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It’s no secret that I’ve been putting a lot of time into SWTOR lately. I talked about it a bit last week, and I want to delve into it a bit more. In about two and a half weeks, I’ve done the following:

• Jedi Shadow from 50 to 60
• Commando from 1-38
• Smuggler from 1-15
• Jedi Sage from 1-34
• Sith Warrior from 1-16
• Imperial Agent from 1-51
• Sith Assassin from 1-53

I’ve created a Jedi Knight and Bounty Hunter but haven’t played them yet. Several years on, I feel like SWTOR delivers on one of the promises it made back before it launched: it’s very much now eight KOTOR games in one, and as such it’s a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m enjoying going through the game, seeing the story content, and taking advantage of the vastly increased levelling speed to take the story at a better pace and do only the sidequests I’m interested in, rather than doing everything possible for experience just to keep up in level.

It’s made me a lot more forgiving of a lot of things as well. When I originally played, I was turned off by what felt like tepid storytelling in a few of the classes– when I’m spending hours grinding levels to be able to do that next story mission, I really want that mission to feel like a reward for all of that grinding. Now, the stories feel well-paced for the most part and make sense– there are highs and lows but each piece feels like a part of a story, not a reward for doing unrelated chores. It reframes the experience to be more like a single-player game, so I can enjoy the stories without needing every one of them to be a fantastic ride.

Similarly, the new speed of levelling means I don’t get tired of planets and can actually enjoy the biomes, rather than being forced to explore every nook and cranny just to move on. I actually think I’ve gotten a better feel for what’s going on in some of the planets because I *don’t* have to do all the quests on them, and I’ve been interested in finding out what’s going on even though those quests aren’t as efficient or as high fidelity as the main class stories.

That being said, wow does this game not feel like an MMO anymore. I previously mentioned that I hadn’t interacted with any other player in my entire time playing, and that hasn’t changed. The other people running around the fleet (which is the only time I see other players) might as well be NPCs with broken pathing AI for all they matter to my play experience. In focusing on a high-fidelity story, which I feel the game delivers fairly solidly on, there’s pretty much no reason to do anything with any other players. At this point, a number of my friends have jumped in to play the game and despite us all having characters in the right places and the right roles for it, even when we’re all playing at the same time, no one talks about playing the game *together*. This is incredibly strange for our group, but I think speaks to how strong the shift to single-player has been.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin, which I also talked about recently. The story in that game is subsumed by multiplayer– the storytelling creates a tension between the players that’s easily fixed by ignoring it and going out fighting. Even the best storytelling with the best multiplayer mechanics seems to have the problem of you needing to wait while someone finishes reading or finishes a cutscene, which is where that tension comes in. Storytelling in Divinity:OS feels at odds with a good multiplayer experience, and the same is true in SWTOR and the other modern story-forward MMOs that I’ve played.

To me, it speaks of a gap in our collective game design knowledge. We know how to create and deliver excellent multiplayer experiences, both cooperative and competitive, and we know how to deliver fantastic storytelling, but there are precious few games that manage both at once. Honestly, the only game I can think of that successfully delivers story while being a coherent multiplayer experience is Borderlands, which is a game that suffers greatly from having a relatively poor singleplayer experience. We don’t seem to know how to make games that are fun for both one person and groups of people while still telling interesting and compelling stories, and we shortchange one to bolster the others.

To go back to my comments last week about the modern MMO, I think it’s that shortchanging that’s caused post-WoW MMOs to flounder. There hasn’t been a big breakout hit since WoW in the MMO space, and I suspect that there won’t be. MMOs want players who will hang around for months, rather than playing for a few weeks and leaving. You can accomplish this by making it take a very long time to level up and see everything, but as games have sped up their own levelling process to get players to the new content faster, it’s made tolerances for long levelling times drop hugely. It’s possible at this point to have a game where you can reach max level and see every scrap of content within the first month of play and STILL have it feel grindy by comparison.

The goal of players in MMOs has become consumption rather than creation– the game has content that you as the player want to see, and you’re done when you see it all. It’s the single-player game model, but it’s at odds with the idea of a game that you log into regularly for months or years– it’s simply not possible to create content that quickly. The fastest pace I have ever seen or heard of for creating content for an MMO was about four months for an hour of content, start to finish, from nothing to ready to launch. My friends reading this who have worked in the industry are probably cringing at that number and imagining the crunch that would be required to pull that off– it’s not a small amount. That ratio of dev time to playtime should make it clear how impossible it is to keep up.

A few games (notably Cryptic’s games) have tried their hand at player-made content to fill the gap. It’s a neat concept and often beloved, but it adds a ton of overhead to the game and creates a huge signal-to-noise problem; it’s very hard to find the good content amid all the mediocre-to-bad content. I think it also continues barking up the “story content” tree, where it’s trying to keep up with the content consumption rate by throwing more people at it.

