Why Instances?

My new game of choice is Champions Online. I played in the open beta and the head start weekend and I am making a special trip to get my retail copy today to make sure I don’t miss a beat. It is a fun game and I am glad to be playing it. However, for as much fun as I am having in CO,  it almost joined that long list of games that have graced my hard drive and been quickly deleted. Nothing is worse than muddling through a long download, install and patch process, only to boot up a game for 10 minutes and realize that within the hour, this thing is hitting the Recycle Bin.

There are any number of reasons why a game is an instant candidate for deletion… of course the main one is that my gaming attention span is that of a hyperactive ferret… but let’s ignore that fact please. Actually, it isn’t that bad. I am usually quite forgiving of my MMOs. I can sift through a crappy UI. I am forgiving of bad graphics. I can even manage games that are horribly repetitive because frankly, all MMOs are horribly repetitive. I do want a game to offer me some hook — something new to the formula. Most games get insta-deleted because, after a night or so of play, I realize that it has nothing new to offer me. If I want to play the exact WoW formula, I have Runes of Magic, or WoW for that matter.

Champions Online DOES have a hook — a couple of them actually. It has great character customization, both in the look and the mechanics of your guy. It also has an action-oriented combat system that, while I am not entirely sure if it succeeds, is at least novel enough to keep my interest for now. I like it… so what was its Big Sin? What almost made me hit the Uninstall button 30 minutes into the game?

Instances

The first time I saw the “Choose Your Instance” screen when I zoned, I was done. It was Guild Wars all over again.  Guild Wars is a decent game,  with some good ideas and a pricing model that is hard to beat, but it is a “hub and instance” game. In these games, you are either in a hub where you interact with other players between adventures and form groups, or you are in an instance with your team, isolated from the rest of the universe. D&D Online is another example of a hub and instance game — you can chat in town, or run a dungeon.

I don’t like hub and instance games; they feel small to me. I like exploring and interacting with people. I like “hunting on the way” to missions and quest areas. I like teams that meet up and join together for the evening, not just as a convenience to complete a single mission. I find that when I am playing heavily instanced games I even miss things that are considered annoying. I miss being kill-stolen, and waiting in line to kill a specific guy to complete a quest. It sounds strange, but these little hassles remind me that I am playing with people. Overcoming these annoyances builds community.

So, I hate instancing and Champions Online is instanced, but I like Champions Online… In fact, I think CO could use MORE instancing. What the heck?

What Do Instances Do Well

1. Instances keep the servers happy — An instance is a copy of part of the world that is segmented, allowing only a (relatively) small number of players to interact. Many server architectures handle different instances on separate servers, keeping the number of connections to each server down. If a structure like this is used for the zones of the world, this can be a great boon to performance. Champions Online caps many of its zones to 100 players, spawning new instances when needed. I certainly don’t know for sure, but I am guessing this has to do with technical limitations of their architecture.

2. Instances allow quest designers more flexibility — DDO has some of the best dungeons I have ever seen. DDO dungeons have puzzles to solve and scripted events. They feel closer to a single-player game, or even to a tabletop rpg, than most other games. Instances allow this. Because the quest desginers know that no one else is in your copy of the dungeon, they can create a puzzle or scripted NPC behavior knowing that someone else is not going to come along and mess you up. Guild Wars had a progressing story where areas actually changed over time, based on where you were in the quest chain. You could not change an area in an open world game.

3. Instances can scale — Instances allow the game designers to scale the difficulty of the missions they contain. If a solo player enters an instance, he can face 1 or 2 enemies. If 10 players enter, 20 enemies can spawn, or tougher enemies can appear. CoX has perfected this concept, allowing missions to scale based on team size and level composition — you can even set your difficulty level to make the missions harder or easier based on your preference. You just can’t do this in an open world.

4. Instances allow players to avoid griefing/inconvenience — Who here hasn’t been trained? I don’t mean trained as in “I am trained in 25 forms of martial arts and can chop boards to bits with my pinky finger” or “I trained my dog to hop on its hind legs while balancing a phone book on its nose.”  I mean, “We were sitting in the Crypt of Weeping Solace, waiting for Gigathrox the Mighty to spawn and these jerks trained 62 Flaming Orcs on us, killing us instantly.”  Kill stealing, camping, training… all problems in MMOs go away when you can hide with your friends in your own little pocket dimension.

Less malicious, but still annoying is the fact that open world quests often create spawns that are needed by many people at once. If your mission is to “Kill the Chief Orc” and there is one of him, and he spawns every hour, it is very likely that there are a half-dozen people waiting once you get there. In an instance, you have your very own orc to kill.

5. Instances help gather teams together — Champions Online copies a lot of the WoW/EQ quest structure. There are hubs where you gather all the quests and then you venture into the open world to various quest areas, complete a bunch of quests, then return to the hub to turn in. CoX has an instanced mission structure. You get a mission, head for the instance door, enter, complete the mission and then turn in. Sounds the same… but the first time I teamed in Champions Online, I realized it wasn’t the same.

