I’m slightly curious about the imminent release of another MMO: Throne & Liberty.
NCsoft almost collapsed, I guess they really need this long-in-development project to turn out well. But there are tons of problems. Some of these are design concepts easy to fix, if the intention exists. But some other are ingrained deep about the type of game. I won’t discuss any of this.
Instead I’ll comment this: https://www.playthroneandliberty.com/en-us/news/articles/autumn-2024-content-roadmap
To begin with, how many times you’ve heard something along the lines of “I absolutely have to play this game, there’s an Halloween event going on” ? I guess never.
Seasonal events are a nice addition to any game because they add some flavor. But they never are the guiding purpose. If a game relies on a seasonal, transitory event to gain value, then it means that the foundation of what the game has to offer is shallow. Unless of course you expect players to come and go in phases, but once again, a seasonal event will never be enough of a motivation to bring players back. If anything it helps engagement of those already there. But okay. I only find quite weird this emphasis and focus, with the launch of a game, for something as TRIVIAL as seasonal events…
In general we can say that seasonal events “follow”: if there’s interest in a game, that interest can be translated to some interest in a seasonal event. But a seasonal event will never magically bring interest BACK to the game itself.
The real problem is that reading this, and without having information about details, I can already say this whole approach is WRONG. The idea of frequent updates rather than wait for a big content drop after months is a better strategy overall for a game that wants to stay alive and active. That part is good. The part that isn’t good is that, as you can read, they put lot of emphasis on the pacing of power, player-progress. Including some hints of a catastrophic approach to deal with this: statistics-based design.
What would even mean “identify the best opportunity” and “active player data and feedback” ?
Best opportunity for WHAT? Obviously, the underlying argument is that the addition of new content has to be …paced. Therefore, as those two points indicate, the western release will withhold some progression systems compared to Korea. They will monitor how the overall community bites onto the game, and measure the rate of progress, in order to keep this overall progression well paced.
Do you understand WHY this whole approach is completely broken without any further examination? I hope so. This is an MMO. It’s, in some way, a world. Yet, the overall game design and game development approach, is to treat this game AS A RACE.
You PAY MONEY to get an headstart, because the sooner you begin this race, THE BETTER CHANCES TO STAY AHEAD.
(note that they gate events even AFTER the early access phase, so that early access servers CONTINUE to be ahead even after the full release)
Itemization is a mix of loot-based systems, crossed with guild-based gating systems (that promote community toxicity and elitism), blended with item level-based progression as a materials and currency sinks. A somewhat “walled” grind, but grind nonetheless, and GATED grind on multiple levels, the minority of which are time based. All the rest is gating by selective systems. Of guild-based rules of circular dependencies of “you need to be already qualified to join.”
It is what is likely to become, very quickly, toxicity: the game.
So, back to the actual problem hinted above, because what I described up to this point was simply cause, not end. This overall strategy worked well for Lineage and similar. It won’t likely work today.
What I mean to write here is not in the way of an “opinion”, but in the way of an analysis. The intention is that what I write doesn’t depend on me, nor it reflects my desires and preferences. It just is (unless I’m wrong, of course).
What “just is”? What is this mountain of a problem?
You are trying to design your game as a race, and then as consequence all your effort is at trying to gather data and feedback so that you get the pacing of that race as good as possible. All good? Yes, if you lacked the perspective. This is exactly the right way of proceeding, as long you embraced the problem as it is. But the scale of the problem is much larger: you are creating a gap between new players and veterans.
To be successful long term (when these days “long term” can be as short as three months), your game needs a constant influx of players. New players. Players who have no idea what they are doing and put effort to learn things from scratch. The game systems, game design, overall structure of the whole thing, need to be constructed as if they EXIST OUTSIDE TIME. No matter if you start playing during an headstart, or six months down the road, or two years from now: THE GAME NEEDS TO BE ACCESSIBLE. It needs to be fun, and it needs to be well paced.
