The Curse of Player Choice

With a title like that, oh yeah, I went there.

If anything, I'm a fan of player choice. You want to allow your players to do things not on rails, so they can come up with creative solutions and basically feel like they have some control over the direction their avatars can go. Even if that control is an illusion, it's often best to feed that illusion rather than tear away player agency from the beginning. 

Some games, such as sandboxes, are perfect for providing player choice. 

I finally ventured a Minecraft day's travel away
from my original base(s) and... built another home that's 
a lot like the first couple. Big, blocky, and with
plenty of lights so a baddie can't spawn in the shade.

Although ironically enough the first (or in the case of the Minecraft house above) the third house ends up looking similar no matter which game you play...

My first house in Conan Exiles, and as you can tell
I had been steadily upgrading it along the way.

My similar attempts at architecture aside, the games allow for a large breadth of creativity. If there's a single "best" way of doing things, I haven't found it yet. At least in the single player version of these games I don't have to worry about opposing players making my life a living hell, so gives me some free time to expand my horizons. While dodging enemies, that is.

***

In MMOs, however, creativity and player agency are frequently not quite so free and available. Since I've never played the game, I'm not going to explore EVE Online here.* If EVE players want to discuss player agency in their game in the comments I'm happy to read them, but it would be foolish of me to opine on something I have no direct experience with.** I'll instead talk about the various MMOs that I have played, which are mostly WoW clones. 

A lot of WoW clones have the outward appearance of player choice --instances to run, raids to do, PvP, quests, achievements, explorations, pet battles, etc.-- but only rarely do they actually have an impact on the game world itself. At best you can change your in-game housing, but outside of that the most you can play around with is your clothing and your titles.

And mounts. Can't forget those.

If that's a brontosaurus, does that mean that Goldshire
is actually Bedrock and I'm in The Flintstones?

Still, you're not going to see player created forts in Redridge, for example, that could be assaulted and destroyed by a Horde guild. You can't create little hidey-holes in the middle of nowhere so that you have a safe place to spend the night. And if phasing doesn't exist, everything eventually respawns in-game.***

This is done for several reasons, but the most obvious one to me is that if players are able to shape the game world in a WoW-clone MMO, the early adopters will have an incredible advantage over anybody who comes after. Think of all the people in ArcheAge who got the prime real estate when the game first released, and people who tried the game a few months later never had a shot to get any housing in a lot of the "older" servers. It's bad enough that progression raiders who don't rush rush rush to the end in WoW (or purchase the top tier expansion to get Early Access) will be far behind their fellows in game, so having the ability to affect the game world would enable those hardcore players to carve out swaths of the game world only for themselves.

I'm pretty sure that WoW would never have lasted very long if all the hardcore players tried to be assholes to the rest of the player base by effectively putting up giant "KEEP OUT!" signs everywhere.

Yes, I'm old enough to have watched the
Little Rascals/Our Gang serials on television.
From Redbubble (and The Little Rascals).

***

Given the lack of ability to directly affect the game world, the WoW clones I've played have had to rely upon other things to provide that illusion of player choice. Instead of buildings in the game world, providing the players with various activities plugs that gap suffices. It's only when you eschew those activities and strike out in the direction of finding your own fun that you realize that you can be somewhat limited in what you can do. 

Sure, you can only be limited by your imagination, but if you want structure to that imagination, you're likely going to rely upon third party addons, such as those used in the original Hardcore WoW modes or Role-Playing assistants. This is one of those situations where the third party addons don't help you raid better, but they enhance what you can do in the game. They're tools, just like those that help you organize your bags and bank space, but it does certainly seem that Blizz' focus on addon reduction in Retail WoW has left these type of addons alone and intact for the time being. 

Some people, such as YouTuber Nixxiom, have advocated for Micro-Blizzard to incorporate Role Playing addons into the base game's toolset in the same fashion that there are now official Hardcore servers in Classic WoW. There are likely other addons that people could use to expand their capabilities to shape the game world to their liking, but I honestly kind of like leaving this aspect to MMOs to the players themselves. By preventing the players from being their own worst enemy by shaping the game world to their liking, MMO developers at least give their games a fighting chance at survival. 

*And to be honest, you could put Star Wars Galaxies here as well. Calling Njessi. Njessi, white courtesy phone, please.

**I know that shooting your mouth off is what the internet is for, but I'm not going to go there. This time. 

***Even phasing is limiting, as people who are on different phases will not be able to directly interact with each other in the phased zones. I rediscovered this back in Wrath Classic, and I really didn't like it.  It felt like I was being pushed into completing story beats just so that I'll be on the same part of the story as everyone else, and if you know me I really dislike being pushed into doing anything, whether it for social reasons or for work. (For the record, I still haven't completed the entire Wrathgate Event in Wrath Classic on any toon.)

#Blaugust2025

Give the People What They Want

(If you get a chance, go listen to The Kinks album of the same name as this title. You won't be disappointed.)

MMOs, by necessity, are a limited slice of an invented world.

As much detail a dev team can put into a game world, there are going to be gaps. Some are massive, such as the lack of religion being prominent as a divisive element,* and some are more subtle, such as the lack of music and the arts in people's lives. 

