In Perspective: Endgame

"endgame"

What you’ve heard

This new MMO is the most disappointing thing to happen to the internet since Emma Watson didn’t do porn immediately upon hitting 18. No one should play it and anyone who does is obviously suffering from some sort of mental illness. There is no ENDGAME! Once you get max level, explore all the areas, do all the quests, collect all the collectibles, do all the dungeons in normal mode, hard mode, and challenge mode, collect the best gear, and unlock all the customizing options there is nothing else do to! This game is a failure!

Except

Let’s take a quick trip over to metacritic to see what games the internet likes the most. We see the top user rated games of all time including titles like Half Life 2, Balder’s gate 2, GTA, and Okami. One thing all these games have in common is an ending, with nothing at all to do once the game has been completed. Half Life 2 and Okami barely have 12 hours of game play between them before you’re at the final credits with no new modes or challenges waiting for you at the start screen. No one seems to have a problem with that. It’s almost like it’s an expected thing that a video game should entertain you for some time and then you should be done with it, moving on to something else.

The best selling game of all time, Call of Duty Black Ops is often heralded for its “infinite replayability” as the main reason it was so successful. In this case infinite means you can grind out the same 8 multiplayer maps over and over again, or play one of 3 zombie maps over and over in a never changing loop. Level advancement was unlocking some new guns and abilities, and when you hit max level you were given the option to start over and do the whole grind again. And although the number of maps went up if you bought map packs for $20 each, this is all the variation the game needed to bring to the table to be seen as something you could play forever.

The modern MMO brings hundreds if not thousands of quests to the table. Using Star Wars the Old Republic, a game that was absolutely shunned by the online community for not having an end game, leveling a character from 1 to 50 takes about 40 to 80 solid hours of game play depending on how much time you spend doing side missions. Star Wars offers 8 completely unique classes to level up with different stories and game play, making the total amount of play time you can milk out of it without having to repeat things in up in the 600 hour range. For free. Guild Wars 2, another game under fire for lack of end game offers a leveling experience that takes about 40 hours, 10 dungeons to explore with 32 levels of variation, and meaningful exploration that more the doubles the amount of time it’s going to take you to fully experience the game. You’ll find the same trend in every modern MMO, 40 to 100 hours of game play in the core experience, and plenty of side missions to keep you going after that. If these were single player games critics and users alike would be praising the exceptional value they offer before moving on to the next game, but because they are MMOs the internet says forget about them because there is nothing to do.

So what’s the deal?

There are two things going on here. First, the “blockbuster” MMO started with EverQuest and moved onto World of Warcraft, two games that did nothing at all to make the leveling experience engaging or entertaining. It was a means to an end, and that end was the endgame grind. It wasn’t until you had max level that you even begin to experience the game in full, and everything was gated by gear and lesser achievements. You had to pull the right levers a given number of times before you were allowed to pull even bigger levers in a never ending cycle. By the time most people were done with a set of levers, the game would release new ones. A decade later, people are still playing these games and at their peak the player bases they had were enormous. They made millions of dollars a month for years on end.

The modern MMO isn't trying to do that. They made the leveling experience as enjoyable as possible and are trying to shift that to the core experience. For many games the idea of a single player spending years and years in the game is not only not a goal but undesirable. Free to play games don’t benefit from people logging on unless they are going to spend money, and most of that money is spent on items like xp boosts or character unlocks that are only useful in the core leveling experience. They don’t profit from end game the way subscription games do, so they have had to shift focus. They want people to try the game, spend $20 to $60, play for 10 to 60 hours, then leave and never come back - just like we do with every other game we ever buy that isn't an MMO. They are not trying to make a million dollars a month, they are trying to make one dollar more than it costs to pay everyone’s salary and the electricity bill. A lot of players will not accept this and regardless of how much fun there is to be had in the leveling up, they still see it as just the means to an end; an end that isn’t there anymore, and see any game that isn't a mega blockbuster hit as a failure.

This leads to the second point. To the old school MMO player this isn't just a shift in market strategy, it’s an assault on his way of life. No one played WoW for 8 years because it was a fun and rewarding game experience, they played it out of the drive to achieve. Endgame progress is the benchmark by which they measure personal success and in an unhealthy but large segment of that population it’s also how they measure personal worth. If today’s gamer isn't exposed to a meaningful endgame after a grueling and undesirable leveling grind, how are they ever going to understand how awesome the old school MMO player is because he woke the sleeper as a global first? This has given birth to a new type of gamer who moves from new MMO to new MMO with no goal other than to spam on the forum and in common chat about how much harder, better, and more meaningful the MMO where they achieved things is, and how anyone happy with THIS game is stupid.

It’s the “in my day we walked to school barefoot and we LIKED it” of our generation, and it’s not going away any time soon. Thankfully, the video game industry isn't listening and slowly but surely nether are video game players. In fact, just the opposite; games like WOW and Everquest have gone back and completely redesigned the leveling process so it's quicker, easier and more enjoyable. They understand now that people have seen a better way, very few people are going to chose the old grind.