Play the System
I started playing Lord of the Rings Online recently, more as an idle time-waster than out of any serious interest in the game. My experiences in the game caused me to start thinking about what I’m looking for in the first five hours of gameplay for any MMO.
Lord of the Rings is, arguably, the most sophisticated and well-developed fantasy IP in existence. When I first started playing, I got to rescue hobbits from bandits, confront a ringwraith, and save a Ranger who’d been stabbed by a Morgul-blade. Good stuff.
But after that, I found myself less and less interested in continuing. I played long enough to get to level 10 so I could try out the monster play feature, and that was interesting, but the game as a whole didn’t have a lot of stickiness. Soon, I was back to playing WoW and Live Arcade games.
The gospel is ‘the player’s first n hours must be very compelling,’ for some value of n. The first hour of LotRO is pretty exciting, insofar as there’s instanced, scripted story content that makes you feel like part of the Middle-Earth setting. They should, according to the gospel, have kept my interest. Why didn’t they?
Here’s my contention: Experienced MMO players, in their first few hours of play, are not playing the content. They’re playing the system.
I was out killing bandits and boars in the tutorial area of the game. I don’t mind killing boars and bandits; I need to learn how to play, and need to be exposed to a variety of combat situations to do so. The content wasn’t particularly offensive; in fact, it was better ‘kill x mobs’ content than WoW has ever managed, even in the expansion.
What I realized is that I didn’t care what I was killing; I didn’t care what my reasons for killing were. I wasn’t reading the early mission text closely, and I wasn’t spending a lot of time thinking about the versimilitude of the world. What I cared about was: ‘How does the combat system work? How do my abilities work? How should I play this character to maximize success? What do I get from advancement?’
What I’m looking for in the first few hours is a compelling, interesting game system. Perhaps this is just the result of market saturation; I’ve played a lot of online games now, and I have a minimum level of expectation for the game content. Frankly, I don’t think many games are going to break out of the ‘kill evil stuff before it kills you’ model, and I’m fine with that. I’m always on the lookout for an interesting new system, though.
I don’t want a system that’s stupidly complicated, to where I can’t parse what I’m looking at when I open various pieces of the UI (that would be Eve, which took me three attempts over two years to get further than mining an asteroid). I don’t want a system that’s so pathetically simple that I wonder what the point of playing the game really is (that would be Lineage 2). And I don’t want a system that feels like something I’ve played a million times before. Enter LotRO.
I don’t want to get too far into talking about their systems, because that’s not my point here; suffice it to say that their combat system feels really, uh, familiar. There are some neat bits that feel like honest-to-god innovations (Deeds are great, for instance). There are some sloppy bits that feel poorly-integrated into the game. But the core combat mechanics are very much like ‘WoW with some adjustments, and with less flavor.’
That’s where I finally pinned the blame for my lack of enthusiasm for the game. In those first few hours of gameplay, I wasn’t exposed to any mechanics that really leaped out and said ‘Look at my potential!’. Everything was very well-constructed, reasonably polished, and functional; it was all really unexciting.
Playing the Content means exploring the world, following the storylines, interacting with the characters. You’re playing the content if you’re eager to see a new zone, or eager to see how a quest turns out, or you’re trying to solve a difficult boss fight. When you’re playing the content, you’re consuming a finite resource: invested content creation time. In an imaginary perfect world, the content would be so amazing you’d be happy to just consume it, and you’d have enough of it that it would sustain you for as long as you felt like continuing to play.
Reading a novel is basically ‘playing’ the content: you read a novel because you want to experience more of the content. If the content stops being interesting, you typically put the novel down — or you finish it so that you can tell your friends how crappy it was. And there is a school of thought that says the problem with MMOs is that they’re not as good as novels, that people don’t consume the content for its own sake because it’s not as compelling as Order of the Phoenix, or whatever novel you happen to like as an example.
I don’t buy that. I don’t buy it not because I think games have content that’s just as well-written as novels — I think it’s almost always worse, and I think that games don’t lend themselves to novel-style storytelling. That’s a different blog post, though. I don’t buy it because I don’t ever log in to WoW hoping to see the next chapter of a story. In fact, I don’t really play any game anticipating the next bit of story, even when (as in Silent Hill 2 and FFX) the story’s really interesting. I play games anticipating the next opportunity to use the game systems, to trigger the big spell or launch the big combo attack or find the next weapon. I sit down to play the system.
Playing the System means using your character’s abilities for the sake of using them. When you’re trying to set up a complicated geo-panel combo in Disgaea purely to see the numbers get huge, you’re playing the system. When you intentionally take a harder route into a battle in Crackdown just so you can drive your semi through a crowd of gangsters and watch them fly in all directions, you’re playing the system. When you want to get to level 40 in WoW as a hunter because you want to upgrade to mail and get the Bestial Wrath talent, you’re playing the system.
The appeal of playing the system can be nearly infinite, given good design. Here’s another non-MMO example: I spent a long, long time playing FF7, long after I could have cake-walked through the final battles of the game. In FF7, magic and special abilities came from ‘materia’, individual items that could be attached to your weapon and armor. Depending on how they were attached, and in what combinations, you could generate interesting effects — you could set up combos that would trigger a variety of spells any time you were attacked, for instance. Many more hours of gameplay came out of any hour they invested in creating the materia system than came from that same hour invested in, say, the parade minigame you encounter a quarter of the way through the story.
Two more examples: Vagrant Story had a system for weapon customization that was ridiculously complex, involved repeatedly using your weapons in specific ways against specific opponents, and didn’t lead to a one-true-weapon outcome; you’d spend hours building up your ‘human-killing’ rapier, and more hours building a ‘dragon-killing’ spear. Legend of Mana had a crafting system that to this day I’ve never seen equalled in any other game. It’s the only system I’ve ever encountered that was too complex for me to fully parse, and was too complex for even the GameFAQs explanation to make sense to me. You could spend days and days exploring the crafting system, and still not have done more than dabbled in the simplest surface layer.
When I’m playing WoW, and I’m excited to do an instance for the first time — say, when I went to SM for the first time a few weeks back (I am a permanoob) — I’m playing the content, and that’s fun. When I lead another group through again, purely to get the interesting blue drops from the bosses in the instance, I’m playing the system. I’m led to this conclusion: WoW works because you can play the system after you’re finished playing the content. The content leads people onwards to the next round of playing the system, but once you’re there, and you’ve done the content, and you’ve got Molten Core down to a science, you’re playing the system, hoping for character advancement in the form of new and exciting items.
This suggests that where LotRO failed to capture my interest was in giving me enough system to play with early on. I’ll probably continue to pursue their content, because I’m a total Middle-Earth nerd, but not with the fervor that I pursue WoW’s instances. It’s not that WoW’s content is better — it’s that its content leads to system play that is ultimately more satisfying.
I’m left feeling a bit nervous, honestly, because when I look at PotBS, I see a lot of content play, and very little system play. Something I’ll have to think about over the next couple of months. It’s possible that our ship combat system is sufficient, but I’ve lived with it day after day for years, so I don’t have a good sense of how compelling it is, in the sense of the system play examples I’ve given above.