I went with a pair of friends from GameCritics.com to see the demo for The Secret World. Neither of those friends is a particular MMO enthusiast, both profess in fact to dislike most MMOs, and both came out of the demo raving about what they’d just seen and how ready they were to jump into TSW.

In fact, everyone I pointed at the TSW demo all weekend came out of it wielding exclamation points and telling me excitedly which faction they were. (Not which they intend to play, but which they are.) One of my GC pals belongs to the Illuminati, the other to the Dragons. (I am, of course, a Templar.) No sooner had I noted this on Twitter than a flood of other friends piped up to tell me which of the three factions they are, and to begin scheming against me and one another. So it appears that Mr. Tornquist’s nefarious plan to indoctrinate us all in his Secret War is a success.

A FunCom employee at the demo booth told me, though, that despite the scheming and striving of the three societies in their Secret War, players of different factions are still able to work together cooperatively, meaning that I will still be able to run dungeons and group up with my Dragon and Illuminati “friends.” (I’M WATCHING YOU, GUYS.) The demo that we watched was an instance-run, and it looked fun. No trash, multiple miniboss encounters leading up to the final boss, and each miniboss encounter was used to teach a different fight mechanic, all of which came together in the final boss fight. Characters switched specs and roles on the fly. There were group puzzles and ARG unlockables — that is to say, you had to go outside the game to look things up and find clues and answers to things inside the game. The animations and creature models were nothing to write home (or to write the internet) about, but they were respectable, and the Neil Gaiman/X-Files/etc. fan in me is completely tickled by the paranormal/urban legend/folklore flavor of the game.

The one reservation that I have got — and it’s a fairly substantial one, actually — is to do with the planned pricing model of the game. Apparently FunCom intends to go with a hybrid: a traditional monthly subscription model, and an in-game microtransactions store. This is my unimpressed face. I could discuss why at greater length — and actually, I am going to, in a forthcoming post about TSW and SWToR and outdated game pricing models. So hold that thought.

The most important thing for you to note is that I am return with swag, and some of you will be getting some of it, so stay tuned for that. I have LotRO swag, I have DDO swag, I have RIFT swag. I do not have WoW swag because Blizzard is too cool to attend other people’s cons, and I do not have SWToR swag because honestly I couldn’t be arsed to stand in line for it.

Also note that Turbine and Trion have got the coolest community folks around.

The games I visited with were: RIFT and LotRO: Rise of Isengard, obviously; Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World, perhaps equally obviously; WildStar; Skyrim; SWToR; and sundry other things (End of Nations, Minecraft 1.8, Torchlight 2, Path of Exile, etc.). I also attended a pair of panels on game writing, a panel with the stellar people of Extra Credits, and one on game data and statistics by Geoffrey Zatkin of EEDAR. I met many people. I have many thoughts to organize. In the coming days you can expect posts on:

• My impressions of forthcoming MMOs, primarily Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and SWToR;
• MMO pricing models and mistakes;
• MMOs and the problem of other players;
• And some shorter discussion of game statistics, trends in game writing, etc.

Right now I am trying to catch up on the life I abandoned for five days when I trekked to Seattle, and the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, and my stalled wordcounts on writing projects, which is why these posts are forthcoming and not right here right now. But they will be soon!

Both here and on Twitter I keep mentioning network effect with respect to WoW’s dominance in the market, so let’s talk about that for a bit, and about what we mean by “the market.”

The market can be defined as the demographic of people who want to play a PC-based* MMORPG.  We can’t call that demographic “18- to 34-year-old men” or whatnot, the way you hear marketing executives or the glue-addled nimrods at EA speak of demographics, because it turns out the audience of people who want to play an MMORPG on their home computers is broader and more amorphous than that. It includes young people and old people and male people and female people and single people and married people and professional people and unemployed people and students and homemakers and parents and children and possibly a really intelligent dolphin or two.  So we will stick with using the self-defining demographic of People Who Want to Play an MMORPG, or PWWTPAMMORPG, which looks sort of like it might be the name of a very small coastal town in Massachussetts.

