GW:EN Sneak Peak: Power Creep

Whoa boy, I was afraid of this. As a quest reward, last night, I received the Armor of Salvation for punching people in the face. Hard. And it's an impressive little doohicky. Extremely powerful, it grants your whole party an extreme boost to their defenses - immunity to crits, +AL, +regen, and 5DR - for a full 30 minutes. Which is insane. But since it's a quest reward it doesn't really bother me since there's a finite supply of them. It's powerful, yeah, but you can only get so many so it's not like you can run around perma-boosted with it. Not forever, anyway. But I did a little digging around this morning and the red warning light is going off in the back of my mind.

Before I go further, allow me a little anecdote. Now, I'm going to talk comic books which I presume won't be a problem. But I just wanted to warn you because, yes, I play video games and read comic books, and the geek level is about to reach critical. But, because I read comics, and I know comics, and I'm about to climb up on a soapbox and crank the comic book shop geekery up to 11.

Superman, when he was first introduced back in the late 1930s was a vastly different character than the one we know today. If you took the Superman from Superman Returns and stacked him up against the Superman of Action Comics #1, you'd hardly believe they were the same fictional character because they have about as much in common as Batman and the Punisher. The Superman of the 30s was just that. A super man. You probably know the words but he could leap tall buildings in a single bound, he could outrace speeding bullets, he was stronger than a locomotive engine. And...that's it. He was from a planet where evolution was ahead of ours and came to ours as the ideal man, the ubermensch. No flying. No special vision powers. Just a really strong guy who got around like the Hulk does, by leaping miles in a single bound. He was also far different characterwise, being much more of a populist vigilante, busting up gambling rings and corrupt politicians like a Dick Tracy, than the brooding "watching over the world" figure of today.

And that's because the character changed with the times. He became popular, got his own radio and then television show. And the writers and the creators began to tinker and alter with things, bringing out the best in the concept while trimming away what didn't work in those days before people cared about rigid story to story continuity. By the 50s, he was a paternalist father figure, straight out of Leave it to Beaver. And he'd also become the greatest superhero ever. He'd learned how to fly, how to see through walls, to time travel, even how to speak hundreds of languages and project his voice miles away and all the other powers that had been added to him over the years. He wasn't just strong anymore, he was the strongest. He wasn't juggling cars, he was juggling planets, suns. There was nothing he couldn't do because the writers and the public had decided that he was the best hero and he should be able to do anything better than all the other heroes who came afterwards. The man part became Clark Kent and the focus was on the super as the iconic version of the character took form. He was, basically, Jesus, and the only way bad things happened on Earth was because he let them. But there was a problem. How do you tell stories about an invulnerable, immeasurably strong character who's superfast and supersmart and supergood at everything? How do you wring dramatic tension out of that? Superman can turn back time and fly through the heart of the sun, how do you put him in danger?

The answer is you don't, and that's why a lot of the Silver Age stories about Supes are famous for their Superdickery. You have to resort to farcical, sitcom, soap opera fun and games over relationships and secret identities in order to have a story. So, somewhere along the lines the decision was made to scale back Superman's powers. During the famous Sandman series, he lost something like a third of his powers to an evil duplicate from another dimension or something that makes sense in comic book science, along with other changes like kryptonite being rendered obsolete, all designed to power down Superman a bit and create a chance for real, dramatic stories. Of course, a third of infinity is still infinity and the reduction in Superman's power was soon forgotten and the dramatic problems started all over again.

Then along came Crisis and the Man of Steel reboot. Starting over fresh, they not only ripped up a lot of what made Superman a compelling character but they also set out to keep his (and other heroes) powers at a reasonable level. This, too, didn't stick and now the pendulum's swung back in the other direction. Superman's been recently re-empowered and he's moving back closer to his Silver Age roots as the excesses of Byrne's reboot are being trimmed away. Everyone knows Superman is the greatest, everyone's got the Superman movies or serials in the back of their mind. But everyone wants a good story, too, and stories about an invincible demi-god are hard to pull off. Those competing dynamics are destined to pull Superman back and forth over the line between too powerful and too weak for probably as long as he's being written.

Now, I just bored you with that story because, to me, it perfectly illustrates the danger of the power creep. That's the tendancy, over time, for the stakes to be raised. In video games, in movie sequels, in comic books, in long running series, when the writers, the creators, are stuck, the easiest way to create some dramatic impulse is to say, "And this time, it's for real." Instead of fighting for their city, they fight for the country, instead of the country, the world, instead of the world, the galaxy, instead of the galaxy the universe. Start out with one bad guy in a martial arts movie? Well, to make the fight seem tougher you add another and then another and another and pretty soon you have your star mowing down pack after pack of faceless ninjas leaping to their doom. But that red queen's race makes it hard to go back. Makes it difficult to cause excitement about a smaller story. To go from saving the world to something less ambitious. You have to keep upping the ante, have to keep increasing the stakes, until you've become a parody. Or a cliche.

RPGs are especially vulnerable to this because they're all about numbers and levels and special features. It's easy to tack a few more levels onto the cap. Or introduce a brand new, must have item. Or a new mechanic. But once you start pushing the boundaries upwards, it's hard to push them back down. And, like Superman, you're going to have all sorts of problems as you undershoot and overshoot the problem trying to fix the mess you caused yourself. By trying to solve the problem you'll create all sorts of new troubles. The simplest answer is to just not add more power into the system at all. But, keep in mind that the developers are trying to sell their products and people like to feel powerful, like to have better things than everyone around them. And they get bored if they feel like they're straining against the cap. So developers are torn between trying to keep their games from spiraling out of control and pleasing their audience and investors.

