Decoding Dragons

[MMOs] When is a digital world a soulless world?

I’ve used this phrase a couple of times. I’ve seen it used in others. Why does a particular MMO ‘feel’ soulless to a particular player? Casting an eye over my initial reaction to the game during release week, I seemed to feel positively about the world.

All the little elements I’ve mentioned – the lore that gets deeper as you look, the rifts themselves being connected to the zones, the ability to skip quests you really don’t like without losing the greater thread, the artifacts (what archaeology should have been) it builds up to a satisfying whole. The game has heart.

I’m not sure if I’d agree with that at this point, but both ‘games having heart’ and ‘soulless MMOs’ are very very odd ways to talk about games and gaming, at face value. Let’s take a look at a couple of quotes from bloggers who have used such phrases more recently.

Guild Wars 2 lacks soul, in my opinion. And, while I mean this affectionately, if I’m going to play a soulless MMO with a great development team then it’s going to be RIFT.
- Liore, Herding Cats

This is the quote that prompted me to asking “Why do I feel this game has a soul, and Liore doesn’t. Also what the hell is a digital construct doing having a soul?” Thus, an exploration of ‘soul’ in MMOs was born.

To me, SWTOR feels like another predictable and soulless experience. It’s akin to a slick Hollywood blockbuster movie with cardboard good guys and bad guys with copious amounts of explosions and special effects thrown in for good measure.
- Wolfshead, Wolfshead Online

Wolfshead can always be relied on to dislike a theme-park MMO. Although all the quotes I’ve included here focus on Rift, SWTOR and Guild Wars 2, I think we can assume that Wolfshead probably has the same criticism of the behemoth that is WoW.

I hate Rift as a game. The content that was around when I left was soulless (get it), dumbed down, and just not what I wanted out of an MMO. What was an interesting evolution of the themepark model in beta ended up being a 2011 version of current themepark design at launch.
- Syncaine, Hardcore Casual

Syncaine is another critic of theme-park MMOs. I’m not sure what changed between beta and launch to prompt such hate for Rift, but at least there was a pun involved. In any case, from the above three quotes it is possible to see that there is this conception that games need to have ‘soul’ in order to be an attractive proposition for a player. I doubt most of us would articulate this need in such a way, so I’m going to say that I think for a game to have soul, the player needs to be able to forge an emotional connection with either the virtual space, or the characters and other players within the game. At least for the purposes of this rambling article.

What makes a game soulless?

How can a digital construct that doesn’t even lay claim to imitating personhood be talked of in terms of a soul? Strictly, it can’t, but like most people I could easily talk about the soul of an old house. The old house has character and all the cracks and bumps and bruises contribute to that, the marks of humans living out their lives within the walls of the house. It’s a way of feeling connected to a building. Alternatively, a city centre tower block will often be seen as a soulless construct, despite the thousand of people living out their lives within it’s offices and public spaces. An ancient church in the middle of rolling english fields is romanticised due to generations of focus on the community rituals and experiences shared within, yet now it lies empty due to the secluarisation of the country and it can still be said to have soul.

What does a game share with a building? It’s a construct, though digital, created by many hands. The NPCs and animations are figuratively created and moved by the will of the animators and designers, the feel and function and mechanics of the construct are created by massive collaborative effort for the consumption of thousands of customers. A building is created through the artistic vision of the architect, and then modified by the owners, the project managers, engineers and the thousands of workers that make the initial plan a reality.

So is it this plurality of creators that renders a virtual world ‘soulless’? Videogames, with their narrative elements, are more often compared to films as the ‘other narrative popular medium’. Now, the videogame industry exceeds the film industry in terms of revenue these days, but films have a greater tradition of popular criticism. Film industry traditionalists  criticise the new technology of CGI for being ‘soulless’, so the completely computer generated gaming industry is already fighting a rear-guard action when it comes to the percieved authenticity and emotional heart of a game.

Creating emotional heart

This post came about mainly because of Liore describing Guild Wars 2 as soulless, and then going onto describe RIFT the same way. No piece of digital media can hope to please everyone, and her comment got me examining my own perceptions of Guild Wars 2 (having played the beta) and Rift.