This is a finite demographic, as any demographic is.  There are plenty of people in the first world with perfectly functional computers and network connections who don’t want to play an MMORPG (can you imagine?), like my parents, or who don’t know what an MMORPG is but will look at you with beady-eyed suspicion if you start throwing multisyllabic consonant-heavy acronyms at them, like much of the rest of the reasonable world.  There is never, ever going to be a single game or song or movie or entertainment or anything else that is universally beloved by all peoplekind (or people- and dolphin-kind), and as soon as you start talking computer games or massively multiplayer games or roleplaying games you immediately eliminate great swathes of the populace who lose interest when you reach those particular magically-repellent words.  But, okay.  Let’s cut those people out and consider our target demographic, the PWWTPAMMORPG.

Enter the network effect.  Network effect is the phenomenon whereby the more users a non-rivalrous good or service has, the more benefit each user reaps, and thus the more valuable the good or service becomes to each individual user.  Social network sites are a great example of this: When Facebook was just a few dopes on a single college campus, it was a lot less interesting and useful (even to those few dopes) than it is now that it’s every dope and his Aunt Bunny in the first world.  When Twitter was about what Ev was having for lunch, it was a vastly less interesting and useful social tool than it has become now that it’s about what most of the world is having for lunch, plus Justin Bieber.  And when in vanilla WoW Tocke and I were playing with a couple of folks in Alabama we’d never met before and one of Tocke’s old buddies in Vermont, it was a less life-gripping experience than it is when 90% of the people I am fondest of all play it, and I can log in at any hour and talk to my sister or her mother-in-law or some of my best friends in the world, who are scattered all over the world.  And if I want to do a group quest or run a dungeon or indulge in some public roleplay, well, there are thirteen million other people playing this game.  Someone’s going to be around and up for it.  WoW, like other social networks, is a better experience for each person, with every additional person that plays it.  The more of us there are, the more we each get out of it.

The difficulty any new MMO on the market faces, then, is this: the PWWTPAMMORPG demographic is finite.  There are holdouts who want an MMORPG but hate WoW for whatever reason, and who mill hopefully around AoC and STO and Warhammer and Aion with every new release, but for the most part, anyone who is a member of the People Who Want to Play a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game demographic is already playing one — they’re playing WoW, in no small part because “everyone else” is.  (The next time someone says, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?” you say, “Jumping off a bridge is not a non-rival good or service subject to network effect, so don’t be absurd.”)  If you want a durable, well-populated game with a thriving virtual economy and plenty of similarly-inclined folks to raid/RP/PvP/play the auction house with, you want WoW.  No matter your opinion of the game itself, its mechanics or lore or content, WoW is where the people are.

Network effect makes WoW extraordinarily sticky.  It aggregates people in some kind of gleeful grinding katamari.  Anyone who wants to leave for another game is going to face the problem that a majority of their fellow PWWTPAMMORPG are all still playing WoW.  Any new MMORPG that comes onto the market is going to face the problem that a majority of their target demographic is already playing WoW — and as most of us who play MMOs know, juggling more than one MMO at a time is a rough job.  And because so many people are playing WoW, WoW is that much stronger and more valuable to each of those people, and it is harder to break them away individually.

Any new MMORPG on the market, then, has two options: (1) the old “WoW-killer” scenario, wherein the new game is so rad that it excites a mass exodus from Azeroth, or (2) wait for WoW to die its own slow death and begin shedding players from the katamari.  The problem with option 1 is that other companies, not quite sure how to bottle WoW’s lightning a second time, busy themselves cloning WoW, and why would anyone play a WoW-clone when, you know, everyone is already playing WoW?  WoW-clones are doomed to die slow and mostly-deserved deaths in the Graveyard of Half-Baked Ideas.  The problem with option 2 is that it’s not very, well, inspiring.  Should we all just sit around drumming our fingers and checking our watches periodically, waiting for WoW to keel over under its own lumberous weight?

