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Just how difficult should a MMO be?

Just how difficult should a challenge/quest in a MMO be -- and should such level of difficulty vary for casual- and hardcore-related MMOs?

Level-design and tweaking of difficulty-settings are recurring items on our laundry-list, as you might imagine, so some blog-postings about challenging game-play and the ease of navigating through MMO-quests recently caught my eye. So, just how difficult should a challenge/quest in a MMO be—and should such level of difficulty vary for casual- and hardcore-related MMOs?

In Free Realms (as Eurogamer puts it), “Everything objective is clearly marked by the obsequiously helpful mapping system, dotted lines on the ground ensuring you never get lost as you follow the breadcrumbs… It’s compulsive, up to a point, but it’s often flavourless and dull.“
Sony’s philosophy here seems to be that short, casual quests (especially for a younger audience) should not comprise lengthy exploration and difficult brainteasers. World of Warcraft will soon patch something very similar in, as Pink Pigtail Inn’s Larisa describes: “A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players can find creatures they must kill for a quest. A skull graphic with red eyes will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that must be killed in order to collect quest objects…“

Both the approach of such hyper-efficiencent streamlining and players having mixed feelings about this are quite understandable. Probably all of us have been in frustrating need of a walkthrough here and there—solving a difficult strategic puzzle or beating a particular challenge, however, is often the most memorable moment in a game. On the one hand, a short, temporary gaming-experience cannot primarily consist of aimless exploring; on the other hand (with the words or Larisa), “somehow the ‘being efficient and do things as quick as possible, ticking off things from your list’ concept has completely overtaken the ‘experience, explore and lose yourself into a different world’ idea.“

It is obvious that such settings vary with each player and the mood they are in at a time—a solution suggesting itself therefore would be to leave it to the preference of each player, of how difficult he or she wants a quest to be. This is the approach we are trying to implement in Coobico. Rather than laying out blatantly obvious lines of breadcrumbs, think more in the ballpark of “buyable” levels of advice/cheats.

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