Now that I’m officially on vacation until January 5th (yay!), I was taking a gander around the usual MMO blogging suspects this evening and came across an interesting post over at Tobold’s entitled “Going Softcore.”
Contrary to the suggestive title of his post (ahem), Tobold was discussing hardcore gamers in World of Warcraft and WAR, and their tendencies in each situation. His post primarily examined the “hardcore” mindset from the business model perspective, but I wanted to take a second to post my thoughts about the whole hardcore mentality, and how some people may be a little biased with what they consider a hardcore playstyle.
As you may have noticed in my intro post a couple of weeks ago, I quit playing WoW a while back, for a variety of reasons. I think it’s valuable to define my playstyle before we discuss what constitutes hardcore versus “softcore”, as Tobold put it. To distill it down to the fundamental flaws that I found prevented me from really enjoying the WoW end-game (at the time, at least — my experience with WoW PvP is now somewhat dated, but I think my opinions are still valid as they caused me to cancel my account):
- PvP was poorly implemented across the board, compared to games in which I really enjoy(ed) the PvP aspect, such as Dark Age of Camelot or WAR. The battlegrounds were added well after release, felt slap-dash in their implementation, and had very few achievable goals. Without proper motivation, or any kind of character improvement ladder, why bother? It’s boring, tedious, and does nothing for me. There’s no “realm pride” and as pretty as they looked, battlegrounds were pointless.
- The end-game consisted of way too much PvE raiding and farming for gear, no matter what your playstyle. If you wanted to PvP (at least back when I played), you really couldn’t compete without PvE raiding, because every solid PvP team would be geared in raid purples out the wazoo. It was pretty shitty to drop into a fight as a casual player and be defeated almost solely due to being out-geared. Skill and your PvP ranking figured little into the equation; I played DAOC for a long time and I had become used to a clearly defined PvP-based character development cycle. WoW just wasn’t doing it for me.
Now, clearly, I have a lot of respect for Tobold as a writer and as a gamer, but this is a point on which we fundamentally disagree. He’s stated many times that he believes WoW’s PvP implementation is the best in terms of mass appeal, and I can see the reasoning behind that to a certain extent. If your game’s aim is to appeal to that middle segment of the bell curve and hit the broadest possible spread of players, it makes absolute sense from a business standpoint. However, you have to keep in mind that you will be alienating both the hardcore and the ultra-casual with that kind of target market segment. According to Tobold, this is exactly what Blizzard has done with the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I concur.
Back to my original point: what constitutes a hardcore player? Hardcore gamers come in a variety of flavours. Many of the MMO bloggers, game developers and designers, forum commenters (and trolls!), and game reviewers out there will tell you that “hardcore” players tend to focus specifically on one or two areas of an MMO, such as PvP, raiding, or (strangely enough) crafting — almost to the exclusion of all else. They’ll use inordinate amounts of their leisure time (sometimes to the detriment of their social lives, family, or job) to get a stranglehold on those areas of the game that really appeal to them, generally playing infinitely more than your average gamer.
I’ve never considered myself a hardcore gamer, although I do spend a good chunk of my leisure time gaming (mostly in MMOs, but I play the odd shooter and my Xbox 360 as well.) I love the PvP aspect of MMOs, but I don’t have the time to commit to compete with the top players on my server. Does that make me a “softcore” gamer? In that case, why has WAR resonated with me instead of WoW? Tobold makes the argument that “WAR had more success with hardcore players, while WotLK was a bigger hit with the casual players.” If that’s the case, why am I still playing and enjoying WAR, while I haven’t even looked at WoW in over 18 months?
I think the argument cuts both ways — WoW has much more appeal for the hardcore PvE/raiding crowd than WAR. I’ll agree that PvE was an afterthought in WAR, and generally slit-your-wrists tedious once you get into the upper tiers (aside from PQs, which are underpopulated in most of the lower tiers now, as well.) But I don’t think that WAR appeals only to the hardcore. In terms of overall volume/player population, WoW could be considered much more “hardcore” solely due to the number of heavy raiding and PvE-focused guilds and players there are in the game.
From my perspective, WAR is more casual, on the whole — I can level strictly from scenarios and open RvR if I so desire, or I can PvE to my heart’s content if that’s the way I roll. I don’t need to raid heavily at the endgame to be competitive on the other side of the court (PvP/RvR.) I don’t need to farm gear endlessly and do something I find appallingly, mind-numbingly boring in order to excel at the portion of the game that I really enjoy. And I’m still doing it in my limited spare time.
Does all of this mean that Mythic is appealing more to the hardcore? I’d say it’s the opposite — but their game’s focus is different and the end-game is realm-versus-realm play, as opposed to large, organized dungeon raids. Raiding in WoW is as hardcore as it gets (at least, pre-WoTLK), from my experience, and I don’t think you can call WAR “hardcore” strictly because it’s a PvP-focused game. I’d rather stick a fork in my eye repeatedly than have to organize a large guild raid and all of the pre-requisites; to me, that’s the utmost in hardcore. Saying that one game appeals more to the hardcore over the other is without much of a basis, I’d argue; they appeal to significantly different segments of the MMO gamer market, but casual players are still well-represented (if not moreso than in other games.)
