State of the Game - Part 5
by Scott Lewis
We've spent quite a long time delving into motivation in the modern mmorpg. Last week, we started to talk about content as the most effective motivator for long term play. This week we will discuss what does and does not work about content additions, leading up to next week's wrap-up.
Content motivates players. This much we know. The promise of new places to explore, along with accompanying new things to get, levels to attain etc. is the thing most likely to keep a player paying his monthly fee. Several aspects of an expansion (a general term used to refer to any content addition) may motivate players to stay or not stay. First, there is the release method. Players often find it galling to have to pay for an expansion on top of their existing monthly fee. This is generally a shortsighted decision on the part of the game' publisher, trading off a larger long term revenue stream for a one-time gain. Assuming the publisher has a stable enough financial structure to absorb development costs, this loss of players can be avoided by releasing expansions primarily through download channels.
Next, there is the wow factor. (Not World of Warcraft, the other wow.) Players expect a new expansion to impress them. This means different things to different players and a wise developer will try to cover as many bases as possible. There must be visual appeal in the expansion, though that appeal cannot generally come at the expense of hardware compatibility. There is a significant segment of the player base for whom "It doesn't look any better than the last expansion" is a death knell. There must be some aspect of the expansion that seems incredible or insurmountable at first to motivate those players driven by challenge and achievement. This is why you see a lot of expansions tied to a specific enemy or group of enemies rather than just to a region or area. The idea that there is some new tougher than the last guy foe out there is a strong motivator for many players long before they even reach the enemy in question.
The new expansion must balance accessibility with depth. Players need to be able to go into an expansion and feel that they can start doing things. The entrance mobs in a new area must be things that small exploratory groups of players can reasonably fight. On the other hand, the expansion can't be something that players will just roll through. There needs to be a steep enough difficulty curve that players feel they are participating but also feel challenged. One of the traps mmorpgs often fall into is attempting to increase playtime by making successively higher level areas require collection of more and more infrequent dropped items to progress, effectively turning progression itself into a time sink. This is a plan that can backfire. If players begin to feel that it may well cost them 50 hours of playtime to see what's behind the next door they will likely decide they'd rather drop 50 dollars and see what's in the next game instead. This sort of increased difficulty through infrequent events is best implemented in small, discrete parts of an expansion. If most of an area is open, but the castle on the hill requires a rather difficult to attain key then players can have their desire to be able to do things fulfilled while still being both delayed and challenged by attaining the key.
An expansion must also, generally, serve as much of the high level population as possible. Some games have fallen into the trap of listening to the active message board population, a group that tends to be a very skewed representation of the player base. This has resulted in expansions that served a narrow subset of the high end population, most commonly those in large, fully-functional guilds. Care must be taken to preserve some content for the small group player or (much more rarely) the mostly solo player. Much innovation in this sort of design has occurred recently with the advent of instanced areas, particularly those with caps on the number of players inside at one time. By keeping some areas restricted to small groups and being sure to include those areas in each expansion, developers can ensure that small group players have space to play without feeling that they're going to be rolled over by one of the big boys at any moment.
One final requirement of an expansion is that it must be complicated. Everything should make the sort of internal sense we've come to expect out of our rpgs, but adding a new system, a new way for enemies to behave, a new class of item or type of ability is a great method to not only keep interest, but to add play time in figuring out what's going on. This is particularly necessary in the modern world of spoiler sites that allow the masses to work on solving a game's mysteries as one unit.
Next week we will wrap up what we know and make the case for a type of game between traditional RPG and the massive multiplayers.