It’s already started on some of the larger MMO sites, but with the dropping of the WAR NDA, every WAR fan blog will fall all over themselves to provide, in great and explicit detail, everything you need to do, and in what order, locations provided, animated overlays to show you in what direction you should face, a comfy chair with wheels on it pushed by a kind old man with an English accent, lit signs floating in front of you saying “OKAY PRESS THAT BUTTON RIGHT NOW!”, and all so you won’t have to ever have to think you are experiencing Warhammer’s world with anything less than complete knowledge.
When this was done in WoW -> BETA <-, I considered the game pre-ruined by too much knowledge. Where's the sensawunda?
But it's much, much MUCH worse now. And I'm sure these posts outlining everything you do are incredibly popular. People are excited about starting a new game, sure, I understand that. But when the new players come into the world and find out there is nothing left to discover, that even by creating a character they have stepped on a well-trod path that has been mapped out by thousands, that there are no secrets -- will they still want to play what has suddenly become just another button pressing finger exercise?
25 thoughts on “Would you play an MMO where nobody held your hand?”
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I do miss the days when playing a game (not using MMOs or RPGs in general, this extends to FPS and RTS games too) wasn’t an exercise in data analysis. Back then, you just fired up the game, and immerse yourself in the world and have fun – pick whichever class or race you thought was cool, and just naturally understand the pro/cons of your choice and make the best out of it over time.
It’s not the same anymore. Games these days are a lot about min/max-ing. Before making a character, you have to plan out every single step of it, much like planning out a kid’s future education. The same extends to RTS games – “Build this structure 3 minutes into the game, and the pump 7 of unit x, while that is going on, build another 3 of unit y”.
Oh how I wish for the old days.
Well, one can just try to avoid to read that kind of stuff, at least if people get into too much details about the games.
I think it is a bit problematic a times when I want to blog about my play experiences, but at the same time not give away too much since the sense of discovery is important.
Step 1) Avoid all spoilers.
Alternatively…
Step 1) Play an extremely obscure game no-one cares enough to post spoilers about.
😛
I love reading people’s stories about their adventures in game. I plan to play WAR in a few months, though, and I don’t think I will be able to NOT read people’s detailed guides on every little thing there is to do.
@Snazfg — playing Wizard 101 did give that sense of discovery, because I knew so little about what to do. I figured out how to play that game just on the help given in the game and trial and error. That was so much fun.
I know that if it were a popular game, though, TTH, MV, VN and all the other sites would be blasting recommended Conjurer strats at me and telling me which cards I should have in my hand for each and every boss 😛
I just doubt WAR needs that much help and kind of wish people would save their guides for the times when they are perhaps really needed.
Well, I won’t get into the details due to the NDA (though it may drop before this comment hits your database), however, I was originally planning on some traditional levelling guides for WAR but after playing the beta, I feel the game is designed in such a way that these kinds of traditional guides are completely unnecessary. My guides will have a unique spin on them: helpful, but not holding your hand. 🙂
Yeah but really you are talking about the amount of data on the internet, not the games. Sure you can thank wow for making games easy but umm…even EQ1 had EQAtlas, c’mon. Its the internet not always every new game.
Also, this brought to my mind how useless traditional print game guides are today in the face of MMORPGs. Half the guides I see in brick and mortar stores are horribly out of date.
EQ didn’t start with EQ Atlas. All of us had our hand drawn maps and lists of locations. EQ was so little known at launch that even information on what spells DID was closely guarded. One of the reasons I stopped playing my very first character, a wizard, was because I had no idea what any of my spells did or how they were different. I thought O’Keill’s Radiation (a 2 point damage shield) was an attack spell.
But that’s way too LITTLE information.
Most of my friends I know from “RL” play that way, they don’t read blogs, they just play. Of course, the problem is they are also the people who get booted from groups because they have no idea what they’re doing.
