A waste of resources: WildStar’s non-raid content

Its no secret: WildStar has been doing pretty poorly subscriber-wise since its release. Interest seems to be at such low levels its almost embarrassing to even write a post about the whole game. There’s multiple reasons as to why things are the way they are, but I want to address one specific reason now: the game’s target audience.

WildStar’s big selling point was, as we’ve gone through before, difficult raiding content. And the game delivered on that point, it really did. Why, then, is the game doing so poorly?

WildStar was made to cater to the modern hardcore raider. People who are used to grinding minigame after minigame, doing dungeon speedruns, playing really hardcore when new content is released, and so on. That’s all well and good, but this niche isn’t spectacularly big. Besides, the majority of this niche is already content with World of Warcraft.

That being said, WildStar’s endgame content does have it’s audience. But how about all the other content it has? Questing, housing, all that? Needless to say, the incredibly on-the-rails questing experience took a considerable amount of time and resources to develop. So did the whole level system and the content required for it, from low level dungeons, armour sets and whatnot to all the zones that have no other purpose but to act as leveling grounds, after which they are forgotten.

Despite all those resources spent on the non-raid content of WildStar, it is all very mediocre, probably because it is modeled after modern World of Warcraft. I doubt many people would deny that. Questing in the game for example is incredibly dull, and I cannot think of a reason to appreciate it over any other game’s similar system.

Developing all that mediocre filler content must have been expensive, especially because the game wasn’t even advertised to appeal to the people who typically spend the most time in that content – the casuals. No, the game was sold as a hardcore raiding game. Which begs the question: why the hell was all that development time really spent on the non-raid content?

I realize Carbine was kind of looking to make a better, more modern version of World of Warcraft. But by now we should all know nobody will beat WoW at it’s own game. This is something we’ve been saying for years, yet its what Carbine tried. Now, differentiating yourself as a hardcore raider friendly game might be a good way to specify your target audience, but if you do so and still spend  the resources on a ton of mediocre non-raiding related content, I think you are wasting resources. You should be focusing on your niche and not trying to broaden it needlessly.

Had WildStar not had a full leveling experience but a short tutorial instead, and should the only open areas have been cities that would’ve acted as lobby areas, the game, I think, would appeal to the very same playerbase it does to right now. Hell, maybe they would’ve gained a few people because several hardcore raiders were probably put off by the mind-numbingly boring leveling experience. Now that might have actually been financially viable, seeing as a lot of money would’ve been saved by focusing  development on the game’s strong points: minigames like raiding and hardmode dungeons.

Questing – why is it so dull in recent MMORPGs

As the years have gone by, we’ve seen a multitude of MMORPG titles come and go, titles that could without the slightest bit of dishonesty be called WoW clones. While these titles tend to have a lot in common, there is one particular thing nearly all of them appear to have: an incredibly boring questing experience.

This week I want to try and answer the question of the title: why exactly is it that what was supposed to reduce boredom by eliminating the traditional way of leveling, monster grinding, now seems to induce boredom at a whole new level?

Birth of the quest-centric leveling system

While World of Warcraft was more of a mix of features borrowed from older titles back in 2005 when it was released, it also introduced at least one innovation of it’s own: the quest-centric leveling system.

While the system faced some level of criticism, in the end there’s no question it was generally extremely well received. After all it heavily influenced the genre for the whole of the next decade, if not for longer. And really, rather than about blaming the system for being duller than mob grinding, the criticism received was mainly about how the system encouraged solo instead of group play.

Now, it is the initial success of the quest-centric leveling system that makes one beg the question: why was leveling so enjoyable in WoW, yet so mindnumbingly boring in more recent games such as Rift and WildStar? After all,  these games are modeled after the MMORPG behemoth, aren’t they?

On novelty

One answer one quickly comes to think of is that it’s all down to the feeling of novelty. In 2005 when World of Warcraft was released, the experience was new – not only was leveling solely through questing a new and refreshing choice of design, but most of the game’s players were also new to the MMORPG genre as a whole. So one could argue that it was the newness of it all back in the day the that made the road from 1 to 60 feel like a magical journey, even to people with previous genre experience.

Indeed one could make the argument for novelty, but before claiming it all on that one feeling, I would consider this: was the original questing experience of World of Warcraft really that similar to that of more recent games like Rift and WildStar?

Gradual changes

World of Warcraft’s questing experience today is not what it used to be. Expansion by expansion and update by update, monsters have become easier to kill, experience requirements have been vastly reduced, money has been made more and more irrelevant, milestones like mounts have been made more trivial, and dreaded new features like the Dungeon Finder and QuestHelper have been introduced. Finally, the third expansion, Cataclysm, has revamped the whole leveling experience by replacing just about all of the old world’s quests with new ones as well as by shaping it’s landscape to suit the new story better.

While the changes have been rather gradual apart from the great leap forward of the Cataclysm expansion, its quite clear that the current leveling experience of WoW is completely different from that of the original game.

Breadcrumbs and overdone questhubs

Looking at how questing works now and then thinking back to 2005 to compare the two eras, the original experience was not quite so linear in the end. In the first one or two zones you encountered as a fresh character you might have found a breadcrumb quest that would lead you to your next zone, but after that such quests were a rare sight.

