Social Game, not Social Life?

ArenaNet on Guild Wars and the Casual MMORPG










With the massive success of World Of WarCraft, many of those in the MMO space may be trying to emulate the extremely detailed, in-depth game world of Blizzard's smash hit. However, this certainly isn't the case for the ex-Blizzard staff at ArenaNet, who are now owned by Korean-headquartered MMO giant NCSoft.

            

             Philosophically, despite all the trappings of the fantasy RPG, Guild Wars is on an entirely different pole from the traditional massively-multiplayer online game. First off, it features no traditional subs!cripion fee, with the initial purchase providing unlimited access and further investment rendered optional in the form of bi-annual add-on packs.

              

Secondly, once past a certain point, your character growth is not delineated by greater stats but a greater flexibility in their combat tactics more akin to Magic the Gathering than the direct contest of statistical attributes commonplace in most RPGs, thereby eliminating, at least to some extent, level grinding. Thirdly… well, the list continues.

            

             But what are the circumstances under which this alternate view of MMOs has appeared? In 1999, Blizzard had shipped StarCraft: Brood War, but for Michael O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain, it was time for something new. Michael O'Brien was working on Heroes of WarCraft, the role-playing strategy game which eventually transmuted into the more traditional WarCraft III. Patrick Wyatt was ruling over Battle.net. Jeff Strain was working on a little something called the World of WarCraft, which at that point was trying to take the Massively-Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) concept and push it more towards a strategy game. By 2000, they turned from being Blizzard employees to Blizzard alumni, founding their own company to create a new, more Casual MMOG: Guild Wars.

            

             As Guild Wars makes its way through its last few tests before release, Gamasutra had the chance to probe ArenaNet's vision of the MMOGs' future and failings with producer Jeff Strain, and explore that fine line between social gaming and social life.



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Gamasutra: What was the nucleus around which ArenaNet formed?


            

Jeff Strain: We felt like the MMOG had become stale. It dragged not only in technology, but in game design. It was stuck in the EverQuest or Ultima Online template that's, to this day, copied without a whole load of innovation.


            

GS: Some might claim that this paradigm is all the genre can be.


            

JS: If I told you 3D game in the mid-90s, you'd have thought of a first-person shooter, because then most 3D games were first-person shooters. In other words, the technology implied the game design. It took several years of that technology maturing for people to start branching out and doing different things. We thought, at the time, MMOGs were in that same area. Look at all the other stuff we could be doing, and all these problems with the core design we could solve.


            

What we all realized was that if we wanted to pull this off, we had to make some bold decisions, take some risks in our design, try and define a genre and start from ground zero. Our goal was to make an MMOG which had a lot of the cool aspects of role-playing games in terms of character progression, but was predominantly a game of skill.


            

GS: Which is so rare in the genre. I was recently talking to an MMOG designer who argued that Planetside was the only MMOG which people play for the actual experience rather that sense of slow growth and progression.


            

JS: Yes. That's true.


            

GS: But oddly enough, that's the game which a lot of people actually said was actually fundamentally repetitive. To me, it seems that you're philosophically trying to draw these two things together development and experience. Why do you think there's something interesting for gamers there?


            

JS:
             I think there's different types of rewards. You either reward them
             for time that is, investment. The RPG reward. Alternatively, you
             reward them for their skill, which is the strategy game reward.
             Some companies reward people for money. There's some companies
             online which will power-level for you, which is just a conversion
             of money for time. I think that games that reward time, and particularly
             games that reward extreme amounts of time, appeal to a fairly narrow
             subset of the overall population. I think people appreciate a game
             where they feel their skill as a gamer and the choices that they're
             making are actually making the difference. I think that appeals
             to a lot broader group





GS:
             I often think that addiction is different to enjoyment. There are
             games that are deeply compulsive, but when you look at your emotional
             reactions well, they're relatively flat. A lot of MMOGs, perhaps
             even most, seem to fall into that category.


            

JS:
             You'll often hear us say that Guild Wars is a game without
             the grind. However, if you want to spend 100 hours trying to get
             a specific upgrade for an item, like a dragon-tooth hilt and a wyvern
             skill scabbard for your sword, that's fine. You have a specific
             goal in mind, and you want that item. What's not fine is
             at level 20 I can access this dungeon, and at level 30 I can access
             that dungeon and there's a 1000 hours between them? Obviously,
             the goals are shorter than that, or you just wouldn't do it but
             we very much differentiate types of time sinks. And that differentiation
             is if it's for fun, or whether it's to arbitrarily take and stretch
             the 70 hours of content you have for game and stretch it over a
             thousand hours. Is it for fun or is it to try and get people addicted,
             so that you can collect another month of subs!cripion fees?