Sometimes I try to teach them, but I realized, they don’t want to learn. They don’t want to spend hours reading about playing a game, they want to actually play games. And if that means they don’t do a lot of group content then that’s what it means.
But it’s too bad that games are designed that way, that if you don’t study a lot you underperform.
So I guess I’m wondering.. are all these sites made necessary because of the complexity of the games?
And also, is it because the group content is hard? Or because there is not enough feedback for you to learn? For instance, my friend had a few 70s in WoW before he understood threat, and then only because I explained it and had him download Omen. He knew mobs like to turn and attack him, but no idea why. Now I guess some warnings are being built in, after 3 years.
Though I think CoV was not too hard, I barely knew anything, took Tactics on my Corruptor, etc, but people still liked me and did not boot me. (though I’d played other games by then). But.. I am not sure it’s really necessary to make studying outside of a game essential to group content. Maybe it is a failure of the games themselves…
I think I went on a tangent there.
I don’t think having a complete walkthrough is really anything new for video games. The internet may have expanded the amount of knowledge that can be pre-gathered by players, but it hasn’t really changed anything. Case in point, I have an old Nintendo Power guide for the very first Final Fantasy that tells you every trick in the game. It even lays down the strategies for beating the game with a single character. I remember my friends and I all took turns passing it around as we beat the game. Not very different from posting a leveling guide on a website in my opinion.
I think I do a pretty good job of keeping away from all the helpful information when I want to experience the game as opposed to get past something in the game. A common comment on my posts about things going wrong is “you should have read the wiki/guide/walkthrough.”
I have been, and will continue to, avert my eyes from information about WAR so I can get some of that sense of wonder and feeling of accomplishment when I do actually figure things out and do something right. I got that damn babel fish on my own, I can do this too if I want.
Two reasons I can think of why help sites are a nessecary evil:
Firstly It seems that MMORPG developers are simply incapable of providing all of the information that you need to play the game by themselves. Bugged quests are an extreme example but there is also a whole bunch of “utility” information that you only ever seem to be able to get from unofficial sources.
Secondly help sites function as a kind of “dynamic difficulty level adjustment”. You don’t need to consult help if you don’t need it but having the information available is a vital safety net for those of us who lack either the time or the ability to figure everything out for ourselves.
From an immersion point of view it would be lovely if we could get all this information “in character” from the game but having suffered the frustration of getting stuck in games without adequate offline support sources I have to say that given the choice of having helpsites or not I vote for helpsites.
I make a distinction between game mechanics and encounter/quest/zone information. I would really like to know what these numbers in my persona window mean. Will I fight better with this weapon or with that spell. Not being able to tell what one of my spells does is a problem.
On the other hand, it’s fun to try to run through quests on my own, or to explore new zones, and to figure out new encounters. And I don’t mind swapping information with other players in-game. That seems fair. I try to stay away from guides for these things, though not always.
When I look at a guide on the internet, it’s to find out what, not how. That is, information about just what exactly that boss mob does is welcome. I’ll figure out how to beat it on my own, thank you very much. Like the 11,500 focus damage we took from a named the other day in Chardok. I’d never heard of focus damage before. A friend told me it’s a damage type that’s unmitigatable and unavoidable, and he thinks it’s an AE on a timer on that mob. A nasty trick.
But there’s still more to learn. Can we outrange it? Is it frontal? Does it go off if he’s stunned? Much more to know.
Honestly, in Warhammer OL, you don’t even need a third party to hold your hand because the in-game map shows you virtually everything. It does away with anything like Thottbot and any need for quest guides. It’s helpful but pretty boring too. I wonder if I can turn that off, come to think of it, and turn it on if I need a cheat…
At least I already got my answers on if I even want to know about this game anymore than I already know…
A wall of text
A lot of videos have the comments
“Reminds you of WoW”
“Kinda like WoW”
Hudsons Hideout
“Then I got sick of the Order quests and decided to do something different”
Common Sense Gamer
“WAR brings the MMO genre a baby step forward and brings some very interesting elements to the table. PQs…freakin awesome. RvR, interesting…but. Classes…you’ve played some before, but healers are really well done.
