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Former WoW developer Mark Kern wonders if WoW is too easy
Mark Kern, who left Blizzard way back in 2005 to found Red 5 Studios, is working on a new free to play, sci-fi MMO called Firefall -- and has some less than flattering things to say about the game WoW has become. His top complaint: that MMOs are now too easy. "When was the last time you died in a starter zone?" Kern muses. "Sometimes I look at WoW and think 'what have we done?' I think I know. I think we killed a genre." The easier content, he argues, means both developers and players focus less on the content in the middle of the game and more on racing to get to the end game -- and by rushing through the game from level 1 to level 90, you miss out on a lot of the game itself. Of course Kern notes that his upcoming MMO has the mix just right -- and that by focusing on the journey instead of the destination, Firefall is a lot more fun. While we are fans of new games -- and love the art style Firefall has going -- we're less convinced about dying in newbie zones as a gameplay necessity. Time will tell if Kern has the right of things -- Firefall's open beta is starting soon.
Lost Pages of Taborea: Is Runes of Magic too easy?
It seems things are never quiet in regard to Runes of Magic these days. If it isn't holiday events or new world bosses, it's large-scale balancing issues. Players may still be plugging away at title achievements this Halloween, but the event has been going long enough for people to settle into a daily routine and get back to everyday affairs. In other words: it's something to do, but the shiny is starting to wear off. I took advantage of this lull and decided to do a Q&A on the overall difficulty of RoM. It's not a huge issue; it's more like a constant issue that creeps into other discussions on class balance or the memento system. And after the attempted change to a percentage-based mana cost, it's definitely worth consideration. Is RoM too easy? The question seems like it'd be a quick one-line answer, but there are many ways to view it that would yield different outcomes. What are players' goals? How can a change to one system affect the whole game? How will future updates affect any changes made today? Is there an answer to whether RoM is too easy or not? Well. Let's find out.
The Daily Grind: How easy is too easy?
Difficulty in games is a contentious issue at any point. Brian "Psychochild" Green recently had a musing on the topic of difficulty as it applies to most games, but even that discussion stops shy of discussing MMOs, where multiple difficulty levels are rarely an option. Designers can make harder events, but if the rewards are the same as something easier, no one will bother making life harder on themselves. That makes the "hard mode" more than just an increased challenge, and sets up a hardwired and sometimes arbitrary challenge-to-reward ratio. On the flip side... well, it's not fun to have the game just hand everything to you. We want to feel as if we're accomplishing something when we play. So today, we ask you, what's too far in either direction? What sort of penalties or challenges make something so ridiculously hard it's not worth bothering? By the same token, how simple does something have to be before you're annoyed at the ease of it all? What levels of difficulty can be tinkered with without making the game unpleasant, and what elements of gameplay are best kept at a set level?
Exploring Azeroth with quest icons on the map
We've heard this argument before, and every time Blizzard makes a change to help players complete quests more quickly, it comes up again. And with the recent announcement that Blizzard will actually be adding quest targets to the ingame maps (again replicating another function of the popular Questhelper addon), players have again brought up the old argument: is the game too dumbed-down? Originally, when the game began (though I don't know anyone that didn't still use Wowhead to find quest coordinates even back then), you were sent "east" to find a tiny little brown backpack to click on, and in the next patch, not only will you see that brown backpack sparkling with flares as you get close, but you'll have it marked on your map the entire time.Larisa waxes nostalgic over at the Pink Pigtail Inn, and says that this is just farther down a sliding slope that leads to a ravine where we all just have two spells and need to kill three boars to level to 100. Kinless Chronicles straight out says "Patch 3.2 will play for you" with some funny tongue-in-cheek analysis. But since I do it so much anyway, I'll play the Devil's advocate here: let's face it, we all used the addons and coordinates while leveling up alts, if not even while leveling mains. It's easy to be nostalgic, but I never did like hunting around for that little pixel of brown you had to click on to finish a quest, and if you really do want to stumble around in the dark the old way, just don't look at your map and/or close the minimap down. I've recently played two other console games, Fable 2 and Dead Space, that also offer glowing line navigation straight to your quest targets, and I did feel a sense of exploration in both -- if I wanted to wander off the path, I was welcome to (and usually rewarded for it), while if I just wanted to get to where I was going, I could do that, too.
