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And They End-Gamed Happily Ever After…
By Corvus | January 29, 2007
This is the first post in a series exploring possible solutions to the problems with MMO “end games” that I brought up in my post, Nerf the End Game (link).
We’re all familiar with the narrative ending, “And they all lived happily ever after.” The fairy tales upon which we cut our teeth ended this way and Hollywood certainly loves to play this ending, or specifically toss it on its ear. Further, single player games often end this way, tossing in a hint of trouble in case the game sells well enough to warrant a sequel.
MMO games, by nature, don’t end happily ever after. In fact, they don’t end, ever. Yet with the current MMO structure, the player eventually runs out of new content, has no more levels to grind, and has the best, most powerful, loot she can get get her hands on. This situation is referred to as the End Game, a misnomer if I ever heard one.
One of the suggestions I have heard to resolve this twilight years conundrum (The Endless Autumn?) is to retire characters to a Hall of Heroes. While this seems like a great idea on the surface, it is not without its difficulties.
First, let’s look at the benefits of such a system. Probably the biggest itch such a system scratches is player bragging rights. Rather than standing around and to be pestered by all the shabbily dressed noobs, a statue or portrait adorns an entry hallway, or museum. Retired characters are handsomely displayed on the company website. There is no more need to keep playing the character to show off your skill, they will be displayed in perpetuity and the player can move on.
Another benefit provided would be a sense of completion or accomplishment. Rather than providing an open ended narrative in which there’s no sense of closure, or complete mastery, retiring heroes provides a very definite sense of closure.
Now on to the problems.
Should retirement be forced or voluntary? Voluntary is the most obvious answer, but what if no one volunteers? What if the museum collects virtual dust, the pedestals on the Walk of Heroes remain empty, and the Hero Gallery page of your site is 404? All the work to implement the system has gone to waste and my understanding of the financial world is that investors aren’t terribly keen on that sort of waste. Also, given that you’ve expected to players to retire their characters, you’ve balanced your game accordingly.* What will happen to this delicate balance once you’ve got too many high level characters wandering the world, looking for something to do?
So, forced retirement then.
DING! Congratulations! You’re now a statue! We hope you’re enjoyed your experience! Please roll up a new character and begin again.
Ugh. No thank you. Although I think there needs to be a narrative solution to the “end game” issue, I don’t think forced retirement is it. Even handled less perfunctorily than I suggest above, it would still be pretty jarring to be taken from the world so quickly. Even more stressful would be to allow the player a grace period before retiring their character.
Congratulations! You have reached retirement age. You will now have twenty four hours to give away your belongings, say good bye to your friends, and decide on a new character.
I can even now imagine a thousand little trollish Jack Nicholsons wandering about in an About Schmidt fugue. That’d be a complete joy-kill for the entire gaming population, never mind the gold-watch bearers.
From a narrative and design standpoint, I’d like to have those retired characters stick around under my control (as well as any abandoned characters, but that’s another topic). After all, they might well come in handy some day and could certainly provide some nice flavor.
I have used old player characters (and still do upon occasion) as a deus ex machina. Of course, I spent a lot of one on one gaming time with the people whose characters were so elevated. I knew them well and I was confident I could re-use them and remain true to the player’s intent. It might be possible to re-use retired characters as quest dispensers, but that could be horribly jarring for someone to run into their old character doling out Fed Ex runs.
Well, if you can’t use them actively again, perhaps you could set up a retirement community for them. Have a nice secluded valley or beach-front community set up and populate it with a rotating cast of old characters. Far from being mere flavor, they could dispense information pertinent to the players’ use of them. For example, should a player have combed a single instance or dungeon extensively, their retired character could wax eloquently on its tricks and turns, fielding questions from eager young characters who made the trip to consult them.
The bonus to this scenario is that you could allow players to bring characters out of retirement when you release new content. Streak their hair with white, push back their hairlines a bit, and impose a “rusty skills” penalty for a level or two. Even better, give them a retirement present based upon their class which, upon their return to action, gives them a nice bonus to a specific attribute or skill to take the edge off their reintegration into active duty. That way, at least, you’d be rewarding them for having taken retirement previously.
Regardless of how you would implement retirement, its important to recognize that it’s not merely a matter of altering the end game, but the very substance of your game itself, from the characters’ first toddling steps to their venerable old age.
The next end game strategy I’ll chew over will be the one I’ve heard called for more often, Permadeath. *shudder* Did it just get colder in here?
*If you don’t remember my thoughts on balance, do a search for ‘plate spinning’ from the sidebar.
Tagged:Design. | 5 Comments »
January 31st, 2007 at 1:52 pm
…and the musings continue (link).
June 14th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Hmm. It seems like you would want to make retirement based on an incentive system. So: Player Abe has three characters, Ben Carla and Diane. He doesn’t play Ben and Carla much any more, and he is thinking about rolling a new character, Elvis, so he can play with that class. Now, level x characters (e.g. 50+ out of 60) are eligible to become “mythic” – they can voluntarily board the white ship and leave the game. When they do, however, your level zero newbie characters can use them for status and competitive advantage – e.g. any character in the same player account can “summon ancestor” like a force-ghost, once an hour/once a day day, to deliver a devastating attack / perform a miraculous heal etc. This isn’t enough to fundamentally change the entire nature of the grind – the strength of your ancestor summon isn’t flat, it depends on your level – but it means that newly-rolled character who can summon three mythic-60s is part of a heroic tradition – one owned by the player, and advertised not on some gallery page but by the appearance of those ghosts in battle. It also provides a motivation to not just let characters you aren’t playing sit – once converted, you can in a sense play your old character while playing your new one.
Thoughts?
June 14th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
My thought is that while your idea has merit, it feels like a decidedly system based solution.
Now, if you had a world with an innate tendency towards necromancy and summoning it would blend, otherwise it would feel imposed externally.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I’m not sure I understand the separation between a solution that is “system based” and one that is “a world with an innate tendency towards.” The question is “what happens to characters you can’t play anymore?” and that can be answered either narratively (“Strike them down, and their decedents will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine!”) or mechanically (“They give the player account a once-per-hour summon with a force of base level + summoned level/ 5″). Of course, that particular example wouldn’t narrate very well in Counter Strike – I purposefully gave a WoW-esque example. In a more realistic game, you don’t take the white ship, you take the desk job, and a newb trooper can use “Mentor training flashback” (with voiceover instead of force-ghost) to generate a burst of added skill. In another game, perhaps committing seppaku to invoke permadeath opt-in permadeath automatically gives subsequent accounts a higher “honor” stat useful for trading, etc. etc.. Narrative integration is different, but note that the play mechanic is essentially the same – character retirement allows a player to claim that their new character is part of a tradition (of play, a play history), and invoking this tradition happens in-game through granting status/abilities to new characters.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
My point is that it’s still a blanket panacea which ultimately robs the player of a true sense of the mythic nature of their previous characters. If you, along with everybody else have this innate, button launched, opportunity to take advantage of what you’ve done before… then it’s hardly a quality narrative choice, is it?
The approach is still one of “here’s a solution which works from a mathematic standpoint, now integrate it into your narrative,” rather than one of, “here’s a narrative solution which fits the world, now how do we make it work mathematically?”