Behind the Curtain: More Epic Gameplay?

Should MMOs give us a more 'epic' feel to our experiences? In the past, when I've explained the time I spend in-game to friends and relatives, one of the common complaints or opinions that I hear a lot is that it never sounds very exciting.

While I know that I've been saving a future Warchief from slavery, or putting to rest the spirit of a lost fiancée, some people are always going to see it as me just killing some more anonymous monsters that will be back in five minutes' time.

"This is boring!" they cry, "How long does it take you to kill a boar!?" I have to explain to them, again and again, the genre staples – incremental gear upgrades, starting from pathetic, finally getting up to ridiculous pieces of gear that make other players weep with envy. When they turn round and say, "Okay, show me the cool gear then, go buy some and use it instead." I have to explain, once more, that that kind of gear is only rewarded after you've spent weeks, months even, in the game, working your way up to them. It's about this time that disgust and terminal boredom sets in, and they drift away to their own pursuits, convinced that I'm slightly mad.

I can see their point, to a certain extent; even though I really enjoy EVE Online, I don't play it at the moment, primarily because I don't have time in my life right now, and also because any time I do start it up my girlfriend – who enjoys WoW herself – mocks me viciously for what appears to be endless hours of shooting at rocks and doing maths for fun. While I realise she's just teasing, there's a niggling voice in the back of my head that tells me she just may be right – although the rewards are there, is the time and effort investment too much to justify the pay-off?

Also, the game is not geared towards playing solo; eking out a living on the fringes of low-sec space as a one-man operation. That being said, being the bloody-minded individual that I am, I always end up playing that way, just to be stubborn.

We all know that MMOs have traditionally taken flak for being chock full of Fed-ex and 'kill X number of Y' quests, but I try to explain to people that MMOs are usually played this way; small-scale victories, the building blocks or stepping stones or baby steps on the road to the larger, epic conquests that will come later in the game; spending an extra few minutes checking mineral prices in EVE might give you that little bit extra on your profit margin that makes the time you spent mining last night worth it; in World of Warcraft, it might be the endless instance runs in PUGs that finally nets you enough tanking gear to take over as Main Tank for your guild's Karazhan runs.

That being said, as games grow and expand and level caps are increased, it can become harder and harder to keep new players interested if they feel like they're facing an ever-increasing level grind before they start to feel like they're participating in the game with the rest of the population. With the level cap in WoW going up to 80 with Wrath of the Lich King, will Blizzard sweeten the deal for new players any more than they did with the levelling buffs they applied in patch 2.3?

Everquest certainly managed to put out a good few expansions, without resorting to increasing the level cap each time and extending the length of the grind faced by new players or giving rise to rampant mudflation – and if it was possible back then, it's certainly possible now.

Should MMOs be giving players bigger and better rewards sooner than we normally see them? Should we be seeing players in WoW riding around on mounts at level 10, instead of 40? Should your first class quest reward you with an overpowered epic?

The obvious downside to doing so is that your progress, you achievements could become devalued. Where would the sense of achievement come from? Where would you go next if, after your first hour or two in the game, you were being handed actual welfare epics? How much value would you place on your gear if it had been handed to you for free?

I'm probably being naïve – 'epic' rewards can just as easily come from the quality of the content you're experiencing, rather than the material rewards you're being handed at the end of said content; the fact that you've been rewarded with a great sword might be little more than a bonus, if the new area you've been exploring for the past few hours has you so enthralled that you completely lost track of time.

At the end of the day, there are arguments for and against both points of view here – some people always gauge their success or enjoyment based on the material rewards they've accrued, while others take equal enjoyment simply from playing, regardless of their (relative) success or failure.

It comes back to the afore-mentioned genre staples – where the material rewards, the gear, aren't really bonuses or extras, but are more likely to be the point of the game. These staples aren't necessarily a bad thing – in a way they're comforting, giving us a way of anchoring ourselves in the game, making it easier to find our feet – but the sooner we see some really high quality, high population MMOs achieve success through subverting them, the better off we'll all be as gamers.