The success of a virtual world is dependent on the ability of the developers to convincingly immerse the player in their world. Without a daily emphasis and reverence for mechanics, art and design that contribute to immersion, the virtual world you are trying to create for your subscribers is in danger of collapse.
Immersion is essentially about belief. In their hearts and minds, players truly need to believe and perceive that your virtual world is real. Real enough for them to invest thousands of hours of their time and dollars and even more importantly invest their emotions in your world.
In recent years the reigning king of MMOs the World of Warcraft has become much less immersive. As time has progressed, this venerable MMO has become decidedly more about the game than the world. Why have they seemingly cast it aside immersion in favor of introducing features and gimmicks that detract from that most noble of all virtual world constructs?
What is Immersion?
Immersion is a state when the player or spectator (in the case of plays and motion pictures) temporarily suspends their disbelief and willingly transports themselves into the realized world of the creator. The difference between films and virtual worlds is that the players are not mere bystanders — they are active participants with a purpose.
True immersion is really a holistic mindset or philosophy of art, design and user interface that when combined should influence all aspects of a virtual world rather than just a few features in isolation.
One example of immersion is critters in WoW. At first glance they seem to serve no purpose — they just exist in the periphery, scurrying about with their own purpose. Yet in Westfall when you see a wolf chasing a chicken suddenly the world feels believable. It is these kind of innocuous details that helps create the illusion of life. But take these seemingly trivial creatures away and suddenly the world feels less alive.
Another example of immersion are all of the tables, chairs, paintings, bottles, cups and other assorted doodads found in a virtual world. All of them exist to give the virtual world depth, richness and detail. This is done to give the player a subconscious feeling that if they put so much work into these seemingly trivial details, then how much work will they put into the important things?
Immersion and the Average Player
I don’t expect the average WoW player to care too much about the erosion of immersion in Azeroth, after all they have already bought into the illusion and suspended their disbelief.
The typical WoW player is probably unconcerned and even unaware of what immersion is which is how it should be; yet they’d most certainly miss it if it weren’t there to begin with. In fact it’s a convincingly immersive experience that attracts many of us to a virtual world in the first place. Think back to those first amazing 15 minutes you spent in those magical WoW starting areas; they were designed to be incredibly immersive to draw us in and hook us.
How to Erode Immersion
The problem with immersion is that it’s far easier to destroy then it is to create. One could have the most amply immersive virtual world in existence then with the careless addition of a few features negate all of the hard work that designers, artists and programmers have created.
Immersion is a state that needs to be constantly nurtured, promoted and guarded.
The Tug of War between World and Game
Back in the early 2000’s when WoW was being designed and produced there was a greater respect for the notion of immersion and there was a feeling that the virtual worlds had great potential. The MMO genre was still not mainstream back then and was not prone to the demands of the current convenience driven ADD mentality that is so pervasive among today’s fresh faced video gamers.
Since the inception of WoW, there has always been a philosophical tug of war at Blizzard between balancing the world aspect with the game aspect. However, the original artists and designers really pulled out all the stops and created an amazingly beautiful and breathtakingly detailed world that is still unparalleled after all these years. It is that initial effort of creation that has been the counter-balance to all of the recent game-centric features.
Surplus and Deficit
Another way to look at it is that WoW started with an unprecedented surplus of immersive qualities: the artwork was stunning and original, the character and mob animations were detailed and luxuriant, the music and sound effects inspired and sparkling.
Then as features were added that did not support the same level of immersion and instead detracted from it, that original surplus has been depleted to its current woeful level.
It is my opinion that the people currently in charge of WoW do not have that same level of respect for immersion and have instead skewed the balance in favor of the “game” aspect of MMOs. Instead of a cohesive virtual world, WoW has become a MMO that is characterized by a series of crudely tacked-on features and mechanics that absolutely fail on any reasonable immersion test.
Let’s take a look at just a few of those features and analyze their impact on immersion:
Drinking the Instancing Kool-Aid
Instancing is the ultimate triumph of game over world. It’s the one feature that has truly defined WoW. It gives the developers the ultimate control of who enters and when. It’s negative impact on immersion deserves special mention even though it shipped with WoW back in 2004.
It’s a topic that MMO veterans used to debate strenuously back during first few years of WoW but due to that MMOs overwhelming success it has somehow been accepted into the canon of MMO features despite its multitude of non-immersive features.
Instancing has often been hailed as one of the most revolutionary features ever developed for virtual worlds. Yet those magical portals that separate the persistent world from the non-persistent world within Azeroth have never really been adequately explained within the context of the world. How is it that there could be hundreds of Lich Kings chasing after Jaina Proudmoore in the Halls of Reflection on any given server at any given time?
And what about instance locks and timers? How is that a player can enter through an instance portal one day but the next day she cannot. How does that make sense?
Instancing is a cop out. Yet we accepted it because the rest of WoW was so brilliant and amazing. Once the player-base accepts one dubious feature, it’s not that hard to for them to accept the introduction of other dubious features. That’s precisely how they got us to drink the Kool-Aid.
The WoW Achievement System
The WoW Achievement System (easily the most unimaginative name in MMO history for a feature) is probably one of the most unoriginal and amateurish features ever added to a MMO. This is another mechanic that makes no sense in the context of the world. When an achievement is announced to you, those around you and your guild, it’s like the disembodied voice of a god-like power much like Santa Claus that watches you constantly and tracks your every move in Azeroth. It knows when you’ve been bad or good and tells the world.
