Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
In a recent thread, Margret asked how we think Ash’s can help bridge the gap between casual and hardcore players and I felt that question was worth dedicating a post to.
After some thought; I honestly think the answer, or at least a large part of the answer, is pretty straightforward:
Reevaluating what is fun risk and difficulty and what is not.
Ash’s will never be a casual game, but at least it can be a casual friendly one.
What does this mean? AoC has long & grindy leveling, a hard very in-depth crafting system, heavy emphasis on economy gameplay, heavy emphasis on group gameplay, and potentially always on PVP.
These are all considered hardcore by todays standards and are also all core pillars of AoC’s game play. What do I mean by that? AoC would not PLAY the same without these features. I do think some steps can be taken to make each one of these more appealing to casuals, but you need all of these for the game to PLAY the same. None of these are inherently unfun, as long as steps are taken to make them engaging and rewarding. In other words, you can make them fun for a casual player.
You know what’s not fun for a casual player? Overly punishing death mechanics? Why is that you may ask? Great question!
A video game is only able to truly punish you in two ways: Monetarily or Wasting your TIME!
1) Monetarily. Games like candy crush will charge you extra for more attempts, for example.
2) Wasting your TIME: this method is much more common, and can be disguised in many different ways.
You die and lose materials? Cool you have to spend more TIME getting more.
You die and gain XP debt? Cool you have to to spend more TIME to work it off.
You die and gain a stat dampening effect? Sweet so it takes more TIME to kill mobs and level
You die and have an extremely long travel time? Rad that means it’ll take more TIME to get back to the fun part of the game.
See what I did there? AoC can pretend it has 4 different death penalties, but in reality it has 1 penalty x 4.
This is pure and simple fundamentally not fun. Now I’ve brought this up before in global chat and it’s been met with the: “Who cares cry more carebear this game isn’t for people who care about that. A game can’t be fun unless it’s bending me over it’s knee and slapping my booty.”
Unfortunately, this kind of gamer is objectively in the minority. There’s decades of data on player counts and player behavior to support this, and anyone who disagrees is either misinformed or purposely ignorant.
That leaves us with AoC. A game defined by its more hardcore nature. This means AoC is a game that will have a more uphill battle retaining players simply by being the game it wants to be. AoC cannot change that without becoming a different game.
However, what it can change are these outdated time wasting mechanics.
If you lessen death penalties nothing is affected:
AoC will still have:
Long meaningful leveling experience
A deep and engaging crafting system
A heavy economy focus
A heavy group gameplay emphasis
And always on PVP
With when you remove intentional time wasters, All of these core pillars remain intact. The game play loops are unaffected and they actually become more enjoyable to engage with.
Last night I spent 2 hours trying to kill a boss in Black Myth Wukong, and when I finally did it I felt EUPHORIC. I can absolutely promise you that had that same boss given me status debuff I had to work off between each attempt, I would have given up, returned the game, and never touched it again.
Games should feel good to play as often as you can get away with. Going out of your comfort zone to try an encounter you might not be ready for should not be met with 4 versions or the same punishment; it should be met with a walk back and the feeling that this time will be the time I triumph.
I hope anyone who read this enjoyed it or at least found it insightful, especially Margret and the team If they are still takin feedback on this subject.
