At what point does challenging become game breaking?
For the most part, todays MMO’s hand quite a bit of information to the player on what could only be described as “a golden platter”. How tough is this mob? Will his buddy join in on the fight? Who around me wants to give out a quest? Which NPC will buy my stack of moldy hides? Which way is east? Information like this, used to be earned. The gamer, in essence, had to rely on his own intuition and wit if he wanted these questions answered. Life was hard, life was challenging but best of all.. life was rewarding.
Those days are gone forever… or are they? In a day when toons know more than we do, are we really better off for it? How many of you can walk outside and know exactly which direction NNW is? Or whether or not, picking a fight with that guy at the end of the bar will be a clean sweep or a brutal lesson in self humiliation? Why don’t we know these things? Our characters do. Is that necessarily a good thing?
Looking at the early days of Everquest is a great example. It was hard. There were no maps, no floating titles above the storkeepers head to show us he exported moldy hides, and that compass of yours would make you dizzy if you stared at it too long. Today when you log in. Your compass is dead on balls accurate, you have a handy map showing you exactly where you are and where you want to go, the shopkeepers all have signs and everything around you is level appropriate. Is life still hard? Yes. Is it still challenging? Somewhat. Is it still rewarding? Hardly.
Why did this happen you may ask. Well quite simply… it had to. As other games “dumbed down”, Everquest had to follow to keep itself viable to new players. Why would anyone, voluntarily go through the extra hardship involved with exploring Norrath when the world of Azeroth was simply handed to you on day one?
I see comments flying about on the various boards from what I shall call the “WoW generation” of gamers all cursing the fact that the programmers are stupid because they can’t put in a simple percentage algorithm to show a player what his current XP is. To this I say… “So… your lucky they were kind enough to put in a colored bar.” I also see them complaining about how game breaking it is to figure out how hard a quest is because there is no number attached to it. My response… “So… try it, if it’s too hard, shelve it and do it later.” Another comment I love is, why are there so many bugs? To this… all I can do is shake my head, because we all know how flawless WoW, EQ, DAOC, EQ2, DDO, SWG and COH were upon release.
I swear, at this rate the next MMO will consist of the following.
Log in… create character… take quest from the first guy you see… ding 100 times just for succesfully talking to him… find noob… pwn for next hour.
