Aventurine: MMORPGs are not casual games

I know lots of people who got into MMOs and it being hard or complex wasn't the thing that put them off. I mean lots of my friends went from WoW to EVE because they were bored and they've been playing EVE since TBC, cause they all feel that expansion ruined the game. They love how complex it is and the skill system and the market, it all turned them on to the game in the first place. They are as casual as you come really, they don't buy many games and didn't know much about games before WoW.

Yet they played new MMOS like AoC, WAR, Lotro etc etc, and hated them. They think they;re dumbed down WoW clones and don't want to play the same old crap again. They want something new and innovative. Being complex and hard doesn't put anyone off, people will learn anything as long as they like the game.

Most MMOs fail because they have wonky UIs, poor combat, poor graphics and animations, poor movement, boring lore and art style etc etc. SWG was as complex as anything and people were willing to learn, the only problem was it lacked content and was buggy as hell. EVE Online again has millions of people that try it, the problem is people hate waiting for skills to train to do anything and want to advance at their own pace.

Not about dumbing the game down for casuals, it's about making a good game. All they needed to do to SWG Pre CU is add a good tutorial, polish it and add content. Instead they decided to do the CU and NGE to dumb it down... guess what, noone played it. Warhammer online was a dumbed down WoW and noone played it. Lotro was a WoW clone and noone played it. EVE Online needs a way to get new players into PVP via battlegrounds in empire where you can't be podded. So they can learn PVP for low sec and null sec.

Frigging developers use your common sense!

As much as I don't like this guy, him for his holier-than-thou attitude, his player base and the attitude he's fostered and don't like the game, I do respect his attempt at a niche audience and I do respect his drive to create something different. He failed miserably, to be sure, but to fail in an endeavor like that puts him miles ahead of people that have simply tried to reinvent the wheel and have still failed miserably.

Also, in answer to Venekor, Peter Noone seems to be a big fan of a lot of games. You sight the CU/NGE SWG, Warhammer and LotRO. If it's good enough for Peter Noone, It's good enough for me.

The entire hardcore/casual divide is nothing more than an invention of message-board warriors that's been exploited by marketing forces to sell you crap.

I am enjoying the new marketing spin of the game. If memory serves me right, previous interviews were a lot more "assertive" on how the game was for tough, seasoned MMO players who didn't mind a PvP fight that wasn't fair. Now, there's talk about how different types of people enjoy the game.

I know Darkfall isn't the game for me -- just enjoying the new spin.

The reason I define casual vs. hardcore in terms of frustration-coping rather than time-sinkage is based on how I see people play.

Casual players are completely willing to pour hours into Farmville, check it at all hours of the day, and spend, spend, spend to feed their need. There are people who will spend hundreds of hours lovingly hand-crafting a mansion in Sims 3.

And there are those who will play Red Orchestra or a competitive micromanagement RTS for a very intense hour and come away refreshed.

I know gamers on both ends of the extreme, and I no longer feel that sheer time investment is all there is to casual and hardcore. Some people love a two-hour game of tackle football on Sunday. Some people love to spend eight hours on a golf course. Should I define the football player as casual, and the golfer as hardcore?

Ugh. I guess it doesn't matter. This is just one of those things I think about at night. :)

Just a few things off the top of my head:

- Auction House, lots of games before had a vendor system and even EVE introduced a very interesting market based economy but nothing on that type of level.

- Phasing. To be clear I'm not referring to instances or multiple IDs of a zone, but seamless integration and transition into your own little world while you're questing. The Icecrown zone is a great example of that.

- Open World Flying, I've never experienced anything like it when I bought my first flying mount in TBC. Having the ability to fly over the same world you spent on foot/mount was definitely a MMO first for me.

- Resting, offline XP bonus, fast combat recovery. Sure it was the start of the World of Casual craft, but every MMO before that looked like torture in comparison.

- Hardmode/Normal mode. A great idea to satisfy (or attempt to) the rift between the casual and hardcore groups. I've belonged to both.

There's plenty of things that Blizzard copied and improved upon such as Raid encounters, PVP objectives, Battlegrounds, Arenas, Questing etc. But their accomplishment is in the fact that they made them so well that those features are used as benchmarks for every MMO developer out there. Innovation can come from improving upon an existing product.

Sure Orc, Elves, Trolls and Taurens (Minotaurs) are all borrowed/based upon Tolkien, but Tolkien himself borrowed/based his stories based upon old myths and stories.

Regarding the main article, I definitely agree that MMOs are generally tailored to reward continuous and dedicated play. At this point its part of the culture to equate "Massively Multiplayer" with massive amounts of dedicated time, well above the 40-50 hour average of a single player game.

