In the middle of a heated fight you steal a glance at the bosses health bar. Excitement floods through you as the groups reached a new personal best, 10% health remaining. Could this be the moment you triumph, together? Now 5%, everyone is still alive and things are looking great. At 1% with everyone almost full health you know you’re going to succeed and so does everyone else but no one types anything and focuses on the task at hand. It’s done, messages start flooding the chat, you’re pumping your fist in the air shouting “Oh, yeah!” and the characters on the screen are jumping up and down. This moment, right here, is MMO’s at their best.
It’s been over two decades since we’ve been playing MMO’s which means the genre is expansive and the definition of an MMO varies a bit. Even now I’m writing “MMO” instead of “MMORPG” as the latter is lengthy and most people recognize that when saying MMO the RPG part is implied. In an MMO players can typically expect to gain experience to increase their levels, increase their player power through, find items, ride mounts, gather materials, craft, farm, explore a vast world, meet other players, join guilds, run dungeons, and so much more. That’s a lot of things to do.
While all of those parts that can make up an MMO are enjoyable, I think the genre really shines when players come together to overcome a Player vs Environment (PvE) obstacle.
To achieve one of these moments you need a few different pieces to fall into place.
- A group of players (e.g. the massively multiplayer online part of MMORPG)
- A challenging experience, usually a boss fight, that requires players to pay attention and not just keyboard smash abilities until loot drops
- Clear mechanics with a pattern or visual cues
- The group needs to be making incremental progress
- Each player needs to stay positive, communicate, and have resolve
This is the recipe needed to create these moments. If any one of these items is absent then the moment won’t happen. If a boss is easy then it’s forgettable. The group finishes the dungeon, wishes everyone the best, and moves on. Yes, this can still be a positive experience and maybe the dungeon was beautiful, the mobs unique, and the group was talkative and enjoyable but it’s still not something you’ll likely remember.
If you’re in a dungeon and the boss is so challenging it just one shots the whole group and there is no hope, the group regrettably disbands and goes to different content. That’s frustrating. Sometimes you run into a challenging boss fight and you really want to stay and finish it but it’s not happening. The missing element here is the group isn’t making incremental progress. For whatever reason it’s not clicking with certain people and you keep wiping. In these cases you just have to say thank you for the time, acknowledge it’s not happening and move on. We’ve all been there.
While playing Throne and Liberty yesterday I had one of these experiences where all the elements came together. The group spent, and I’m not exaggerating here, almost two hours to kill the final boss in a level 30 dungeon. By the end of it I think three of us were part of the original group and the other two players had joined at some point as we had players continuing to leave. The time was also dragged out by players continuously crashing due to the beta servers but that’s fine. This group of amazing players were always positive which allowed us to stick with it so long and openly discuss the mechanics and strategy to get better with each attempt.
What made the boss fight difficult, and memorable, was at a certain point he would run to the middle of the room and start dealing massive Area of Effect (AOE) damage. In order to stop this attack there were four chains you’d have to pull relatively quickly, each at an opposite corner. Once the chains were pulled the attack would stop and we could heal up and go back to fighting the boss. Luckily each chain had a different color flag near it so we could assign them out. It took some time but in the end everyone understood the mechanic and how the timing of the fight worked clearing the way for our victory.
Some people might look at this as time wasted but I look at this as a beautiful gaming moment. If I left and got lets say an hour and a half back what would I have gained? I would have spent that time grinding a few quests for some experience. That time would be easily forgettable. I’d also miss out on the great loot from a dungeon boss. In the end, if I would have left the group earlier, the biggest thing I would have missed out on is experiencing MMO’s at their best.
Thank you to US East 20 players Soru, Wheymeelk, Retri, Churrin, and Hecko for giving me this moment. And I know A10Warthog would have been their if their game didn’t keep crashing.