RIFT may actually be a beneficiary of the option 2 scenario.  Anyone who follows the WoW community on the interwebs has detected in recent months a general flavor of dissatisfaction with Cataclysm, and it helps that an extremely polished and engaging fantasy MMORPG just happens to be hopping up and down on the sidelines waving its hands to get those people’s attention.  It got my attention, and that of several of my comrades in the Azerothian diaspora.  Whether we will stick with it, of course, remains to be seen — it depends not merely on the quality of the experience Trion has built, but also on the network.  A ghost-town MMO is, well, not really an MMO, is it?  Massive multiples of players are the measure of health of any allegedly massively multiplayer game.

But wait.  Did I say there were only two options for game companies?  Let’s consider some others.

First, genre.  As I noted above, there is a finite audience of People Who Want to Play a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game.  So what if we start tweaking the variables?

If we’re no longer talking about RPGs, for example, who else might we interest?  Is it possible to attract a new, non-WoW-immersed audience by showing them something new and not-WoW?  At PAX East’s Future of Online Gaming panel on Saturday, Curt Schilling of 38 Studios (and, you know, that other thing) noted that because of the tremendous cost involved in building a triple-A MMO (cost in both time and money), developers in the MMO space are less likely to gamble on novelty.  The panelist from BioWare observed that the RPG has traditionally lent itself best to the MMO model: character progression, experience gain, questing, etc.  It would be “tougher” to adapt other genres.  But “tougher” doesn’t mean insurmountable, and therein lies space for creativity and something potentially really new and interesting.  Colin Johansen of ArenaNet, on the same panel, suggested that everything in gaming is right now moving toward a kind of “MMO-fication,” and that we will see all of these new species — MMORTS, MMOFPS, etc. — in future.  If it can be done cheaply enough and creatively enough, this may be where our Next Big Thing is lurking.

What if we tweak the platform?  Some of the huge smash hits of gaming in the last two years have cropped up on unexpected frontiers – your phone and your Facebook, for example.  Note that the things your phone and your Facebook have in common is that they’re both also subject to network effect, but the networks were in place already, and all the game companies had to do was deliver the game to the network.  They didn’t build their own player networks from the ground up, the way a triple-A MMO must do, they brought their game to the network in place.  And it worked in a big way.  Could an MMO be delivered to a new network on a new platform in this way?  What happens when suddenly the demographic we’re looking at isn’t the old PWWTPAMMORPG, it’s people with iPhones or people on Facebook?

What if we tweak the standard model?  Blizzard’s WoW is a subscription-based MMO, and for a few years the games scrambling at its heels emulated that.  Turbine‘s LotRO and DDO saw huge and sudden success, though, with a switch to a microtransactions-based free-to-play model.  The Turbine model is a great and thoughtfully-managed one.  As Craig Alexander of Turbine observed on the PAX panel, some people have a lot of time to spend on a game, and some people have a lot of money to spend on a game, and those groups rarely overlap, and the Turbine model makes the games accessible and comfortable to both.  And once a game is free-to-play, or operating on some other new and different model, suddenly you’re no longer “competing” with WoW.  The expectations are different.  The BioWare panelist noted that any game company charging a monthly fee is unquestionably up against Blizzard’s 800-pound, $15-a-month gorilla, and that requires meeting a whole new level of player expectations.  You’re chasing the same $15 a month.  How many newly-hatched baby MMOs are going to be able to offer the same level of shine and polish for your monthly money as Blizzard’s six-year-old, three-expansions-big behemoth?

There are a lot of different ways we might conceive of an MMO success story as big as WoW’s, and most of them involve abandoning the myth of the “WoW-killer” and looking in new directions.  WoW-killing is big, expensive, unlikely business.  The only thing I see potentially killing WoW at this point is Blizzard itself**; meanwhile, those of us who are looking for something new are going to have to get creative and think of something new.  It can be done.  There are billions more people (and really smart dolphins) in the world than the PWWTPAMMORPG.  We have to think outside the WoW-box.

*Don’t get all Mac-howly at me, I mean “personal computer.”