To take a closer look at Guild Wars 2 – the art work and lighting is absolutely stunning. The game is beyond beautiful without trying to be photo-realistic. One of the original trailers for Guild Wars 2 had one of the developers talking about how the game should feel ‘hand-crafted’. In terms of having an emotional centre, that feeling of lovingly created environments is a very good start. Every time I pan the camera around, there are beautiful vistas almost every angle feels like a natural world. The game is huge, and the snatches of conversation I hear as my character wanders around, the way the wind moves through the grass, it feels like a wonderful MMO.

But didn’t I say similar things about Rift? Well, yes, but by the time I got to the end of the levelling curve I was tired of  desert, and the lack of social interaction. After the visual clarity of WoW, I started to find the pretty graphics of Rift inaccessible. The more disconnected from the game I felt, the less heart and charm the game seemed to have. To give a game heart, players need to feel an emotional connection to the world. To say that a film, whether big budget or indie, has charm is to say that the film has succeeded in charming the viewer. To say that a game has heart is to say that it makes the player’s heart (or emotional swell) respond.

The emotional heart of a game comes in part from the central vision of the game, the themes explored by over-arching plots and the atmosphere crafted by the game creators. Diablo 3 is an incredibly monetized game, with emotional connections forged by players who have been waiting for 15 years, yet the emotional heart of the game comes not from the rather simplistic story, but from the atmosphere, music, and the attention to detail displayed in the character animations and the addictive gameplay.

Warcraft has the home advantage

As with many things, WoW has the advantage in that millions of players have already forged emotional connections with the game, the community, and the game world. After not logging for a while, the soaring music of Stormwind as one flies through the front gates still tugs at the heart strings. There’s a lot to be said for the emotional centre created by the veritable mountain of memories created by raid triumphs and failures, by RP moments, by silly guild events involving ogre suits and fireworks. Rift, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World have to fight against 6 years of emotional highs and lows, of the rituals of WoW raiding and PvP (at least in my case.)

How do I forge a connection with a world that is completely new to me? Despite the gorgeous graphics, as an MMO veteran, a game world of a new MMO is always seen as a construct first, and a ‘digital world’ second. Despite the ratty graphics and legacy designs of Warcraft, the landscape of Azeroth has left an indelible mark my history as a gamer. For many others, previous and concurrent Blizzard games will mean that the emotional connection to Azeroth goes even further.

Questing to create a connection

And this is why the ‘questing’ and social aspects of new games really are the make or break features of a new MMO. Firstly there is building on and evolving a system that has bridged from game to game. Secondly there is the relaying of narrative that helps players connect to the stories of NPCs and to their own tales. Guild Wars 2 eschews the linear narrative approach in the way that players interact with the world. A renown heart, on it’s own, has very little story connected to it. Instead the Renown hearts, the continuing events, create the overall background of an area. I’d even go far as to say that every single zone is a quest, and how a player interacts with the Hearts determines how much or how little of the zone narrative you chose. For me it harks back to the early days of questing in WoW where there were some quest chains, but many individual quests that could go in any order.

Which is not the same thing as min-maxing travel time and XP.

The Hearts definitely appeal to the explorer, but they could appeal to the narrative junky if the player takes the time to talk to the zone scouts.

So emotional heart? Well Guild Wars 2 does that for me whenever it starts to tackle issues of gender and parenthood, because those are the issues that matter to me. Whenever I hear a female charr growling “Kitten’s got a sword too” in answer to a patronising male charr, I cheer inside. For me the game has heart because it’s clear that the developers and artists really believe in what they’re doing. The game feels designed with a gamer like me in mind, and I’m not even that much of a PvPer!

On the other foot, Star Wars: The Old Republic hinges it’s emotional connections on how well the storylines are written, and on the playerbase’s emotional connection to the Star Wars IP. Rift was always going to be battling against the lack of established IP, and the juvenile nature of it’s storylines let it down in the early days. My initial reaction on hearing about the dragons and planes was “Seriously? What happens when they run out of dragons?” Trion have managed to balance out a shallowness of concept by setting the gold standard in terms of content release and response to issues. Yet the dynamic content doesn’t really connect with players on an emotional level (at least not in my experience), and the questing is questing we all know and love. Players who love and enjoy the game, and it’s souls, will have found and made those emotional connection with other players  and the stories of the game. I still have fond memories of solving some of the various puzzles and discovering caches, and those moments of triumph helped  me to forge that connection with the game and start to see it as a game with soul.

What is ‘soul’ again?