This bizarre system of categorizing and quantifying almost every aspect of gameplay does nothing to increase the level of immersion in Azeroth. Sadly, it could have been integrated into WoW with more elegance and harmony via NPCs that could track such things or even some kind of journal.
But don’t expect anyone to balk at the Achievement system now. Today’s generation of video gamers raised on a diet of XBox Live achievements not only expect it, they demand it.
The Dungeon Finder System
It’s really hard to believe that a little green eye better known as the Dungeon Finder can somehow assemble your group and magically transport you and 4 other players from other servers into one random dungeon. Then when you are done, you are magically transported back to your previous location like Dorothy waking up in Kansas in the Wizard of Oz.
You don’t even have to visit a particular location or interact with an object or even enter through a portal. Being part of a group takes little effort and can be completed in 2 mouse-clicks.
Remember hearthstones and inns in the first beta? Back then when they were implemented at least Blizzard was not so lazy and unimaginative. Players had to physically click on something in their inventory to get teleported back to an inn. If this feature was created today it would no doubt be placed on an easy to find icon on your toolbar and you’d be transported instantly.
From the We Stole it From Pop Culture Department
The ridiculously high percentage of pop-culture references has always bothered me in WoW as being something that brings me back to the real world rather then reinforcing the virtual world. Today it’s not unusual to find almost every NPC that has some connection to a motion picture or pop song. It’s almost become a meta-game to uncover and appreciate the pop culture references in WoW.
You have to wonder about the integrity of the writing and question Blizzard’s commitment to immersion, when a recent video interview the lead Blizzard Quest designer admitted that the quest he was most proud of was where he pilfered a line of dialogue directly from The Godfather.
If you are going to steal stories and plot lines then at least do it with class and disguise it.
Mr T Invades Azeroth
Probably the worst offender of all is the introduction of the Mr. T mohawk grenade which transforms people (against their will) into a likeness of Mr T — a D list celebrity from the 1980’s sitcom the A-Team.
Someone in high places at the Blizzard marketing department thought it was clever to re-purpose some art assets from a previous Mr. T WoW commercial and use it for the current promotion and place this moron’s face in the MMO. Well it’s utterly stupid and has no place in Azeroth. Score another failing grade for immersion.
What’s next, exploding Ozzy sunglasses that suddenly turns players into rambling, incoherent, washed up rock stars?
Who’s Responsible?
Creating a believable immersive world where humans can escape to and take on the roles of great warriors and powerful mages is not an easy task and nor is it cheap. The very nature of the Internet and even players themselves represent forces that naturally work against the immersion of a virtual world. Therefore it is incumbent on the MMO company to do all they can do push back the barbarians at the gate who would seek to destroy the sanctity of those worlds.
One really wonders if those at Blizzard are doing all they can to protect the integrity of Azeroth?
If I had to put my finger on the main reason for the recent erosion of immersion is that the current leadership at the helm for WoW just doesn’t have the personal passion and design vocabulary for this under-appreciated virtual world building block. Somehow they’ve taken for granted that a virtual world needs all of its component parts to each contribute to the players sense of immersion.
It’s a also a much different video game landscape today then it was 10 years ago when WoW first entered the psyche of its creator Rob Pardo. Blizzard has created its own mystique about WoW and redefined what a MMO is, with the end result being that WoW has attained a sort of critical mass in the popular culture.
Another reason could be that the original crew that made WoW are probably long gone or moved to other projects or with other companies. This has the effect of leaving us with younger developers whose only standard for immersion is tragically WoW itself.
It could also be hubris on the part of Blizzard. Eventually even the very best of companies can fall victim to the deception of invincibility. In the case of the Achievement System and the Dungeon Finder system it’s clear that Blizzard is either just plain lazy or so arrogant that they believe their millions of subscribers will embrace anything they create. Anyone remember the horribly broken Honor System?
Concluding Thoughts
For a company that earns $600 million in profits every year from WoW, I have to wonder why it’s so hard for them to find the resources to ensure that new features meet some standard of harmony and cohesiveness with respect to their immersive value before they are included.
At what point will someone stand up during a high level meeting at Blizzard and have the courage to say “NO” to the approval of yet another feature that detracts from immersion? Is there any line in the sand that the Blizzard developers will not cross as they drain the well of immersion dry in order to quench the thirst of the gamer?
What really worries me is that all future mass market MMOs will look to Blizzard’s WoW as a blueprint for success. Blizzard’s lack of reverence and stewardship for the concept of immersion could find its way into these MMOs and the results would be disastrous.
The leadership at Blizzard who keep introducing these non-immersion features are recklessly spending the surplus of immersion created by their predecessors. Some day the tally will go into the red and by then the tipping point will be reached. At the present rate, that day may come sooner than they think.
-Wolfshead
We already had the invasion of the oz near the end of TBC with http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39769
For me, WoW has become nothing more than a 3D version of Facebook with lots of little mini-games. I have alot of friends on there, and abandoning them is very hard to do. The mini games (read: Instances, daily quests, achievements) are quite fun to do – most of them.
The sense of immersion is no longer a factor in deciding whether or not I play the game any more, only during levelling where I actually visit anywhere other than Dalaran and instances.
I agree with much of this, as is often the case with your posts (except where we disagree violently :D). It’s making me wonder if “immersion” is another one of those obsolete RPG-based concepts — games seem to be moving ever close to an extension of social media rather than an extension of books/movies/tabletop games, which is how a geek like me approaches them but certainly not how 99% of WoW’s non-RPG gaming players do.
There may even be anti-immersion — make sure players don’t immerse too much or they’ll forget they’re playing a 3d, lush version of facebook. Or something. (It’s too early for much coherent thought!)
