A Lego Man Stole Your Cargo?
I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft last week. Effectively, I’d dropped out a couple months ago, but canceling the subscription is the formal break. After two and a half years of play, and moving heaven and earth to create the best dang product they could, Blizzard just ran out of sufficient variation to hold my interest. But that’s two and a half years. Ain’t nothing wrong with WoW, apart from the fact that I’ve already played it. (Maybe not every last boss, class, race, and quest, but close enough.) Much to my surprise, I miss it. Or, more precisely, I miss the sense of exploration and tactical experimentation that I once enjoyed in WoW. So I’m looking toward the horizon for what might duplicate that earlier sense of discovery.
Future is the operative word here. Though WoW gets all the attention, a half dozen MMOs with respectable critical success and a stable population still survive in its shadow, catering to certain niches. The problem with joining any of these now is the level curve.
The heart of the misnamed “computer RPG,” multiplayer or otherwise, is a treadmill of “leveling up,” borrowed from the old D&D game, played with dice and paper. By achieving various game goals, mostly killing disposable enemies and looting their corpses, you collect points of “experience.” Collect enough experience points, and you gain a new level, and with it a greater capacity to pursue game goals, again mostly killing disposable enemies and looting their corpses. The bigger and buffer you get, the bigger an enemy you can take on, yielding even larger experience rewards, so you can take on bigger enemies, and so on. This cycle is duplicated in gear: every corpse you loot may have a piece of gear, usually a weapon or piece of armor, better than your own. Equipping this new, more powerful gear allows you to take on bigger enemies, who drop even better gear, and so on. Bad guys are conveniently sorted by threat level; at level 10, you fight bad guys who present a challenge to level 10 skills, and who drop rewards suitable to level 10 muggers. You’re safe from bad guys appropriate to level 20s until you travel past the mountains into the land where level 20s hang out, and from there to the Marshes of Level 30 Peril.
This creates a strong obstacle to players who join an MMO significantly after the first rush of players at the launch. MMOs want people to play together; if they all play separately, there’s little reason to participate online, suffering lag and other technical problems, and exposed to the occasional twerp spoiling your fun. Good MMOs are designed to reward group play, usually through a better reward-to-risk or reward-to-effort ratio. But that only works for players of comparable level; teammates of grossly mismatched levels are dealing with bad guys who either butcher the lower player or offer insufficient reward to the higher one. So players who join an MMO late may find it difficult to join in the kind of group activity that makes MMOs worthwhile. They may find certain challenges ruined by hints from fellow players who have been there, done that. They may also suffer in MMOs with a strong player-versus-player component, perpetual victims of players who started earlier and hold higher levels.
That’s why I’m looking to the future, instead of current successes: MMOs are plagued by disincentives to late arrivals. The view from here is not very promising; the blockbuster mentality which has taken over the computer game industry discourages challengers to WoW, which sucks the oxygen right out of the market. But we might see something worthwhile in Pirates of the Burning Sea. It’s got John Tynes behind the design, which is good; I’m a longtime fan of Tynes’s pen-and-paper RPG work. On the other hand, Sony Online Entertainment is writing the checks, which can’t help but raise fears of another meltdown like they induced in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO.
Pirates of the Burning Sea is still in development, so the official website is a little light on detail. They’ve clearly learned an important lesson—there must be both a robust player-versus-player (PvP) experience and a robust solo (PvE) experience—and they seek to cover their bases. It looks like both styles can be played in a more cerebral ship-to-ship arena or a reflex-driven video game of individual fencing. Information on the supporting economy is considerably less concrete, probably because it hasn’t all been worked out, yet. That’s too bad, because SWG had a robust economic model, one which could support players who did nothing but craft, if that was their thing, and I’m interested in how much of that survives from the rape of SWG to the newer title. Whether each person runs his own ship, or whether ships can be crewed by multiple players is unclear. So is the question of how much of one’s ship is vulnerable to capture by pirates or enemy warships—the cargo, the guns and gear, maybe even the ship itself. Nor is it clear how, having lost a battle, one goes about recouping the loss.
So I’m forced to fill many gaps in the official press with personal speculation as to how it all will fit together. Curiously—and this is the point I’m finally getting to—given what I know about Pirates of the Burning Sea, all the gaps could sensibly be filled in with something very similar to Puzzle Pirates.
Puzzle Pirates is an MMO, too, with a small but loyal following. It differs dramatically from typical MMOs by replacing the heroic combat simulation with a variety of highly abstracted games more or less akin to Tetris. You don’t so much try to outfence that scurvy dog; you try to fill in yellow columns and blue rows of sword icons faster than he can. Add a character design that resembles yellow, blocky, perpetually-smiling Lego people, and it’s easy to mistake Puzzle Pirates for something shallow. It’s not. The economics were reasonably sophisticated, and the strategic thinking behind securing a stretch of productive territory for yourself, or more likely your guild, could get quite sophisticated. I never got into it—never even played it—because I don’t like Tetris and its relatives. But attach the background economic engine to a game more personally involving than tumbling blocks, and I could get hooked. We’ll see.