Category: Gaming

I purchased System Shock 2 while I was in college – probably the original release. The game was in a silvery-blue box that I wish now I had kept. At this point I can’t recall what prompted me to purchase it, but I believe I came to it via the Ultima Underworld series – I knew that the folks who had worked on that game, which I had really enjoyed, had moved on and were at Looking Glass Studios. So I picked up the game at Electronics Boutique, brought it back to the house that my friends and I were renting, and fired it up.

Horror movies had never really been my thing, but I had played Doom, so some of the tricks they used in the game such as the dark lighting and the surprise of having an enemy jump out of a doorway weren’t new. Resources in the game were tight, though – this was Doom without the near-limitless ammo and where your combat effectiveness was constrained by a system of RPG-like upgrades. You’re kept on the edge of survival, many times, until you figure out how to harbor your resources and make headway in clearing out areas of the game where you can access medical tables, purchase supplies, and upgrade your skills using the resources at hand.

Not only do you have a compelling, edge-of-your-seat resource management component added to a first-person shooter, you also have a unique and compelling story. You’re thrown into a crisis situation in medias res, and the characters and dialogue play out primarily in the form of comm logs you discover. The game teases the possibility of interacting with other survivors, but doesn’t really deliver – the only person you can interact with, early in the game, dies just as you reach him.

I think it’s this compelling narrative that caused me to fire up System Shock 2 a week or two ago and plough through the entire game all over again. It had been a good 15+ years since I’d last traveled the corridors of the Von Braun, and I marveled again at the clever level-design, the resources hidden in little pockets or dark corners, the way the designer hooks players and encourages them to look one way while they’re bringing up a nasty surprise from a different direction. The ending of the game still felt epic – a death-march through formidable foes and a showdown with the villains who have taunted you all throughout your journey.

The games Looking Glass Studios released around the turn of the millenium (Thief, System Shock, and the original Deus Ex) are my favorite games – but I think System Shock 2 is the most compelling. The Bioshock series is a carbon copy of System Shock 2, with a few other faction names and characters cut and pasted over The Many and SHODAN. While the Bioshock series is good, I think it’s only Bioshock: Infinite that began to approach the level of genius that System Shock 2 began. There aren’t many games that I can turn on and enjoy just as much now as I did 20 years ago; the fact that I can do that with this one is unique. I think that, just maybe, System Shock 2 is my favorite game of all time.

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. 

Holly Longdale, “How EverQuest survives in the era of Fortnite and Apex Legends“

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.

The complete removal of preparation, challenge, and thinking from MMO quests has turned them from exciting and fulfilling journeys to boring content gauntlets players are funneled through for the sake of progression, no better than the grind they replaced.

Ethan Macfie, “How MMO Quests Get It All Wrong“

I don’t believe Ultima Online had quests at launch, making EverQuest the first massively multiplayer game to introduce them. Even so, there were precious few “quests” in EQ on opening day. The first one I discovered was the “mail” quest line: a NPC (non-player character) in Kelethin told me to deliver some mail to the dwarven city of Kaladim a short distance away. It was my first step into the broader world, and introduced me to the joy that can be found in exploring a massive game world filled with other players.

When I say “quest”, of course, I mean “tasks.” The “quests” in massively multiplayer games are often droll, tedious affairs (as Mr. Macfie points out in the quote above); there isn’t really a lot of variety to the types of quests players are asked to do. The worlds of MMOs are akin to amusement parks where all the staff are effete beggars too inept or too lazy to do their own dirty work – but somehow have an endless supply of goodies to hand out to players who can run errands for them.

And, make no mistake, it’s those goodies that players are after. The famously offensive “dickwolves” comic by Penny Arcade was originally intended to poke fun at the lifelessness of MMO worlds, where quests about an weighty topic like slavery lose all pathos among a base of greedy players performing rote actions for pixelated rewards. Those rewards, by the way, were pretty scant at EverQuest’s launch. Few quests were considered worthwhile, as the experience, gold, and items you were given in return for jumping through hoops were nowhere near as desirable as the rewards to be gained from mindlessly camping for hours on end in the spot where a rare monster was known to spawn.

