Last year I penned a few in-depth and apparently controversial articles that evaluated some of the EverQuest 2 starting areas from the perspective of a newbie. It has long been a reality that in the video game industry the average player will play and essentially audition your game for 15 minutes. If you don’t impress them within that short time period you will most likely lose that customer forever.
The video game developer has but one chance to knock it out of the park with concentrated awesomeness. Every aspect of your game has to be amazing, captivating, and compelling for those critical 15 minutes. It’s even tougher if you are making an MMO.
In both of my main articles, I urged SOE to focus on improving the newbie experience so that more people could experience the wonder and magic that is Norrath. Some complacent EQ2 veterans who shall remain nameless were not very impressed with what I had to say but there is some recent news that might make them reconsider their objections.
Today I read the February 14 pre-launch of Sentinel’s Fate producer’s letter from Alan “Brenlo” Crosby and I came upon some very interesting information that I believe has vindicated my series of articles. What did Alan Crosby say that impressed me so much?
SOE is Listening
Here’s a portion of Alan Crosby’s producer letter that shows that finally someone at SOE is listening:
As many have noticed, Halas is not going out with the expansion, many have asked why and the reasoning is twofold. We have three pretty decent starting areas already. Darklight, Greater Faydark and Timorous Deep. We know they are not perfect and so the team has done considerable work in reworking those areas, streamlining the progress path to make for a better experience. We believe that you will find the experience in those zones to be far better than it had been.
Alan Crosby and the team at SOE deserve my sincere congratulations for improving their existing newbie experience before releasing a new one. It’s nice to know that EQ2 has wisely decided to put the welcome mat out for potential new players. After all, what is the point of having an MMO full of amazing content if new players don’t stick around long enough to see it?
As a result of this positive news, I’m going to purchase Sentinel’s Fate and check out the new polished newbie experience. Believe me, I want to get hooked and fall in love all over again with Norrath. EverQuest has a special place in my heart as it was my first MMO.
Blizzard Reveals Their Newbie Friendly Strategy
On a related note, there was another news story last week that drives home the importance of a well-crafted newbie experience. Blizzard has at last publicly revealed that one of the keys to success in MMOs is the ability to consistently attract new players. Why? It’s because you need more new players subscribing than old players quitting for your MMO to keep growing.
This revelation was made by Blizzard President Mike Morhaime when spoke during last week’s Activision/Blizzard investors conference call about the completely revamped newbie experience that will be coming to WoW via their new Cataclysm expansion. He stated that the WoW newbie areas that have been untouched for 5 years will be infused with the improved level of craftsmanship and quest design that is currently evident in Wrath of the Lich King.
This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that used to be that once your MMO is established you have to cater exclusively to established subscribers with high-level content. Now we have clear evidence and not just conjecture that attaining a balance of attracting new subscribers and keeping existing subscribers happy is the proven recipe for success and growth.
If anyone doubts that creating a state-of-the-art, welcoming newbie experience is not as important as keeping content for your high-level players then the president of Blizzard’s comments to the investment community should diffuse that doubt entirely. This is precisely what I have been saying all along on this blog and it’s gratifying to see two major MMO news stories in the past week reaffirm that.
-Wolfshead
I agree with you. I purchased EQ2 during Xmas for 5 bucks. I finally decided to try it out. Maybe it was my old EQ days, but it seems Everfrost is no longer a starting area. I was totally disappointed. I wanted to relive my experience from 12 years ago.
I ended up spending less than five minutes in the game, and cancelling. I am just glad I only spent five bucks on it.
@Brian, the reference to Halas by Brenlo is that Halas will be made available as a starting area in the next live update, which should be May. When EQ2 launched, part of the differentiation from EQ was that the lands were shattered, and only Qeynos and Freeport were (opposing) starting areas. There are now starting areas in Timorous Deep (Kunark), Darklight Woods (Neriak) and in Greater Fay (Kelethin). We’re all looking forward to Halas launching in May, and I hope that you try again then!
