My cousin’s foray into a more traditional massive fantasy title has come to an end. Her desire to transition the fun she was having in her first MMO, Free Realms, into the gaming experience she’d heard about in World of Warcraft didn’t take.
Even in the vanilla-flavored, on rails and spoon-fed character progression you find in a WOW, there are complexities of “real” progression that can’t be avoided. Unless of course, you’re off tooling by yourself in a corner, which isn’t what she wanted.
Besides the fact that the “Recruit a Friend” XP boost levels you faster than you can even afford to buy class spells and abilities, the nature of knowing your role, specializing for it and playing that role in a group, can only be watered down but so much. At some point, you have to dig in your class’ undies to deal with choosing a talent spec and making somewhat sensible gear choices when presented with options.
You could take the character ride completely clueless – I suppose. Level all alone and move through the content at a pace that would eventually feel like crawling on broken glass. If that’s not your brand of amusement then yes, you need to know that a Mage has Arcane, Frost and Fire specs, and when you’re in a group they expect you to how have the Sheep spell and know how to use it. They expect you to have Blizzard and Frost Nova, and know that when they send you into the middle of the mobs bubbled and you're being healed, that you need to use those skills to... well – kill shit. Oh you don’t have those skill or know how to use them? Well then, “ktnx bai l2p gtfo noob!”
While no one was that cruel, it quickly became obvious to her that a traditional MMO isn’t just about showing up, winging it and having a good ole time, while being unprepared and clueless. She decided WOW was interesting but it was more than she wanted to deal with in terms of gaming entertainment. She has happily returned to her Free Realms Mage. Those of us who “really” play MMOs might look at such as her and think, “You’ve got to be kidding me. If you can’t make it in WOW, you can’t make it in any traditional fantasy MMO.”
WOW brought MMO goodness to the masses. Its polish and ease-of-use are now infamous. It’s playing legion 11 million strong. Yet for someone who knows nothing about online gaming beyond FR, even WOW isn’t easy enough. That’s an interesting bit of perspective. Will there be more players that think to make the leap from FR to a WOW-like game, only to slink away whimpering? Will you have FR Tourists skipping through your MMO? More importantly, will you dissuade and abuse them when they arrive, decry they’re not man enough and send them off packing?
I doubt that players whose first massive title is FR, have blogs out there so we can follow them as they attempt to make the leap to a more traditional MMO. I wish there were. I’d love to see how this plays out for others. Maybe some will pop up in the not so distant future.
Wow is serious business. ;)
At least she was willing to give it a try before deciding it wasn't for her. That's half the battle for any MMORPG, even one with a gargantuan userbase like WoW. I think the next step for her is getting her used to playing with other people; something that a good guild can do.
Coincidentally, Free Realms just introduced their guild system recently.
Posted by: Winged Nazgul | June 29, 2009 at 02:33 PM
I was thinking much the same about EQ2s AAs and I am used to WoW. I think talent trees are just intimidating - you feel some pressure to make the right choice but with no real info as to what the right choice might be.
Posted by: Spinks | June 29, 2009 at 03:33 PM
It comes down to which group is bigger, or which one you want to cater to if you are not aiming for 'everyone'.
Do you make your game FR-easy, and alienate those looking for depth/challenge, or do you up the challenge (however high) and attract those at the expense of FR-like tourists who won't buy into the complexity.
DarkFall is too hard for WoW players, while FR is too easy for them. Where you set your bar in part determines your spot.
Posted by: Syncaine | June 29, 2009 at 04:14 PM
Personally, I never really thought about WOW being to hard for anyone who's interested in gaming. I got my son hooked on MMOs at 9. My nephew was 7. She's in her 40s, it my mind, it should have been a breeze. I thought it was more of do you want to be bothered with all these choices.
As for FR, I'm continually amazed the my oldest daughter who's resisted the MMO fever even though she grew up with a band of fanatics, is all over FR and not just doing the mini games. She's still questing. That still cracks me up.
Posted by: Saylah (Lauren) | June 29, 2009 at 05:00 PM
Mrs Bhagpuss and I started playing WoW yesterday. We've never played it before, even though we've played MMOs as our main leisure activity for nearly ten years now. We were in EQ2 beta and we went with EQ2 on its early pre-emptive launch when all the buzz was about WoW. Since then we've just never gotten around to playing it, and we've developed an image of WoW based on what people said about it in the games we did play.
So when we found ourselves at an MMO loose end this weekend, after FFXI didn't quite work out (though I love it so far) we decided to give WoW a try.
I expected it to be easy. No, Iexpected it to be VERY easy. I expected to zip through the first ten levels in an hour or two and be at the free trial cap on my first character next day. I expected it to be garish, brash and simplistic. That's what people had been telling me it would be like for years.
Well, I was very surprised. I've levelled a ton of characters through the low levels in many MMOs and the last time it was this slow and grindy was probably EQ1 circa Luclin. I've just last week played FFXI for the first time and my character there levelled faster.
I loved it. It was just like any other MMO. No dumber, no brasher, no stupider and no faster. I've played a good deal of Free Realms and there is just no comparison whatsoever. WoW is a complex, full feature MMO! Who'd have guessed?
So if there really are MMO virgins being broken in on Free Realms, they are in for a very sharp learning curve wherever they go from there, and WoW isn't going to offer much of an easy transition.
We just subscribed, by the way :)
Posted by: Bhagpuss | June 29, 2009 at 05:20 PM
@Bhag - Woot for you. I'm a bit jealous, always am of gaming couples. I'd settle for an interest in gaming from a partner, let alone actual gamer. If you haven't read it before, you should definitely read Kinless' blog. He blogs about his gaming adventures with his wife, which is primarily WOW. Booyah, and good luck.