“If you are going to steal stories and plot lines then at least do it with class and disguise it.” — Oh, so right. I’m a sad intellectual snob. I much prefer seeing Werner Fassbinder the NPC in Warhammer and knowing a) the designers are cultured enough to know the name of a relatively obscure film-maker and b) I’m cultured enough to catch the reference. More subtle, more witty, altogether more amusing over the long term.
WoW’s pop culture is often the triumph of short snickers over genuine wit.
Hooray, you’re posting again! 🙂
I’m going to disagree with some of your reasoning. I think that players will either be able to see behind the facade or not. Accepting the wolf chasing the chicken as part of a living world instead of a simple A.I. script means the player doesn’t know what goes on behind the curtain. I don’t think that same person is going to think really hard about the fact that there are multiple copies of an instance with many people in them. For most people, you get lost in your own story in your own instance and not care about what others are doing.
Personally, instancing is one of the least immersion breaking things. I found it harder to maintain immersion in cases where the “horrible enemy rampaging the countryside” that I have to kill for a quest is overcamped. When an enemy is killed as soon as it spawns by roving bands of adventurers, it’s hard to believe I’m really doing the NPC a favor by fighting these foes. Or, take the infamous case of Sharpbeak, where you have to stand in line with your party members, each taking turns releasing the trapped griffon. Or consider how you go kill the same boss over and over again. These are obvious game-like elements that harm immersion more readily than having to stop and think that someone else might be doing the same instance as you at that very moment.
Peresonally, I think the shift in focus is probably just WoW adjusting to realities in different stages in its lifecycle. I remember Will Wright talking about The Sims, and how a lot of the initial marketing focused on the neat A.I. they programmed into the game. This got the hard-core interested in the game. But, they got bored with it after a while and the significant others of the hard-core gamers picked up the game for the expressive properties.
I think WoW’s lifecycle is similar. Initially the game was a deep world full of mystery for gamers to explore. As WoW has penetrated into more of the mainstream, they have to appeal to a different type of person. The geeks who want to live in a fantasy world are being displaced by people who see WoW as something a lot more social to do with others. It’s like playing golf or shooting pool: you play the game and bullshit with your friends. Getting immersed into the world isn’t important to WoW’s current audience. I think most of the hard-core gamers have left WoW by now, but it’s the more casual people who are interested in just hanging out that make up the larger audience now. So, while immersion might have been vital to the game at launch, it’s no longer such a major part of the game for the audience still playing.
Interesting insights, though. 🙂
“The success of a virtual world is dependent on the ability of the developers to convincingly immerse the player in their world.”
Take out “virtual world” and replace it with “game”. Do you still think that is an accurate statement?
I don’t.
WoW is a game. For a very, very long time, they have made no illusions about the fact that it is a game. While Blizzard creates some very dramatic trailers and cinematics, inside the game there is no fourth wall. You can almost see the NPCs winking at you.
Has this impacted the success of their game? Obviously not. Purists may decry a lack of reverence for the sanctity of Azeroth as a fantasy world, but so what? Sales numbers make such claims irrelevant.
WoW is certainly not the only example of this approach, and it isn’t the way I’d personally do it, but that doesn’t make Blizzard’s decisions wrong. To suggest that they need to do something differently is absurd. It’s working for them; it doesn’t have to work for you or me.
I would agree that WoW is a essentially a game that is disguised and marketed as a virtual world. Most successful MMOs are. That doesn’t invalidate my concerns that a MMO should be as immersive as possible within reason.
I’ve read some of your articles and comments over the years and I’m well aware that you don’t feel comfortable with the the term virtual world.
Anyone can make a game and thousands are made each year and most are forgettable and end up in the discount bin. However not everyone can make a convincing virtual world.
Regarding immersion, I do recall you wrote a blog post where you expressed deep concern for the notion of immersion after motorcycles were added to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
The problem is that Blizzard isn’t even trying anymore to keep a high standard of immersion for WoW. Clearly they have the money and the resources to ensure that when a feature is conceived and created that it passes the immersion test.
It seems that WoW has become an amalgam of “wouldn’t it be cool” features without any regard to how these features play of each other and work toward establishing harmony and cohesion.
As far as Blizzard’s success, this seems to be the common argument that people use to immunize them from criticism. McDonald’s is extremely successful as well, yet I doubt that in the halls of culinary schools they praise the awesome taste of fast food.
Immersion matters. The more immersive a virtual world, video game or film is the better it will be. That’s a guarantee.
Future MMO companies that think they can get away with copying Blizzard’s modus operandi are in for a big shock. Being more immersive is one way a new MMO could really distinguish itself from the pack of WoW clones out there.
As far as Blizzard’s success, this seems to be the common argument that people use to immunize them from criticism.
I think this argument shows that Blizzard is still achieving their goals despite various complaints and accusations. Blizzard’s goal is to get a lot of people playing (and therefore paying) for their game in order to make a profit. It’s as simple as that. As long as they have a lot of players, they’re succeeding; it doesn’t matter if the immersion is missing, for example, if their audience is still p(l)aying. You might argue that they could be more successful if they changed something, but obviously they disagree.
The danger here is that you should not rely on Blizzard to revolutionize MMOs. That is not their job, any more than it is McDonald’s job to revolutionize haute cuisine. Blizzard’s job is to make a lot of money, and they do it by making good games, not by focusing on an area you find interesting but that ultimately may be a niche interest.
Want more immersive games? Start pointing out the ones that are more immersive and supporting those that still are immersive. Of course, the problem is that part of immersion, according to your article, is very high art production values; any project that pours a lot of money into art assets is probably going to aim for the mass market. Looks like you have a catch-22 here.