** And look at what Blizzard is allegedly doing: targeting a new and broader audience, with an SF-flavored MMOFPS. If you want to know how to get around the problem of WoW, look at how the WoW guys are doing it.

There are two kinds of choice I’m interested in: story-choice, which has to do with the game-world and narrative, and mechanics-choice, which has to do with gameplay, talent speccing, et cetera.  Both are huge and important kinds of choice.  I plan to write about the latter soon, but today let’s discuss the former.

Early on the Defiant side of things in Rift (yes, I am picking on Rift again, not because it’s a bad game — I like it, I said so — but because it’s the readiest example to hand), you are given a tiny little storyline quest in which the friendly neighborhood Questmuppet informs you that a Disposable Bad Guy has been captured and wishes urgently to speak to you.  So you trundle off to speak to the Disposable Bad Guy and he delivers to you a message from his boss, who wants you to know that it’s not too late to ditch the whole hero-ing gig and enter the employ of her boss, who is the Big Bad behind the whole show.  It’s admittedly not the world’s most appealing job offer, since your choices appear to be (a) oblivion or (b) painful death, and I don’t know but I was kind of hoping for an option (c) where maybe the hours are kind of long but I get overtime and decent dental and the world doesn’t come to a shattering fiery end.

This is the dialog box you actually get, however:

Or (d) All of the above.

OH BOY, choices!  Let’s see, shall we tell Regulos to (a) bugger off, (b) bugger off, or (c) bugger off but kind of politely?

Hey, wait a minute.

Now, WoW gave you the occasional sort of conversation-quest also, but in WoW’s case you were never given a choice, Blizzard just went right ahead and put the words in your mouth.  (“How fascinating, Varian, do go on! Also, what big muscles you have!”)  So WoW gave us no choice in this regard, where Rift gives us the illusion of choice.  It is a patently transparent illusion (couldn’t one of the options have been, I don’t know, “Hey, I’ll think about it, thanks”?), and it is not better.  In neither case — no-choice or fake-choice — does the player actually get to do anything that affects her game experience or adjusts her engagement with the world.

What if — let’s hypothesize for a moment, and I promise to stop using em-dashes soon (that’s a lie) — what if the player actually got to decide something there that shifted her experience of the game in a big way?  What if that were a genuine branching-point, rather than drab story-filler?  Maybe instead of (a) No, (b) No, or (c) No, thank you, our choices could have been (a) No, thank you, (b) Your offer intrigues me, tell your boss I wish to subscribe to her newsletter, or (c) HELLS YEAH LET’S BLOW THIS POP STAND.  In which case your actual game objective then becomes (a) return to Questmuppet and report back dutifully, (b) return to Questmuppet, lie through your teeth and await further contact from Big Bad, or (c) kill the guards and help the prisoner escape back to his boss, whereupon you swear your allegiance to death and oblivion and stuff hells yeah.

And then, consequent to whichever decision you make, your actual position in the game changes.  Choose (a), go on being a good guy for your home faction, receive extra good-guy bonus perks.  Choose (b), become a morally murky potential sleeper-agent with the option of occasionally sabotaging your home team and/or the Big Bad depending on how you feel when you get up in the morning.  Choose (c), switch teams, lose your place in the Defiant Hall of Hero-Fame and join an altogether new faction, Team Regulos (long hours, great dental, oblivion).

Now there’s a new array of PvP options open to us, too.  Previously, we were Guardian Heroes vs. Defiant Heroes.  Now we can be Guardian Heroes vs. Defiant Heroes vs. Team Regulos, or maybe the Guardian Heroes and Defiant Heroes will put their differences aside to take down Team Reg, or maybe Team Reg’s own power-hungry stars don’t wanna play nice and we get Heroes vs. Team Reg (Guardian flavor) vs. Team Reg (Defiant flavor), or maybe we get all four up in each others’ business, G vs. D vs. TR(G) vs. TR(D).  Maybe these are fluid alliances, not game-set ones, and the players in a given battleground or world PvP zone can decide on the fly whether to ally with those guys or these on a battle-by-battle basis.  But the players get to decide.  The players are making the story.

