I was particularly interested in “Public Dungeons,” solo-able and often-underground areas resembling the ruins that you’d find in previous Elder Scrolls games. Many quests would lead you to them, but I was confident that through exploration, I’d find some that were well off the beaten path, only sparsely populated by other players, and maybe through that I’d experience I’d be able to create a story somewhat unique to me.
Nope. Time and again, I’d enter a dungeon and fight my way to the boss, only to be greeted by a dozen players camping him, killing him over and over again as soon as he respawns. See, these bosses can drop valuable items, so farmers and smart players alike kill them repeatedly for gold, experience, and crafting materials. I’d join them, of course, because I’d be foolish not to. Levels, skills, and gear, right? But eventually, I realized that I was living the same story as everyone else, decided that story wasn’t worth the time, and quit.
It’s easy to chalk this up to the very nature of MMOs. Good luck finding anything productive to do in WoW that hasn’t been done by a million other people, right? Online gamers have become relentlessly savvy at reasoning out the most efficient ways to achieve a game’s goals and attacking them for all they’re worth, even if doing so decreases the overall enjoyment for everyone involved by, say, requiring them to sit for hours in the same spot and kill the same enemy over and over again. It’s a depressing example of game theory, where each player is doing something because if he or she stops doing it and everyone else doesn’t stop, everyone else will more quickly achieve the levels, skills, and gear required to complete the goals that the game is pushing players towards.
Changing this behavior without disincentivizing it is a losing battle, yet removing the push towards levels, skills, and gear is a non-starter. So it’s hard to blame ESO for failing to capture the spirit of the Elder Scrolls series when it conflicts with the very nature of the MMO genre. Right?
Until last weekend, I thought so, and was more depressed at the state of the genre than the specifics of ESO’s failure.
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But then I played the ArcheAge beta, and realized that ESO has just been doing it wrong. If the problem is players relentlessly pursuing the game’s goals to the point that playing is less fun for everyone, then the solution is for the game itself to take a more ambiguous stance towards what its goals actually are.
I’m not here to persuade you to play ArcheAge, or hail it as some kind of revolution. I’ve played it for four days, and upon longer exposure may sour on it myself. I’m not qualified to make any declarations about the quality of the game or its long-term potential.
But I also feel like the conversation surrounding it is obscuring the single most important thing about it, something that is largely independent from the quality of the game or the specifics of its systems.
Gamers throw around terms like “Sandbox” and “Pay to Win” as if they are hard black-and-white measurables as opposed to buzzwords that vaguely refer to situations that are clearly on a continuum, and a heavily subjective one at that. Reading people argue online about computer games is like reading people argue about politics on Facebook, where there’s an entire vocabulary that’s been created or co-opted for the purpose of such arguments, during which the participants bicker about the meaning of words in that very vocabulary. Is this a sandbox? Is that a theme park? I don’t know; but more importantly, when did this become an issue of semantics?
From the ArcheAge beta, the one conclusion I feel comfortable drawing is that the game does not push you towards a particular end-game goal. It certainly encourages you to participate in the main quest, but as gamers are fond of saying, the real game doesn’t begin until you’re at the max level anyway, and hitting the max level (currently 50) in ArcheAge does not seem like a particularly daunting task.
The game does feature a dungeon/raiding structure, but it’s far less robust than WoW or its counterparts. There is no group finder, and dungeon choices appear fairly limited, though they still provide the requisite gear drops. ArcheAge’s most powerful gear, however, is reportedly available only through crafting, and most articles about the game seem to remark on its intricate and wide-ranging profession system. In broad strokes, the conclusion most everyone has come to is: crafting is very important.
Which, based on my limited experience, seems absolutely true. But the more interesting question to me is, important to what end? Because while you can craft the expected swords, armor, and potions, much of the game’s crafting revolves around items not directly related to levels, skills, and gear: furniture, trade goods, ships, songs (songs!), siege weaponry, and hundreds, possibly thousands more.
And these items are far from cosmetic in value. Say you want to be a farmer. You can certainly use what you grow to create potions or food for buffs, as in other MMOs. Or you can focus on growing food with the purpose of bundling your crops into “trade packs,” which can be transported to another town and turned in for a sum of gold or other valuable items. The longer and more treacherous your trip, the bigger the reward you receive. Maybe your goal in the game is to, through trade, become so rich that you can afford to purchase and maintain a mansion, or even a castle, collecting taxes from other players who live on your lands and paying an army of fellow players to defend them.
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Or maybe your goal is to prey on those merchant players who are transporting goods. Maybe you pour your resources into building the fastest ship and acquiring powerful gear, then put that gear to use towards hunting down other players who are pursuing their goal of gold accumulation, stealing their trade packs and turning them in yourself. Maybe you want to become the most hated player on your server, not through annoying people over Trade Chat, but through absolutely ruining entire merchant fleets and causing other players massive monetary losses.
Or maybe you do want to raid and beat the game’s biggest bosses with your guild. Maybe you want to work the auction house and build your fortune that way. Maybe you want to gather and help your guild build its castle, or grind enemies for profit and materials. Maybe you want to do a little of all of these things, or maybe you want to do something else entirely. After getting you started with rather routine quests and incentivizing you to embark on the main quest, the game seems to gradually pull back from funneling you in any particularly direction. Whether or not you call that a “Sandbox,” I don’t care; but to me, it’s rather exciting.
My most memorable moment from the ArcheAge beta happened on Sunday night. After a couple days spent questing, our small group of three people (my brother, my friend, and myself) decided to build a ship. This was our goal; there was no accompanying quest, nor any reward beyond the ship itself, which has massive in-game use for trading, pirating, and transportation. The materials were daunting, and given that none of us are yet subscribers, we were at certain disadvantages. But through a combination of making trade runs, choosing the right trees to chop down, a little bit of stealing, hunting for deals on the auction house, and one of us staying logged on all Saturday night, we somehow cobbled together the resources required. At around 10:30 PM Sunday night, after all of us devoted the entire afternoon to the project, our boat touched down in the water, and we celebrated. It felt like an accomplishment, but different than downing a raid boss or winning a roll for a piece of gear. This was something that we decided to do, that we determined the best way to go about doing, and that we judged as being worthwhile. And we accomplished it, through our own means and on our own terms. Of course scores of other people successfully built boats during the beta – and probably much more impressive things, too – but I’m positive that none did it in exactly the same way we did.
In short, ArcheAge provided us the opportunity to create a story outside of the one the game is telling us, the same way that Skyrim did for me years ago. Whatever you want to call that, I feel like it matters.
Kyle Trembley is the Editor-in-Chief of ShowRatings.TV, a user-driven television review website. Follow him on Twitter @KyleLovesTV