The Digital Continuum: This year, PvPing is the new raiding

Ever since World of Warcraft hit the scene back in late 2004, it has experienced enormous success that even its creators hadn't foreseen -- with an estimated 2.5 million active player-base in the United States, 5.5 in Asia and around 2 in Europe. I think we can all agree that World of Warcraft's position as king of the hill isn't going to change anytime soon, because change takes time with all things. There is, however, a change that's been coming to a slow boil. For the past three years players have been leveling up in WoW, but when they get to the end most players have only two choices. They can either choose to focus on battlegrounds/arena PvP or they can partake in endgame raiding of various instances.

These last few months I've been looking closely at the two hyped-up massively games 2008 has to offer; Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. It has become more and more apparent to me that this year is going to be the year of the PvP endgame focus. A lot of people have played or seen the raid game and found it to be something they had no interest in. Ideally, if a developer can make a PvP endgame experience that's easy to get into and fun for everyone involved they will have something different on their hands that could potentially grab tons of subscribers.

Before I get any deeper into this there is one thing I should explain for those of you about to cry out in horror at the thought of getting griefed left and right. I've never been a huge fan of typical open world PvP where players that are just trying to ding their next level get slaughtered for no good reason. This isn't about that sort of an experience, because there's nothing fun about that except for 10% of the people on the server. What I love most is a competitive environment where both sides of a conflict are willingly pursuing victory.

Essentially, think of it in terms of a first person shooter like Call of Duty 4. If gaining ranks (levels) in that game were like open world PvP, then you would join a server to kill randomly spawned NPCs for experience, while other players twice your own rank popped into the game and killed you for their own amusement. The problem with this model is that while some players are trying to enjoy themselves in a way that doesn't bother anyone else, other players happen to be griefing somebody else just for their fun -- it's important to emphasis "their fun" as opposed to everones' fun. That's not to say open world PvP can't be a fun experience, but before it can be fun it needs to be balanced for fair play.

I wouldn't want to forget Pirates of the Burning Sea, which is a PvP-focused game that has just recently launched. Although the game hasn't even been out for a week yet, some are finding it less than compelling in relative terms to what else is offered. Aside from some undercooked PvE content, the primary problem with PotBS is its lack of any compelling consequences for all the player vs player confrontation. Not only that, but the only type of PvP that the game offers is the standard open world format that, while including port capturing, doesn't do much else. I'm not saying PotBS isn't worth playing, it's just not for most people because it really only caters to the hardcore PvP crowd out there.

What's more important -- and far more interesting -- than open world PvP are the various other kinds of PvP systems developers are working on bringing to the fore. Age of Conan will let players construct entire functioning cities that can be attacked and defended with tactical maneuvers and siege weaponry. Not only that but players of the highest levels can contribute to these cities in different ways, which is sort of like prestige crafting classes. Also, combat mounts in PvP sound like a lot of fun.

Warhammer Online is planning what sounds like an innovative world conquest feature, complete with open world PvP where it's not only optional but promises to maintain a low grief count by severely weakening high level players who enter low-level PvP zones. Also, there will be player-controlled keeps of various sizes to capture for your realm, siege weapons for taking down enemy structures and instanced objective-based scenarios of in-game areas.

There are real world consequences found in WAR, in the form of controlling actual enemy zones that lead to the capital city raids where successful sieges allow the ransacking enemy cities. Of course, all of this is reversible and shouldn't punish the losing faction too severely. Warhammer Online will need to find the sweet middle where casual players who just want to solo, go questing or even PvP a bit with a small band of friends can enjoy the same game that hardcore players are enjoying as well.

While both of these games have a strong PvP focus overall, what they both truly share is variety -- a sense that the developers are giving us lots of different things to do in their respective games.

One of my biggest disappointments with World of Warcraft was that it didn't have more instanced content intermittently through the original 60 levels of gameplay. Generally massively games have the problem of starting off really, really well and then slowly curving down into being all right, but not as great. That is until you reach the higher levels and endgame content. The upside to a game with various small, medium and large player vs player content chunks is that they can be mixed in with the player vs environment content thus giving a -- hopefully -- smoother quality throughout all levels. Granted, this entire thing is about the endgame experience, but nonetheless I thought it worth mentioning for a simple reason. When a game's quality is better throughout all levels, more players are likely to get to that endgame -- which will only make it that much more fun.

Even assuming that neither of these games ends up being the next big thing, what have we got to lose except the time we already devote to massively games? It's not really about beating WoW anymore, especially when it has a subscriber base half the size of Australia. I hope for the developers of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online that it's never been about beating the massively monster. I also hope that players who don't particularly care for the player vs player experience find themselves enjoying WAR's special brand of player-on-player action.