            

You
             have to be able to make a judgement call. You look at the activities
             players are doing, and divide them into people do that because
             it's fun and people do that because they have
             to? Let's keep the stuff that's fun.


            

GS:
             So did the idea of the pricing model come from the game design,
             or the game design come from the pricing model? The idea that you're
             paying for more content and extra stuff to do, rather than simply
             being there seems to flow naturally from your design priorities.
            


            

JS:
             It was very conscious. Probably the reality is that we sat down
             and said this game will not provide a subs!cripion fee. Period.?
             That was statement number one. I would say that the design came
             out of that, rather than the pricing model came out of the design.
             What it comes down to is that we don't have to try and find ways
             to keep you playing. It's perfectly fun to have 70 hours of content
             which takes 70 hours to play through. If you buy the game, play
             it for 70 hours, have a rip-roaring time, put it down and then six
             months later when the next chapter comes out and you want to come
             back and experience that well, that's great. That's fine for us.
            


            

It
             means you don't have to feel guilty to be paying a subs!cripion
             fee and be not actively playing the game. Another comparison is
             that Harry
             Potter books. They come out every two years, and it's enjoyable
             when another one comes out, but it's not as if you've been reading
             Harry Potter for the entire time between books. Here's something
             I enjoy. I'm going to extract the fun out of it, and then I'll do
             something else until the next one comes out and I'll have fun with
             that too.


            

GS:
             I'd imagine the server population will fluctuate around the packs?
             but I don't think it actively matters, does it? With the game linking
             up opponents in Player Versus Player modes and having hub areas
             to gather a party before moving to instanced areas for the actual
             quests, a small population won't get diffused over a large area.
             It doesn't appear as reliant on mass dynamics as the traditional
             approach.


            

JS:
             We channel communities into common areas, so there's always people
             to play with. We also talk a lot about mission flow, in that it's
             a lot better to have four 30-minute missions, rather than one 2-hour
             one, as you want people constantly cycling back to the public areas
             to have a chance to hook up with someone else. Having said that,
             I don't want to give the impression that we expect people to play
             through the content and stop playing. Obviously there's the phenomenal
             player-versus-player aspect which people will get into it. And even
             beyond that there's a stream of content from the live-team. They
             can very organically change the environment, not just adding another
             mission: a genuine 'change the world' type of quest.


GS:
             It strikes me that the game's design pushes towards the two poles
             of online experience. On one hand, you've got something that's a
             lot more like a traditional single-player RPG with instanced quest
             missions which you experience in small groups. On the other hand,
             you have the player-versus-player section which is very much pure
             ritualized combat between groups of heroes, based on player skills.
             What you've done, however, is excise the middle ground.
            

JS:
             I think the rough metric, looking at our player population, is that
             about 50% will play both, 25% of them will play the player-versus-player
             and 25% the player-versus-environment. That means there's substantial
             numbers of people who are playing the game [because] they like that
             purity in one of those two areas.


            

GS:
             The criticism people have thrown at Guild Wars is that it
             seems to have thrown away the whole idea of a virtual world, which
             was part of the vision of the online living world. How would you
             respond to that?


            

JS:
             I'd respond to that, by saying that there are far more people
             who'll enjoy a true role-playing experience allowed by being able
             to have quests that are not FedEx quests which change the
             world around you, rather than people who'll be irritated by that.
             MMOGs even the most successful ones, even World of WarCraft
             - compared to WarCraft III or Diablo appeal to smaller
             numbers of people. I think World of WarCraft is largely riding
             on the reputation of Blizzard and the fact that it's a very polished
             game, but we'll evaluate it in six months time to see how many people
             are still playing it. After it settles down, what's the real
             long term player population of that game? I suspect it'll be quite
             high but I don't expect it'll be close to what Diablo sold
             world-wide.


            

I
             think that there'll be people who won't
             like Guild Wars because they like baking pies. They
             like well, we always say the Grind with a negative connotation,
             but it's not always bad. Grind just means you're investing large
             amount of time in order to reach a goal, and some people enjoy it
             and have the time for it.


            

GS:
             While fairly radical in design to most MMOGs, its actual setting
             and theme are very familiar to anyone who's ever picked up a simulated
             word of Kobold Slaying +4. There seems to be a contrast between
             form and content, in many ways.


            

JS:
             Like I said, MMOGs are a technology, not a game design. Take
             these wonderful technologies and wonderful new opportunities we
             have to build online experiences but let's bring some innovation
             to the genre. Let's sit down and re-evaluate a lot of these things
             we've taken for granted. Not just for Guild Wars, but we
             hope for all products that come afterwards. We hope they'll say
             they did a lot of things differently, and a lot of that stuff worked
             out well and some things which I'll change And we're hoping this
             will spur the industry to think about online technologies and online
             games in a bit of a different way.











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