Hardcore Casual

I forget who made this comment, but some developer stated he would rather make four 10 million dollar budget MMOs than make one $40 million dollar budget MMO. My first reaction to that comment was somewhat negative, as I imagined getting four half-assed games with some gimmick to sell a few copies over one high quality MMO that would really move the genre forward and provide months of entertainment.

Thinking about the statement a bit more however, I think I can also see his point in a slightly different light. Instead of assuming we would get four different versions of low budge WoW-like MMOs, what if instead we got four very focused games? One would be all min/max PvE (raiding), one would be all e-PvP, one could be a crafting/econ game, etc. Let’s say you built all of them off the same engine, and all the very basics were somewhat similar. You level up, you get gear, new skills, all that. But then at the end-game, which would be fairly easy to reach, you get that more focused game. So if you are playing the PvE game, you know that at the level cap, all that is available to you is to join a guild and go on some raids, and all developer focus would be to balance those raids and continue to expand that end-game. Same with the PvP game, skills and gear would always be balanced around PvP, and all development would be focused on improving the player’s enjoyment of that top end PvP, without any time wasted on new raiding or crafting.

This idea came to me when I was thinking about WoW and how that game really tries to do EVERYTHING all at once at the end-game. You have casual PvP (BG), hardcore PvP (Arena), casual PvE (5 mans), hardcore PvE (raiding), and crafting/auction house management all vying for developer attention, with any one tweak to a single area effecting all others, sometimes in a positive way but far too often in a negative. While WoW is an amazing game for many reasons, is it really a better game because all these things are options once you hit 70?

Would it not be better for everyone to break WoW into say four separate games, all still using the WoW engine and lore. The PvP crowd would have one game, and all the tweaks and changes would be focused on them. Instead of seeing new raid dungeons and quest zones, they would get improved battlegrounds and arena changes, and all skills would be primarily balanced for PvP. The PvE game would basically be the reverse, with no Arena to effect raiding skills, and no ‘easy epics’ just from being afk in a BG for a few months.

Even if you are a fan of both styles and like to mix it up, what if each WoW game cost say 5-10 a month, and you simply had to pick which game to load up before you start playing? With things like Vent and guild websites/message boards, you could still keep in contact with all your gaming friends, but instead of having to log in and wait to see who shows up for a raid, you could instead check vent, see it’s not going to happen, and instead load up PvP WoW and join your Arena team for a few matches. The added bonus to all that would be that you could play two characters, one that you liked to play for PvP, the other class that you like to raid with. Currently WoW forces you into both (unless you have an alt, but that gets tricky due to how gear dependent WoW is), so you might really like your class for PvE, but hate them in PvP, or vice versa.

If we also assume that such a focused game would cost a fraction of a ‘full’ MMO, player base expectations would be greatly reduced. A community of say 100,000 accounts would be considered a success, rather than a huge budget MMO getting 300,000 players and being considered a failure. And if MMOs have shown us one thing, it’s that a bigger community is often worst off than a smaller one. Compare the community in EVE to WoW and you start to see what I mean. Sure you will always get bad apples regardless, but the average tends to be a bit higher when your game is more focused.

Now the big question is whether that ‘four games instead of one’ idea actually follows the model above, or is it just another way of saying ‘we will clone WoW with four different settings on a smaller budget, hoping one of those clones gets enough sales to make us some easy money’. The cynic in me says option number two, but one can hope, right?