Crafting, likewise, was no method for getting rich – or getting anywhere, really. While you could farm some of the items required for crafting from monsters, gaining skill in a craft typically involved purchasing items from the townsfolk and then combining them into a resultant item that those same townspeople would buy for little more than the cost of materials (not including failures). Other players often didn’t want crafted items, either – the armor you could craft was weak, the weapons lackluster, the magic jewelry only so-so. To be sure, a few items like large tailored backpacks were desirable, but not sufficiently so to make it a worthwhile endeavor for most.

All of this leaves me wondering why the original producers felt like they needed to include either questing or crafting in the game at all. Perhaps the two systems were meant to be fully fleshed-out after the game launched – and, indeed, both have been substantially built upon in the years since. The rewards for crafting were somewhat improved, and numerous quest “chains” were added to the game.

Both crafting and questing, however, feel like clunky and haphazard assortments of clutter thrown together rather than any attempt to present to the player a cogent and compelling reason for their game time. You can craft armor in EverQuest, but it’s pointless – the armor you can get from a starter quest these days will be light years better than anything you could make yourself. Quests, likewise, have rewards that range from miserly to mediocre. You’re still far better off simply farming the items and money that drop from monsters than you are trying to piece together the disparate components needed to get a tailoring kit or towns-person to spit out an item.

It’s a shame, really, because both of these systems could do wonders to support one of the two “pillars” of the game: classic high fantasy. You could be performing meaningful work for a living, breathing set of non-player characters that depend on you for their existence; instead you’re gathering pixels to hand in to a set of cardboard cut-outs acting like the employee taking tickets and handing out stuffed animals at the county fair. You could be crafting legendary items that your peers use to perform epic feats of bravery; instead, you’re clicking on a bunch of pixels so that you can gain the skill necessary to click on a bunch of other, fancier pixels later.

Most of this is due to the static nature of the game world. I’ve used the illustration of an amusement park more than once in this article because I think it’s an apt one. Amusement parks (or county fairs, or what have you) present a stock assortment of standardized fun. There’s a set of stations (or rides, or booths, etc.) that present the same or similar experience to each and every person that comes. Different people at a fair like this don’t change the experience – the rides aren’t really experienced differently based on who’s present. It’s homogenized, static, and bland.

It could be more – it was probably meant to be more. The PVP servers present at EverQuest’s launch were clearly an attempt to have players be their own content – to foment wars between factions in the game. It wasn’t done too well in EverQuest; subsequent games such as Age of Camelot did a better job of this. EVE Online clearly does well in setting up a sandbox and having player-versus-player conflict create the dynamic content of the game.

But EverQuest remains, to a large degree, a tired, dilapidated amusement park with tattered tents and creaky rides. The animatronic staff still hand out their worn tickets and prizes as they stand at counters thick with flaking layers of paint pasted on over the years. Most of the areas are dead and deserted; it’s not a living world, it’s a dead one.

Next time we’ll explore some ideas for how this might have been different. The current state of affairs is definitely a result of designer responses to the changing state of the game world and player base – but there were alternatives available.

Man is by nature a social animal…Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

Aristotle, Politics

In the late 1990s, we were all still discovering the radical effect that the Internet was going to have on society. Amazon was changing commerce to become “e-commerce”, e-mail was replacing the postal service, and in gaming we were just discovering that it was a lot of fun to game with other people from the comfort of your own home office.

To be sure, multiplayer gaming had existed before. The technorati were playing games like “Airflight” (a multiplayer flight simulator) on mainframes as far back as the 1970s. Home video game consoles (the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System) allowed up to four players to game together from the comfort of your couch. In the early 1990s, a little PC game called Doom swept the country, bringing university computer networks to their knees because the multiplayer “deathmatch” games were so thrilling.