I was thinking of this when I read Bhagpuss' post about how the Guild Wars 2 devs tried to artificially create player hubs when the players had organically established their own hubs. It's a good post and well worth reading, and as you'll see my really short TL;DR doesn't scratch the surface of its detail. I don't play GW2 enough to comment on that specific MMO, but it did give me fuel for thought concerning other MMOs.

The most prominent of MMOs, World of Warcraft, has the recurring theme of conflict between Orcs and Humans at its center. This is artificially propped up by Blizzard, even though the most popular expansions (BC, Legion, Wrath) all center around the two factions joining together against a common threat. Expansions --or portions of them-- that emphasize the conflict tend to not be as well received**. However, Blizz keeps pushing the conflict because.... It's the core of the game. Or something. Although if you asked me what the core of WoW was, it's that "Old Gods are bad and the source of all evil. HP Lovecraft rules."

Still, it also seems that Blizz attempts to do the same thing that GW2 has been guilty of, which is to create a new player hub for each expac. Or, in the case of Cataclysm, an artificial attempt to re-establish the faction capitals as the primary hubs in the game. 

It's not like ArenaNet and Blizzard are the only guilty ones here. Standing Stone has created new hubs with each expac in LOTRO, and Bioware the same in SWTOR. To an extent, I can understand the need to create central hubs in new territories, and they become the hub of activity for each expac. But at the same time there's no reason in a Fantasy or Science Fiction MMO that you can't just have a gamified way of allowing players to simply return to the hub of their choice and bounce back and forth from wherever "the front" is. 

I guess my whole point is that instead of observing what the players are doing and trying to change behavior by artificial means, why not let the players do their own thing? 

***

I do realize that there is a game out there that does just that, and it's called EVE Online, but EVE takes the "give players the latitude to do what they want" and opens up to an "anything goes" environment.

That sort of game isn't for everybody.

EVE is definitely not for the faint of heart.
From giphy.com.

 

And yet, looking over how Blizzard has implemented WoW from expac to expac, I can't help but think that Blizz has lost a lot of what made the original Vanilla (or Classic) implementation of the game so great: you can wander around and make your own way without being railroaded into a specific path. That doesn't mean that people haven't figured out optimal paths for everything --there's a reason why boosting services are so popular in Classic-- but to experience endgame content you aren't limited to a very specfic path. To experience Naxx, you don't have to have gone through AQ40, for example, and vice versa. About the only limitation those two have is that you have to have at least gotten a decent amount of T2 gear from BWL, and even then it's not a strict requirement. I'm living proof of that.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Some games, however, you can't not have various hubs. With the events of the War of the Ring as a backdrop, LOTRO can't avoid having hubs in various locales. And SWTOR has hubs on each planet you visit as a necessity, since traipsing across the galaxy is not a simple thing. But an Azeroth or Tyria? They have no such limitations. It's all up to the devs to observe the players and reinforce their preferences rather than trying to redirect them, because artificial redirection doesn't always go well.

*This is merely an observation, not an indictment. Many of the longest running conflicts over the centuries have been fueled by religion, so the absence of those types of conflicts in MMOs do tend to stand out. And as many conflicts are driven by religion, an equal or greater number use religion as an excuse for something else (such as Albigensian Crusade, which was merely an excuse of the northern French nobles to invade Languedoc in the south of France).

**Battle for Azeroth as the primary example, although the complaints about that expac are much much more than just "artificially creating conflict".

***Besides, you always have your ship to hang out in.

In Other News....

Although it was not as directly impactful to me as Wildstar shutting down, there was other MMO news last week: EVE Online developer CCP was sold to Pearl Abyss, the developer of Black Desert Online.

I found it somewhat amusing that the EVE Online fans --who play in a cutthroat open universe PvP game-- are looking askance at this buyout. After all, isn't a buyout perfectly in line with EVE Online's gameplay?

As If I Didn't Have Enough to Do

I have several blog posts in various states of completion, and you'd think that I'd just finish them off to get them posted. After all, none of them are time/date dependent, and it would be nice to get some of these posts just done and posted.

But as you can guess, the answer to that is "Oh no, I couldn't possibly do that. I had to go write something else instead."

***

The truth is, I've not had that much time for writing. Well, I can find the time to write but I also want to sleep. I thought that this summer would have afforded me more time for gaming and writing, but I've been instead spending my time plotting and figuring out work schedules and college trips, cleaning and fixing things around the house, and just trying to hang in there from month to month.*

A sword? A blaster? a lightsaber?
No, THIS is my current weapon of choice:
the Ryobi Brushless Motor Impact Driver.
It replaced a 21 year old drill that was barely
hanging on. From ryobitools.com.

But in a bizarre set of circumstances, I've taken some of my spare dollars** and bought games on Steam, in spite of my a) lack of time to play games, and b) my current slew of games that ought to be completed. Because "shiny", I suppose.