It’s not a fucking race, even if you want it to be a race. Because, no matter what, you have two scenarios. Either you have millions and millions of players on day one, and then are able to keep enough of a fraction to be successful. Or you’ll have players, if the game is good enough to convince players to try it, that maybe join a week later, a month later, six months later. If all your efforts are spent in a well paced race, then you are ERASING the totality of potential player-base joining PAST day one. You are desperately hanging on that momentous splash of day one. Placing all your hopes that the game will bleed players slowly enough to still make sense commercially. And even still, even IF an enormous success, you still run on a countdown.
Or maybe just understand that you need a time-zero type of design: the game needs to be well structured, out of time. No matter when a player joins.
I know how these games try to wrestle the problem: eventually they’ll implement some catch-up system. Some cuts in the early game so that new players have a faster on-boarding. Destiny 2 is that type of game. It’s also that type of game that shot itself repeatedly in the feet. It just happens that eventually you realize you can’t walk anymore.
You can’t fix this through band-aids. The “speed” is never a point, because being in a constant race is only appealing for a tiny group of players. Within some niches, a tiny group can be well enough to be sustainable, but I suppose at the scale NCsoft wants to operate, it won’t be.
It can all be fixed, just as long you understand the game needs to be designed to be accessible and fun AT ALL TIMES, rather than surfing at the temporary edge, dominated by an elitist group. You want to have meaningful progression? Ok, so the risk is that players get scattered across many power levels, populations dilute below levels that are active enough. It becomes a solvable problem of player distribution, and tiering that encourages players to also continue to populate lower tiers.
The problem is already embedded in the words of that announce. Their efforts are focused about timing the introduction of updates. Meaning that the CONSEQUENCE of this strategy SOLELY affects the players who are active THAT PRECISE MOMENT.
Whoever will join the game later, whoever wasn’t active in that time frame, whoever takes a vacation to do something else… Whoever wasn’t right there in an ever fleeting FOMO, is screwed and cut out of the game.
A game built on an ever shrinking elitist pool, where the focus on timing will be ironically PROPORTIONAL to the pacing of the game’s failure. The more SELECTIVE the player progress, the faster the game will bleed players out.
The more focus they will put on TIMING THE GAME RIGHT, the faster the failure they’ll get. Because every single timing they get PERFECTLY RIGHT, will also cleave the playerbase between who was there, and who is permanently gone.
I have no specific information of what’s contained within the boxes labeled “tier 2” and “rune systems”. Is it well designed, or is it not? You instead are saying: if we release it in September it’s bad, if we release it in January it is good. Then, I can confidently state that YOU ARE WRONG.
If the timing is perfectly right on day 1, it automatically means the timing is WRONG on day +x. Meaning that every player joining past day one will have the game being WRONG, always. One determines the other. Either game systems are good and work at all times, or they are wrong most of the times.
In the presence of everything I wrote here, all accusations and recriminations about P2W that DOMINATE discussions everywhere else ARE IRRELEVANT.
I don’t care if you can PAY TO DELETE FUN out of a game (you are the victim of your own choices), I care that a game has good game design built on rational analysis.
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In light of all I wrote above, the first line of that image is obviously completely wrong and quite silly: “The content release cadence is one of the most important (and trickiest) to get just right.”
It’s written as a matter of fact premise, when it instead just pure irrational delirium. The faster and the greater the amount of content, the better. Obviously. Of course considering the quality, that usually is the cause behind delays. Imagine taking that line seriously: “we’ve made a game that is simply too good and too big, our players are not prepared. We’ll destroy our competition, we cannot release it.”
You have a certain amount of limited resources, costs, and you try to make the best work you can. You try to match the speed of making something, with the amount you can spend, and the quality you have as a target. Within this context, you simply try to do it as fast as possible, as much as possible. Of course you don’t add a ton of content at once so that you open onscreen seventy pop-ups at the same time like in Black Desert, but that’s again a matter of gaming direction and designed flow, not of some ideal “content quantity” to guess right. The part that is tricky to get right is to avoid mistakes as much as possible, and focus development on what makes enough of an impact. You want to avoid making predictable mistakes, that then cause more time wasted to overhaul systems already complete.
How many resources you want to reinvest to secure the long term future of a game, and the quality of your game design. That’s all that matters. Everything else is out of your hands.
