MMO Gaming

Back to this talk of tutorials, or lack thereof. I promised this time to talk a little bit about how WoW relates to other games with tutorials, like Tabula Rasa or City of Heroes/Villains. Before I do that though I want to talk about two other games, briefly, and how they handle tutorials.

First up a little talk about Lord of the Rings Online. I won’t lie and pretend I like the game. I just don’t, and I apologize to all fans of the game, but it just bores me to tears. That said, it does have an interesting introduction to the game. You start off by yourself in a given zone (depending on race chosen at the beginning.) This is the introduction to the game and they have you do the normal set of tutorial “stuff” before moving on.

The next thing you do, though, is not move on into the big open world. You instead move on to a larger, but still contained, area. This area has other players but is not quite the wide open world. This is an interesting approach. It would perhaps be more interesting (and more beneficial) for a game that was heavily focused around PvP, allowing players to get a bit of experience before thrusting them into the open. Either way, it is worth mentioning if only to show another way of handling new user experience in game design.

I also want to talk briefly about EVE and it’s tutorial. The first time I loaded up EVE on the 14 day free trial I didn’t even manage to make it past the tutorial. I had been playing the game for over 3 hours. That, to me, was a huge problem. If in 3 hours I could not finish the tutorial (and, judging by the bar that showed me how far along I was, not even halfway done with it) then I did not care enough to stick through more.

Later, when I purchased EVE for myself (an odd story given my dislike of the 14 day trial, but that is a tale for another time) I found that the tutorial was significantly shortened and simplified. I finished the whole thing in about an hour. They then let me loose to do things on my own. Except, instead of teaching me everything I needed to know to play the game well, they taught me only the basics. New tutorials would pop up as I came across new things or wanted to use new features.

This idea works particularly well in EVE given the amount of depth and difficulty the game has getting into it. Being bombarded with a multi-hour tutorial is annoying, but gradually increasing my knowledge when I am requiring that information is useful. It is a thoughtful balance that was struck.

Now then, on to WoW. If WoW is any indication of how to properly design a game for the masses (and it may or may not be) then having any sort of tutorial area is a waste of good designer time. Why? WoW has no tutorial. What you do at level 1 you continue to do until you hit level 70. You talk to people with the ! marker over there head. You turn in when they have the ? marker above their head. You kill the bad guys to collect whatever it is they want. There is no tutorial (there are the new player pop-ups but I’ll treat that as a separate case.)

The game that needs no tutorial has the most players. WoW haters, and probably several lovers also would point this out as a bad thing. It shows the game is too simple, too easy, and essentially made for the lowest common denominator. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that stance, but I would have to question whether this is a bad thing or not. Certainly Blizzard, swimming in more money than they could have imagined, doesn’t feel bad about designing a game open for anyone and everyone.

On the other side of the WoW coin though is an issue common to my time in WoW that I have noticed lessened in every other game I played. Group dynamics. In WoW grouping is not so much about finding a group that is good as it is about finding a group that doesn’t suck. In many other games, the fact that there is a learning curve, no matter how slight, means that people better understand how to work together, or at least slow down enough so as not to get themselves and others killed. Many WoW players seem unable to understand this. There is no learning curve to the game and its pick up and play ability makes it extremely fun and also extremely frustrating when dealing with players who are new, or have not taken the time to learn.

As a matter of quality, I guess it is hard to say which is better. From a purely business perspective Blizzard would seem to be the clear choice, but from a design perspective each option has its ups and downs. The question is, will other games be able to see significant success with different methods if WoW-like quality existed?

World of warcraft, wow, game design, tutorials, eve online, lord of the rings online, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming