The Scorpion's Dilemma: Modern MMO Communities · 2:13am Jun 28th, 2015
I am struck with the desire today to ramble about vidja games for a bit.
As those who know me well know, I am a player of World of Warcraft. And I have been pretty much for the full length of its lifetime. I distinctly remember in late high school, sitting at the computers in the little computer lab my Catholic school had, and pouring over every detail that Blizzard was releasing about the development of the game. I had burning desire to explore every inch of this world that I had fought wars over in its RTS predecessors.
That being said, it hasn't been a solid duration. I've wandered in and out over the years, trying a few other MMOs and having my heart broken a few times. Looking at you Warhammer Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic. But I've always come back to WoW in the end like an old friend.
Which brings me to the bit of mental philosophizing I've hit upon today.
I dunno Brain. Where would we find rubber pants this time of night?
Right now, WoW is neck deep in the middle of Warlords of Draenor, the fifth expansion pack that we've had in the game's line so far. The general consensus is that it is a pretty bad expansion pack, a stance that I find myself agreeing with.
But I see very little agreement on why its so bad and what is "wrong" with Blizzard Entertainment.
Sure, there's a great deal of discussion about what's gone wrong. From YouTubers making all kinds of videos, to debates on all kinds of forums, it seems like there are a few dozen groups all trying to push their own ideas about what the game should be forward. PvPers want more stabbin! PvE people are split between raiders and non raiders and then split about four more times along questions of difficulty and immersion (such a nebulous term, that last one). Sometimes it seems like WoW has become this massive, unwieldy hydra of conflicting desires that the developers are stuck dealing with.
Here's the thing though. This isn't unique to WoW. Hell, its not even unique to MMOs in general. The arguments are very similar across the video gaming sphere.
Which brings me to the title, where I brought up the scorpion. See what I did there? Bringing it alllll back together!
For those who aren't familiar with the fable of The Scorpion and the Frog, here is my condensed version. One day a scorpion asks a frog to help him across a river, by letting him ride on the frog's back. The frog points out that the scorpion would sting him and he would drown and die. The scorpion promises not to and they set off. Then, half way across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway. Before the frog is completely paralyzed he asks the scorpion why. After all, now they will both die. The scorpion answers with a simple response.
"It's in my nature."
The dichotomy between the different MMO player groups feels like something I can tie to that fable. While the moral of the original fable is usually interpreted to be that no change can be made in the nature of the fundamentally vicious, I think that an equally valid way you can look at it is this. People will do what they feel is in their own best interest, even when its not.
Thusly, in the context of MMO players, I sometimes wonder if these different groups in these games means that the MMO market is undergoing a self correction right now.
WoW hit about 13 million subscribers at its height, attracted a whole bunch of different people to its world, and influenced the MMO market in ways that are still being felt. But numbers are going down, and whole games are going into sunset. The question becomes, at least to me, "Can MMO's continue to cater to all these groups that might want fundamentally different things in their game?"
It's a tricky question and one faced by plenty of games and even other industries before and will continue to happen from here on out. Can you split development time five different ways? Or will these games keep contracting and retreating to set niches that they do well and accept their smaller subscription numbers?
I'm not sure I have any set answers myself, but I had to voice my thoughts and present the question openly. There is one thing that I am sure about though.
The collection of scorpions that are WoW's player base will continue to stab the metaphorical frog that is the development team, all trying to get what we want. Why?
It's in our nature.
You also have to realize that the game is no longer being run by gamers, like it was at the start, but a corporation now. Often great games get made by those that love games, but as soon as it gets snatched up by someone that cares more about money the game starts to decline. For me, WoW started to decline when they started to dumb it down to make it more accessible to more people.
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See, this right here is kind of what I'm talking about, because I disagree on almost all of that.
Blizzard has never not been a for profit company. Two of the three original founders of the company are still with it and Vivendi, which is almost always portrayed as the main devil behind Blizzard's bad decisions, acquired the company back in 98. The year we got the original Starcraft that went on to become so beloved.
I stand by the position that by not becoming more accessible, WoW's numbers would have dropped even faster. The 13 million we had during Wrath of the Lich King was never going to be sustainable in the long term. There is no reason to think that a genre who's last juggernaut had peaked at 450,000 subscribers could maintain 13 million.
