The Soapbox: Spoiled solo
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column.
Back when I got started with MMOs, I was playing Final Fantasy XI and complaining quite loudly about the nature of the gameplay. I think it was after yet another night of sitting in Jeuno looking unsuccessfully for a party that I went on a real tear, complaining at length about how ridiculous it was that the game didn't let most classes just do things solo. Grouping up for everything was a gimmick, a cheap way to throw roadblocks at players. If you wanted to experience the game solo, you should be given that option by the game.
Final Fantasy XI never really changed to support that playstyle, but it wasn't long before we saw a flood of games with a much more solo-friendly attitude launch. World of Warcraft launched with solo leveling as a core feature, and over time we've moved on to games, such as Star Trek Online, which can be played solo almost the entire way through. You would think I'd be happy -- and I am, really. But I look back at games that required me to party up before I could even go out and earn some experience, and I can't help but think about what we've lost in the interim.
Community
If you've never played an older game, it's hard to really picture what communities used to feel like. You get tastes of it here and there if you step back into an older game, but considering how many players have moved on to newer pursuits, there's not the same real mutual bonding.
Put simply: In an older game, you needed other people to like you and get along with you.
This might sound like a simple principle, but the resultant effect on community was slow and pervasive. Many of the people you grouped up with from day to day were familiar -- they were friends or at least acquaintances -- and you would often have memories of moving up in levels as a group. That meant you had a decent sense of who most of the people in your party were and how they tended to behave. Leveling itself was a breeding ground for relationships that could help you with future group quests and the like.
Even more influential, however, was the fact that you needed these people to not kick you out of groups or spread bad talk about your behavior. If no one wanted to invite you, you didn't get invited to groups and didn't get to level. As a result, bad behavior was far more self-regulated -- the community could quite literally shut you out of the game if you couldn't act with at least a little maturity.
Of course, that rarely happened. I'm trying not to idealize the past; there was a fair amount of subterfuge and outright lying going on at any given time, as you could expect. It was not a golden time for everyone. But there was a sense that you were part of a larger community that would not simply accept you if you did terrible things all the time. Being a jerk had some long-lasting consequences, far beyond an environment where you can buy a server and name change for a little extra money and leave no one the wiser. The worst a guild in World of Warcraft can do is kick you out of a raid. Being a consistent theif and jerk in older games could make you a pariah.
Patterns of play
WoW convinced players that serious grouping was the province of the endgame, and that irked some members of the community. After all, if you've gotten through 60 (or 70 or 80) levels of the game without needing a group to progress, you'll be a little upset at the thought of your previous skillset's being rendered wholly superfluous. And this wasn't a trick pulled off by older games, not in the slightest.
No, in games in which you grouped to do everything, the endgame didn't "switch" to anything. You knew right from level 1 that in order to accomplish anything, you were going to need a group, and that went for even the most mundane of tasks.
On the one hand, this meant there was no point to logging in unless you knew that Team Venture (or whatever you called your companions) would be on and ready to go. But this also meant that the skills you had been practicing all along were the ones that the endgame demanded. You didn't level to the cap as a Dark Melee/Regeneration Stalker in City of Heroes only to find out that your solo-friendly invincible build was essentially wholly unwanted because the endgame would require a group for task forces and the like. You knew that very early, and you also had a reason if you used one of the few builds capable of working alone. There were no surprises.
More recent games have gone a different route -- essentially, they've made endgame as solo-friendly as the rest of the game, with very few exceptions. While this does mean you don't get a sense of whiplash from what the game wants you to do, it also means you have even more of a shock when you run into one of the rare pieces of content that requires a group -- in a game that is otherwise essentially a single-player experience.
Shared knowledge
Database sites have always existed for popular online games, for reasons so self-evident it's almost silly. But there was a time when your first instinct was not to change windows and open a web browser if something in a game mystified you. Your first instinct would be to ask other players in the game, and more often than not they would make a genuine effort to respond in a useful fashion.
Yes, you still got people who would make fun of anyone asking how part of the game worked. But it was less common, and more often than not asking a polite question got a polite response with the information you needed. There was a strong sense that no one knew how the whole game worked, that we were all piecing it together as we went. It even extended as far as builds, with players often first learning the "right" way to put a character together from other players offering tips.
Working in the dark was frequently frustrating, but it provided another avenue for players to work together instead of working at cross purposes -- or just eschewing one another altogether. You got the feeling that the world was much larger, that you never knew what was just around the corner or what other quests you could hope to unlock if you got everything just right. These days, of course, it's a rare day when Wowhead doesn't have quest information and detailed comments on any tricky points you might encounter. Telling someone to just look up the information is not just the fastest way to teach -- it's also useful to disguise the fact that we frequently don't know the answer ourselves.
So this is a bad thing, right?
For all this, it probably sounds as if I miss the old days of MMOs and want to return to that halcyon time. This could not be further from the truth. If we returned to games in which we have to group for everything, I'd probably just drop the hobby altogether. Heck, I agreed with Justin's column on the topic many years before it was written.
All the virtues possessed by older games didn't disguise the fact that on some level, I was right. The spate of solo-friendly games proves that pretty much every reason given for forcing players into grouping is just an excuse. You can design entertaining and intensive content for solo players, and you can do so while still retaining decent subscriber numbers. There's not just an audience that prefers grouping, but a huge audience of players who prefer to play alone rather than being shackled to a single group until the end of time.
MMOs, as an industry, have moved away from a forced group because it's a bad and archaic design that most players didn't really care for. As time goes by, WoW has steadily reduced the group requirements for endgame play, simply because it turns out most players really don't want to group up with 39 other people, or even 24 other people. I'd be willing to bet that if you included an option to run everything solo, you would see group participation drop like a stone.
I come here to bury party-based games, not praise them. And unlike Mark Antony, I mean that very honestly. But they possessed certain virtues, certain robust community aspects that might not be possible to reclaim without a grouping environment like that we once possessed. It's sad, but sometimes sad things happen.
Still, I wouldn't take all of the community knowledge in the world for another week spent sitting in Jeuno waiting for a group that never happens. That seems like a fair trade.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively writers every Tuesday as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews. Think we're spot on -- or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
