So this weekend I succumbed to the urge that had been growing over the last few weeks to give Champion’s Online another try.  And while most of the things that caused me to go “meh” the first time I played it are still there, this time around I’m actually having quite a bit of fun.  Read on after the break if you’re interested in my reasoning as to why I think this is, and why I think it’s a good idea in general to give just about every MMO two shots.

Games I Hated, and then Loved

Champions Online serves to remind me of something that I too often forget.  And that is that, with the exception of World of Warcraft, just about every one of the MMO’s that I’ve come to consider some of my most favorite games – top of the line MMOs – are games that I initially didn’t much like.  When I first placed City of Heroes, I remember I loathed their random mission location distribution over the entirety of a zone.  What idiot designer thought it would be okay to have a level 3 player playing dodge/skip/flee around red and purple conned mobs in order to get to their level 3 mission door! And their contact system made it next to impossible to allow you and a friend to follow the same story arc at the same time.  And don’t even get me started on Perez Park, which they through you into at the tender age of level 7.

And I still have a review I wrote in 2005 on Guild Wars after my first night in the game.  And I’m here to tell you that review is pretty scathing.  Of course you couldn’t jump, everyone hated that.  But more than that, I didn’t really care for Guild Wars’ “Dungeon Siege” style zone design, where you walked along the road until bad things popped out of the ground or aggroed you, you killed them, then continued down the road to the next mob of mobs.  And at level 6, when I first got to post-seared Ascalon, and this beautiful game I had been playing turned downright ugly, and I died over and over and over again trying to solo the instances because the game had never taught me that it *expected* (even demanded) you to fill your group up with henchmen at all times, well I walked away vowing to never come back. 

But I did come back, (granted it wasn’t until much later) and I came to absolutely love Guild Wars and I still play it to this day.  The same is true for City of Heroes – I have a level 50 in CoH and a level 42, both achieved before they broke the game with custom mission AOE grinding.  The same is true for Lord of the Rings Online, and Everquest II. 

So what is it? What is it about MMO’s that for so many of them I’m turned off initially, but then can find something later to enjoy, and even dig into, and stay with it.  Am I just a naturally forgiving, second-chance kind of guy?  Not so much.  But here’s what I do think it is.

MMO’s are like Girlfriends – without the Sex

More than any other game genre, I think we approach MMO’s with a very specific idea of what we want that game to be.  Unless you’ve never played any other MMO before the game you’re about to play (an increasingly rare individual these days), then you go into the game with a pretty clear collection of game conventions, playstyles, and content that you are expecting from the game and want the game to present to you.  This is true whether you admit it to yourself or not.  And also I think, more-so than any other genre, this collection of expectations for the game is vastly different for each person playing the game.  Some people love the crafting and the creation, and some people hate crafting.  Some people love the social elements, and some people hate the social.  Some people want to log in and grind mobs for 20 minutes and log out, some people want a deep, engaging story, and some people want to shape and mold the world itself.

And this collection of expectations is more important for us in MMO’s than it is in any other game because with an MMO, we are eyeing this game with the prospect of a long term commitment – both in time and money.  If I think the story in a freshly launched shooter is lame, I don’t mind so much because I know I’m going to be in and out of that game in about 10 hours, tops.  And if the skirmish mode of a new RTS is unbalanced that’s okay because again short commitment, and if the campaign was great, then I got my money’s worth.  

But when we sit down to play a new MMO, rolling around the back of our head is this one fundamental question – Is this the one?  Is this where my friends will stay and play?  Does this game have everything I want, or if not everything, is what’s here at least good enough for me to want to stay?  So we have this rich collection of expectations about the game, and our criteria for success is more stringent than it is for other games. How can any game succeed under those conditions?  But here’s where it gets worse.  Here is the real shocker.

What the Developer’s Aren’t Telling You

The developers have their own idea of the kind of game they are building.  I know right?  And the thing is, it most likely isn’t exactly what you thought it was.  And to make it worse, due to a variety of factors, whether it be changing design, marketing and publishing pressure, or last minute changes due to a poor beta, in most cases the developers will not communicate to you exactly what kind of game they are building.  You will know some broad things, sure.  We know Star Wars, The Old Republic is all about the story.  Before it launched, we knew Star Trek Online was some mix of space flight and ground combat, and had lots of character customization.  And before Warhammer: Age of Reckoning launched we knew it was going to be all about the PvP.  But in none of those games did we know exactly how they were going to go about fulfilling the expectations they’d set.  But two things were still true:  the developers had their own ideas, and we had our own.   