It’s meaningful choice.  It’s emergent narrative.  It’s people having an impact on the game-world around them, or the game-world having an impact on them, but either way they’re engaged with it, they have decisions to make, not just sparklewidgets to click.

This particular example is a simplistic one, obviously; there are a million more and more interesting things that could be done with real player choice.

Why don’t we get this kind of player choice in the medium?  In part, it’s probably a question of scale and technical implementation — but then again, how complex was the choice I described above?  If you’re going to put two factions in your game anyway, why not a third and maybe a fourth?  Why not a couple of additional questlines and a couple more PvP-flagging options?  And now you’ve got players in the story, instead of just jogging them past your narrative in its cage and saying, “See? There’s Regulos! He’s bad! Click this button!”

RPGs have a background story to tell, they all have an overarching narrative of some kind.  But the present games on the market keep their narrative in a box for players to look at — but don’t touch! — and ludonarrative be damned.  Either you play our story our way or you can go over there and grind boars, meathead.  You can kill the Lich King or not kill the Lich King but either way the Lich King’s gonna die and you don’t get the option of playing for his team, cos he’s the badguy, cos we said so.  A player might start to feel a little insignificant, after a while.  A player might start to feel a certain lack of investment in this imaginary place, where these imaginary events will trundle along on their imaginary rails whether we’re along for the ride or not.

People think about MMOs in terms of the MMORPG because that’s what we’ve got at the moment.  Because that’s what WoW is, and the games industry is an industry, and industries are conservative.  But RPGs are not the only game-species out there, and this is where other game-models for MMOs might bear fruit.  What about sandbox MMOs, where there’s a world in place — maybe even a world with a rich and interesting lore and story-history — but the only unfolding story is what the players make when you set them loose in it?  What about an MMORTS, where the face of the world and its power structures and allegiances are fluid based on player action and interaction?  What about players giving each other quests, or building their own factions, or constructing their own empires for good or evil?  What if PCs could be bosses?  What if?

The feature of games that people most often tout is that they’re interactive.  Games are an interactive medium!  They’re an interactive art form!  Only in their biggest present incarnations, they’re not, really.  They could be, but we’re still hung up on the idea of story as a thing someone else tells us.  What games could be are stories the players tell.  What if we let them?

I recently retired from World of Warcraft after six long years in Azeroth.  Just as I was making the decision to leave WoW, I received a beta key for Trion Worlds’ Rift MMO.  I gave it a try, enlisted some similarly-inclined friends, and the rest, as they don’t really say, is prologue.

I like Rift.  There’s a lot to admire about it.  It’s managed to make good use of the best elements of a lot of other MMOs — and to people who begin their gripes about the game with, But x is just like World of Warcraft, or But y is just like Warhammer, I observe that any creative work stands on the shoulders of its predecessors, and it would be pretty bleeding stupid at this juncture not to have picked up a thing or two from the behemoths that passed this way before.  Especially WoW.  Let’s please don’t clone WoW, let’s see something fresh and daring, but let’s also bear in mind that WoW is six years old (not counting years of development before that) and millions of players and billions of dollars strong, and there’s a great deal about it that works very, very well, no matter your overarching views of the game, its current corporate parentage, or its player-base.  To ignore all of that for the sake of some imagined purity would be folly.  Games aren’t supposed to be pure, they’re supposed to be fun.  And financially viable.  Lots of people clearly find WoW fun.  Lots of people pay money for WoW-style fun.

(Side note: I am not at the moment going to get in to network effects and the user value of WoW in this post.  It is a huge consideration, and the major reason that none of the touted “WoW-killer” MMOs so far have succeeded in that arena, but that’s for a later discussion.  Here and now I just want to talk about basic structure and design considerations.)

