Editorial: When is a choice not a choice

By Jeffrey Philipp | December 10, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials

Welcome to my mind once again!

I’ve been playing around with a number of games recently, and I wanted to touch on something that’s really starting to bother me; probably because I’m just way too sensitive about silly things.

Generally when I start up a new game, I almost immediately make a bee line for whatever character type/class/race/whatever serves as the healer for that world. I do this for a number of reasons. The universal healer drought is one, I always ended up biting the cleric bullet when I played D&D is two, and let’s be honest it feels good to have the power of life and death.

This tends to work out rather well for me, except when it doesn’t. There are rare cases when perhaps a game doesn’t feature a dedicated healer class, or the healer winds up being underused because of the recent trend of making games easier and easier, or whatever other reason there is that I can’t find my priest/cleric/healer sapien.When this happens I have to end up picking a character class more or less at random.

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. MMORPG has basically become synonymous with “formula” these days. There’s almost certainly going to be tanks and healers and DPS. These are almost certainly going to consist of some variety of fighter, cleric, and wizard. Then there are the rare cases, when I can’t find my regular cleric. When that happens I can’t count on the rest of the formula to be there, and that turns my selection when I create a new character into what is essentially a completely random guess as to what my characters overall role is going to be.

Granted there is usually some manner of description, and a little bit of common sense goes a long way, but my point is that even though I have a habit of picking a similar character type in every game I can, I’m counting on the game to be like other games I’ve played. This is from someone who has been playing these games for decades, imagine if this was the first time you ever fired one up on your games box.

My biggest gripe about this whole paradigm, is that players are forced to make decisions about the entire life and career of their characters before ever stepping into the world to see what it’s like, and how things work, even for one second. It’s only the incredibly rare situation that you even find a partial move list for your selection. These are not simple decisions either, there is a healer shortage in almost all games for a reason; the usual drawback to being able to extend the life of an adventurer is being more or less ineffectual in combat.

I understand this when I make this choice, but a new player who wants to play a cleric or priest or medic for aesthetic reasons, or they thought the description was interesting or they just didn’t know that the pitfall would be there has a very high chance of being frustrated with the time it takes to accomplish the easiest combat tasks.

Let me also say that I don’t think making a character go through the first five levels, or a number of simple dungeons as a “peasant” or “civilian” class is a particularly elegant solution to the problem. That just frustrates everyone. Veterans of the genre are going to be annoyed at being forced to go through what generally amounts to busywork before they even get to start building their character, and new players are very likely going to find such a solution boring and are unlikely to even make it all the way through to the meat of the game.

On that note, I would like to mention another thing that has been bothering me. It’s something that I think is absolutely ridiculous, and probably one of the poorest decisions that one could make in the design of a character creation system; and the saddest thing is that it’s present in almost every game presented to the light of day in the last decade. That problem, is the combination of the above two issues.

Generally speaking, when I create a new character in almost any game, I find myself choosing all the skills and abilities I will EVER have access to, as well as my greater role within the games combat system, all before ever stepping foot in the game world. Combined with that almost every time I start out with a broken knife or bent club or something, and one or two (if you happen to be lucky) combat abilities besides auto attack. Yes, technically I’m not playing the first five levels as a “peasant” class, but it tends to amount to the same thing.

I have to whack the first hundred enemies to death with a stick before my priest even begins to see some of the depth of an actual priest class.

So it’s easy for me to sit here and go on about how everyone is doing it wrong, much like the couch coach and people who leave “I could do that if I just practiced and had talent” comments you find under YouTube videos. I, on the other hand, am going to make the effort to suggest what I think might actually improve the lot of new characters in online RPGs, as well as possibly making the lives of altaholics like me a little bit easier.

I should be clear that this is not a completely new idea, as I have seen it in the occasional game before, though I can’t for the life of me name one of the top of my head. It is unfortunately somewhat rare, but whenever I do come across this particular system I find it quite enjoyable. I’m not sure what the official name of this would be, but I just tend to call it tiered character development.

Essentially it works out to building your character in stages throughout the game, one might very feasibly select a base class at the beginning of the game and at various plot points, or predetermined levels, or however you want to work it out go through specialization at some future point. Aion did come close in that regard, it’s just a shame that they didn’t carry the idea a little further.

For my money I think that this way of doing things allows for a more educated character progression system, rather than finding out thirty levels into a game that your chosen class doesn’t really do what you thought it would based on whatever notions you may have had from the character selection screen.

I also imagine that it would make for a more organic character progression, one that feels a little more like a character actually growing than the flashy level ups of most games. Finally, I imagine that it would make it a great deal easier for players new to the whole persistent online world thing to feel like they have some control over their character while they’re embroiled in the process of learning everything else about how to play a game like this.

I’d like to point out that I’m certainly not saying that the way things are in the majority of cases is wrong, that’s not it at all, it clearly works very well. The ability to start a new character with little effort means that it’s not a game breaking issue if you happen to pick a class that just doesn’t “click” with you, but I just like to think that altering a characters progression path at semi-regular intervals would be a very nice quality of life feature for new players, without being a hindrance to veterans and players who know exactly what they want, and in that I might be entirely wrong.