I seem to have defined it here as ‘having an emotional centre’, but that is a very ambiguous phrase. Does a game have soul if it was crafted and created with love and passion, or because the designers created a stage suitable for the enactment of ritual, friendship, and emotional highs and lows? I suspect it’s a little of both. There is a tendency to see large companies as faceless entities, with games created by committee with revenue models in mind, and to forget about the passionate individuals that want to create games they want to play. Yet the biggest MMO of all probably has more soul in it, invested by millions of players and thousands of developers and contributors, than the smaller game that is attempting to evolve the MMO genre.

Hence the magic of social features. Rift remains quietly successful and has fabulous social features and connectivity, and many MMO bloggers continue to praise Trion, and I suspect I would find the game a much more emotionally charged experience if I were to start playing it again now. At the moment the personal story in Guild Wars 2 leaves much to be desired, and the emotional connection for me comes from discovering a more motion-based combat style, and hearing of the struggles of Charr females and Norn women. I have no clue if that will persist for me once the game goes live, or if I will find the launch day game lacking in emotional centre. Whether a game is Soulless or not is certainly not an objective thing, in my opinion.

I haven’t touched upon the ‘soul’ of expansions, or on The Secret World, Wildstar, or any number of new MMOs. Do you think my conception of a ‘soul’ for a game is the correct one? There are certainly other things that one could mean by it!

 

[MMOs] When is a digital world a soulless world? was published on June 13th, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , , under the Analysis, Game Development, Games category. There are currently 16 comments on this article so far.

Meaningful travel time – passengers and drivers

I was reading this post by Syncaine on travel time in MMOs. And it got me musing a little bit. In real life (or meatspace) there are no instant teleports. You either get to drive, in which case you are occupied with the task of steering, or you are a passenger. In the case of the passenger you are essentially waiting. Waiting for transport to arrive, and then waiting for the place you intend to disembark. The act of travelling and travel time can thus become a moment of multi-tasking. In the digital age we all have our noses in a phone, a laptop, an ipod or a book (or a kindle!)

If you’re driving you might have music on, but in many places it is illegal to be fiddling with a phone (not to mention down right dangerous.) There are some correlations to this when travelling in WoW – you can fly up high and be ‘safe’ in a way that travellers in RIFT cannot, but if you tab out while flying you risk flying off the map and dying of fatigue. Or the curious situation of flying into invisible walls (such as the SKY) and coming back to the screen to find your mount squawking at you in an undignified fashion.

In RIFT you either teleport over great distances/between zones, or you run and weave a path through the dangerous mobs. Sometimes a zone has several teleports, enabling easier questing and crafting, other times it has one. WoW also has portals, although really the flight points to Vashj’ir aren’t that bad, and the hearthstone mechanic. Now the comments over at Syncaine’s article make some great points.

  1. Faster travel changes your perception of space
    Every day I get the bus into a nearby town. I did this when I was a child going to school there for 7 years, and I’ve done it again as an adult going to work. I tried walking it once. Oh boy. It was a long walk, although the ridiculous thing is that I’ve walked further than that on hikes for fun.
  2. Group content always needs a way to get everyone in one place NOW.

So what is meaningful? ‘Lobby’ is an accusation often thrown at WoW by critics, and sometimes with all the portals I feel they may be right (do we really need one to Vashj’ir, or even to the Storm Peaks?) However is ‘meaningful’ travel time, as in where you actively have to drive, really fun? Other than an exercise in influencing your perceptions of space and the feeling of danger; is it a fun gaming experience? That’s going to be different for everyone, as some will relish the ‘feeling of danger’ and see it as part of the immersive experience, while others will see it as getting in the way of the immersive activities they prefer to do.

I can’t put this book down

One final thought. Both WoW and RIFT have a ton of in-game books. WoW mostly has them in the forms of static books that need to be read (and there are even achievements for reading a lot of them.) These books contain some brilliant snippets of lore (biased sources of course). There are also items you can hold in your inventory that you can read, but these tend to be grey items and not many folk hang on to them. In RIFT they actually have a book collection, allowing you to keep hold of the texts without cluttering up your inventory.

Something I’ve missed from RIFT was having a moment where I can open those books up and read them. For some reason they haven’t been compatible with crafting, so I can’t flick through the history of the Bahmi while Caerys smelts Titanium. And of course there are no flight paths enabling me to sit back and read a book while I travel from one end of the continent to the other.  I won’t say this is a missed opportunity in RIFT, because most people would rather teleport instantly than be forced to take a flying taxi, but as a perpetual passenger in real life, a lot of my life is spent immersed in whatever it is I’m reading while I travel. (Or should that be engrossed?)