So: yes, Rift borrows.  I’ve heard from MMO veterans more broadly experienced than I that there are hints of Warhammer and savors of DAoC and a snip or two of Aion in the mix, but mostly one hears how like WoW it is when people first behold it.  The interface, for example, is clean and intuitive and user-friendly in the same way as WoW’s. (Don’t get me wrong, I love LotRO, but that game’s cramped obscure interface has been a gripe of mine as long as I’ve played it.)  Rift takes things a step beyond, though, by offering built-in the kind of UI-customization options that in WoW one has to get from mods and add-ons.  The Trion devs seem to have looked not just at what appeals to people about WoW, but also how people actually use those things in WoW.

The farther along in Rift one plays and the more one gets to experience the world and storyline and rifts and public questing system and the huge and complex array of choice afforded by the souls system (and I’m going to save discussion of lots of choice versus meaningful choice for yet another later post, because it’s important), the less like WoW it feels and the more Telara unfolds into something unique and interesting in its own right.  There is one early and glaring flaw, however:

The starting areas are dreadful.

It’s a pity, too, because the story offers potential.  As a member of the Defiant faction, at least, your demigod-like character is literally spawned from a machine on the last day of the world by a panicky doomed remnant of society, and must complete a series of arcane tasks meant to accomplish the activation of the time-travel device (“Orphiel’s Failsafe”) that will send you back in time to play the rest of the game and presumably avert same apocalypse.  That’s awesome.  On the Guardian side things are both murkier and less interesting — civil war, unholy alliances, getting sent forward in time, etc. — but that’s what you get for playing a “good” guy, I suppose, you weenie.

Despite all this potential, the first quests you get, no matter your faction, are the stale and venerable Kill six woogums.  No, wait, those are the second quests.  The first quests are Talk to Questmuppet A.  Once your Questmuppet-talking skills have been sufficiently exercised, you are dispatched to the care of Questmuppet B, who then tells you to kill six woogums.  You are required to demonstrate some facility at spamming your 1 key — or, depending on your first soul-choice, your 1 and 2 keys, for the Advanced Placement kids out there — and looting some (presumably ironic, ho ho) candle-stubs, and then your third assignment is to Right-click on Sparklewidgets.  And so on down the Gaming for Imbeciles checklist.

Add to this criminal lack of engagement the fact that there are only the two starting areas in the whole game — one for Defiant, one for Guardians — and those of us who suffer from Chronic Hemorrhagic Altitis begin to feel a little short of breath.  How many woogums can one woman kill?  How many times must Questmuppet B see my papers at the border?  I have already shown you I can click on the sparkles — click! click! — surely you have some more interesting task for me this go-round?

So let’s talk about what starting areas in an MMO-type game need to do, and what we want them to do.

The starting area needs to be a kind of tutorial, to introduce players at a basic level to the mechanics of your gameplay.  Rift’s starting areas accomplish this dutifully and joylessly.  I realize that players of various ages and experience and skill-levels all play these things, but it would be rad if the starting zone did not treat me and my nose-picking eight-year-old neighbor exactly the same way, which is to say, did not treat both of us like nose-picking eight-year-olds.

The starting area should also introduce your world and story.  Rift falls down on the job here — there clearly is a story and a realized world, the designers have put obvious thought and effort into the construction of these things, and then they do both narrative and setting a sad injustice by shuffling players along at speed to kill woogums and right-click sparklewidgets while the story happens in the background, just in case you are paying attention.  In both factions’ starting areas, you have the choice of asking the Questmuppets not just for your next quest please-and-thank-you, but also “What’s going on here?”  In the Defiant starting area, you have the further option of talking to little holographic story-muppets in communication devices you may find at intervals, who will relate to you sections of the background story if you happen to be interested.  But (a) you have to be interested enough in the first place to ask the Questmuppets or seek out the story-muppets, and (b) you have to find standing around reading muppet-text an interesting means of experiencing the world’s story.  Which, come on.  Freshman composition — and I mean freshman in high school — taught us Show, don’t tell.

In a similar vein, this was a failure of the night elf starting zone in the original WoW (I don’t know how much it’s been revamped in Cataclysm).  Part of the starting zone quest line entailed having the PC collect vials of water from the various moonwells, run them along to the next Druidic Sage Muppet in the line, and having said Druidic Sage Muppet relate a snippet of Kaldorei history in exchange.  Boring.  The Kaldorei have some of the craziest and most interesting history in the game-world, and there is just no way that quest line actually engaged anyone with it.