I beat the “abolish levels” drum a lot, and part of why is this content consumption problem. When there’s a clear numerical “end” to a given progression bar, it splits players into those who feel like reaching that end means the game is over and those who feel like everything that happens prior to that end is irrelevant compared to the things that occur at that end. It fuels the consumption mindset and fragments players.

There’s a grand plan in there somewhere, finding a way to make an MMO that isn’t hamstrung by its own split foci, but it’s a lot of moving parts. We’re no longer in the era of high-budget experimental ventures, which will make implementing that kind of grand plan very difficult. I think that the promise of games like Pokemon Go is that they represent a push into a new MMO frontier, where there’s space for experimentation. To steal a marketing term, the current MMO market is a Red Ocean space, that’s crowded and hyper-competitive. Pokemon Go represents a push into a Blue Ocean space, where things are mostly uncharted and unknown. Different risks, different results.

It might be what revitalizes the genre.

A bit of a followup on this month’s GOTM for Aggrochat. At Thalen’s suggestion, we played through Tron 2.0, a game that regularly makes “top shooter” and “greatest games you never played” lists. You can listen to the show here — we had a lot to say about the “golden age of experimental video games”.

It’s something that I mull over a lot. For a little while in there, just as video games were starting to poke their heads into the mainstream, there were a whole ton of experiments going on as people searched for The Next Big Thing. Mostly what this meant were a lot of buggy, unpolished games with really interesting (if not entirely implemented) ideas were coming out, and a lot of big promises were being made. I remember it as the era of vaporware; games that promised big things but never really materialized, but I was playing MMOs at the time and for a while there in the early-to-mid 2000s, there were a slew of interesting MMOs, most of which either never made it to release or released and floundered.

There were a lot of experimental games in that time frame. Spurred by the first really off-the-wall experimental shooters (my favorites being two of the first: System Shock and Thief) and bolstered by top-tier productions like Half-Life, there were a ton of games that tried to deliver on the promises of great games that weren’t just “shoot all the guys in this room”. It’s the point where I really got into shooters; I never cared for Doom/Quake/Hexen and that era of games, though Dark Forces is an exception (and I adored Dark Forces 2 and the Jedi Outcast/Academy series). A lot of the groundwork for what are pretty standard features was laid in the years of experimental games.

A few things mark these games for me. A lot of them haven’t aged well. Some of the things that were really experimental were in the realm of graphics, which were amazing for the time but look brutally dated now. I remember just looking around the environments of Deus Ex in awe when I first got the game– there were REFLECTIONS and LIGHTS — now the game shows its age. A lot of these games have new, really interesting ideas– shooters started to pick up RPG elements and an open-world feel, something that you don’t see a whole lot of anymore as that kind of friction has given way to a more streamlined, action-heavy experience. A lot of these games can be very well described as “really great, there’s nothing like it, but it’s got some bugs and issues you’ve gotta work through”. The ideas were fantastic, but a lot of them reached past what their budget and time constraints let them actually make.

Tron 2.0 is interesting to me because I feel like it’s a game that came out about five years too early. It’s got a bunch of mechanics that aren’t quite fully thought out, and it tries to do a whole lot of things that eventually turned out to be good ideas but needed iteration to really shine. It’s also got a story that (I think) isn’t quite bold enough– it tells an interesting, very TRON-like story but it has/had the potential to be a seminal work in post/transhuman sci-fi, in something of the same way that Mass Effect revolutionized the space opera.

There’s a good reason Tron 2.0 makes the list of “greatest games you never played”; you can see the edges of the future, like stumbling in the dark watching the sun rise. Nearly every single mechanic in the game has survived in one form or another, which is not something you can say about a lot of the ideas that came out of that era of games. Even the other fondly-remembered games of that era– Deus Ex, Vampire: Bloodlines, Arcanum, KOTOR, Hitman 2 — all contained ideas and mechanics that were pretty rapidly shed.

At the same time, the mechanics that didn’t survive are very noticable. The ability to run completely out of ammo in places, reliance on quicksaving, non-regenerative health, all of these exist in Tron 2.0 and make the game feel a lot more dated than it otherwise might. As I commented in the podcast, it’s amazing to me how much the game shows how far we’ve come. We have better mechanics than we used to, and for as much as people complain about regenerating health or frequent autosaving making things “too easy”, it’s rather hard to go back to games that lack these things. Not because it’s too difficult, but because it’s easily recognized as unnecessarily frustrating by now.

I wonder, sometimes, if we’ll see another era of high-budget experimentation in games. Indies have filled the experimental games gap in a lot of ways, but there are things that indies just can’t achieve with their generally limited production values. I think that might be why I like Mirror’s Edge and Dishonored so much (and why I’m so excited about the sequels)– they represent new entries in the experimental, high-budget game sphere, which I see precious little of.

