MMO Gaming

Back in August I wrote a fairly short little post about the business sense of straying too far from what is “normal” when designing an MMOG. Just a few days ago I got an e-mail about that post from someone who disagreed. His stance was a game could be both innovative and intuitive to play. His example was Katamari Damacy.

I freely and openly admit to not having played the game so I’m going to go ahead and take his word for it that it has a quick and easy tutorial that gets you off and rolling around having fun in very little time. That got me thinking. Assuming that what he says is true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, how can this game, a game which has a pretty different twist on what you are doing and how to play it accomplish what many other games can’t?

Since this is an MMOG blog let’s take a look at the MMOGs I’m talking about to start. First up I’ll tear down a game I personally enjoy and am playing, Tabula Rasa. It wanted to do things in a new way, change up some fundamental aspects of how we play in our MMOGs…at least as much as was reasonable for them. They knew this would be new to a great many MMOG players, so they do have a tutorial.

The tutorial in Tabula Rasa is a lot of fun to play through, but does it really teach you all you need to know about how to be running and gunning in no time? I can’t say for certain. I’m used to playing shooters as well as MMOs so the combination of the two wasn’t such a big shock to my senses. For a great many people the tutorial probably got them in and started in no time. But what about those people who were like me when I wrote the post back in August. Those who had a game to go back to so they weren’t willing to stick out and wait for their fun when they could get it immediately? If a handful of posts from the beta boards are truthful, they probably left and never came back.

Now, that isn’t to say this is such a horrible thing. Chances are those people were never going to stick with the game long term, or possibly even buy it on release. It just wasn’t there cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine. Still, that is a hurdle the MMOG designer needs to overcome. That’s an obstacle in the road. These games require investments of time and money larger than most others. People only really play one or two MMOGs at a time, and even then one is usually played more than the other, even if which game that is may switch from week to week or month to month.

Example two, City of Heroes tutorial. CoX is not a huge change from the standard MMOG. It has, as every game has, it’s own set of quirks and differences but on the whole coming from EQ or WoW, you know what you are going into with CoX. That said, they still have a tutorial. This tutorial teaches you the basics of their systems that don’t appear in other games, specifically inspirations and enhancements and how they work, as well as giving out a general introduction on normal playing and beating up the bad guys. It also happens to be a free level of experience for those that do it.

How good is it though, really? It will certainly get you started and will teach you pretty much all you need to know about the how the game works but it lacks something rather small, something that is easily overlooked and by all rights is not a problem inherent to the actual tutorial at all. You can, and many do, skip it after they have played the game for a while. They skip it because in all honesty it isn’t that much fun to play through and it is probably just as quick to get that level after the tutorial than during it.

This isn’t a huge gripe of course, that’s the basic premise behind the tutorial, teach you to play and then set you off into the wide open world. But looking at Tabula Rasa, I can’t help but think, for all the things that tutorial might not do right, it actually is quite a bit of fun to play and replay, which is good, because you may need to a few times.

The point of all this is that the game that innovated suffers from people who need the tutorial not wanting to bother with it, and the game that is fairly similar to the “standard” MMO gets people out and playing immediately, but they could just skip it entirely and still be okay. Essentially what I’m saying trying to show here is the game that actually needs a tutorial is losing their players before the game that doesn’t.

Assume for the moment that the statement above is true, even if you disagree with it. What does that mean when it comes to design and creation of MMOGs? How does that compare to the gold standard of the MMOG, World of Warcraft? I’ll be looking into that in the next article.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, innovation, game design, tabula rasa, city of heroes