Beyond simply introducing world and story, I want a starting area ideally to engage me with these things, to give me a stake in them.  I admit that I am a roleplayer at heart, and I am aware that a massive proportion of the MMO player-base are not roleplayers, but there’s no way that engaging a player, role- or not, with your world is a bad strategic move.  Invest people in the thing, make them a part of it, and they will stick around.  They will want to stick around.  As explained above, Rift dropped this ball and dropped it hard.

I want a starting area to give me meaningful choice or variety, not just a strict linear tutorial.  This is part of engaging players and giving them a stake.  In WoW, although the starting-zone quest lines are linear (and involve a lot of woogum-slaughter), you have your choice of starting zones (an incredible twelve of them, as of Cataclysm-launch), each with a unique (if still linear) storyline.  Sufferers of Chronic Hemorrhagic Altitis everywhere rejoice: that’s more starting zones than you can possibly have characters on a single server.  You can fill your entire chosen server up with alts and not have to play the same starting zone twice.  So even where the actual quest chains afford little in the way of autonomy or choice, the player does have the meta-choice of which quest line to experience.  Choice can happen at more than one level.

Choice and variety also add both longevity and replay value.  I know that Rift’s designers have done a nifty thing with their soul system and may expect that no one will roll more than one of any given calling because they’ll be able with each to experience all of that calling’s souls.  To that I say: ha, ha.  See above, re: roleplayer, altitis.  And I say furthermore: even if I didn’t need two rogues and two clerics and a warrior and a mage, even if I did just want one of each thing — why, that’s still four characters.  That’s four trips through your joyless starting zones.  If you honestly believe that the way real people play MMOs is to roll a single character, grind it straight up to max and then just hang out there with it, then I guess a quick-and-painless starter zone of the bland n’ grindy flavor will do.  If you’re actually acquainted with the way real people play MMOs, and you want them to stick around and do and see more, then you’re going to have to do better.  Why “replay value,” you ask, when everyone knows an MMO just goes on and on and on?  Well, because no one just plays it on and on and on.  That’s why we have the word grind.  Everyone takes a break from their main, everyone wants a role-switch or a change of pace or scenery, everyone gets more out of a game when there are more ways to see and do it.  And soul-choice will only get us so far, when the world itself is the same flat linear tutorial every time.

Dragon Age: Origins isn’t an MMO, or even a multiplayer game.  DA:O is a single-player game.  But it is heavy on the starting stuff (see: “Origins”), and that starting stuff is extremely well done.  Do you know how many hours I’ve spent playing DA:O?  You don’t, and I’m not actually going to tell you because it’s sort of embarrassing.  But I will tell you that I have currently got eight active DA:O games saved.  I have deleted more half-completed games than I remember in order to start again.  I have played through it multiple times as multiple classes on multiple difficulty levels.  I can do this because even though the main story-arc remains the same and the game world remains the same, I can enter the world every time with a slightly different stake or perspective, I can frame the whole thing differently each time.  Similarly, in my six years of WoW, I managed to max out two accounts’ worth of characters, and to play every starting zone in the game multiple times.  If, every time I’d rolled an alt, I was back outside Northshire Abbey with yet another tedious kobold-incursion to address, the whole world would’ve worn thin a lot sooner.

Starting zones matter.  They matter a lot, and to the entire experience of your MMO.  The beginning matters a great deal to the durability and longevity of what comes after it.

I’m going to stop talking here for now, because this is an incredible text-dump already, but I’d like it to be just the beginning of the discussion.  I have more to say about engagement and choice, and meaningful choice, as I noted above.  I have things to say about narrative and ludonarrative dissonance and player motivation.  I even have some dry and tangential things to say about network effects.  But here is where I solicit input and conversation:  What do you feel is necessary to a starting zone, and what do you want from one?  What are some of the better starting zones you’ve experienced, and what are the worst?  How do you judge a starting zone experience?

Begin.