Some time ago now, I took it upon myself to experience some new online worlds, and I noticed a curious trend in the way such games are drawing their users back in, or sending them away from daily play. This aspect to their design forms the backbone of their long-term rhythm and feel. It reminds me of the frustration in offline game save checkpoints, and the way late-90s Playstation games would drive me wild with manual checkpoints every hour compared to today’s games, often with too many autosaves. These bookmarks help define a lot about the game’s timing, from mission length to total average play duration, and even the reach of a player’s personal goals. Can my level 80 warlock complete all the available daily quests within, say, two hours? How close will the next level take me to dinner time? From Farmville to Eve Online it’s all a little different, but I didn’t regard this device all that closely until a rare thing happened; a big-name game actually broke my feeling of immersion to tell me that I could no longer play.

First, a run-down of my experiences:

World of Warcraft

I’ve long enjoyed World of Warcraft because of its depth, the easy interface and the way I can dip in and out with some new task or personal goal there to await me. I’ve played through most of the game’s zones and quest chains with one character or another, but at the time I began my cross-world exploration my ‘main’ was stuck doing PvP battlegrounds, dailies and reputation quest lines, having run the solo game’s course already. My enthusiasm really began to wane as a result of that, and a still rather small guild incapable of supporting the dungeon and heroic runs associated with ‘the endgame’. While each of WoW‘s dungeons tends to offer a different challenge to my lower-level alts., it is only with the recent launch of a ‘random dungeon’ matchmaking feature that I stood any chance of seeing new content. While PvP pits me against human opponents the settings and goals are always the same, and so it often fells to the solo daily quests to provide my sustinence.

Dailies are not particularly exciting. Fair play to Blizzard for giving us persistent quests to see us through the endgame drudgery at all, but they only go so far. Every 24 hours, Gemenar the warlock faces the fascinating choice of bombing Scourge again, attacking 20 vrykul again, laying mines to kill 12 snobolds again or charging Scourge cavalry at the Lich King’s doorstep.. again. There seems no room to randomise this given WoW‘s setup, and the only alternative is to play so-called ‘pickup group’ instances with strangers. The problem with these is that most of the players you’ll be placed with have run the dungeon many times before, and so the chance at a new experience is stripped down to “kill, kill, kill, loot”. It seems then that variety only comes about from applying pressure to your peers – get them up to your level so that you can enjoy new content together. This is far from being a ‘daily’ objective.

Eve Online

I downloaded and ran Eve Online‘s free trial knowing it only to be ‘a different beast’ to other online games. I didn’t enjoy the experience, as followers of my Twitter feed will know, but I found that it does deploy an intriguing training regime. Unlike Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, training is planned and lengthy. There’s no visiting trainers on every even-numbered level as you grow, handing over gold for education-in-an-instant. Instead you are given training manuals and invited to form your own lesson plan. By docking at a space station (best considered a base like an inn), you can review the manuals you’ve collected and apply them to your 24-hour schedule. It means that if you need a certain skill (e.g. the use of your shield) in order to survive a mission you’ve been given, you’ll have to abandon hope and come back to try again in a few hours or a new day, depending on your lesson plan. It’s really quite jarring, coming as I did from a world in which your only barriers are experience and in-game cash – both of which are readily available.

Most bizarre is Eve‘s bonus reward scheme. Real-time strategy (RTS) fans will be familiar with secondary objectives, such as keeping five tanks in play or capturing three buildings as you go about the primary mission. For at least the first few missions in Eve Online, there are such secondary tasks to be done and most are time-based. It essentially means that on the third or fourth quest, the new player is offered a mission with impossibly difficult enemies possessing firepower well beyond your starter ship’s meagre defences and repair capability. It soon becomes clear that you have some training to do, but the quest is counting down a timer. Take too long to train on your hours-long manuals and you lose that bonus. Abandon the mission and you are locked out of it for four hours, lest you incur a penalty to your reputation.

Whereas WoW grows tiresome because its novel content runs out, Eve Online pushes its regimens so hard as to encourage you to not to play, just to keep things a little fresh. Eve does appeal to a different sort of player of course – obligations to your own trade goals and to your corporation, if you have one, will draw you back in to see the missions through. WoW features a social culture, but its rewards are generally more personal, such as the chance to equip some great gear on your character. Despite (or because of) its logical approach though, Eve came across to me as a fairly joyless experience, preventing me from playing any more just when I’d begin to get the feel for interstellar mining and combat.

FarmVille

I’ve been playing FarmVille for a while too now – happily, I might add. Unlike online games, heavy on graphics and loading times with logins to boot, FarmVille is by design the sort of game we dip into on a daily or twice-daily basis, with objectives to match that sort of time frame. As one might expect, it involves running a farm by planting crops, letting them grow and harvesting in order to repeat the cycle. As a structure it has much in common with Eve Online, but really all it lacks in comparison is combat and exploration.

Of course, FarmVille and Zynga’s other, rather similar games fall victim to social and microtransaction pressure. Houses, larger homesteads and some decorative items are locked out unless you buy some of the game’s currency, connect with a certain number of Facebook friends or invite them to send free gifts to you. My endeavours to create a personalised, gothic farm are blocked by steep social grinding and about £20 worth of the game’s FarmVille coins, while even Eve would only deny me through having to wait around a bit.

Price to Pay

My experiences of each world have basically sunk or swum on the balance of grind versus reward.  No world would or could satisfy my every wish as and how I wanted them, but World of Warcraft and FarmVille have done for me what Eve could not and kept their promises in line with my rewards for playing. WoW has teased me with the challenge of learning every engineering schematic, exploring all the world’s geographies and discovering its stories. Schemata are a reasonable grind away, exploration is a pleasurable journey with fast mounts and the ability to fly, and its story seeps into almost every quest line. I’m constantly working towards these personal goals because the game allows me to.

FarmVille is arguably less successful, but then it never promised much in the first place. The game has placed me inside an isometric grid with the means to make money and offered some purely visual, non-interactive trinkets to work for. While my level 80 warlock can demonstrate the benefits from wearing a more powerful robe in the manner she dispatches enemies, my quaint little farmer will sow and reap crops just as easily with a gothic arch above him as not.

Eve stands out as a world in which either my pre-conceptions of MMORPGs, or CCP Games’ package, have given me ambitions which it cannot realise. That is to say that while I cannot discern whose fault it is, my dream of being a space pioneer was blocked by training schedules, financial diagrams and a very steep ability curve. The game could not intice me to play every day because I could not work to my own goals, and even the daily grind of Scourge slaughter in World of Warcraft could do that.