So the attempt to use travel to enhance immersion and sense of space, while it works, does make me smile. For me, travel is a moment to check out of the world I’m currently in, not something that necessarily engages me with the wider world. At least until I reach my destination.

Meaningful travel time – passengers and drivers was published on May 5th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , , under the Warcraft category. There are currently 3 comments on this article so far.

RIFT: First impressions of Telara

I doubt this will become a RIFT blog, but one never knows. In any case, I finally picked up the RIFT beta over the last weekend and gave it a go. In the past I’ve tried Warhammer, EVE Online and had a brief stint in LOTRO, but none of them ever clicked and I was never able to put my finger on why. In Warhammer my computer couldn’t handle the level of graphics required to make the landscape truly stand out. In LOTRO the Tolkien geek in me was sobbing quietly in the background.  EVE Online just…I have no emotional connection with a spaceship, sorry.

As things stand, I’ve ordered a copy of Rift. I plan to play I am playing on the RP server ‘Argent’, and will likely be playing Kelari and dwarf! have Kelari, Bahmi and dwarf characters.

Immersion and Lore – how does it work?

I’ve heard a large variance of opinions on game lore. At first glance the game feels like a very amateur fantasy novel, with your usual big bads, traitors, heroes, grey areas and unpronouncable names. I’ve seen a lot of to-do about how the lore is bad or how people just don’t care about any of it. I mentioned LOTRO earlier because for me this is relevant: when developers take an existing IP they are necessarily going to end up with confrontations with everyone else’s imagination. LOTRO Middle Earth, while beautiful, was not the same as the one I’ve been carrying around in my head since the age of seven.  That’s a tall order for any company to compete with, even though an existing IP comes with a built in fan base. Triton start themselves off at a disadvantage precisely because we have no context for all this stuff happening on Telara. However the lack of preconceptions may, in the end, work in their favor when competing against big brand MMOs.

As far as I know, we knew nothing about the World of Everquest, and once upon a time even Azeroth was relatively unknown to us. All these extensive IPs were brand new once, and the best ones have taken time to develop a loyal fanbase. The closer I look at the starting areas, the more interesting and intriguing they become – it’s well worth reading up about them in detail after you’ve played through them, and Covenant of Telara has great lore summaries of Mathosia and Terminus. Asha, Orphiel, Shyla and Cyril *coughwhydidtheycallhimthat* aren’t interesting to us yet, but Trion have put some great characterisation in the game, the further you get it.

What at first appears to be a cut and dried ‘straight laced religious fanatics’ vs ‘cool steampunk atheists’ is a lot more complicated than that. The ‘lore’ presented in both starting areas is told from a biased point of view, and the development of these storylines really benefits from playing both factions and paying attention to the quest lore. The zealotry of the Guardians as presented in the Defiant starting area is tempered by their pragmaticism and the dark edge to the Vigil. One of the things I’ve noticed a lot in Guardian lore is the use of chain imagery, which suggests something altogether more brutal than the pretty silverwoods suggests.

The Defiant are, of course, not evil. They’re desparate and have a willingness to do some very sinister things. One of their leaders actually helped the guy who unleashed Regulos. Cut scenes in the Defiant Life Factory bear witness to a gruesome scene where many souls are combined into a single body, creating the Defiant Ascended from the souls of the Guardians. The technicians definitely have a preference for Defiant souls though.

Immersion is the wrong word

It may be pretty easy to see that I’m immersed in the world of RIFT. This is partly because I can pick it up and put it down with very little pressure. Warcraft involves officering and raiding, two lots of responsibilities that are weighing too heavily for me to do much with them right now. Real life has been much more hectic and exhausting than usual, and so casually levelling through a brand new world is more relaxing than doing my duty in WoW.

I think immersion is the wrong word when it comes to MMOs. MMOs should be engrossing. They should take your attention and make you think. RIFT has definitely managed to do that with me – both about my calling choices, my immediate plans in-game and the way rifts interact with local zone lore. Rifts in a given zone have lore and objectives tied into that particular zone. Then there are what are called ‘story’ quests that are more about history than they are about killing ten rats. Although there is plenty of killing ten rats, you can end up translating troll petroglyphs, or searching for puzzles, or reading journals. Questing is broken up by diving off the path after an artefact balanced on a high ledge, defending a quest hub, or sending a troll to kill elementals.