I’ve been out of town for about a week, but am back now, and back to my usual posting schedule. A short break helps me get my thoughts in order.

I’ve spent a decent amount of my available free time playing SWTOR, as I mentioned before I left. In the two weeks since I picked the game back up, I’ve levelled my original Jedi Shadow up from 50 to 60, have a smattering of characters between 15 and 20, and have levelled a Sith Inquisitor from 1-51, completing the main story for the class and getting a good chunk into my goal of seeing all of the class stories in the game.

My /played time on the Sith Inquisitor is 23 hours and 14 minutes as I check it while typing this. I’m taking advantage of the massive exp boost you get for main class story quests as a subscriber, which levels you at an incredibly fast pace. It’s honestly been a fairly leisurely pace for me, I’ve taken the time to do a few side quests that I liked, to play through a bunch of the companion stories, and a variety of other neat things. What it reminds me of, more than anything, is playing the original KOTOR. I’m essentially playing the game as a series of single-player campaigns, but the pace is fast enough that I’m not bored of grinding for the next story hit. It’s just a steady stream of storytelling that I get to enjoy, and the natural pacing of the main story quests is rather good.

What I’m realizing as I do this is that I MUCH prefer this to the usual slow pace. Things are changing and moving along at a pace that doesn’t bore me, and I actually get to enjoy the stories. What it does is rob the experience of the sense of playing an MMO. I haven’t interacted with a single other player in my entire two weeks of playing, and for the most part I don’t *want* to, because this is a story experience for me that doesn’t mesh terribly well with other players.

It’s interesting to me that the MMO space has moved so determinedly into the storytelling space. With story as a central ‘pillar’ of an MMO, it asks a player to voluntarily cut down on how much they play the game, lest they run out of story. As anyone who’s worked on an MMO will tell you, you can’t possibly hope to keep up with the speed at which players consume content. As a result, we get the grind, a way of slowing things down so that we as designers have a prayer of releasing content at a rate fast enough to keep people from getting bored and leaving.

Here’s the problem: we’ve gotten really good at writing stories. We’ve gotten good enough that players get hungry for more story, and will grind as fast as possible to see it all. We’ve paired this with a pervasive sense that “max level is where the game really starts”, when in reality the so-called elder game is a desperate struggle to keep players interested when they’ve run out of all but the most minute forms of progression.

Once upon a time, an MMO was a place where you logged in nightly to hang out with friends, meet new people, explore someplace you’ve never seen, try some dungeons, do some farming, basically live a second life. We’ve stripped away a lot of those frivolities in favor of streamlining, and ensuring that you have all the tools you need to experience the content we’re creating. We’ve replaced the frivolous “life” parts of the game with storytelling and high-production-value glitz and glamour. We’ve chased the fidelity that single-player games have brought, and attempt to deliver stories and experiences that meet that quality bar.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think that the pursuit of higher fidelity has broken the genre. I know a great many people who tell amazing stories in the MMO space, but I’m not convinced their talents wouldn’t be better placed in a brilliant singleplayer or small-group co-op game, where player actions can be more constrained for a better story experience. In the meantime, none of the MMOs I’m playing feel like a ‘home’ I can log into; they’re games, not worlds, and my pursuit is for more tokens to buy fancier gear. Very specific things, not the vague “adventure” or “something new for my house”, or “meet some new people” that I’d chased after in earlier times.

As I run through SWTOR, I’m struck by how much I avoid other players. They’re an active detriment to my experience– I’m not talking to players I run into in the world, I’m not talking to my friends on voicechat (because it interferes with the storytelling!), and I’m not seeking out shared experiences because the ones I’m having are so personal that having another person around might harm it. I’m reminded of the opening segment of Divinity: Original Sin, wherein you run around a town talking to NPCs with a friend, and quite possibly find yourself frustrated or ignoring the writing because you’re there with a friend and really you want to get out of the town and do something.

We’ve successfully brought single-player aspects into MMOs, and with them has come the single-player mentality. It’s why I think Pokemon Go is the future of MMOs– not because it’s a technical marvel or a new frontier in storytelling or raids or whatever, but because it’s building on the original promise of the MMO: get out there and meet new people in this game, who will be your friends and allies on a great big adventure that YOU set the goals of.

It’s a promise that even the most sandboxy of MMOs (EvE, Elite: Dangerous, etc) fail to deliver. Seeing other players in those games is very rarely a joyous occasion. You can set your own goals, but other players exist to disrupt them, not add to them.

I worry that we’ve forgotten how to make open multiplayer games where seeing another player is a cause for delight and excitement, rather than concern and worry (or competition, if you’re a PvPer). It’s so much easier to paint red targets on every other player than it is to make that green or blue highlight something you’re happy to see.