World of Warcraft: So easy, a caveman can do it
If it feels like World of Warcraft may be losing its luster for your, then chances are that you feel the game has become too easy. Since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, a large chunk of the game population has hit 80, done the heroic dungeons, and even entered into the raids with ease. Has the game become too easy?GameSpy editor Gerald Villoria has dedicated one of his columns to just some of the ways that Warcraft might have become too easy for everyone. While he points his finger at both the player community and the developers, his main point comes from the newly introduced heirloom items that come from the endgame emblem vendors. With enough emblems lying around to fill a bathtub, Gerald was able to equip a new rogue with three heirloom items and effectively outclass almost everything in the lower levels including blue item drops.At this point, it seems that any higher class player, or any player who enters the game through the recruit-a-friend program, can develop a character that can completely skip through low-end content without giving it a thought. You don't need to get excited about rare drops in early dungeons, or even really pay attention to the item drop system anymore. Has the game become so easy that it's no longer fun?
Counterpoint: Yes, we should track raiding progression
There's been a lot of hemming and hawing lately about how Wrath is too easy. And there's no question that it is: Ensidia cut through the endgame like an epic dagger through the Vykrul, and any guild that steps into the endgame these days, even with low numbers or cheap gear, finds success. Adam suggested this morning that raiding is so easy these days that we shouldn't bother to track progression, and while Adam is a great writer and a terrific player, I'm here to disagree with his opinion: progression is exactly what the new endgame is all about.While Karazhan was one of the (if not the) most successful instances ever, it had one big problem: it killed guilds. It murdered progression. It was a roadblock after a roadblock, so much so that it took some guilds months to conquer, if they survived at all. Ten man Naxx obviously doesn't have that problem -- anyone with a little raiding experience who wants to beat bosses in there can do so, and Obsidian Sanctum is just as easy. The problem now, however, is that guilds like Ensidia and guilds who pushed through to Sunwell in the old endgame, are finishing the content already, and wondering what's next? They were 80 two weeks ago, and now, barely a month after the expansion's release, they've toppled every dungeon they can find.And what's wrong with that? Nothing.
Is the Horseman too easy?
Now, a little while ago, Blizzard implemented an Arena points system, where as long as you ran 10 arena matches, you could stock up points and then use them for Arena weapons. So raiders (who didn't PvP much, but wanted the weapons) would save up their points even if they lost, and buy the weapons once they'd saved enough. Arena players, however, cried foul-- they said the Arena weapons had become "welfare epics." So Blizzard required a good Arena rating to buy those weapons.As of Tuesday, it's Hallow's End in Azeroth, and there is now a Headless Horseman event in Scarlet Monastery's Graveyard. Everyone I know (including me) has run the event multiple times, and Epics are dropping like Hallow's End candy. So here's the question: should Blizzard really be giving out Epics for an event that takes just a few minutes and only a modicum of skill? Aren't these as "welfare epics" as they come? Is the Horseman event too easy to be giving out loot like this?Now, obviously, the rings and helm that the Horseman drops are hardly the Arena weapons that Blizzard had to put behind a rating. Though they are Epic, they're not that amazing-- one trip through Karazhan could probably replace all of them. But Karazhan is a ten main raid, and this is an event that can be done with as little as three people once every day (and I wouldn't be surprised to see it soloed by some ambitious Paladin before long). Already, three days into the event, my guild was running a 66 Mage in there just to get a "free" epic ring for him to use, four levels from now. Isn't that a bit much?
