Nov

23

1001 Crazy Game Design Ideas: #6 End Game at the Beginning of the Game

November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I am trying to remember which Everquest server this happened on. I believe it was Tholuxe-Paells.

On the very first day that the server came up, I had made a human character in Qeynos and was running around in Qeynos Hills happily bashing wolves and snakes and whatever I could get my level 5 sword on when a strange thing happened: I ended up on a 30 person raid.

You see, in Norrath’s Qeynos Hills, a Necromancer named Pyzjn will rarely spawn and occasionally drops a piece of rare loot which, back in the day, used to be worth a fair bit. Unfortunately, Pyzjn is about level 14 and the highest player in the zone at the time was level 8.  But since this was an expansion server full of people who had put aside higher level characters on other servers to “re-roll” as newbies, the call to arms went out across the zone and soon we had a good part of the zone organized into an impromptu raid force.

It was a bloody fight to be sure, but in the end Pyzjn was down and there was much rejoicing (no real loot to speak of) and then about 30 seconds later everyone went back to the business of trying to level up their little characters to get up to the “end-game” part where we could do this raid thing all over again.

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I started writing this post a couple years back (timely updates are hard to come by on this blog) and at the time, I was prepared to propose some radical thinking: Why not have end game style content available at the beginning of the game? I mean, it seems as if a great majority of players try to rush through the “grind” to get to the “end game”, so I wonder if it wouldn’t be cool if instead of simply throwing chaff experience monsters in the path of otherwise brave raiding adventurers, games would present some kind of raid content (with raid level loots) throughout the course of the game instead of just all bunched up at the end?

Since having this notion, I have seen in several newer MMOs, that the impromptu raid idea has been incorporated to varying degrees of success. Warhammer and Champions Online both feature raid-style content for triggered zone events. This is a step in the right direction, I think, but they lack the intricacy of planning and strategy that dedicated raids tend to have. I know, I know… I haven’t played all MMOs out there exhaustively and I am sure this kind of thing is done on some kind of level somewhere, but I expect, at best, it is hardly the norm.

So I wonder, why not offer it as an alternative? Some reason not to simply rush through the levels to get somewhere because the somewhere to get to is right there all the time? Make the loot rewards you get at a low level scale with the character’s growth, so Bigblam’s Bow of Boffoness is a kick ass, cool-looking weapon at level 2 or 10 or 100. Just because you get it at level 2 doesn’t diminish it’s coolness, but maybe even enhances it, based on exclusivity. Imagine if many of the “best” end game weapons had to be acquired at the beginning of the game  Imagine if special titles, abilities or bonuses (like a fancy glow!) were only available at the beginning of the game. Then what kind of paradigm have you introduced?

This isn’t the same as making people jump through “advancement quests” or grab “zone keys” as hurdles to slow leveling. Getting cool loot, or titles is purely an optional exercise, but at some point in most MMOs, that’s what people are looking to do. Making it available at the beginning and middle could help reduce the over-emphasis on the whole rush to the “end-game” idea.


 

 

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