MMO BinA Geek's Look at Massively Multiplayer Online Games

I’ve talked about this before on my own site, but wanted to go into a little more depth on the matter. One of my personal pet peeves is games that allow a player to out level the content. I realize that games move in a linear fashion and that it’s not exactly easy to provide content that appeals to the masses - but what you really don’t want is for people to have a reason NOT to visit your content.

Lets take EQ2 as an example. Encounters in game ‘gray’ out, providing no experience or loot (aside from body loot which is typically used in quests). Unless you happen to be a quest-o-holic or you happen to be mentoring there’s really no reason to go back to an older zone. As the leveling process is sped up, more and more content is overlooked and lots of it isn’t even touched. Have you been to the caves in Pillars of Flame beneath the monk camp? Have you done all of the Gobblerock hideout instances in Commonlands and Antonica? Chances are if you’re a fairly new player you have not.

There are a few ways EQ2 has chosen to combat this. One is allowing higher level players to ‘mentor’ lower level players and adjust to their level. This allows you to play with friends and experience lower content. Lower level quests (10+) also offer achievement points for first time completions which inspire higher level characters to quest since those points are difficult to obtain.

This simply is not enough inspiration.

Over the time I have leveled it’s amazing to see how much empty content is out there. EQ2 is a huge vast world but you only ever need to level in a very small portion of it. Players keep asking for choice and content but forget the vast amount of content out there already because they have no reason to re-visit it.

Now take a game like EQ or Vanguard or even WoW. The content in these games does not trivialize. Sure, you may not gain experience from defeating an encounter but you will still find crafting goods, as well as quests and achievements to unlock, and even loot (gear etc) from defeating mobs. This allows players to at least have some sort of purpose. Perhaps they are working up a new crafter, or need gear for an alt, or have some unfinished achievements to unlock.

I know the whole concept of an achievement system has been over played these days. WAR and lotRO have vast systems where killing any mob or discovering any new area unlocks a new title reward. Players LIKE these though, they like having goals to aim for and have a sense of pride over hunting down each and ever little bit they can acomplish.

If there were title achievements for EQ2 like perhaps completing all of the quests in a zone, or discovering all of the POI (points of interest) maybe we’d see people in more areas then just the ‘main’ leveling ones. In EQ the problem is some times even worse because there are ‘hot zones’ which offer a substantial increase to experience then regular areas. Each level tier only has one zone associated with it, so while you may find groups within those specific zones fairly easily, you’ll be hard pressed to convince people to venture out into the world (which is gigantic).

This topic of out leveling content certainly is not new, either. You can take a look around the gaming blogs and see that it’s cropping up this week more often then normal. Why is that? Is there something in specific that we’re all trying to grasp our minds around here or are we just bored with the content we’ve been given and find ‘most’ players in so we’re trying to make a mass appeal to ‘older’ content for a change. Have any thoughts on the matter? Feel free to leave a comment below!