Finding quests, let a lone efficient quests in a new zone was not as self-evident an act as walking to the nearest town and gathering the five to ten quests from there, all of which are simple gathering or killing quests that take mere minutes to complete. No, new characters had a lot of exploring (or Googling) to do to simply find suitable quests.

With quests being spread so sparse and many quests spanning over multiple zones or even continents,  as well as with the absence of breadcrumb quests, some exploration can be with good reason said to have been encouraged by the basic design behind the system.

On the contrary, the post-Cataclysm system does not have hidden or off-the-beaten-path quests, or if such things exist, they do not make much of a difference in leveling speed or how efficient leveling feels to the player.

Mimicking the wrong era of the game

In it’s post-Cataclysm state, World of Warcraft’s questing system can not by any measure be said to encourage exploration. Now more than ever it can with good reason be said to be overly convenient.

But here’s the deal: we are talking about a 10 year old game. In the case of such an old game, it actually makes sense to sacrifice some credibility of the game world in order to make things feel more convenient. Your playerbase mainly consists of people who have seen everything there is to see, explored every corner there is to explore. When they level up new characters, it’s OK for them the experience is over very fast. They’ve done the content so many times they like the fact they no longer need to focus on memorizing which zones to go to at which level or which quests to pick. To them, it’s not a problem equal level monsters no longer take up to a minute to kill, because they’ve been there, done that, and they just want to get done with their business.

Exploring a new game world is fun, even if it is just a themepark world built solely for the leveling experience, but as a game ages and it’s subscribers along with it, the call for convenience starts raising it’s head. This all brings me back to the leveling design of Rift, WildStar, etc. Their questing  experiences were super linear from the get-go with little variance and a very handholdy feeling.

When it comes to the leveling experience of the major WoW clones,  I tend to think they tried to mimic the wrong era of their role model. When a game has just been released, it is good for it to encourage exploration through a less linear questing experience. Autopiloting through a preset path filled with huge amounts of simple, overcrowded quest hubs is simply dull to a new player.

Once your  game matures and the players start becoming routined, you can start making things more convenient, albeit at the expense of the magic any newcomers are going to feel on their first playthroughs of the content. But before that, I would take the approach that questing in itself should encourage players to explore that beautiful world your dev team has put a lot of effort into creating.

Why the hardcore need the casual – even in PVE

An Introduction in Place

Hello there, dear reader!

In all likelihood you are a new reader, considering the fact this is the  first post in this blog. So allow me to welcome you in the most heartfelt of manners and introduce myself.

Take a man who’s proletarian by day and a wizard (or another fantasy archetype) by night. Then add into the mix a slight amount of weekend philosopher and basically what you have is me, Waxwind.

Here in the Weekly Wizard I will attempt to pick a subject related to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (or MMORPGs for short) each week and write down my thoughts on it. I cannot say how I will succeed in keeping up the pace yet, nor can I promise the best of quality in the whole of the video game blogging world, but do trust me when I say that I will be trying my best.

In this first post I want to give my take on a topic related to a very recently released game: WildStar, and the niche it appears to be aiming for: the hardcore raiders. So let us jump into it.

Why the hardcore need the casual – even in a PVE focused game

For this first entry I want to discuss the apparent post-release subscriber loss of the recently released WildStar. The specific issue in question is: is catering only to the hardcore the mistake WildStar made?

I would consider myself a pretty hardcore gamer. I am not strictly a raider, but if I play a game and that game includes raiding as it’s endgame, I am going to delve into it. That being said, hardcore content is not the only content I partake in, and to be honest, I can see WildStar has little to offer for anyone to whom raiding either isn’t enough to keep them interested, or who want to do raiding but cannot invest the time into it.

At maximum level WildStar has very little to do outside of raiding for the PVE-minded. And herein lies a problem – the casual gets there and gets bored. The game also bores me, a person to whom raiding is not enough to make a whole game worthwhile (because I except a virtual world and not a lobby game filled with minigames from a title calling itself an MMORPG, but that is a topic for another time.)

If the developers wanted to cater only to the hardcore, why would they care about the loss of casuals then? They have their niche nailed down, right?

Unfortunately I don’t think it is that simple, and this is my point: raiders are a very special type of a niche. While not all of them recognize or would admit this (and while a minority them are unaffected by this), a large part of raiding is showing off. That’s right, it isn’t all about how awesome the boss fights are. Partly, sure, but for a great if not for the most part it’s about you being able to show off you’ve completed those boss fights.

And to whom does the raider show off to? The casual. If there are no casuals, there is nobody to show off to, except if you are in a world first  guild, in which case you at least get to show off to the rest of the hardcore raiding population, which in WildStar is already dwindling – dwindling in my opinion partly because there are no casuals to admire them.

The original World of Warcraft had plenty of content for the casual to consume outside of raiding, which isn’t the case for WildStar. Granted, at the time alterantives were few, but playing WoW for the first time actually felt like living in a virtual world no matter how little time you invested in it (and why this was the case is a topic I want to cover in another post). But the same isn’t the case for WildStar, where the casuals do not become as attached to the game and so they leave quickly. And when there are no casuals, the people to show off to, the hardcore raiders get bored.

While seeing new boss mechanics can be fun, few are prepared bash their heads against a fight that takes multiple hours of practice per night for a week or two just for the sake of it. Nay, most people are only prepared to do it if they can brag about it, most likely to a semi big audience – and not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just how humans work. And lastly, few people care even about world first kills in a game with a population as small as WildStar’s.