My Ultima Online Story
I’ve long been a fan of online virtual worlds, so when I first started to hear about Ultima Online, I was very excited. But terrible word-of-mouth reports from people I knew in the beta, even worse press, and the fact that I spent most of my computer time on HP-UX in those days kept me from actually playing the game until just after The Second Age came out in 1998. Some friends of mine were playing too, so I signed up for the game and picked their shard.
Even though things had settled down considerably (I think the massively powerful teleporting guards were patrolling the towns by then), I knew from the buzz that it was dangerous out there. So the first thing I did, before I ever logged in, was go out on the web and read what I could on how to play UO. There were various opinions on how to level up various skills, but there was one thing that everyone seemed to agree on at the time: In order to adventure in UO you had to have an in-game income, and the only way to get one was to craft. I’ve learned a few things about game design since 1998, and know that this was certainly not the case, but at the time I believed all the guides.
So I logged in to UO, used my starting money to buy a hachet and carving knife, and set out to become a fletcher. I knew from the buzz that it was a 24 hour PvP bloodbath outside of town, so I stuck to the few trees that I could harvest from inside of the city limits. These were pretty well exhausted all the time, but I did get some logs off them, wittle the logs into arrow shafts, and then sell the arrow shafts to an NPC.
I spent a couple of nights doing this before I gave up. I probably spent all of about 6 hours in UO, and in that time I never had a single fight. For that matter, I never even left the starting town. All because of that stupid “how to play” page.
If I had played UO the same way I played, oh, Ultima IV, V, VII, and IX, it would have been a much better experience. Sure, I might have been PKed. Sure I might have been a terribly ineffective character and never had any significant economic impact on the game. But I would have had a little fun in the process, and maybe I would have even stayed a subscriber past my free month.
And that is my sad UO story.
That was then, this is now
These days, it’s exactly the same problem again and again for every single game. The only difference is that people actually make money selling such guides. Players use the guides and miss the whole point of the game. The most boring way you can plan most games these days is to hunt randomly spawning mobs in an area, then move to a new area when you level to far and start the process over again. That’s exactly what all these guides tell you to do: play the game in the most boring possible mode.
I want to scream every time I hear someone say something like, “That game doesn’t really start until level 50″ or “Levelling to 60 is just practice for raiding.” That’s completely backward: The game is levelling up to the level cap. A bunch of games have an elder game tacked onto the end of their advancement curve, but it’s never the same game as the advancement game, and rarely as good. I don’t want to play a PvE game for a year getting to the level cap just to have it switch to a PvP game. I like PvE, and want more of the game I was playing before the level cap.
Even if people manage to avoid the “kill the same 5 orcs over and over, then move up to trolls at level 20″ trap of game guides, there is another trap that awaits them. The guides tell you all about the “best” way to play your class. They cause people to respec endlessly into the latest “killer build” until the game is dominated by Rifleman/Combat Medics, Fire Tankers, or Beast Mastery Hunters. The game isn’t dominated by these classes because they are unbeatable, they’re just more popular because somebody posted how to build them on the internet. Usually these builds are the least fun builds in the game because the authors of these guides are trying to maximize something other than fun. Sure, you can (or could before the mean old devs nerfed them) tank an entire instance full of bad guys with a fire tank that’s specced right, but after you’ve collected all the bad guys to one corner there’s nothing to do but sit there and wait for them to die. If I wanted to “win” without actually playing I would play Progress Quest.
What can we do about it?
I’ve already done something: I no longer read game guides. If I can’t find a quest objective, I’ll sometimes go find an answer to my specific question, but that’s it. I expect that reading the skill descriptions before I buy will result in a build that’s perfectly playable, even though it’s not optimal. I assume that the nerfs are for good reasons, and if they bug me too much I start another character (or another game, since I switch a couple times a year.) And boy has it made me happier with the games I’m playing.
In a more general sense, there’s probably nothing we can do. We don’t want to stop players from talking to each other, since that’s our best form of advertising. Any attempt to censor the sites that publish game guides would result in a lot of bad PR and be doomed to fail anyway. All we can do is try to keep our in-game help and interfaces friendly and helpful. Every player we can keep from feeling like they have to go to some external site in order to play our game is one that won’t be exposed to the horrors of the game guide.
