again I think the next MMO needs to break free from the current tinned animation+models) or do away with it (I'd prefer they left it in if the alternative was to dumb the game down).



I see good and bad in this, the good is the game systems that Blizzard sometimes gets right with the classes where the ability to play a class better involves timing things better and can get quite hard to master especially when a lot of other things are going on.

Then there is the game world, I don't like the totally linear world either, Guildwars was the biggest example of it and that was the thing I really didn't like about it as so often I just wanted to go left and see what was there. I think in most cases the real reason its there like that is due to lazyness in wanting to just do the minimum amount of work to give people something to do instead of creating a living real world and seeing what happens.

Yet I don't have a problem with Wolfsheadonlines comments, for me MMOs should be huge, why not have a clearly defined quest arc running through a zone tell the player the story, the have lots of small hard to find things going on the player can delve into and discover. Right now its just bean counters counting the number of players who "experience" the content that gets in the way of this concept.



I think what's wrong with entering a city of vast possibilities are the bean counters that go through the game and say "only 5% of the player base experienced this content, we need to make it more accessible". I saw that a lot with Blizzards latest expansion, the prime exhibit I'd offer up would be Naxxaramas, only ~5% of the player base saw this raid at level 60, so they dumbed down the difficulty on the numbers and dropped it exactly the same art and gameplay at level 80.

I'd love to see cities slowly over time added to so they really do feel immense, ideas like wandering pick pockets, thieves etc would all be good, I've suggested this before, not really sure though what the developers vision for it is though if the key developers making the decisions don't have that sort of passion for the game though then we'll just get the bland formulaic crud instead for a game.

And I don't like the games becoming more and more straight forward, Warhammer Online is currently the worst to me for that, going to a red patch, killing 10 of X and then heading back to the other red patch destroys any immersion. I don't want things to be just plain frustrating so that the player has a big advantage to go online and just find the co-ordinates (I don't think the game should even release co-ordinates), if they want these sort of hunt X quests then the item should be randomly placed. Not sure if I'd like something where you had to randomly bother every NPC to find a quest, unless they made it so that people who needed help called you over, or the player could see something was going on.

Maybe if they did go with an inquisitive system like that you could have the quests available to you change as events progressed, that system would stop again the advantage for people to look up in a browser which NPCs to check out etc?

If we are going to have an in game map then I would actually like to mark on it where a quest came from, maybe this dumbs things down? I'd see that as something possible in the real world though. But the big thing I want to see in questing are multiple pathways to choose, nothing makes the player read the text and get involved with a quest more then seeing two or more choices pop up, EQ2 has a few of those quests and I absolutely love them.

Over all I would like to see a much less linear world for the player, they need to add in decisions to the quests, random to events in the world, where you find items etc - that would kill of this addiction to having to look everything up in the game world in a browser and save the players from themselves.

Monsters that wander were always a fun addition, yet because they wipe out a few newbies things like that get removed. Saying that I do like a lot of Wolfsheads suggestions like for city design, having a core of a useful city makes sense, then just add sprawl around it, in real cities the useful stuff does tend to gravitate to the centre too.

What exactly *is* the "auto attack debate"?

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Its a tricky one is'nt it? Reading Theo's comments I nodded in agreement. The most fun times I had in EQ2 were at the beginning when, as Theo said, you HAD to hail every NPC just to see if they had any quests to offer.Even more hardcore, you could pick up quests from books and other inanimate objects, so you were forced to mouse-over every single item!! Good times.

The thing is.....when SOE introduced the markers that appeared over the head of a quest giver, they also gave us the choice to turn it off. No-one I played with at the time actually clicked on that option though, because we all wanted to level as fast as we could and it helped. In fact we all had already installed the map mod with POI markers on it anyway.

As for the quest-lines-that-lead-you-through-the-zone thing, they are a nice, neat way to help players pass through a zone with the minimum stress, but to me it's like driving everywhere with your sat-nav on: you get to where you want to go, but you never take any notice of the beautiful scenery you are passing. Yet if you give me the option, I WILL take the fastest route to the next level possible even though I know I will miss all the great content. So who would want to be an MMO designer? Make it hard and deep and people praise you but don't actualy play your content. Make it easy and shallow and everyone appreciates your work, but complains that it's dumbed down and pines for the old days. Like Bart Simpson said, you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you dont.

However,the biggest change in MMO gameplay that I have noticed since the rise of WoW is not mentiond anywhere in the Wolfsheadonlines articles. That is the disappearance of forced grouping. EQ2 was my first MMO, my only previous experiences of onlne games were shooters such as Soldier of Fortune 2 and Battlefield 1942. Online games meant log on, shoot commies, log off. job done, back to the TV to watch films about shooting commies with the wife. Yet after a couple of days in Norrath, I would happily sit outside Stormhold for an hour doing nothing just so we could fill that last slot in a group. In doing so I made a lot of friends and was drawn into the world in a way I had never been in any shooter. Yet I would complain that my Troubadour could'nt solo, so the game was broken. When RoK was released I was in decent raiding guild but we all took a break from raiding to get from 70-80. Kunark was the most soloable stuff in EQ's history so solo it I did. Then I hit 80 and have barely logged on since: without the NEED to group I lost contact with other players annd therefore, my incentive to log on every night.

Like I said, it's a tricky one.

I'd agree that if the game has levels people will try and reach the maximum level but I don't see that as a problem in itself with any game, whatever system there is most people will always seek to try and complete it, in EQ2 and WoW that can be several things. If the problem is that people are not experiencing the content because they're just following join up the dot guides on the internet to speed through it then my view is the real problem is the linear predictable nature of these games.

Since its faster to read the walk through then figure out the quest because there is always only one way to do the quest and one result. If instead you had many paths through the storyline with each quest going 1-3 ways maybe dependant on what you did previously, my guess would be in a game like that it would be easier to actually play the game then try and figure out what to do on a website especially if the quest names were semi random generated.

I could see a game like that hiring a few less graphical artists and a few more game designers, one of the memories playing WoW WotLK was flying over Icecrown and think there was so much artwork there, I barely bothered to land there when levelling since there was so little to do.



I can confirm that WoW is all about getting to max level in much more extreme way then EQ2, Blizzards policy for any content previous to the current expansion is that it should be irrelevant. If something changes in the game that effects early level content they have no problem trivialising that content to fix things rather then spend time trying to rebalance it around a new ability. A big example of that was at the end of the burning crusade expansion, they changed all the talent trees in a big way, so instead of rebalancing all the raid bosses they just reduced all of their health by 30% and removed some key abilities that no longer had player counters without replacing them with anything.



But there has to be some sort of progress in Eve, a friend who kept trying to get me into it told me he worked out that he could mine astroids for 5 hours a night 8 times a month and be able to get enough in game credits to pay for his subscription, at that point he sensibly decided to quit :) I think you can grind if you want to, but its hard to compare to a level based game with progress since in Eve progress is a mixture of accumulating credits, building socially, and login time to learn skills.

Actually Eve (and Darkfall) are games that I don't really understand the motivation of and what drives people, its got to be more then just pvp?