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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.

An important issue for any MMO is its endgame component (what you’ll be perpetually busy with after maxing out your stuff). For Coobico, we assume that, while some players will be satisfied to just build and manage their settlement and resolve quests, others will seek to wage wars with their competitors. By any means, we are trying to implement a solution for different players’ preferences to co-exist in Coobico’s world.

Introducing fortresses: a fortress is a structure you can upgrade your city-center to, which is going to enable offensive and defensive capabilities of a settlement. As long as a settlement is not extended by a fortress, it is flagged as peaceful and cannot attack and be attacked by other players. After building a fortress, you loose this protection, even if the fortress is destroyed later on.

A fortress will need a bunch of accompanying structures as prerequisites, to keep players from building empty cities which just consist of a fortress and nothing else (a castle without affiliation to a town would not appear to be realistic anyway). More about this later, after we have implemented this features more thoroughly.

There has been an interesting study by interactive marketing firm Future Ads about dramatic cutbacks in paid- and console-games in 2009—interesting, even though the findings are disputable, since Future Ads runs a casual gaming website which lets the report appear to be a bit biased. 

“Consumers report slashing their spending on paid console and online games this year. Among the nearly 4 in 5 casual gamers owning consoles, 79% report ‘significantly’ cutting back on game purchases this year over 2008, with another 10% reporting they’re cutting ‘somewhat.’ There is also a similar tale for console accessories/peripherals: 85% are cutting back significantly, with another 7% cutting ‘somewhat.’ For paid online gaming (subscriptions, etc.) 83% are cutting significantly, and 7% ‘somewhat.’ Conversely, online casual gaming continues to boom: 61% are spending more time playing online games this year than last.

When asked what the single biggest drawback to console games was, 77% singled out ‘they’re simply too expensive,’ swamping the less than 4% that pegged other specific obstacles: ‘the technology becomes obsolete;’ ‘not all games work on all platforms,’ or ‘can’t travel with them.’ ... 78% of respondents report preferring free online games that are supported by advertising vs. the 22% preferring paid games without ads.“

Nonetheless, I dare say that these findings reveal the size of the impact free-to-play games had on the whole (traditional) gaming industry so far. Gamers find a lot of free offers online, with ever growing quality and quantity. Sure, free games cannot compete with the production-values of AAA-blockbuster games and “serious” hardcore-gamers probably mostly still prefer the next 60$ game retail, but the boundaries are getting increasingly blurred:

“The Gamevance surveys also reveal dissolving boundaries between casual and hardcore users and markets, a disappearing gender gap, and increased online gaming adoption across all age groups… 51% of online gamers surveyed personally play hardcore games. The time spent with, and enjoyment of, these platforms, is notably balanced: 52% spend more time with hardcore games, 48% more with casual. And despite multi-million production budgets for hardcore titles, 46% actually find casual games more entertaining.“
 
Via GigaOm