Let’s say for the purposes of argument that success for Blizzard is defined as making as much money as possible. While that may be true, it doesn’t invalidate the benefits of a philosophy of completely immersing the player in that virtual world.
Who would ever want to spend millions of dollars and thousands of man hours on creating a non-immersive world?
Immersion provides the mechanism where players can indulge in escapism. Escapist entertainment is what this video game medium is all about.
My argument says that it can be done better and it’s not all about producing art assets, rather it’s a mindset. It requires desire and will on the part of the company.
Steve Jobs and Apple revolutionized the computing world with the Macintosh and subsequent Apple products. Do you really think it’s all about the money for Steve Jobs? It’s not. It’s about his passion for creating new products that exist in only his mind and bringing to them to fruition in the marketplace.
Yet Apple has never been more profitable. Who says that you can’t be both revolutionary and successful at the same time?
I would agree that Blizzard is on the evolutionary path rather than being on the revolutionary path. Some would even argue that they are de-evolving the MMO genre but that’s another blog post. 🙂
Also, Blizzard clearly spends a disproportionate amount of development resources on PVP, arenas and e-sports. They’ve been indulging in a series of botched experiments in this area for years now. Somehow that’s fine and nobody complains (except me). But ask for some standard of immersion to be followed and maintained and you get comments from people seem to say that it’s not a very good return on investment.
No doubt Blizzard has changed the MMO landscape and they’ve done many things right which I’ve pointed out here in many blog posts. But when they screw up like they have with silly gimmicks like Mr. T then I will not hesitate to call them on their shenanigans.
…success for Blizzard is defined as making as much money as possible.
Understand that this is 100% the case. Blizzard is part of a larger company. Read what the CEO of Activision Blizzard has said and tell me that it’s not all about the money. Yeah, Blizzard might be in a unique position to be able to do some cool things, but they will not when the Sword of Damocles hangs above their heads.
Immersion provides the mechanism where players can indulge in escapism. Escapist entertainment is what this video game medium is all about.
There are a lot of very popular games that are not based on escapism. It’s often repeated that Klondike Solitaire is the most played game, and escapism is nowhere to be found. As I said above, I think that WoW is more about killing time with friends than trying to live up to the potential of MMOs as people have talked about it for the last several years. Basically, putting it terms of playing D&D, it’s now more about getting together with friends to enjoy in jokes about Mountain Dew rather than Serious Roleplaying(tm).
But ask for some standard of immersion to be followed and maintained and you get comments from people seem to say that it’s not a very good return on investment.
Note that I’m not saying immersion has no place in MMOs. I agree that being immersed in a game can be a wonderful thing. I’m saying that at this point, immersion may not be what the audience playing WoW really wants. I don’t think that the whole Mr. T thing is a “screw up”. Obviously there was some response to the original TV commercial, and Blizzard is following up on it. Not to say Blizzard is perfect, because WoW certainly isn’t the game for me anymore, but I think Blizzard is making a smart decision here to retain the audience it currently has.
If you want immersion, you need to stop hoping Blizzard will make a radical change and start looking for games that will provide the immersion you want. If I’m right, the games to provide such immersion will tend to be the newer games. But, it may not be that way forever.
“As far as Blizzard’s success, this seems to be the common argument that people use to immunize them from criticism. ”
Got to throw a couple of comments in here, firstly a developer at WoW said
“So while we haven’t rapidly expanded our player base over the last year, we’ve retained our record subscription numbers after five years since World of Warcraft’s release.”
(http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/23094060397-blizzard-what-is-your-plan-for-40man-raids.html)
So they’re success was based on the start, not on more recent changes. Activision have announced again that they have 11.5 million subscribers (the same as last year) although this appears dubious since 6 million of them were in their stalled China operation. I think they are being more than creative with their subscriber figures here.
So their success right now doesn’t sound all that great, they are not a growing MMO, personally I doubt (disregarding China) that they are even standing still.
I have to say this was a fantastic article which put into words a feeling I had about WoW for a long time. They even have described their game as a MMOG and the current developers definitely are just interested in that.
Your line
“Is there any line in the sand that the Blizzard developers will not cross as they drain the well of immersion dry in order to quench the thirst of the gamer?””
Sums up the exact attitude of Blizzard, if they can implement a feature for faster easier quicker amusement then they will irrespective of whether it makes the “World” of Azeroth any more enjoyable, or of the long term consequences.
Sidetracking a bit with consequences, the new dungeon finder tool I believe has the possibility to seriously damage the future of WoW. They’ve already removed everything from outside of a dungeon or raid that needs a group, and now even dungeons will have groups of people not even on the same server.
Thinking back to my nearly three years in WoW I do not see how with this system in place I would ever have met the friends I did in WoW since as each group ends I never get to see the people again.
The quick fix solution of cross server PVE could prevent the social network of friends that keeps a MMO like EQ1 going on for years and years from growing.
So their success right now doesn’t sound all that great….
Except if you study history, you’d understand that keeping that many players for 5 years is pretty amazing. Admittedly, there hasn’t been a whole lot of competition, but even contemporaries such as Lineage 2 started to show some decrease after that many years. As I said above, I think Blizzard has shifted from acquiring customers to retaining them; they’ll release a new game to acquire new players, I suspect.
That said, I do agree that it seems like Blizzard is playing some tricks with their numbers given the China situation. So, it’s hard to know how things are really going. I’ve suspected for a while that Blizzard was obscuring shrinking Western subscriber numbers with Chinese “subscribers”.