Kinless Chronicles
http://kinless.wordpress.com/
Posted by: Saylah (Lauren) | June 29, 2009 at 06:58 PM
"you feel some pressure to make the right choice but with no real info as to what the right choice might be."
Indeed, and that's bad game design. Mike Darga has written about it more than once. I've written about it, and it's the core of why I am a huge fan of FR's "free anytime class change". Too many irrevocable decisions (starting with class choice) and too many other players quick to jump on "wrong" choices make for an unforgiving experience that is ultimately a disservice to the game.
Posted by: Tesh | June 29, 2009 at 10:21 PM
> "Indeed, and that's bad game design..."
No really. What is missing is more help, or perhaps a gentler learning curve. The basic game design I think is sound. It wouldn't even have to be 'in your face flashing exclamation mark' type of help which WoW uses to teach the basics of the game to new people. Quests could be added to explain everything from correct gear choices to what different talents mean and under what circumstances they most help (e.g. an NPC would send you at the proper level to do a PvP question, hinting that a silencing talent is best used for PvP, or casters in general).
> "Too many irrevocable decisions (starting with class choice)"
There are few irrevocable decisions in WoW, and soon there will be even fewer (with faction changes coming). Yes, class choice is not something you can change for a specific character. You do however have 8 character slots per server and the ability to roll additional characters on more servers... Whether a set class is good or bad for WoW is I think debatable. But it's certainly not a killer problem. It's a game feature, one that defines the game apart from other games, for better or worse. And a strong case can be made for why it is actually a good choice. In any case, as I said, even if you end up not liking your current character you can always roll another.
I honestly don't know what you mean by "Too many irrevocable decisions" - what other changes to your character cannot be made that you are aware of, apart from class?
> "and too many other players quick to jump on "wrong" choices make for an unforgiving experience"
That's not a game feature, that's a feature of the player base. You could make the case that this behavior is encouraged by certain game features, such as 5-man instances and larger raids causing player interaction where you are judged by your abilities and gear, or PvP causing player interaction where '"wrong" choices', as you put them, will quickly put you in a disadvantage compared to other players.
Yet what are the options? MMOs, by their nature, require interaction. Sure most allow some form of soloing, but if you solo your way through the game you're simply giving up on a large part of what makes MMOs interesting and different from single-player games. The only way to equalize all players (thus taking away the ability of poeple to criticize others) is to take away all choices. No gear differences, no talent options, etc. I don't think many people would really enjoy such a game. I know I wouldn't...
Last but not least, WoW has been around long enough so that you can go outside it for help - with wowhead and wowwiki and a hundred other sites offering help on every aspect of the game, or ingame addons from curse or wowinterface to show you where to go, what to do and the relative value of gear, there is little need for someone with some google-fu to have to slog through getting to know WoW alone. Even though these are external resources to WoW itself, I think anyone introducing a player to WoW should also introduce these sites to the new player.
Posted by: Solidstate | June 30, 2009 at 04:25 AM
@Solid - your last paragraph is exactly why she went back to FR. You have your "I'm a gamer" hat on. She just wanted to play a game. She didn't want a second education or research project. So while we're all fine with being dependent on external sites and tools to help us progress our characters, not everyone wants that much work. After all, she didn't have to do those things to progress in FR so she went back to FR.
Posted by: Saylah (Lauren) | June 30, 2009 at 08:36 AM
That is one thing that bugs me about a lot of people in regards to new players. Rather than just give a quick answer to help out someone new to a game, usually they just give a "go read the wiki, noob" type response. Yes, it is pretty easy to check things on another site (GW even put access to their wiki site mapped to the F10 key, but left that info off the quick ref card, hah), but like Saylah said, more casual players just want to play and have fun, not do research on how to play.
I try to help when I can and have often met some nice people as a result. Just the other day someone was trying to find something in Nightfall, more than halfway into the game, so they weren't new, but wasn't getting answers to their question. We teamed up and took a quick trip to where the quest was. Had a nice little chat about a few things, exchanged some ideas on where to best hunt certain monsters and then continued on with what we were each doing. Much more fun than just telling someone to go look up the answer on a website.
Posted by: Wade | June 30, 2009 at 12:00 PM
Hah, I understand where you are coming from Saylah. My wife hates video games in general, never mind actually getting her to play one with me *gasp*. I gave up on that part of it, instead I have learned to just tone down how much I play in the first place.
Posted by: RomaGoth | June 30, 2009 at 01:19 PM
@Saylah - there's no real answer I can give that won't make me sound condescending, so I will refrain. I will however point out the first part of my previous reply where I expanded on how I thought more helper quests would help new people, so for you to focus only on the part where I point out that additional external resources exist is a bit unfair :)
@Wade, there is a famous quote attributed to Lao Tzu: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
So yes, if asked directly or if I see a question in chat where the answer can easily be gotten from wowwiki or wowhead, I will point the person there. It's not because I treat new players as "noobs" but because by pointing them to places where they can find more answers I answer not just their immediate question but also many of their future ones. This strikes me as being Something Good(TM) :)
Posted by: Solidstate | July 03, 2009 at 04:20 PM
@Solid - Uh? I only pointed out that while MMO gamers, people who really game, are just fine with add-ons and using the internet to research how to progress, there are players for whom that is more work than gaming. I'm hazarding a guess that she's not the only person turned on to massive title via FR is going to consider research a bit more than what they're looking for in a game.
Posted by: Saylah (Lauren) | July 05, 2009 at 02:02 PM