See, the problem with copying the WoW quest structure is that people don’t team in WoW to quest. It’s too inconvenient. Invariably, people don’t have the same quests. If you share quests, then you find that people haven’t completed one of the prerequisites to get your quest. Other quests you have are unsharable… for some unknown reason. Once you get everyone together, and share all the quests you can share, the team sets out and then people scatter. Someone sees a quest pickup… for a quest they have that they couldn’t share… over there by those goblins. Once you are fighting the quest mobs, they are way too easy for a group to kill, so people tend to drift… and then see something shiny near that tower and … “oh I just died, I’ll be back”. Hopefully, as you kill monsters, the quest drops count for everyone, or else you have to kill even more creatures, which takes you longer than if you’d just gone it alone.

Champions Online has these problems, but then adds the fact that the guy who knows where to go can fly, so he goes vertical and you are left to putz through the zone with your superspeed or acrobatics… aggroing pretty much the entire contents of the zone to your destination. Of course, while you were doing this, the flying guy accidentally aggroed the big-bad you were there to fight and had to kill him while you were still too far away for the kill to count for you, meaning you have to wait for a respawn and kill him again, to which the flyer gives you a happy, “Good Luck” and takes off, having completed HIS quest.

Really, I am not bitter…

CoX’s instanced missions keep everyone focused. Someone gets a mission and then you all head for the mission door. There is no ambiguity as to where to go, or can you run off to kill Bob the Unclean who is just over that hill. You go to the door. Once everyone is in, you start. It is more linear and thus, easier to get everyone on the same page.

6. Instances can promote teamwork — In WoW, instances provide the hardest content. In CoX, instances scale to the number of people in your team. Difficulty tends to bring about teamwork. If you cannot face the evil boss alone, you have to bring friends and if the enemies are hard enough that even when you bring friends, you had better work together, all the better. In the open world, generally quests are easier because they cannot scale up, so if you team, you are bringing too much firepower. This generally means no one has a good reason to work together and thus teams never gel because their members are busy soloing on a team. I have seen many evenings in both WoW and CoX where a team would have a hard time the first few pulls, but then as they understood how everyone was going to work together, they improved. By the end of the night, we would be steamrolling the opposition.

Why Instances Still Stink

1. Instances make your game feel small — Hub and instance games feel small and often lack that feeling of exploration you get from open world games. If I am just going from hub to hub and dungeon to dungeon, I just don’t feel as though I am seeing that much. Even the most linear of open world games gives you the option to go places you aren’t supposed to go. You just never get that in DDO, or Guild Wars, and so even though they might have a similar amount of content as other MMOs, they still feel smaller.

2. Instances make your game feel empty — In Guild Wars, travelling (even town to town) meant heading into an instance. The hubs may have been populated, but travelling, you never saw anyone. DDO has “open world” zones, but since they are instanced, you and your friends are the only people there. Ultimately, these games feel busy only when you are in town. CoX has some action outside of their instances, but they long since adjusted rewards and risks such that no one “street sweeps” anymore. Heck, with the Mission Architect, no one even ventures outside anymore to even hop between mission instances. I am picturing a world where all the superheroes are pale and cannot bear the light of the sun.

3. Instances scale — Of course, I just said this was a good thing, and it is, but there are also pitfalls here as well. One possibility is that everything is either too easy, or too hard. Who judges what is the correct level of difficulty for an MMO? What should a solo character be able to fight? How can you possibly scale a mission for a team of all dps, or all tanks? What if the players are worse than average, or significantly better? Before CoX allowed players to choose the difficulty of their missions, it was pretty painful with some builds being able to fly through instances while others would get stuck, unable to clear missions without assistance.

4. Instances don’t foster community — Strangely enough, some inconvenience and crappy behavior is good for a game. When there is an issue, good people tend to rally together to deal with it. This can be as simple as getting a team invite from a stranger when you are both waiting for a coveted spawn, or as involved as starting a guild to hunt down notorious player-killers. Heavily instanced games don’t have strong communities because there is no need for them. DDO and Guild wars take this to a pretty extreme level in that not only can you spend the majority of your time alone in your private adventure instances, but the truly anti-social can bring along NPC henchmen and never team with another human being again!!

What does all of this mean? Well, for one thing, it means I still don’t like hub and instance games and for that reason, both Guild Wars and DDO have been off my play list for a while. Still, I look at a game like Champions Online and its troubles with open world questing and think that it could use more instanced quests. Champions Online has made me reconsider instancing as a tool. Like any tool, it has advantages and drawbacks. Used well, it can be a boon to a game. Used poorly, it makes your game feel like a single-player game, except with a rotten story and repetitive combat…

But those are problems for another article.