The Key to Any Relationship – Better Communication

So, up until the game launches, I can forgive developers of not providing specifics about the game they are building because quite frankly, for the reasons I mention above and many more, until the game is launched they themselves don’t know exactly what it’s going to be.  But once the game is launched, I think this is where most developers fail.  Most MMO developers completely fail to communicate to you exactly what their game is.  And so we go into the game with a set of expectations, and these clash against the expectations the developers built around, but because we don’t know or don’t understand those expectations, we simply proclaim the game as a failure to meet our needs, and we walk away.  Whereas if we had understood better beforehand the expectations that were used in designing the game, we could adjust our own accordingly, and enjoy and appreciate the game for what it is.

In every MMO that I came back to and learned to enjoy, in every instance, I can trace it back to a point where I learned something fundamental about the game’s design that the game didn’t teach me, but that players and personal experience did.  And, having understood that, I could play the game for what it was, and stop wringing my hands over what it wasn’t.  In Guild Wars, once I learned that the game expected you to fill your group with henchmen when you walked out into a zone, I immediately started enjoying it.  In City of Heroes, when I learned the game expected you to run around those reds and purples, and even provided powers designed to assist in that, then I stopped bitching about it (mostly) and was able to enjoy the other aspects of the game.  The same was true for their contacts.  Once I read a thorough a guide on how their contact system actually worked and understood the random nature of them, I could plan around them, and voila!  Suddenly my game experience was actually fun! 

And in no game have I ever played is this more true than in Champions Online.  When I sat down to play Champions Online – what I wanted, what I expected, was a spiritual successor to City of Heroes.  And so every aspect of the game was evaluated against the criteria of how well this game provided me with that experience and built upon it.  And oh boy does Champion’s Online fail in that regard.  From a design standpoint, the similarities between City of Heroes and Champion’s Online absolutely end the moment you leave the costume designer.  When I came back to Champions Online, I came determined to try to figure out what the game actually was, and to play that game, instead of the game I wanted it to be.  And I came across this excellent guide over at Elitist Jerks.  First, if you find yourself wanting to return to Champions Online, or if you want to try it out for the first time, I absolutely recommend you read this guide from top to bottom.  About half way down, you’ll find the following expletive:  “Holy Fuck I’m only level 5 do I really have to know all this?”.  And the answer, both in the guide and me telling you – is absolutely yes!  I still think it was a terrible design choice to build a game in which you have to have such a fundamental knowledge of so many of the game’s mechanics before you make your first choices in the game, but that is the game they built.  When you visit the powerhouse for the first time and select your first own powers, you really do have to be armed with that knowledge.  But regardless of my thoughts on the design decision, that is how the game works, and I’m past that.  And now that I know how it works, I’ve built a character that is plenty playable and survivable, and I’m having fun.  Furthermore, now I’m getting into all the nuances of their power-system, and how the gear augments it, and a dozen different mechanics that weren’t explained in the game, but I’ve learned through pouring over player guides and forum posts on how they do work.  Does it suck that I had to resort to forum posts and player guides to learn how to play Champions Online?  You bet it does!  Am I having fun now though that I do know what the game is?  Definitely!

So if there are some MMO’s you’ve recently dropped because they just didn’t do it for you in the first month you played, maybe they are worth a second look.  And it might mean you have to stop looking at it in the light of it not being the game you want, but rather in the game that it is.  And to figure out what that game is, it might mean spending some time gathering information from outside the game.  While I agree it shouldn’t be that way, the reward might be that you find a game you actually do enjoy playing, even if it’s not the game you expected.

And finally, as developers, the onus is on us to do a better job.  It’s easy for me to pick on Champion’s Online, but the truth is most MMO developers are failing to inform their players exactly how their game works.  If you’re building a complex game, then don’t try to hide the complexity from the players simply by failing to tell them about it, and relying on your community to inform the players how the game really works.  Let players know what your expectations were as developers.  Most of us them are adults – they can handle the truth.

I know, long-winded again, right?  If you actually got to the bottom of this, and have your own experiences of leaving a game and then coming back to stay, and can recall exactly what it was that got you to stay the second time around, I’d love to hear them!