I have noticed that the main system is finally showing its age (6 years old) after the latest Windows 10 update in that graphics are taking longer to switch on screen in spite of the 1+ year old RX470 graphics card. I'm sure the old Intel i7 Ivy Bridge + 6 year old hard drive has something to do with that. The games I've bought, however, can easily still fit within my system parameters for the "recommended" settings, as they tend to be (at newest) a few years old.

Because I don't have enough MMOs to play
with, I picked up ESO on a Steam sale.
From elderscrollsonline.com

One thing that I've noted is that there really are very few SF or Space Fantasy MMOs out there. There's SWTOR, EVE Online, Star Trek Online, and Wildstar, and maybe Destiny/Destiny 2 if you squint hard enough and claim it's an MMO, but far and away the MMO genre of choice is Epic Fantasy or its cousin, Sword and Sorcery.

So naturally, to balance out picking up ESO, I decided to download the game that I never said I'd be interested in, ever, and fire it up just to look at: EVE Online.

I haven't actually done anything with EVE yet, simply because I've been trying to figure out the backstory for each racial option, but one thing did raise my eyebrows quite a bit: your body is "grown" as a clone in a similar manner as that found in Brave New World*** and your toon has interface holes in the back where you plug into your ship. I have to admit that this is a bit of a new twist on why you pilot your ship around without seeing your toon --see Star Trek Online for a different example-- and one that frankly gave me an uncomfortable feeling up and down my spine.

EVE Combat suit concept art by Andrei Cristea.
If you look at the back, you'll see the neural
connections that allow you to plug into your ship.
I'd have picked a bare back pic, but most of
those are of dead bodies in space.

In a way, the fact that your body is grown and then let loose to go and be a space merchant (or whatnot) without much of anything in the way of normal human familial contact is about the most radical piece of social engineering seen this side of Sparta. If there wasn't a more perfect worker drone prototype created to promote the corporate mastery of the bourgeois, I've not found it yet.****

Beyond that, I've not done anything else with EVE --or ESO, or any of the other games, for that matter-- simply because I know that I won't have much time to play at once, so I've been sticking to games that don't require a huge chunk of time investment at once (such as running an instance or dungeon), and that I can stop at the drop of a hat.

So here's to Summer, the (supposed) slow period of the calendar year!




*I also thought I wouldn't be called on quite so much to be a personal taxi given that school is out of the summer, but it seems that things have actually gotten worse in that regard. Silly me.

**No Gen Con this year again --due to school timing-- so any money saved for that has been freed up for a few games here and there.

***I wonder if Aldous Huxley gets a nod in the EVE wiki somewhere.

****Oh, I could have so much fun with this, utilizing Marxist language I've not used since a few university classes.

EVE Online Adds to F2P

I've said before that I'm not that likely to play EVE Online, but I do keep an ear to the ground whenever major updates happen. And this week's particular update has expanded the capability of F2P players within EVE.

Battlecruisers and battleships, the mainstays of the large fleets, are now available to F2P players. While that by itself is impressive, in order to not cripple a F2P player by giving them a ship without the skills to operate it effectively CCP has expanded the skillset of F2P players as well.

It all adds up to a big expansion of F2P players' capabilities within EVE Online.

It's a great win for F2P players, but I have to wonder as to the reasoning behind the move. Maybe they CCP has data that shows that they get a high rate of F2P to subscription movement, and by adding capabilities to F2P CCP hopes to entice more people to subscribe. Or maybe they're looking at simply shoring up the number of people logging into EVE on a given day. But if nothing else, these changes do make the F2P option for EVE more appealing.

I guess we'll see how this shakes out in the months to come.

Why I Likely Won't Play EVE, Part Whatever

I was originally thinking of writing something a bit more lighthearted for Friday, but I came across this little post in Kotaku from Wednesday:

How EVE Players Pulled off the Biggest Betrayal in Its History

A game that prides itself on its no-holds barred/Machiavellian environment* in a space economy is the only place I'd expect to see something like this. Sure, it makes for fascinating reading, but I know I couldn't handle this sort of shenanigans. It'd be like watching real work intrude on my gaming fun.**

Oh, and the spreadsheet aspect of EVE isn't something that I'm enamored of, either. Sure, I'm good at spreadsheets, and I use them even outside of work, but it's not something I like to do but rather something I have to do. Like keep track of college data so we can drill down on what universities mini-Red #2 should be focusing on when we go to the college fairs.*** Or working out the cost details on house projects. But if you want to be good at EVE, you need to run spreadsheets. LOTS of spreadsheets. And that doesn't spark my interests.

Still, more power to those who love to play. It's the difference between respecting somebody who is good at the old Avalon Hill boardgame Diplomacy and actually playing it: the people who are best at both may not necessarily be the people you want to hang around with in real life.

*With the major exception of out of game threats of violence being met with a perma-ban.

**The main reason why I won't read A Song of Fire and Ice and other, gritty SF/F novels is because if I want to read about gritty realism and how characters must suffer and die, I'll go turn on the news.

***Seriously. There's not enough time at those things to cover every university that is there, so you have to focus on the ones you're most interested in. Add to that the complexity of finding universities that have majors that you're interested in --English or Chemistry is easy, finding a university with a Music program that has an Oboist, not so much-- and you've got the makings of a pretty challenging environment.