World vs. Game

The Grimwell Online gaming forum restarted as if the 9 month of shutdown didn't happen. The big advantage of discussing there is that you meet people preferring different play styles, and see how they see things. While on this blog the discussion rages around hardcore and casual gamers, on Grimwell Online it is often between "world" and "game" style MMORPGs.

I'm definitely on the "game" side of that discussion, with WoW being very much a "game" MMORPG. But a lot of people prefer a different style of gaming, "world" style, where the interaction between players is more important than the interaction between the player and the game environment. Not only in PvP, but PvP is usually a part of it. Typical "world" MMORPGs are EVE and SWG. While in a game MMORPG your level and equipment is most important, in a world MMORPG it is your social network, be it your network of suppliers and customers, or the army fighting at your side.

Of course every game has both game and world aspects, just to varying degrees. Everquest tried to start out as game, and gradually lead people into a world style, by making the difficulty raise faster than the players power with level, forcing people to band together first in groups, then in guilds. Dark Age of Camelot is a good example of a MMORPG which gets the compromise between game and world nearly right, having a lot of game PvE for leveling up, plus world-changing realm vs. realm PvP battles. If Mythic learned something from their DAoC and Blizzard's WoW, the upcoming Warhammer Online could be a very good game. My ideal game would be "game" in the combat aspects, playing much like WoW PvE during the leveling part, but have much more "world" aspects in the economy, resource gathering like in SWG, a much more intricate crafting system, and a trading and market system much like EVE. The advantage of this would be the ability to switch freely between game and world aspects, and the fact that economic competition is a lot less frustrating than getting killed in PvP.

A quick look at subscription numbers shows that "game" MMORPG are a lot more popular than "world" MMORPG. In fact when people complain about certain aspects of WoW, like high-level raiding or PvP, it is often the world parts which fail to please. But it is also often world parts of a MMORPG, like guilds and social interactions, which keep people playing a MMORPG for a long time. Social interaction is like chatting on a party, there is no inherent end to it. "Game" is about the consumption of developer created content, and once you saw all the content, the game is over, only the world remains.

While the longevity might be more limited, the advantage of the "game" MMORPG is that it is easier to get ex-players to resubscribe. Many people quit WoW after having reached level 60, and running out of content, not liking the "world" style raid or PvP game. With the Burning Crusade expansion, many of these people will be back, either just continueing to play their old level 60 up to the next level cap, or creating a character of the new races, playing in the new low to mid level zones. If you didn't like participating in guild politics, PvP, or raids, having been gone from WoW for a couple of months is no disadvantage at all. You can just restart where you left off. Compare that to my experience when I received a free 10 days retry of SWG some time ago. My armorsmith couldn't just restart: My house had evaporated, which also destroyed my stored resources. But more importantly my network of clients, my guild, my social network were gone. If the MMORPG is about your interaction with other players, a couple of months absence basically destroys everything you had built up.

There is a market for both "game" and for "world" style MMORPGs. But the "game" market is much bigger. If you want to have both aspects in a single MMORPG, you better put them in in a way where they don't depend too much on each other. The old "level up by gaming, then enjoy world interactions at the highest level" concept that many games inherited from Everquest is unfortunately flawed. It just leads to people who hate having to grind the gaming part to get to the world part, and others who complain that the game ends at the highest level and only the world part is left. The world part would much better be in parallel to the game part, and not depend on your PvE leveling at all.