Anyway, we can argue about if Blizzard is dying or not, but without hard figures it’s hard to know if a move away from immersion is truly helping or hurting them. Even if we did know figures it’d be hard to say if a focus on gameplay over immersion might not be slowing the typical decent.
“Who would ever want to spend millions of dollars and thousands of man hours on creating a non-immersive world?”
umm..the person that makes 100 million off the 1 million investment?
Immersive virtual worlds with real RPG elements are a niche. I just hope that someone decides to develop there and not go chasing after mass market money hats.
I agree with Moorgard. It’s game, or at least it is now. It may have been a virtual world when it started, but that’s not what everyone wanted. If everyone wanted a virtual world then Second Life would be a lot more popular than it is.
I keep that in mind when I set my expectations for WoW. I don’t expect a world from it. If I want a world, I go play a different game, perhaps D&D or something. If I want a game, I play WoW. No one plays Minesweeper expecting the mines to chat about this year’s crops.
I think that it’d be nice if there was a virtual world and game that balanced them perfectly, but I can guess that I’d be one of ten people who’d pay for it because everyone’s definition of perfect is different.
Second Life isn’t a virtual world, it’s a random smattering of crap that people threw together. Some cared for consistency, other’s did not… but taken as a whole, Second Life is pretty much the antithesis of everything Wolfshead argued for. Most of all, it lacks cohesion.
Moorgard is bang on with what I was thinking.
But I can totally understand where Wolfshead is coming from. I usually like something that is more immersive but the older I’m getting the more I just want entertainment.
The problem, as I see it, is that virtual worlds and themepark-style MMOs are like oil and water – they just don’t mix well.
Blizzard knows who their customers are and what they want – they want a nicely polished game where they can log in, have some fun with their friends, and not be bothered with the game or other players getting in the way of their fun in the name of immersion. So that’s what Blizzard does and it works well for them.
I also play EvE Online, a game where every action you take affects the entire game world, said world is entirely self-consistent, there are no instances, and NPCs are irrelevant except as a way to make money.
I think it’s quite telling that long-time WoW players and long-time EvE players, for the most part, despise each other. They’ll make up all kinds of reasons but what it really boils down is that they want completely different things from their games. Even though both call themselves MMOs I consider them to be different genres because of these differences, and I really don’t see how they can be reconciled.
Still, judging from the sheer amount of box sales from many recent MMOs, there is a strong demand for something new and fresh in the MMO scene. A lot of people want more freedom than strict on-the-rails type games like WoW allow, but don’t want to deal with the risk, steep learning curves, and ‘players as peons’ (which I think I got from this blog) effects that occur in the more popular sandbox titles. It doesn’t help that the major alternative themepark titles are close enough to WoW in gameplay that people who’ve burned out on WoW rarely seem to find them interesting for very long.
It usually starts with pop culture references and juvenile jokes. The same happened to later Guild Wars chapters, and it was greatly taking away from my enjoyment and immersion.
I could not agree more when it comes to the paragraphs instancing, achievements, dungeon finder and all that.
There is definitely a change in the way the game is played by now, it is “instanced Dungeoncraft” at the moment.
But the future for an ambitious virtual world project looks grim. “Copernicus” by 38 studios might become anything, we know nothing about it. And I am not a fan of the Star Wars universe, so I am unfortunately left out if Bioware creates the next major MMO hit.
Interestingly, I find Cryptic’s highly flawed STO to be very enjoyable. It is not a virtual world, it is a game – maybe a prototype for future online games that abandon the concept how a MMO has to be that has been coined by WoW for ages by now.
It is at least different to the generic mold that is quite popular, Runes of Magic and Allods are to me nothing but WoW again, just not nearly as good.
But in terms of a virtual world MMO and companies that even bother to try it looks indeed grim. I can’t help but say that MMO gamers were closer to a virtual world in 1997 when Ultima Online was launched than nowadays.
Mounts, Crafting, Instances, Raids, Dailies, Achievements -> voila, there you have your MMORPG. :>
The only thing that baffles me about your entire thesis is that you ever managed to find immersion in any MMO – most especially WoW – in the first place.
Seriously – repeated quests, the same dragon killed over and over, mobs appearing right in front of you, global chat, the quest giver who can’t be bothered to kill a few of the rats ten inches away, the random drops (but WHY do I keep destroying all their toenails? I only need one!), a bad guy coming running when you hit him while his five friends, standing there watching plain as day, do nothing. And the players…
Oh, god, the PLAYERS… The idiotic names, the degenerate speaking, the the camping, the killstealing, the discussion of RL stuff over the aforementioned global channels, the players who’ve been through the instance a dozen times and know exactly where to go and what to do, killing the same mobs for the same uniquely-named magical weapon…
That’s all the way back to UO and EQ, and it’s only gone downhill from there.
You’re lamenting something that never existed. What you should be asking yourself is why your capacity for self-deception has faded lately, and why you can’t ignore all of the immersion-breaking things any more.
I agree with you. Once we take an honest look at MMOs/virtual worlds it’s becomes evident that most of the mechanics are seemingly unexplainable in the context of the world.
As a players we all indulge in a form of willing self-deception or a more charitable way to say it is — we willing suspend our disbelief. We can’t just be passive consumers, we as players have to contribute something to MMOs to truly make them come to life.
However, I don’t think you can apply an all or nothing approach to achieving immersion because perfect immersion will never exist. Instead a MMO needs to be as immersive as possible given the limitations. For example, some kind of chat interface will always be needed, as well as some kind of user interface.