I remember the days of tedium that was trying to find dungeon groups back in the pre-LFG days. I remember the niggling annoyance that was so many of those little book-keeping things that (in my opinion at least) didn't add anything to the Role-Playing aspect, since the game has never let you effect the story all that much with your decisions like I can when I play D&D.
But that's the point I was hitting on. You and I are on different ends of this particular fight. How can the developers cater to both? Is there some kind of middle ground even possible to find? But both of us will push for the features and game play ideas that we want in the game and I would imagine that we both might be willing to push for those things to the detriment of what the other sides want.
Like I said. It's in our nature.
Well truly it isn't about how mmo's or games in general getting dumbed down as in the fact that modern culture is falling into a style but not substance phase that is readily apparent in gaming currently. I'm a firm believer that graphics have reached a capping point in games in general, but the general conscience is that games have to grab your attention with great art. While this isn't a logical fallacy, it is moving things toward art mattering more than gameplay/story which is truly a wrong viewpoint to take.
Yes the correct visuals can tell a compelling story if done correctly, but a lot of games seem to lack the underlying substance that would make such visuals more compelling if the story was handled correctly in the first place. That or the development team is under corporate control to produce something noteworthy in a underalloted development cycle.
A game I truly could tell would be touted by the game industry as a great game but be left by most players after a month is Destiny. While it has stunning visuals and does tell a decent story, the overall goal (other than taking your money) story wise seemed lacking and covered up by the possibility of co-op modes and shared gameplay, Which seems to me like they should have concentrated on a single campaign mode more but were under pressure to make money as soon as possible. The problem is that I've seen this kind of game model before and it leads into one of the MOST frustrating things I've seen as paid for DLC.
DLC should be items or characters or alternate gameplay modes. It SHOULD NOT be extra chapters explaining the games premise more thoroughly and actually adding to the main narrative from the same viewpoint. All that is, is making a quick buck off folks on something they already should have HAD! But that is life in the current game industry making you pay for content that you already should have received in the first place, which is part and parcel a part of the current culture of nickeling and dimeing your way into folks wallets.
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I agree and disagree with some of this.
When it comes to graphics though, I keep thinking that the next big thing that'll might help the situation with them now is some kind of automation, almost.
See, back when I was younger, I viewed the forward progression of video game media as being the development of playing options. The ability to do more, to have stories that could react to your decisions and to have greater control over the kind of characters you could have.
But the rise of graphics has caused a conundrum. The more powerful they become, the more time and money it takes to program them. Which leads to cost overrun and fewer features, which also probably has a hand in the rise of DLC too.
If there was somehow, some kind of tools that would almost automatically fill in some of the destructible physics, or if you almost had a lot more stock programming assets so that some of the more normal things could be banged out quickly, leaving the full programming time for the more important bits, you might see those costs drop some.
Admittedly, I'm not a programmer, so I might be talking completely out of my ass on that.
On the DLC thing though....
I dunno...I like the idea of having a game's lifespan expanded by being able to buy more chapters of content for it. To use an analogy to D&D, the core game would be like D&D's core rulebook and the DLC would be like module series you can buy.
I think that right now though, it suffers from the same problem that's hamstringing the amount of content that you can put in a full game. Development time and costs. Because you can only put so much stuff in a piece of DLC before it stops being profitable to make, since I think that the gamer market has decided on some general price levels for certain kinds of DLC content.
The scorpions dilemma huh... well that pretty much summed up the gaming industry issue in a nut shell lol.
3188537 Its not a problem with automization, its more a problem with getting your physics engine right so that the game does what you want it to do as you envision it. A action rpg needs less realistic physics than a FPS. Sure if your series gets made repetitively like call of duty you can keep a physics engine pretty much the same while streamlining the process somewhat so that all objects perform the correct action when used or affected. Otherwise what takes a lot of time is making sure your rendners don't clip and that the objects and camera placement can be used by the compiling software.
On the dlc thing, sure its a continuation of story that might never have been told. But a lot of companies are abusing that privilege.
Things like the last of us or bioshock infinite are examples of extra content that is a addition to the narrative done correctly. Other triple a games though are just abusing that they had to rush out a title to make money quickly before somebody wises up that the game they produced was sadly incomplete narratively. As I said before some dlc is fine, its just the chapters that literally should have been in game I worry about since loads of folks seem to think that paying for something we already own is a good thing on either end of the spectrum.