With a few notable exceptions, levelling in MMOs is a temporary experience. We get a few weeks of meaty questing and cinematics, followed by months of waiting for content updates. It’s the Achilles Heel of the theme-park experience – rich and deep while it lasts, but bland and repetitive once the cap is reached.
I’ve made no secret about how much I was put off Mists of Pandaria, seeing a small forest of exclamation marks to mark the daily quest hub, as if to signify where I’d be spending the rest of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor tried to mix it up with the Garrison experiment, but it left me feeling less like a hero and more like a middle manager.
Which is why I’m surprised with how I feel about Legion. Sure, there’s an element of nostalgia here, as familiar NPCs play out a story that feels more like a main event than a timeline-based distraction. But it’s also been – and continues to be – hugely enjoyable to play, and that includes the time I’ve spent dancing around at cap.
How has Legion pulled off this magic trick? Looking deeper, I think there’s a clever blend of design choices at work, all acting together to make that endgame experience as frictionless and immersive as possible.
‘Thank you for fetching my tools, Wilkins. But, before I can teach you the secrets of Mid-Legion Tailoring, you must carry out one more task’
‘Yes, Master?’ The scruffy young apprentice looked up, hope welling in his big eyes.
‘Indeed. You see, we have run out of Milk. I’ve heard tales of the Naga breeding incredible cows, and I long to sample their produce within my precious Sin’dorei tea. You must travel into the Eye of Azshara, defeat the Naga, milk one of these cows and bring a pitcher back to me. Only then, will I feel refreshed enough to share such intricate work with you.’
The elderly figure, a stick draped in expensive robes, shared a wide, almost predatory smile.
‘But… but that’s Hero work!’
‘No buts, Wilkins. Now go, and don’t return without my Milk!’
By now, most of us have been chewing through Warcraft: Legion for a few weeks. On the whole, it represents a fantastic return to form for the ageing MMO, with a renewed focus on telling an immersive story and shrouding characters in a rich fantasy. It’s a formula that seems to have worked, with over 3.3 million copies sold and more players returning than ever before.
But, while most design updates have been enthusiastically received, one particular facet has come under increased scrutiny – the abundance of dungeon quests to gate content. If you want to complete your Order Hall missions, or even max out your Professions, expect to spend some intense combat time with four other people.
Recently, I’ve been playing Stardew Valleya lot. It’s a charming retro game, featuring a young hero who shuns being a corporate slave, trading it for a new life on his grandfather’s farm. But it’s not just about growing crops and tending animals; there’s a little bit of adventuring on the side, and the entire game is overlaid with this social aspect of helping the townsfolk and rejuvenating the village.
Part of the success of Stardew Valley is that it’s a stark contrast to what most of us are currently playing. The 8-bit art style and gameplay is evocative of Harvest Moon, a franchise that’s still yet to make it to PC, and uncorking a significant amount of bottled-up nostalgia. The slower pace also flies in the face of immediacy-driven or constant-trickle rewarding, with both crops and friendships taking time to nurture and grow. While Stardew Valley isn’t groundbreaking, it represents time well spent, which is all most of us are after at the pocket-money Steam price.
That ‘of-the-moment’-ness is also evocative of a less favourable time in online gaming. With Mists of Pandaria, it seemed as though Blizzard were cramming in similar gameplay to World of Warcraft, where we’d get an old farm and start building it up. The concept was added to in Warlords of Draenor, as we got our own garrison of minions to do our bidding. It felt as if the studio was trying to offer two-speed gameplay – dunegoneering for immediate reward, alongside being an armour-plated middle manager for longer-term gains.
Trouble is, what happens when those dungeons and raids start to feel old and stale, or no longer offer rewards? My own experience was a gradually shrinking gameplay session, where I’d log in, do stuff around my garrison, collect loot from my minions and send them out on missions again. It became a daily checklist – I wasn’t being a hero any more, but just a supervisor on the factory floor. That’s not an adventure, it’s a job. Just add in some commuting mini-game, and you’ve got a regular nine-to-five compressed to half an hour of mouse clicks.
It also nuked the social aspect of online gaming. After all, why go to the big city when you have everything you need at home, all carefully optimised thanks to some guide you found? I didn’t see my gaming buddies any more. I no longer felt the need to stir things up in Stormwind. I didn’t randomly role-play any more. And, in the end, I stopped logging in. That, and the entirety of WoD felt like a self-indulgent diversion from the actual plot.
Now, I’m not saying that Blizzard can’t learn from previous expansions. My experience with the Legion alpha so far is almost like comparing chalk and cheese, and I’m enjoying it immensely. The subtle move to class order halls is also interesting, as it means you’re more likely to bump into other players while going through your game session cycle. Those order halls will also have follower missions, and here’s where the cynicism creeps in. There’s a tremendous opposition to the existing WoD garrison format – of being a taskmaster rather than an adventurer – and it’s an opposition that I definitely share.
In Legion, the word is that we’ll still send our followers on missions, but that we’ll also lead them on those adventures instead of sitting back at the ranch awaiting their return. That said, follower missions haven’t been added to the current alpha yet, so there’s an element of the unknown here.
Anyhow, back to my point. When designing an MMO, there’s clearly a desire to look at other games that have high player adhesion and no real end-state. Management games like The Sims and Stardew Valley are one. Idle games like Adventure Capitalists are another. But if those games don’t gel with the core experience – of being the hero and going on epic adventures – then players are legitimately going to question why you’ve added them. And if those diversions start to replace those core experiences, so a player’s entire game cycle is taken up with non-core stuff, don’t be surprised if they go searching for heroic adventure elsewhere.
I’m more confident than normal that Blizzard knows this, as there’s been a lot of talk about bringing out the various fantasies, and making the classes and specs feel more heroic and true to type. This focus on different ways in which players can be heroic is a great thing, and it’s something I hope has been osmosed into other design teams. Give us different viewpoints of the heroic fantasy, instead of trying to climb the corporate ladder at Adventure, Inc.
Stardew Valley is quite happy being Stardew Valley. WoW doesn’t need to be every game under the sun – it just needs to be great at playing out that fantasy of being a hero on an epic adventure with friends. Sounds simple, right?
With a few notable exceptions, levelling in MMOs is a temporary experience. We get a few weeks of meaty questing and cinematics, followed by months of waiting for content updates. It’s the Achilles Heel of the theme-park experience – rich and deep while it lasts, but bland and repetitive once the cap is reached.