With WoW, it’s obvious now that Blizzard isn’t even trying anymore. It’s a death of a thousand cuts.
My belief for WoW (and most other MMORPGs) is that immersion is there for those who seek it. Suspend disbelief, but be aware of reality. WoW is, at its core, a game – and it would be heavy self-deception to believe it were meant to be a virtual world any time after world design happened – even before the game itself came out. WoW has performed many revolutional things to get players to stick. It does it well.
I think that one of the things it does well is personal immersion. Full stop.
Now, I know that’s what this blog post is set up to bash, but please do consider it from the perspective that it is just a game, made to generate profits and keep players via social community. From the start point, it has never been otherwise, and scrutinizing it as a virtual world just tells me that the expectation bar has already been too high for years – and then, it is kind of silly that the stand is made now as opposed to years ago, what with all the immersion flaws in a MMOG itself since day one.
WoW does not attempt world-wide immersion. In a game with social talking OOC far more than IC, respawning mobs, fairly striaghtforward AI, and all the other immersive flaws inherent in just the fact that it is still a video game, you’re not going to get that. Everyone has to suspend disbelief nonetheless – to a fairly high magnitude – for any similar MMO.
So Blizzard aims for the individual player, the ‘self’, and plays on that. Who cares about multiple instances? When -you- are doing a quest, instance or raid, with yourself and some other people you are cooperating with, what you care about is what you see in front of you. Even those not willing to suspend disbelief that much won’t be spending their time thinking about how thousands of other players could also be doing the same thing. When you’re running away from the Lich King in the Halls of Reflections, you’re immersed in your goal, in your obstacles and so forth. Very rarely do you think about how counter-immersive the instancing is while you’re doing the running. Sure, one can gripe afterwards, but if the immersion aimed for in the span of ‘something happening’ is delivered then, I feel that the goal is accomplished.
Would a game set to simply keep profits generate the vast amounts of quest text that sends you from place to place? The books, letters, and other items full of text that most gamers will never even peek at? The Angrathar the Wrathgate cinematic, and all the interactions you have with those crucial NPC players of the event before and after it happens? The music you hear and the shouting between the Alliance and Horde commanders as their gunships clash, vying for the right to settle their business with the Lich King? Why would they purposely risk customer-raging server load by attracting overload with world events like the opening of Ahn’Qiraj or the scourge attack on the capitals?
These details, combined with Blizzard’s continued effort to make endgame content (where the most contemporary story happens) accessible to more people, I am certainly led to believe that there is a non-trivial effort to allow players to experience an story that is being told – if they wish to seek it out. Take the game parts of it in stride, and appreciate the story being told _when_ it is being told. I believe that they should be applauded for working to inject immersion into a game whose primary drive is to turn out profits, not derided for not trying to be the ‘ideal virtual world’ that exists somewhere in Dreamland but will never truly be reachable.
Clearly, the intention of Blizzard all along has been to create the illusion, feeling and perception that you are indeed in a “world”. There is a reason that it is called the “World of Warcraft” and not just “The Game of Warcraft”. So the inclusion of the word “world” in World of Warcraft was not by accident it was by design. Blizzard wants you and your fellow players to feel that you are part of a world.
Instancing ultimately detracts from the notion of a virtual world because one of the key tenets of a virtual world is persistence. There is no persistence in an instance as currently produced by Blizzard. Rather what goes on in an instance is transient, disposable and meaningless to the more legitimate and somewhat more persistent world that exists outside instances.
Within the context of a virtual world, instancing is masturbatory activity with no consequences, intimacy, reality or credibility.
Killing Onyxia in her lair is utterly meaningless because she is still there 365 days of the year for anyone to experience at will. Insert the CD and press play and there she is. Whether Onyxia dies or not in an instance, the real world of Azeroth remains unaffected.
While the “self” or the “player” is the ultimate target of Blizzard, the MMO genre was supposed to be about so much more than that. MMOs and virtual worlds are supposed to be predicated on interaction and cooperation with other players. To say that what your fellow player is experiencing doesn’t mean anything is to shortchange the potential of the genre.
In my opinion, Blizzard is playing it safe and is unambitious in that they are not even trying to immerse the player more fully nor do they even proactively enforce the rules on their chat channels. I would agree that Blizzard is probably providing just enough immersion to get the average player hooked and keep them p(l)aying.
That may be enough for the average player but it’s not enough for me.
It never existed, but it has gotten worse over the years, so to say.
And this exactly is the problem. Is the only progress the genre makes these days to be dumbed down more and more so that everyone can play the game semi-afk, which is then called accessible? That combat and killing takes even more place and that apparently nobody even tries to create a “virtual world” anymore?
I mean we could stop dreaming, but I would rather want an evolution of the genre than a devolution or stagnation.
All too true, I’m a fan of EQ2 myself and there I just ignore the things that break the immersion for me of a fantasy world (some player names are just amusing, some depressing!).
All in all though the high fantasy theme is there though, its like a play, you can enjoy and get deeply involved in the storyline even though you know they are all actors and a set, but only if you allow yourself to.
But if while adventuring in Azeroth someone drives past on a Motorbike with a numberplate saying PWN there comes a point where you can no longer suspend belief.
On instancing though I never found that as immersion breaking as other things in the game, for me respawning mobs are the worst offenders, especially a quest that requires you to stand around while they magically appear (the designers are too lazy to even make them run from holes in the ground or some sort of explanation).
The story telling in WoW is something else that put me off as it became a lot less immersive. In TBC you were an adventurer and have adventures, in WotLK you are the mighty hero that stands next to Thrall just like the entire rest of the population of the server doing this unique event that’s super easy (because the dev’s want everyone to see everything), comic book style stories with no depth or emotion.