There is a flip side to it remember, even if you have the best first 15 minutes in the world, the rest of the game had better hold up to a similar standard or else no-one will play past it. I’m looking at you Age of Conan.
That’s okay. You can name us. We don’t mind. Although I didn’t think disagreement equaled complacency.
Actually I forgot most of the names, as it’s been a while. You are right, disagreement doesn’t equate complacency in all cases. That characterization was not directed at you but directed at one self-appointed leader of the EQ fan community.
I’d suggest invoking the Metroid Prime principle: Not only do the first fifteen minutes have to be good, they have to give you a taste of what the rest of the game has to offer. In an MMO, this means giving more than two abilities and a kill ten rats quest.
Of course, the newbie grind may well be representative of the rest of the game… but that hints at larger issues in my book.
I remember your EQ2 newbie experience articles well and I feel largely the same way. I’ve tried a few times to get “into” EQ2 and really want to, because it is such a rich game. But I found myself getting so frustrated that quests would send me to the same damn hill to kill those orcs about 50 different times. EQ2 could really use an interface update, with a much easier map showing quest objectives (not the add-on which only serves to clutter things up.)
I’ll be watching to see how much they really have changed the new player experience.
I only went through the Kelethin zone you are describing there with a new player once, I actually much preferred the Qeynos zones that Wolfshead’s articles were based on personally even while they were not perfect!
As for getting into it, I remember it took me a few hours to get into WoW originally (I remember starting at that dreary dwarf starting zone) maybe if I hadn’t have purchased the game and TBC I would have given up, but the blood elf zone was much more enjoyable, it really had some emotion in the storylines.
In comparison EQ2 took longer to get into but once I got to my racial mentor (Froglok) I really felt at home in the game. If anything I would like to see them get you involved with a race/zone in the same way that WoW did, it adds emotional depth to the story which makes everything mean so much more when questing/adventuring etc.
They are really learning. The latest expansion also seems to be very good.
Next Step: Set the whole theme park design core afire and create the next generation of EverQuest, that is about as stunning and new as EQ and Ultima Online were back in the days as MMORPGs were a novelty! 🙂
Pfft, forget that. I want my BattleTech virtual world already. 😉
Before you congratulate SOE on revamping 3 of the 5 existing starting areas, just remember that the EQ2 developers had revamped the Queen’s Colony starting area and you still tore it apart in your first article. And if you notice, Queen’s Colony is not one of the zones that is going to be revamped.
There is one other thing to note. In June, Brenlo announced at FanFaire that his team would be looking into improving the new player experience. The emphasis in his presentation was that Halas would be the best starting zone and he made it sound like it would be used as the free trial zone. I’m glad to see that other areas will be getting some love.
I’m skeptical of the 15 minutes decision thing here, some people do load something up and literally play for 5-10 minutes before making their “decision”. I question myself how many of them were all that bothered in the first place, anything more complicated then tetris takes some serious time set aside to decide whether to get into it.
I gave Star Trek Online that time, probably in all about 4-6 hours, the graphics were ok, the gameplay though was tepid.
Putting aside the third person starship battles that could have been captured in all their glory on a Spectrum 48k the big problem was after many hours of gameplay the designers failed to challenge me once.
Its as if games designers now are mortally afraid to let potential new customers fail in a game. I’ve heard WoW’s Ghostcrawler talk about how he doesn’t like the concept of aggro being something you have to work hard at holding for a warrior because he thinks players feel emasculated by losing it. One of the first things I like to see now in a game is something stomp all over my new character teaching me maybe to not wander close to the dragon.
Or a close battle I lose that makes me wonder what I could do to improve the next time. I do wonder now if new players really are that fragile in games with setbacks, or if designers are too worried about players failing and then turning away.
Personally I think if they can show the potential of the world, even glimpses of it then it makes all the setbacks worth, again something that in 4-6 hours STO failed to do.
For the entire duration of the play I didn’t see anything that inspired me to play, things like seeing a mounted night on a great looking charger, some sort of high level activity that looks fantastic fun to get involved with. Instead I very much had the impression that what I was playing was all there was to see.