Is The Concept Of An Endgame Part Of The Problem?

Week after week and year after year, I read about someone’s endless torment as they attempt to find a new MMO to call home. We’ve all probably read the popular reasons dozens—if not hundreds—of times over. They can’t handle another World of Warcraft copy-paste game. They can’t do open PvP. But there’s another common issue with modern MMOs that seems to be slowly rising to the forefront: it seems that the endless gear grind—the common solution to the otherwise ephemeral endgame—is finally getting to people.

Part of the blame can undoubtedly be placed on the rise of free-to-play games. Perhaps you can enchant your armor several times over, but the necessary items drop on raid bosses, and are destroyed on enchant failure unless you pay for a 100% chance at success. Perhaps they just need to hook you in so that you will invest money to remove limits on how many dungeons or raids you can take on in a single day. Regardless of the case, the grind has become ostensibly more extreme in recent years.

Maybe this was inevitable. Even World of Warcraft’s endgame additions diminish to a slow drip. Game designers are inevitably looking for “new” ways to keep players engaged in the upwards of six months between content updates. These ways appear to slowly be failing more often. There is hype surrounding Legion, but the general consensus seems to be cautiously optimistic at best. Blizzard did “screw up” Garrisons by designing them to be another grind. At what point will the grind end? Can they be trusted to not introduce yet another grind?

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Let’s take a step back for a second and look from a different angle. You have your themepark game. You’ve slowly funneled your players through different zones based on their chosen race. Maybe they had options for what zones they could level in based on where they ventured off to. But now they’re at the level cap. You can’t just ask them to keep doing what they have been doing. It could go on eternally. You also can’t cap the game off right there by ending whatever story they have likely not been paying attention to as they’ve made their way around the world. They would have no reason to come back then. So you concoct relatively meaningless tasks for your players to complete over and over until they’ve either obtained all that they can from these tasks, or inevitably become bored with said tasks.

MMOs are meant to be worlds you can see yourself spending time in for an indefinite amount of time. But when a game world has a definitive beginning, middle, and end, the sense of a world fades away. It’s replaced by this feeling of an extremely long guided tour. You could deviate from the intended path, but why should you? The tour guide is over there and happy to leave without you. At the end, you’re often left with naught but a grind for more gear, an experience not unlike being dropped at a gift shop. You could get more shiny things—at a cost—or you could leave.

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Moreover, worlds are meant to evolve. While World of Warcraft changed a large part of its overall map at the release of Cataclysm, and games like Echo of Soul have minor state shifts that occur by transferring the player to a different instance of the exact same map when a particular quest is complete, the grand majority of the time, the world simply doesn’t change. You take on the same dungeons and raids week after week. You visit the same cities week after week. Nothing changes. It’s rare to see old content updated. More often, the intention is that you will move to another zone and do the same thing in a new setting.

Perhaps, then, the problem isn’t with the endgame grind, but rather with the concept of the endgame itself. There’s a sense among the MMORPG community that “an MMORPG doesn’t begin until the endgame” or that “the leveling process and the endgame are two different games.” Perhaps this separation is exactly the problem. In the current system, at some point, one of the games ends and the other is left with far too little content and far too much repetition. To give us the sense that we are part of a living world, shouldn’t our options increase rather than decrease?

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Realistically, there may not be a solution to this that will work for everyone. Player interaction would be the core of any potential solutions. Whether it is a constant war for territory or a constant attempt to collectively build something new, players need a reason to interact. Unfortunately, the general populace is less willing to interact with other players than ever.

Personally, I find that the carrot at the end of the endgame stick simply isn’t enough. I can’t endure the same bosses and the same dungeons over and over in order to do nothing but obtain more gear. There has to be something else. The games I tend to stick to often feature either a large territorial warfare segment or revolve around sandbox gameplay. MMOs are in a fairly unique position. The endgame should be meaningful player interaction, not more grind.