Its the same in Cataclysm, every Goblin will save Thrall 😛 Put together I can no longer care about my characters in WoW, when a game has all these customisation options and I just don’t care anymore then I believe something is wrong.
Sweet. More Wolfshead! Good to see you posting again. 🙂
I actually don’t mind instancing. Guild Wars feels more immersive to me than WoW, just because I can make a difference in the world. Once I kill a critter in a wilderness area, it *stays* dead… at least, until my play resets the area. They don’t just vanish and respawn for the next schlub.
Other than that note, which is indeed highly subjective, I’ll readily agree with your thesis here.
That said, I do see that the ultimate goal of Blizzard has to be profitability, and unfortunately, immersion isn’t something that the current mainstream cares all that much about. In other words, the issue isn’t just Blizzard, it’s the players.
I agree with Tesh, I was really thrilled to read this article 🙂 Love your stuff, don’t stop!
I think WoW has always been pretty loose on immersion and although I find the pop-culture references and in-game jokes amusing, they don’t actually help me bound much with my character or the world. The whole Mr T thing is just a further extension of that (I really hate it) and makes me feel like I’m playing a game and nothing more. Which is exactly what I think Blizzard want. They aren’t trying to craft an online world that sparks our imagination and sense of adventure (like EVE does, in my opinion), they just want to create a quick, fast and fun video game thats good for a few minutes escapism. Nothing wrong with that but it is very different the traditional MMORPG appeal.
The natural question, then, is what does the market really want, and is there a profitable niche for something that embraces immersion in a way that WoW is angling away from?
I have to say, Tesh, that I find it amusing to hear you lamenting lost immersion. You’ve argued repeatedly that a character should be able to change class and keep their levels, and I can’t think of many things more immersion-breaking than an on-the-spot instant redefinition of what my character can do.
I think it’s pretty clear what the market wants by this point, unfortunately. Whether or not a niche can be profitable remains to be seen – Fallen Earth seems to be doing well so far… But top-tier MMOs are simply too expensive to develop without the potential for a mass appeal payoff, so niche is where they’re likely to stay.
The one hope I have on this is Old Republic – if anyone is capable of generating immersion it will be Bioware, and they’ll do it whether the masses want it or not. Plus their history and the attached IP mean they have enough of a shot at major dollars that they can spend what they need to spend to make a top-line game where they don’t have to cater to the lowest common denominator the way WoW does.
Perhaps that’s another problem, then, B. I don’t mind being able to switch abilities, but you do. Fallen Earth’s “immersion” is just a series of onerous time sinks to me, but some love it. Immersion is a very variable thing.
In fact, flexibility is *more* immersive to me precisely because I’m flexible in real life. My job demands it, as would the handful of other careers I could switch to. That’s just the way I’m wired. Not everyone is. *shrug*
I wouldn’t mind the ability to start a character from scratch as something new, but that’s not my understand of what you usually ask for. You want to take your max-level ranger and turn them into a max-level priest so your character doesn’t have to learn their way back up. That’s not flexible, or immersive, it’s Matrix-learning.
I remember that I heavily opposed the idea to respec the char attributes in Guild Wars in town. You needed to grind refund points, and then you could reset them and try new builds.
In fact it was a huge limiter, but I was concernced if I could switch too many abilities, actually everything, that my char would lose its “character”. In the end everyone liked it.
But your primary class did not change at all. But I wonder if we really would lose “class/char identity” if we would be able to change our class, too. My “gut feeling” is “NO, TOO MUCH” but actually, this is also how I felt about the free respeccing in Guild Wars. I was strongly against it.
Nowadays, if the old system would be re-introduced, people unanimously would say it is the worst bullshit ever. 😉
Very cool post, and definitely made me think.
I am actually coming to the conclusion that although virtual worlds may be becoming less immersive (and I mourn that too), the actual gameplay is becoming far more immersive. Faster paced, with more emphasis on using cover, line of sight, targeting, and interacting with the world around you (in combat at least).
First of all great blog, I’m surprised I haven’t found this sooner. Now mind you I am not some Role Player type person, but I think the reason I fell in love with WoW, is because I cared about the world I played in . I cared that the Horde did well against the Alliance. A little Immersion is needed, which that little in WoW is being stripped away.
That’s why I didn’t last long in Warhammer Online, or AoC….The Immersion factor just wasn’t high enough with all the instancing, and scenarios. They were fun games but in the end I stopped caring about these virtual worlds.
I agree in saying that WoW has no immediate immersion, because to me It didn’t. With quest helper the game felt more like I was jumping through hoops to get items and gear than experiencing a massive story. I quit shortly after hitting 80 because I did not want to Grind for equipment (plus my friends quit and my guild broke up). It’s not like this for everyone that plays though.
Immersion is a choice, there is plenty of game lore to immerse yourself in if you care enough to search for it. I did not when playing wow but many of my friends spend hours discussing the finer points of the main story arch. After listening to them I actually want to go try to kill Arthas just to see where the story goes, event if that meant reactivating my Account for a month or two.
Taking the time to actually read the quest logs, chatting with npc’s and generally paying attention to the sheer amount of content there is will make the game like one long giant book that you have to move around and interact to read. This may not be the immersion you are looking for since its less of the traditional RPG character development and more like a character being a vehicle of story deliverance.
For an MMO to be immersive to the point of caring about your character there would actually have to be true character story development, which WoW does not have. Hopefully Bioware will change that for the MMO genre with Star Wars: The Old Republic by putting their usual forethought into the conversation system and integrating it well into an MMO.