Spiders here, spiders there

Or hiding in a cave to escape a spider swarm. I wish I was kidding. In Scarwood reach there is a quest hub that gives you 2-3 quests that involve counting spider grubs (involves going into spider infested caves), killing particular types of spiders (hello caves) and curing poisoned soldiers (hai caves.) Outside the caves are dotted ‘ripening pods’, and I discovered that these periodically burst and spawn many many tiny spiders. Most of which are 2-5 levels higher than you. And they all tend to burst at once and the only safe spot seems to be…uh, those caves I mentioned.

So I cowered in a cave, considered corpse running and then watched open mouthed as a level 30 NPC soldier ran out from the cave I was standing in and aggroed a mob of spiders. He died pretty fast. I took the opportunity to run past the second time this happened, and went on my merry way. So, my cleric is apparently scared of spiders now. Later on, after an epic quest involving a permenant air rift nearby, I noticed that the spiders had gone and went in to complete another quest. 30 seconds in, SPIDERS EVERYWHERE. Questing nodes are littered with these extremely dangerous events and moments, a great variant on the traditional patrol.

Planning ahead

Another thing that engrosses me in RIFT is running across the landscape. Even as a level 30, those low level mobs still matter. Maybe it’s different on 90%+ mount, but even low level mobs have a high chance to dismount you and force you to turn around and deal with them. Attempting to run from a single mob invariably means aggroing a second and third mob. Highly annoying until you learn to path around them, or how to use your abilities to train them in the traditional EQ sense. Either way, for me it engenders respect of the environment around my character and so careening around Freemarch in search of death rifts is a mini-adventure that requires knowledge of the landscape. It also helps that I adore the horse mounts and the riding animations.

It is entirely possible for the map to light up with 10+ rifts, invasions, and Guardian invasions as well – do you attempt to keep questing or flee the zone? Do you join in, and where might you be most effective? Lowbie melee DPS will find their first few rifts beyond King’s Retreat extremely hazardous – should you just stand back and lob a few ranged abilities? That is, if you have any?

The tethering of crafting abilities both for gathering and crafting profession results in yet more  - such as the need to find the nearest porticulum as quickly as possible in order to empty bags or levelling crafting. Add this up with random spawning invasions of spiders, and hordes of elemental invaders sweeping through the land, artifacts on high ledges above you and random explosions (mainly in the secondary newbie areas) and there’s a whole wealth of things to consider. Rifting enables you to open new rifts (on top of guardians), summon allies, empower and enhance quest hubs (through wardstone technology) and boost your abilities against plane touched creatures. Creating wardstones in Scarlet Gorge spawns daily quests, and if one of the factions creates enough of them a raid boss spawns.

Engrossing.

Building to a crescendo

Now, it’s been said before that RIFT is nothing new. It really isn’t new, but then how new is the latest fantasy novel? I love World of Warcraft, but I wouldn’t say it has better lore than Eddings Belgariad/Mallorean series, or better lore than a Pratchett novel. Assessing the quality of lore and writing in MMOs is extremely difficult when the number of writers involved in everything from websites, comics, novels, in-game quest texts, in-game books, to raid cut scenes is massive and not necessarily interconnected. Lore often falls by the wayside in order to serve the dramatic moment or power an encounter for the player.

Warcraft, for all it’s nuances and richness, is still a juvenile world, as much about the pop culture references as it is about the dramatic. It has power because the writing is teamed with fabulous artwork, and criticially acclaimed music and sound work. RIFT is an older creature, and I find the humor and whimsy a lot more subtle. If MMOs were Terry Pratchett books, WoW is the Colour of Magic and RIFT is Night Watch. This doesn’t make one better than the other, but if you’re looking for more of the type of the thing you like, then RIFT is great. If you’re looking for game changing and completely new, then it’s going to disappoint. My first impressions are good, but I really hope they give people another chance at a free trial.

All the little elements I’ve mentioned – the lore that gets deeper as you look, the rifts themselves being connected to the zones, the ability to skip quests you really don’t like without losing the greater thread, the artifacts (what archaeology should have been) it builds up to a satisfying whole. The game has heart.

 

Hopefully WoW blogging will resume shortly, but this has been sitting in my queue for a good 3 weeks now and I wanted to publish something. Jury is still out on whether I will make this a more general gaming blog atm.

RIFT: First impressions of Telara was published on March 8th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Rift category. There are currently 10 comments on this article so far.