The Daily Grind: Is endgame merely the beginning?
by Akela Talamasca 
Apr 17th 2008 at 8:00AM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Game mechanics, Guilds, Leveling, Raiding, Endgame, Grouping, Opinion, The Daily Grind
People who love MMOs tend to cite the fun of social, shared play as the reason. It's more fun to play together than alone. However, at the higher levels, when it becomes necessary to group just to stand a chance of completing a raid or instance, it becomes difficult to find a group of players of the same level as you -- unless you're already at the highest level you can attain. One thing to be said about reaching the ceiling is that you can stop worrying about leveling and concentrate on some good, solid 'endgame' content with a bunch of like-minded players.This begs the question: is all game content merely there to help you get to the endgame, at which time the fun truly begins? When you're bored with your top-level character, and you roll a new one, do you grit your teeth and sigh expressively through the lower-level content until you're back up on top? Once you've reached the heights, is the rest of the game still fun?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Lucifrank said on 9:54AM 4-17-2008
I'd argue that endgame as it exists in current MMOs blows--and the satisfaction of leveling and grouping through level cap is much more appealing and offers a lot more flexibility, growth, and fun than grinding out the same instances with 20-40+ people you don't know. Endgame will not always suck. It'll just take devs coming up with something more inventive than following the blueprints of what has passed for "endgame" for just shy of a decade at this point.
Endgame today annihilates any sense of the RPG in MMORPG, turning what was once fun into work. I'm willing to bet no one's gonna show us any different until 38 Studios or CCP's next MMO start breaking the rules a bit. They are the only two companies I can think of off the top of my head that will have the resources AND the creativity. Every other MMO developer at this point only has one or the other, IMHO.
Everyone else is too fat and content and has a consumer base who more than willing apparently to feed on yesterday's cold leftovers.
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Lemmo said on 10:31AM 4-17-2008
Can I say that once again, this mentality seems to come from a very WoW-centric playstyle? Only in World of Warcraft or its clones do you have to rush up to the max level and earn a ton of good gear just so you can qualify to run with a particular crowd.
City of Heroes is the other way around. The end game content is negligable, aside from badge-hunting, PvP and recipie snaring, your 50's are really only good for helping other heroes progress. And with the sidekick system, level doesn't really matter for people to play together.
Neither way is perfect - if they were, the game would be fun all the way through and then some. You'd want to play the beginning as much as the end. But still, I think this whole abstraction of levelling and linear progression through these games is really going to start showing their seams as players want more dynamic content.
Could you imagine an MMO where your level doesn't matter nearly as much as what you've experienced?
I have a concept: What if your character was proficient only at zones you took time to conquer? What if you fought all the creatures in the Alpha Caves such that they became easy, but someone over in Beta Forest would have a problem with them, due to some mechanic of unfamiliarity? Seasoned characters wouldn't be high in level, but rather versed in the whole virtual world.
Bah. Even that sounds like a grind. Carry on, I have no solutions.
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Bartlebe said on 11:16AM 4-17-2008
I have responded to this on my blog. Just thought the author might want to know.
www.bartlbe.wordpress.com
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Bartlebe said on 11:18AM 4-17-2008
Thats www.bartlebe.wordpress.com
Sorry.
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Nick said on 11:38AM 4-17-2008
I got bored very quickly when I got to 60 pre-BC - waiting around for groups/raids to form is like watching paint dry.
Right now I'm levelling a warrior to 70 (got to 60 yesterday woohoo). I suspect that once I've got there and I've got my flying mount I'll roll something new (perhaps Horde ?) and do it all over again.
I'm a very casual player (2hrs in the week, and as much time on the weekend I can get away with before my wife thumps me), and so raiding isn't something I can be bothered with/get good at.
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Kadathwack said on 12:23PM 4-17-2008
From my WoW experience, I've had fun doing both. Leveling my first character was a blast. Seeing new sights, following along interesting questlines, picking up not just new gear, but new abilities and talents.
But things were still pretty good after I hit the level cap. Instead of seeing new zones I was seeing new instances, and instead of new moves, my existing ones were propelled to superhuman power by the fat epics of Karazhan, or at least that's how it made me feel.
Regardless of level, I really do think it's the eventual repetition that gets to you (and me). The raid instance is less fun after you've been through it for the same reasons the starting areas are. I think a lot of the people "rush" to the endgame content in an MMO do so mainly because they've been through all of the startgame and midgame content before. And endgame seems to be the only thing, at least in WoW, to get content patches anymore.
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