Although there had been “massively” multiplayer games prior to the late 1990s, they were typically limited to expensive, closed networks (e.g., Gemstone on the GEnie network or Neverwinter Nights on AOL). Ultima Online, and then EverQuest, brought multiplayer to the masses – and were the first games to allow not just hundreds, but thousands of players to inhabit the same, persistent, virtual world. It was easier than ever to connect your computer to the Internet, and it was easier than ever for people to game together in real time.

It’s important to remember that these were the days before the dark and seedy side of the Internet was widely known. The Internet grew up, after all, within the environs of government research – and employment within that small community was the de facto gateway for admission. There were no safeguards, and there was no identify verification, built into the network itself – a “feature” that some exploited (e.g., Markus Hess, one of the first well-known individuals exploiting the Internet’s anonymity for espionage). It was an age of naiveté – an age before malicious cybercrimes, one when it simply didn’t occur to people that computers could be used for mischief and mayhem…although by the 1990s people were starting to get a clue.

It didn’t take long for things to go off the rails in the first MMOGs. The most famous incident in MMOG history happened before Ultima Online even launched – the assassination of Lord British. EverQuest might have learned that particular lesson (no one ever killed Aradune, for example), but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of other ways for people to cause grief. EverQuest was nothing if not a large amusement park, with each zone, area, or monster a different “ride” that someone could enjoy (read: kill). There was only so much content to go around, and competition for that content could be fierce – especially when the “prize” at the end of the ride was a unique and valuable piece of loot that could carry your character forwards in their progression of power.

At EverQuest’s most advanced levels, where players are taking on “raid” mosters that require the cooperation of dozens, only a select few players typically experienced that content (by design, according to Holly Windstalker, famous for saying “Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen“). While this could sometimes lead to player strife, it was also the cause of some of the greatest cooperation in the game, in the form of “guilds” – player-made associations for communicating and coordinating efforts. At launch, EverQuest’s guilds typically allowed chatting together and…that’s about it. Later iterations of the game allowed for shared banking (among other things), but the main feature of the guild was to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and to make it easier to find friends to group with.

Of course, given that individuals spent so much time in EverQuest, the social aspects of coordination and cooperation sometimes tended to lead to other socializing that was less directly connected to the game’s content. Players found friendship, confiding the personal details of their lives – or even finding romance and having in-game weddings. For some folks, the relationships they find and forge online have more history and weight than those they find out in the real world.

While writing this post, I logged in to the live EverQuest servers and discovered the menu that would allow me to view the Silver Circle guild that I left long ago. Starrhawk – probably my best virtual friend from that time long ago – was no longer a member; she’d moved on to other guilds and I’m sure had an immensely successful EverQuest career. Mungalung is a guild leader. None of the others I recognized…and almost none of them had logged in for the past 15 years, most so long ago that it didn’t even display when. I certainly wish I could contact most of these folks, but I haven’t a clue how to do so – we’ve certainly lost touch over the years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them didn’t even remember me.

All that to say, suppose, that this pillar of EverQuest’s “game” design worked. It did allow folks to get together, to meet each other, to socialize. The combat was fun; the virtual world was fun…but I really don’t feel as strongly about those as I do about the relationships I had with folks. I was miles from home at the time, off at college, in a dreary city where I didn’t know a ton of folks. In many ways I was adrift – the world had suddenly opened up and I am not sure I had quite been prepared for it. EverQuest allowed me to meet a need for interacting with people (a need I am not sure I was quite mature enough to realize I had) in a way that didn’t feel quite as chaotic.

To summarize: the early MMOGs allowed people to interact virtually in a way that had never been done before. You could meet and “spend time with” folks all over the world. Sometimes that could be a bad experience, as some used the relative anonymity of the Internet to make mischief. But for many, it became a great experience. EverQuest’s great gameplay might have been the lure, but the social aspects – that was the real hook that kept people engaged.