First the guy is clueless. The primary reason? This statement: " When you play an MMO youre making an investment". One, if the person paying to play an MMO can physically have some paper stating he has the rights to his ingame money, items and avatar, ideas, storyline, etc, then yes, that person is making an investment.

However this is not the case, the only investment is the time for entertainment that is gone when you flip that power switch for all intents and purposes, for at that particular moment if they wipe the game or shutdown everything is gone. Your "investment" just went south and no longer exists.

The majority of any game base are the folks that can only log on for a limited time, label them if you want, its a fact. Stating a game, any game, will profit or succeed on only people spending countless hours is ignorance.

Limit choices, limit content to only certain demographics, and you have a niche game that doesnt do well, this company fits that description perfectly, as does its game, along with 20 year old ideas. The guy is a joke.

Well said.

Oh BS. I've played MMO's casually for years and had tons of fun doing it.

If you look at the full interview, he says this later in it:

"Darkfall is not the strictly hardcore game it’s made out to be. We have numerous casual players who enjoy the game as much or even more than the hardcore players."

But anyway, DARKFALL may be Dependant on hardcore players, but to claim all MMO's are is just wrong. Your game is because it's PvP warfare all the time with buildings and sieges. It's hard to be casual there and keep up (Unless you play Kingdom Heroes, which the Kingdom War is twice a week two hours each time - after you level up anyway you really do get to play casually and have as much impact in the war as everybody else, it's great).

Heh, every time Massivly posts about darkfall the trolls ride out of the woodwork.

I'm a avid player in darkfall, my name there is Shiva Firewing, look me up on EU-1 sometimes.
i've played a good 40+ hours a week since release, and only stopped once for 2 months due to personal reasons.

Wile the game, and the company running it have MANY faults. (god damn you AV, talk to us) the game itself in it's current state is very enjoyable, fun and intense.

no, the game isn't for everyone. it might be the open-pvp that isn't your liking or the various features like Housing or skillgain, or even how no-breaks-insane the communitie is. so the man has a point.

i also know that the game is very much playable and enjoyable casually - just dont expect to "raid at the highest level" so to say.

I played WoW for two years and enjoyed it. It got me into MMOs. I eventually burned out and tried WAR, AoC, Aion. Not to criticize the latter three games, but after playing WoW, they weren't different enough to keep me interested. I appreciate WoW and I can see the creativity of their developers even if others claim there is little or none.

I have played Darkfall for four months and enjoy it more and more as time passes. I initially played for two weeks and then rage quit. A couple of weeks later, I went back. It somehow fascinated me and made other games seem dull to me. I kept thinking about it and went back to it with a more determined attitude.

Bottom line for me is that I had fun playing WoW and now I want to play Darkfall. The fun people have doing whatever they do is no less valid that someone else's fun.

Darkfall is not for everyone. It wasn't for me (at first). But then I went back and I am glad I did.

Aventurine knows this how?

From their vast experience at making widely acclaimed and immensely popular MMOs?

I played a variety of different MMOs with a different "investement" of time and "accepting annoyances".
When it comes to Darkfall, my problem simply is, that there is no real "variety" that keeps me engaged over a long period of time - and I am not talking about "grind to higher skills to do pvp" (that is like arguing getting in wow to 80 to do end-raids, it's bullocks).
E.g.: Yes, you can only skill up the skills you want/need to use, thus you can do even odd things like: A mage-tank - Possible. A dps-er & crafter? Check.
And that is again where the problem lies - the skills are *too* interdependent. To get stronger you can (don't have to, but all do it) e.g. mine ore. Makes sense that you need strength for that. But then, every combatant sooner or later is also a crafter, so for someone who mainly wants to craft, there is little incentive.
Then there are pvp-raids - cool, different, but they get boring (for me) after a while. Same old, similar to Warhammer, once you reached level 40, you still have your renown to get to 80 in the same 5 or so places.
So what else is there to do in DF? Only skilling up. Housing? Um, ye, not the greatest of implementations. Otherwise?
And don't get me wrong, I really do like DF in principle - but I don't think the developers have looked past the skill-up pvp and brush things aside with "hardcore vs casual", even if they are attempting to appeal to the casuals in *some* way, but not in the "right" way (if there ever is one).

Wow, Tasos almost sounds like a mature games developer in that interview - has he been coached in PR by his marketing department recently?

I'm quite sad - I always enjoyed Tasos's poorly worded PR disasters - ok, they weren't as amusing as the guy who ran that scam MMO Mourning, but still it was good popcorn material.

A sad day for the industry.