Playing the Hero

The BioWare Austin folks are talking a lot about Star Wars: The Old Republic. And they should, because it’s without question one of the most anticipated MMOGs on the horizon, thanks in no small part to BioWare’s reputation for making quality games.

Besides meditating on the size of one’s lightsaber, a major point of emphasis that the devs focus on is the role of the player as hero. For instance, the lead writer discusses making the player feel heroic:

Daniel Erickson, Lead Writer BioWare Austin: The k’lor’slug is 20 feet tall, and horrible, and can eat your face … and that’s what you fight at level one as a Sith. The first thing you ever fight in the game is that thing. And you never do anything less heroic than that. There are no bunnies, no rabbits, no snakes …

A noble goal, that of relieving players of the burden of killing all those tens of rats. This has caused many to consider the role of the hero, including some folks I happen to know. But while I agree with the general goal of making the player feel heroic, there’s a lot more to it than just the type of creatures they fight.

Players feel awesome for a variety of reasons in MMOGs. There is a distinction between making someone feel like a hero, giving them a sense of accomplishment, or making them feel like a badass.

The Hero

Heroes are extraordinary people who do amazing things that the average person can’t. Traditionally this has been a rather weak area in MMOGs, simply because of the very properties of the game.

A quest giver may beg your character to fight back the orcs that threaten his village, which seems a worthy task for a hero. But sooner or later you realize that if you don’t fight back the orcs, someone else will. Worse yet, killing a certain number of orcs may complete your quest, but the orcs just respawn and threaten the village again. in order to feel like a hero, the game needs to give consequences for your actions or the lack thereof.

Consider this scenario instead. The village is being overrun by orcs, and if the players don’t successfully defend the village against incursion over the course of the invasion, the villagers will be driven out and orcs take over. All of a sudden the player’s choice becomes meaningful; they can see an outcome based upon their actions or inactions, and their world is changed as a result.

Scenarios like this are one-time-use bits of content, and as such are usually regarded as too expensive for MMOG makers to undertake except in rare circumstances. But the games that really want to play up the role of the hero will find ways to make the investment. Without it, heroism in these games will continue to feel shallow.

Accomplishments

Making the player feel they accomplished something worthwhile with their time is different than making them feel like a hero, but is just as rewarding. Such moments become even more memorable if the player feels like these goals were set by themselves rather than having them dictated to them.

The run from Freeport to Qeynos is a good example. Nobody gave you a quest at level one to make this journey, but staring at the EverQuest world map inspired many players to make the trip. Those who survived, especially after suffering wrong turns and horrific deaths, had a story they tell with relish to this day.

Don’t get me wrong; achievements like those recently introduced by WoW are cool. But they don’t compare to the adventures players undertake on their own, for no other reason than to see what happens. Game designers inspire these accomplishments by making a game world with enough depth to allow players to tell their own stories and imagine their own adventures.

Being the Badass

Sometimes you don’t care if you’re serving a greater cause or helping your fellow man. Sometimes you just want to smash stuff in the face.

A surefire way to engage players is to allow them to unleash carnage. Drop them in a room full of zombies with a machine gun (or a katana, or a chainsaw) and let them go to town. Few things feel as gratifying in a video game as mowing through a sea of opponents and coming out the other end bathed in the blood of your fallen enemies.

This feeling can be tied to heroic acts, but doesn’t have to be. The Harclave buff in EQ2 is a great example of making the player feel like a badass. With that buff, the player cuts a swath through a dungeon teeming with group mobs that don’t stand a chance. In fact, it’s just about impossible for the player to die. People played through this Splitpaw dungeon over and over again because it felt so freaking fun.

Balance is Key

Storytelling is about rising and falling action. You can’t just crank the volume up to eleven and expect to sustain that buzz indefinitely. For the heroic and badass moments to have significance, you also need quieter moments of reflection to consider what you’ve accomplished.

That’s not to say you need to give players boring crap to do, but MMOGs are about more than chopping up opponents non-stop. One of the great social elements of EQ was the downtime between fights, which allowed players to bullshit with one another while ramping up for the next encounter. Though EQ took downtime to extremes, the complete lack of it in other games has had a palpable effect upon the way they build lasting communities.

So while the goal of never giving players a less imposing nemesis than a 20-foot slug is cool, that’s certainly not the only way to inspire feelings of heroism in your player base. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what made you feel like a hero or a badass, or what kinds of accomplishments you felt most proud of in your MMOG career.