In which I talk about the importance Tidus’ tale has in my journey towards mental health.
I recently completed Final Fantasy X for the PlayStation 2. They’ve released a recent “re-mastered” edition for the PC, and I suppose I could have forked out the cash for it, but I wanted to play the original, since I already had it and since I had tried to play it years ago. Twelve years ago, in fact – around 2007.
That year was probably the most difficult year of my life. I sank into a deep depression after what was at the time a severe disappointment (a girl that got away), and for a period of several months I didn’t want to do anything. No games, books, movies…I’d come home and just sit down on the couch. At the time I didn’t know a whole lot about mental health, so I didn’t realize quite how bad things were, oddly enough. Video games are a lifelong hobby of mine, though – if I have no desire to play them at all, there’s probably something wrong.
One of the games I was playing at the time was Final Fantasy X. I don’t think I had gotten too far – the Mi’hen Highroad, I believe. Once I started to become depressed, I put it down and then avoided it for years. Anything that reminded me of that time was a bad memory.
In recent years, my mental health has gotten a lot better. I’m able to reframe how I think about things, see the positive aspects of most situations. Playing Final Fantasy X therefore has been a step on my journey to mental health. I’m happy I was able to pick it up and enjoy it – gradually replacing any bad memories with good ones from the present time, and enjoy the game for what it is – and actually finish it this time.
I’m glad I did. It was a good game – even better than Final Fantasy VII, one of the few other Final Fantasy games I’ve completed (along with the first one, III, and IV). The plot was decent, albeit a bit linear – you don’t have a lot of real choices (I would have picked Lulu over Yuna, personally, but hey). The game now has a completed status on my Backloggery. If you also use that site to track your games, feel free to add me to your MultiTap!
In which I talk about how EverQuest could have averted its current fate.
Over the past five or six posts, I’ve taken a retrospective look at EverQuest, and how the various parts of the game have changed since its launch. Today, I’d like to post a final portion of that retrospective and look at some “what-if” ideas: things that EverQuest (and most MMOs) could have done differently.
Massively Multiplayer Online games like EverQuest have two great challenges: gaining new subscribers and retaining old subscribers. These games are, after all, a business – one predicated on incentivizing players to hand over cash in exchange for entertainment. The EverQuest of today has largely abandoned the idea of gaining new subscribers, and is trafficking almost entirely on nostalgia – counting on old subscribers to return to the game and give it a try again.
Over the years, we’ve tried to get new players and now that’s not our focus. Our focus is to get people back who’ve played already.
The strategy for most MMOs when it comes to player retention is “new content” – an expansion on the game with new options, levels, areas, items, enemies / challenges, and so forth. In the early days of EverQuest, this involved having players purchase a new $30 game box that would grant access to this new content. Today, the fee is largely included with the subscription – getting that routine payment in an era when most of these games are free to play (with some limitation).
Of course, this never-ending stream of periodic power-bumps comes with a cost. New players in 1999 had to climb a 50-rung ladder to the top; now that ladder has 110 rungs (or more). The new items in any expansion are almost always more powerful than old items, leading to “power creep” that makes old content worthless (we discussed this briefly when noticing that EverQuest now grants newbie armor that far surpasses the tattered clothing of old). In addition, you usually have new areas – and, inevitably, the migration from old locations to new ones. EverQuest’s zones of yesteryear are ghost towns today as players have migrated to newer content.
For better or worse, the die has been cast for EverQuest and SOE / Daybreak have made their decisions. There may have been other solutions to the problems of player retention and acquisition than the route they took. Today we’ll look at a few ideas I had while I was looking at the appeal of the early game (and contrasting that with how that appeal has been diluted or destroyed with the subsequent changes to the game).
Let’s recap a little bit, though. We’ve discussed how EverQuest has two pillars: player interaction and the high fantasy theme. The high difficulty of combat in the original game, and the fact that combat was the only real game in town, forced players to interact. They’ve watered this down a lot over the years, providing NPCs-for-hire to replace other players and making the game a lot easier in general. The fantasy world at launch had evocative areas with distinct moods and designs; later zones (or zone re-designs) lacked such distinctive flavor, I’d argue. There are now also so many different areas that the player-base has been spread over a lot more real estate, leading to the potential for infrequent player interactions. The crafting and questing systems, which could have done much to enhance the feeling of the fantasy world and increase the potential for player co-dependency, feels haphazard and patchwork.
So, what could have gone differently? A couple ideas:
Don’t create new zones; revamp existing zones. It’s instructive that, even on Project 1999, there are zones with almost no one in them – dead ends where players rarely venture. The EverQuest team could have spent their time and attention on these bare patches – adding interest and utility. Take Ak’Anon, for example. The gnome starting city is in an out-of-the-way location, and offers little besides a bit of flavor. The same is true of Halas and Erudin. What if the gnomes had dug a tunnel to connect the city (where players can bind) to Dagnor’s Cauldron, significantly reducing the travel time from a player’s bind point to the popular dungeon of Unrest? What if that river connecting Halas to Rivervale were real?
In addition, they could have made the content of existing zones more dynamic. What if zones that had no significant player activity over time became filled with greater and more dangerous foes, with more and more lucrative treasure? What if dungeons became the foes’ “staging points” for zone-wide invasions that, if left unchecked, would result in raid-level events happening? At some point, players would simply band together and farm content in different zones, adding a lot of variety and interest to the game as certain areas became “overfished” and others teemed with mobs and loot.
Provide a game mechanic to enhance player socialization during “down-time”, and enhance the value of cities. Despite taverns littering the game, there was never any real reason for a player to go into one. What if spending time in a tavern added a temporary buff to players that increased with time, reaching a certain maximum and wearing off after a few hours of adventure? What if a performing bard or imbibing player-crafted brews or food enhanced that effect? What if the effect were increased with the number of players present? What if player transactions gained bonus gold if they were conducted within a city (rather than the tunnel in East Commons)? What if players could vote on temporary, weekly bonuses to certain types of crafting, buffs, or transactions if they were bound to a particular city? These are just a few ideas; there’s so much untapped potential here that it’s almost criminal they never did anything with it.
Don’t raise the level cap; encourage players to retire characters and give them a benefit for doing so. What if your level 50 character could, if retired, provide a guild-wide bonus or boon for an entire year? What if guildless characters could retire to a particular lifestyle in a particular city, enhancing the buffs or skills of those living in a city? What if players could bequeath “boons” to their other or newer characters that increased as more characters were retired – new and different skills…and maybe even the ability to play new class / race combinations, or have unique titles. Some limits or enhancements to this would be required, of course, to encourage players to spread out to less populated cities, but this would have done wonders to renew players’ interest in the game, provide more players in each level band, and make content less of a “wall” for new players.
Those are a few alternatives they could have considered. Maybe some day we’ll see an MMO do everything EverQuest did right at the start and then improve upon it. The fact that MMOs fall into decline and stagnation means that the developers aren’t really improving the game…the current techniques of designing an MMO are dated at this point, and I would argue that the entire genre has fallen into decay. I hope it revives at some point.
With that, I’m through with writing about EverQuest for a long while. Probably should have wrapped this up sooner – I haven’t played the game in a few months, and have moved on to other things. I’d also like to write about some non-game topics for this blog. Writing takes practice and discipline; I should have moved on once Project 1999 no longer interested me.
