Tourists or searching for something different?
It has been one month since Aion Online has hit the shelves and about the same for Champions Online. This is right about the time where a gamers mind turns to “virtual tourism” – the end of the first free month. The following was in the recent release of the “October Community Address” from Aion Community Team:
“You’ve told us that it’s difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we’re planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly ‘grind.’” – The Aion Community Team (full address is here)
Both gamers and those who make the games expect potential customers to come and take a tour of the new game world. And it is certainly expected that not all those who arrive in that first free month of a games life cycle will make the virtual world one of their new homes. The question still arises, however, what happens when a game fails to turn a “virtual tourist” into a new “virtual resident”.
This was one of the questions that My Co-host Fran, and I will be discussing with Tipa from West Karana and JMO from MMO Voices on an upcoming No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) show.
When Paul Barnett discussed the matter with us, he likened the process to someone who leaves a girlfriend, hoping to find someone better, but always ends up yearning for the “love of their life” – whatever that first game or mmo happened to be. There certainly must be something to that; for the “first love” of many players is World of Warcraft (WoW) and that is the game against which all others seem measured. Yet while investors and “triple AAA” developers alike hesitate to do anything other than what is expected, that can be one root causes of virtual tourism.
What exactly do games “expect”?
Take 1 million gamers and ask them what they are looking for in a game and you are likely to get one million different answers. In the end analysis, no doubt the gamers themselves aren’t sure what they are looking for but will merely know it when they find it. If the product you create is “approachable” as Scott Hartsman told us on an earlier there will be any one of a number of players who view themselves as the “core” of your customers and say “its too easy” (as happened in WoW after the Northrend expansion). If it takes too long to level, for whatever reason (see Aion Online comments above) there will be yet another sector of gamers that will react as if you shot their dog. To paraphrase the great U.S. President Lincoln…
You can’t please all of the people some of the time so you had best please a few of the people most of the time.
As you will hear TIPA point out on a future show, many players take a tour of a new game world hoping to find something different and end up finding the same game they just left. After all, who needs another WoW when you still have the WoW icon on your desktop? Mythic Entertainment started with a tabletop game named Warhammer where a great battle will often find three armies pitted against another, the survor always ready to pounce on the weakened victor. What they gave us (all considerations of art style aside) was a game with one side pitted against the other…more of the same game mechanics used in just about every game that hits the shelves.
Aion Online, on the other hand, can’t seem to decide what it is. Yes, they have called it a PvPvE game. An interesting approach but it is still a two sided game because the third side is controlled by the AI (the “E” in PvPvE). If a gamer, such as myself, joins looking forward to new and innovative pvp I end up dieing on the vine as I try and wade through 25 levels until I get to pvp (Yes, I know about rifts but that isn’t pvp, that’s a slaughter).
This is why I will always applaud the independent game developer who dares to do something different. There may be those in the gaming community who, in their ignorance, will sneer and call such games a “niche of a niche”. What such games present to the mmo community are something that is desperately needed – someone who marches to the beat of a different drummer. When a developer finally breaks out of the mold of game mechanics that are tried and true, we can finally go out looking for something different and find it.
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather*
*Brought to you from a bed in a convent, somewhere in Illinois.