I still have, on my hard drive somewhere, my initial impressions of Guild Wars, which I wrote in 2005.  It is, in a word, scathing.  There was a lot I didn’t like about Guild Wars in the first fifteen minutes of playing it.  Guild Wars, eventually became one of my absolute favorite MMO’s, and is one that has earned a permanent place on my harddrive.  I still log in from time to time, and go through bouts of extreme activity around the holidays, or just when I get a hankering to travel with Koss, Mhenlo, and Cynn.  I keep my scathing first 15 minute review around to remind me that, quite often, especially where MMO’s are concerned, my initial impression does not end up being my lasting impression.  That often things drive me crazy in the first fifteen minutes I eventually overcome, get used to, and learn to look past, to enjoy the broader, much bigger picture.

And this is why I haven’t put up my overall impressions of Champions Online until now — nearly 3 weeks after launch  (Well this and the fact that I’ve been insanely busy, but lets pretend this is all carefully planned — indulge me).  But the closed beta has come and gone, which I participated in to some extent.  The open beta and head start have come and gone, and now, the game has launched for real.  So it’s time to talk about it for a bit.  Read on:

 
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By far and large, the design ideas I throw out over here at Of Course Ill Play It are iterations of existing concepts and notions within the classic MMO.  There is a reason for this.  I am a huge fan of give the players a lot of something they know, and a little of something new.  While I like as much as anyone the idea of revolution and innovation, the truth of the matter is if you throw something completely foreign and new to a playerbase that has preset expections, you are setting up a recipe for fail on an epic scale.  And the MMO landscape is littered with the corpses of those that have gone that path.  So much of my ramblings are about ways we can take things we know, and make them better.   This however, is not such a post.  This idea is so radical *I’m* not even sure it’s a good idea.  But it’s a notion that’s been kicking around in my head for some now, and hell they don’t pay us the big bucks to always sit around and play it safe (okay truthfully no one pays me at all), so let’s throw this out and think about it.

 
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One discussion that is as old as the genre itself when it comes to MMO’s is that of solo play vs. group play.  Probably no other topic stirs as much contentiousness and strikes closer to the core of people’s playstyles than that of to what extent do you support, encourage, or even require players to play in groups versus playing solo.  I personally, in true diplomatic fashion, am a fan of both.  Some of the very best experiences I’ve had in MMO’s have come out of being in a group.  Not just the social aspects of it — of accomplishing something amazing and having people there to share it with — but that incredible feeling of satisfaction that comes from being on a team where each member of the team has their role and each of you performed your role expertly, and in doing so, accomplished something really hard.  These experiences are why I’m still a huge fan of class based systems (and always will be), and why I feel strongly about having group roles.

But on the other hand, easily over ninety-percent of the time I play in MMO’s these days I play solo.  For all the reasons that just about every solo player lists, my lifestyle is completely in-conducive to most MMO’s requirements for group play.  I have neither the time nor the patience to sit and do nothing while either attempting to form a group or to wait for one to be formed.  If I’m in a group, it is entirely likely I could be called away at a moment’s notice to take care of some real life crisis of the moment.   There is absolutely no block of time in my day that I can dedicate three hours to a single session.   So I have argurably the most pathetically geared level 80 warrior in all of existence because I got to level 80, looked around, saw no real content for me as a solo player, and so promptly started working on an alt. 

So it’s a dilemma from a developer’s standpoint.  We know that people that form ties and become a part of the community in your game will want to stay in your game, and that’s something you want.  So you want to encourage group play.  But at the same time, you have to, or you should, at least, recognize that the average age of your player is maturing, and if you want really broad appeal, you simply can’t require people to group up after they’ve reached some certain level to progress their character.   One of the things that always has me shaking my head is when people talk about how “back in the day” how awesome it was when the MMO you were in simply required you to group to progress.  It wasn’t even a question, so it was just inherently understood you had to group to progress, and so everyone did it.  What those people fail to realize is that yes, the people they played with did know that.  But the vast majorify of the people that got to whatever level the content decided you had to group to progress in the game simply left the game.  Which is why those games never had more than about 200,000 subscribers.  It wasn’t until WoW came along and said no matter what class you play, you can solo the entire game, that all those thousands and then millions of people that started the game stayed in the game.  Because they didn’t have to leave their comfort zone.  They could play the game they wanted to play. 

So I have, in the past, already talked about systems that I think could encourage grouping, and teach players very early in their career that it’s okay to group, and how we as designers can go much further than we currently are in removing the barriers.  But today I’m going to talk about going in the other direction.  About doing more to support the solo player.   I’m going to talk about the privateer. 

 
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There’s been quite a lot of discussion lately over the current state of WoW — most of it centered around how it has become too easy.  Tobold recently posted a great commentary on its current state of failing to challenge people.  And GameSpy posted a very similar article on not just twinking your character, but on the myriad of ways that are available to players to make the game easier to them.  From extensive online databases (thottbot, wowhead) that answer every possible question for every quest, to mods and addons that point you directly to where you have to go at every conceivable moment.  And you can’t hardly swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting another blog from someone who’s fed up with how easy the end-game content is screaming about moving on.  Even Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, has recently posted on the WoW forums that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if some of you that consume every bit of new content we can produce take a break and try something else for awhile.  Now I worked with Greg for quite a long time over at Ensemble, and when I read this post, I can fairly hear the frustration in his voice at the throngs of forum posters standing beating down his virtual door waving pitchforks and shouting MORE MORE MORE!  So what’s going on here?  Hit the break to hear my thoughts..

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So if you’re one of the four people that follow this blog, you know already I’ve been playing MMO’s for, well, a damn long time.  And today it is, as much as ever, still the primary genre that I play.  But as I’ve been working my way through Dragonblight and Grizzly Hills these past days, taking my time as I savor the content of Northrend, a recurring thought has been echoing around in my head:  MMO’s have changed.  And they are continuing to change.  And if you’re starting development today, what kind of trends should you be paying attention to if you want your game to feel current three years from now when you finish?  And that’s how today’s post was born..

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