Even as a spectator the depth of immersion can greatly enhance the experience of the end user.
I recall as a child having fun on the various amusement rides. The Funhouse ride in particular was amazing even though it was very primitive.
Then a few years later I had the opportunity to go to Disneyworld in Orlando. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride just blew me out of the water — literally! The level of immersion in that ride characterized by the boat venturing deeper into pirate territory complete with cannon fire just a few feet away from the boat was light years ahead of the caliber of rides such as the Funhouse ride I described previously.
I find it unfortunate that some MMO industry people are content with the level of immersion that Blizzard has created with WoW. Conventional MMO wisdom 2010: WoW is successful ergo their level of immersion must be correct.
This is precisely why you don’t see MMOs that have challenged WoW. It’s because people are trapped in the shadow of Blizzard and can’t for whatever reason break free of the “success” formula that they have created.
Yet at some point Blizzard took a look at the industry leader SOE and reckoned they could make a better product for players and the rest is history. The next big MMO will have people at the helm who have the courage to step out of the shadows and dare to take their MMO to the next level. Well, the ball’s in your court.
Well said, Wolfhead! I could not agree more!
Hi Wolf,
Haven’t checked out your blog in a while, which was a mistake since your articles always get me thinking! Thanks for wasting the last 3 hours for me.:)
Awesome article, I guess now that I think of it immersion in a game is what I have always wanted but there seems to be a wide gap with the immersion I may feel watching a video clip of a game and the actual playing. And I agree culture references and even instances have taken away from that.
I have found though in some MMOS I have played having a house adds to the immersion in the sense something belongs to me while I am there.
Thanks Tesh for your comments, always food for thought!
Thanks for stopping by Curtis! 🙂
For some anecdotal insight, I’m a player who left the game due to the decline in immersion. At the beginning it was fine, quite involved in fact.
However I think it’s apparent that the ‘virtual world’ was simply a medium used to apply the behavioural psychology techniques designed to produce compulsive behaviour. As time progressed, that medium was simply streamlined. Anything that delayed someones reward was cast aside in favour of easier access. Smaller required teams, more instantaneous travel, shorter story arcs.
The end result is what we see now, where you teleport from one planet to another in order to fight space goats among floating purple rocks, then teleport back to hand in the tokens you were awarded while communicating telepathically with people fighting the lich king in Northrend and others who are several years backwards in time, engaged in combat with Arugal at the time when he was still alive and living in Shadowfang Keep. There is no need to communicate with your fellow players for 99% of the game, as everything can be pugged via the dungeon tool with zero communication apart from a few raids.
However we all know that part, the thing that interests me is that which I was referring to earlier… every change was made with the intention of making it easier for people to press the lever enough times for the pellet to drop. I won’t go into the origin of battlegrounds since they were announced before release, but there are other changes from that era that also signalled what was to come.
People found the instances too difficult, so they were made easier. More flight paths added. Smaller raids added. Shorter instance reset timers. Cross realm battlegrounds for shorter queues. Portals from the new cities to the old. Removal of elite mobs. Cross realm dungeon tool.
All so that people don’t have to waste their time travelling through the world or communicating with other players, and can instead focus on obtaining more upgrades. Less interaction, more repetitive behaviour.
If nothing else, they’re obtaining some relevant data on exactly how close your game can be to progress quest before it affects subscriber numbers too dramatically.
I do not only agree, I applaud you for this really concise and comprehensible summary.
Brilliant post Ymir! I concur 100% with what you are saying.
The fact that since the introduction of the Dungeon Finder feature, most players now just show up in random dungeons and never talk to each other. MMOs have been reduced to PEZ dispenser machines. How sad that social interaction — and there wasn’t much in WoW to being with — is seen as something that impedes the process of getting more loot.
The concept of a “world” in WoW is just an illusion. Never mind the fact that 80% of what goes on in WoW is happening in instances which there is zero persistence and the other 20% which is the outdoor “solo” areas are barely persistent to start with.
MMOs have been reduced to reward dispensing Skinner boxes. It’s a sad and sorry state.
Skinner boxes are profitable, though, and that is the ultimate acid test what with the expense of making these games. Vegas still exists, after all, despite being in an armpit of a desert, infested with all sorts of degenerative social and moral vice.
I’m all for some fantastic virtual world design. That’s why I started blogging, as it happens. (Being who I am, I’ve run a few tangents since…) I just don’t think we’ll see it in the mainstream until it can be comparably profitable to the skinner box MMO design. I’m not sure that will ever happen.
Just found an interesting quote about immersion from Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28449/Tomb_Raider_Creator_Immersion_Is_Everything.php
There are many opinions on what makes a great game. For Tomb Raider creator Toby Gard, the answer is immersion.
“I would argue that the power to immerse the player, to absorb his attention completely, is the common attribute of the greatest and most successful games,” Gard wrote in a new Gamasutra feature.
He said that when creating a game, the entire development team — not just the artists — should put forth effort in establishing immersion within a game. “Gathering and studying reference is critical to creating immersion for the player,” he said.
I wrote something tangential with my recent Edelweiss article. Paying attention to the little details as you craft a world can really pay off. Reference and understanding why things work in the real world is crucial to making an artificial world really click. I’ve also argued before that the best game designers (and artists) are those with wide interest sets, and an eye to how pieces of the puzzle fit into the larger picture. You *must* think through the consequences for design choices, and make sure that your game world is logically consistent and plausible. (Ditto for storytelling, actually; too many plot holes can destroy a story.)