…but we’ve already played WAR, it was called World of the Lord of the Everarcraft Hero.”
Guess I am not sold yet…
Guess I can save cruising the WAR wiki for now…
lol
i think people just want to get to the end content and be number 1. It seems for more and more people that level 1-45 is the shit you put up with to get to the actual game at 46-50. Which is why i think MMO’s should start coming out with only 10 or 20 level straight off the bat. So yes you still have to work to get to level 10 or so, but 95% of the content is still open to the player at that level. instead of player burning quickly through 60 or 70% of the content at launch and getting bored of the 30% that is the high end.
5 years ago I probably would have played a game that had no hand holding. Today I probably wouldn’t. Whether that’s something that’s come from getting older and having less time or simply because expectations have changed due to games like WoW – I’m not sure. I fondly remember accidentally stumbling into Lesser Faydark and getting destroyed by a passing Brownie. Or that first run from Kelethin to Qeynos and not having a clue where to go. I can’t imagine that happening in a new MMO, it’s all there in the interface or via addons. No surprises.
@Rooks — Well, I have to admit that when I started Guild Wars, after I hit level 5 I went right to the wikis to help me construct a good skill build for my Mesmer/Ranger, because the one I came up with was not working. After looking at the builds, I didn’t feel too bad. There’s no way I could have gotten enough experience to make one with so soon. And for sure, I would have used more information about EQ to find my way around if there had been any. I always suspect, when I don’t know much about a game, that I am not having as much fun as I could be having. Even then, my long, long journey from Qeynos to Freeport remains one of my best EQ memories.
@Ogre — WAR offers pretty much the same content at 40 as at level 1 from what I understand. There’s no point to racing through the levels except that’s what people have been trained to do. One of the problems of MMOs, actually, is that by playing, you are forced to progress, leading inevitably to characters pinned at max level. If you’re having fun where you are, you’ll still have to leave.
@Open — Hudson’s beta review was pretty disheartening. He got tired of everything pretty darn quick. But he could have written the same thing about any MMO. MMOs by themselves are repetitive and boring; it’s playing with other people that is their strength and salvation.
@Alice — yeah, everything I’ve read about WAR says it’s so trivial and easy that guides are just overkill. So why do people go looking for them when they don’t need them? Boggles the mind.
Despite the frustrations of trying to get around without maps with a little YOU ARE HERE on it (and trying to give directions to someone without sense heading!), I think I prefer that to Warhammer and WOW’s map system. I still have my maps from EQ Atlas. My favorite is the one that I marked VERY DANGEROUS LVL 15+
I agree with ya. Though I have to say that I do enjoy reading peoples blogs about their adventures in online games as long as its not filled with too much details/spoilers. But the general idea is great. I just found a new blog (seems so) a couple of days ago, nothing major, seems only a few posts so far, but I enjoy the short stories (http://everquest.wordpress.com/).
Steve
Four posts in two years? Heh… I hope he keeps it up. So few blogs talk about EQ, there’s room for more, lots more.
You all have to remember I had been playing beta at that point since FEB and I was VERY sick of having my characters deleted and having to do that content over and over again, check the comments on my FIRST beta post again real fast is all I ask. As my posts go up please remember that those are things that I wrote WAAAY back in June and July and I had to take a 2 month break to try and sell my condo in between march and June. HAVE FAITH!
@Hudson
Ok…
I still have my money on boredom of the game, but you will stay for the people!! (You have a really good guild going, and THAT will make the game fun…as the game itself does NOT look fun)
Cheers
PS:
Tipa…sorry off topic but
Why have you not discussed this MAJOR news
http://spellborn.acclaim.com/
My My
I did, in the comments of my last Spellborn post. But yup, it definitely deserves some love of its own.