It’s been an argument brewing for some time now. If you are an MMO RPG player, then you have had this talk with countless people who all agree that instanced content detracts from game play. If you are one of the vast minority of players who indulge in “Kill Stealing” and “Random Ganking,” than your days are numbered, and you no doubt know this. Haren tells us why “Instanced Content” will revolutionize our game play entertainment, and who the leader for the next generation will be providing our gaming enjoyment.
For many years, the MMORPG paradigm has focused on persistent content and realism. However, recently that paradigm has begun to shift as a new concept known as “instanced content” is becoming popular in the MMORPG world. To date, we have seen games such as Dark Age of Camelot and Star Wars Galaxies implementing instanced content, but the newcomer in the MMORPG market, NCsoft, is setting the stage to take instanced content to the next level. At the Electronic Entertainment Exposition, we witnessed firsthand the line of upcoming titles published by NCsoft including ArenaNet’s Guild Wars, Destination Games’ Tabula Rasa, and NetDevil’s AutoAssault. Each of these games represents a new age in MMORPG design in the fields of content, player interaction, and game play.
Instanced content is, obviously, an entirely new methodology of handling a MMORPG’s game content. Rather than presenting a static, persistent world in which all players take up at the same time, it can provide similar but radically different versions of the exact same area of a game. This presents a large difference in how a game is played and what content it can provide.
Examples of this would be Tabula Rasa’s method of managing player housing in which every player starts the game with their own personal home, an “island,” that is only accessible by the player and their friends. AutoAssault takes it a step further in a game where the entire environment is interactive and destroyable by designing their instanced content to stay the same between a player’s sessions within the instance. The example NetDevil used is if you destroy a bridge in an area during a mission and return to that area in the future, the bridge will remain that way when you return in the future without causing the same influence on another player’s game.
As for Tabula Rasa, instanced content will allow its missions to be scaled based on the players’ capabilities insuring the mission is neither too difficult nor too easy. These are a few examples of the way instancing is revolutionizing game content, but its effects will also be seen in other areas.
The concept of instancing will undoubtedly have a large effect on players and their interaction with each other. The greatest fear for most gamers is that instanced content will create a situation where players never meet other players they do not already know, and while this is certainly a valid concern I feel that so far it is unwarranted. All three of NCsoft’s upcomin
g titles that focus on instanced content have been intelligent enough in design to avoid basing their game 100% on instancing.
Guild Wars, for example, provides towns that exist in a persistent state where players can interact, and to further the ability for players to meet each other it provides game types where players can be randomly joined in both cooperative and competitive environments to insure the social element of the massively multiplayer game is not lost.
AutoAssault also provides major areas of its gaming environment that are persistent instead of instanced, and overall these entries into the MMORPG market seem to foster the understanding that, for the sake of social interaction, there must be a symbiosis between instanced and persistent content.
Fortunately, instanced content will not hail the death of player interaction, but it will definitely set a new precedent in how player interaction affects game play. There are definitely high points to instanced content for all styles of game play. For the player who enjoys missions, quests, and a player-versus-environment style of game, instanced content will help insure they are free to play the game the way they want.
A good example is Tabula Rasa, which is claiming to have a detailed and highly enjoyable mission system, is able to provide missions that players can work through and complete without interference from “grief” elements or waiting for other players to complete the same mission and area. Guild Wars is able to provide a PvP-centric environment where teams are equal and balanced to prevent one side from “zerging” another, a fact that creates focus on player skill instead of numbers. However, these are not even the major points of instanced content’s affect on game play.
The major selling point for both Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa are the speed at which players can find action. Rather than encouraging traveling and downtime, both of which are something few players enjoy, they provide systems in which players can quickly find action whether it is with their friends or with strangers. Tabula Rasa promotes a system where players can travel around instantly, including directly to their friends, making it possible for the gamer to quickly join up and get into trouble with their gaming associates and allies.
Ultimately, this is going to cause a major change to the current massively multiplayer paradigm that forces players to have large amounts of time to play due to time required for travel, combat preparations, and combat recovery. I believe we will finally see the casual gamer being able to more greatly enjoy and compete in this new era of instanced content.
For all those gamers who have asked for a change in the massively multiplayer market, where games do not try to imitate the experience of Everquest or Ultima Online, I believe their time is coming.
An era where games will focus more on providing the player with readily available action, enjoyment, and fulfillment is at hand, and players who hate the concept of spending their gaming time traveling or resting will find these new games tailored to their tastes. All we can do is encourage game developers to continue working towards a fine balance between persistent and instanced content so that the most valuable feature of a massively multiplayer game, its interaction, is encouraged and taken to new heights.
In the meantime, let us welcome the beginning of the instanced content revolution and hope it brings tidings of glorious things to come in the gaming industry.
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By Kenneth “Harendiel” Flood, who has been gaming within MMO’s since 1995 and is the founder of The Seraphic Empire, a gaming organization with four years of experience in multiple gaming environments.
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