Guild Wars would seem to be somewhat immune to this. After all, the idea behind the game is strength through options not power. The point of the low level cap, which sadly seems to get missed by most players, is that you don't need to grind out a bunch of useless levels to be at your strongest. You reach that point early in the game and can focus on improving yourself in other ways. By working on your personal player skills, sure, but mostly by collecting more skills and choices to work with. Grinding in Guild Wars isn't, or I should say wasn't, thank you very much title tracks, about needing to have those last few levels or uberitem to compete, you get smaller and smaller returns the closer you get to the max, it's about filling out those skill lists and being able to adapt yourself to a given situation. Someone who doesn't spend a lot of time, theoretically, can keep up with someone who plays the game for hours, if they're smart or they stick to what they know works. You worry about new skills and profession unbalancing the game, of course, but compared to a more traditional MMO you're talking about razor thin margins. The kind of margins you need in a well balanced PvP game, of course, but nothing like the disparities between a lv60 Warlock trying to duel a lv70 loaded down with epic tier whatever gear.

But my warning klaxon is going off because there's been a disturbing trend to creep up the power in the game. Mostly, as a way of rewarding those players who've been playing, to entice them to keep playing, and to give them the goodies and treats they've been clamoring for as they have. That's why we have things like titles. Grinding those out is a way to keep players interested, a carrot for those who stick with the game. And, I'd add, a perversion of the casual, "you can play if you have five hours or five minutes" game I was originally sold on. And those titles which used to be matters of strictly prestige - you didn't get anything for becoming a cartographer or having a Tombs rank of 9 except the respect and admiration, even envy, of your peers - have accrued in-game benefits. It started out slowly, the way power creeps always do. The PvP ranks increase your faction cap. Some PvE ranks give you better chances to succeed with chests and salvaging items. And then you had Nightfall where your Lightbringer ranks would give you vast bonuses in the later stages of the game. You'd have damage resistance and do more damage with your special skill. And, now, with GW:EN, there are even more titles which you're going to need to craft the best armor and get the bonus and PvE skills you need to get into the best groups. Not to mention the way favor works now, requiring players in your territory to max out their titles in order to open the gates to some content. Which is fine for the people who spend hours and hours playing but what about the casual player? What about the neophytes who are just picking up the game? The players playing love things like titles and more power but it drives away the people who aren't playing, instead of inviting them in.

And, now, not only are their PvE only skills to get which are going to imbalance the PvE side of things, there are also things like the Armor of Salvation. Or the Powerstone of Courage, which will wipe out all your DP, if you can beat the Defense of the Eye quest (which I haven't managed to, yet). But not only that, while traipsing through the collected knowledge of the interwebs to find out more about them, I also stubmled across a little item called the Grail of Might. The deal there is, if your Norn rank is high enough - level 3 or 8k points - you can talk to an NPC who'll craft it and other items for you. For a price of course. Some crafting materials, a pitance of gold, and a skill point. And with that, you can give your team an amazing boost to their health and energy and attributes for a full 30 minutes.

The problem here is that it creates a gap between the people who can easily afford to craft a few Grails before every run and those who can't. They don't create a situation where the people who have them have a nice little bonus, they create an environment where those who don't have a debilitating penalty. I have a few friends who play WoW and they have similar complaints about potions and other consumable buffs. They provide bonuses and protections for the various raids and dungeon crawls and whatever it is people who play that game do with their time, but they're incredibly expensive to produce. You can spend a lot of gold, a lot of resources, equipping your character with those items and there are players who spend their time before or after a raid just farming for the goods they need to deck themselves out for the next raid. Those potions, and the time sink it takes to get them, are almost a requirement if you want to get into the best guilds and raid groups. They aren't just something that's nice to have, they're something you have to have if you want to compete.

And that's exactly what I see happening with these mega-consumables. I only know of the three - the Grail, one that's like a massive Light of Dwayna that resurrects your whole party, and another that lets you transfer a skill point to another character at a premium - there might yet be others from the Asura or the Dwarves or the Vanguard. And all of them are nice, in concept. I can see why people would want and use all of them. They're going to be popular. And the players are going to want, going to ask, going to demand more. And the devs will probably give them to them. Maybe not in GW1, but in GW2? You think they're not learning what works and what doesn't before the next go around? But these consumables are going to become a prereq. A way for the rich to get richer. And by rich, I mean the people who have the means or time to spend playing the game all day and not the casual players or guilds. There are going to be those teams that run around perma-boosted to the roof and those that aren't. And the real danger here is that those perma-boost get taken into account in the game's design. If the developers start tweaking encounters and difficulties to compensate for the fact that the hardcore PvE grinders are saying that they're too easy. When the reason isn't that they're too easy but that the hardcore, who've made a point to have all the available bonuses, are playing under a different set of rules than the average, casual player. You start shifting the game to compensate for these consumable bonuses and it becomes a vicious feedback loop. You need to get the consumables to play and you need to play to get the consumables.

It's grind, people! And not the good kind. Way back before the game was released, we had this discussion, this debate over skill crystals. Back in the day, you didn't learn skills from trainers but through crystals that bosses would drop, randomly. And the twist was that each crystal, which was an inventory item, could also be clicked on to temporarily add a 9th skill to your bar which you could use like any other skill there until it faded away. They lasted something like 5 minutes. Thing was, you could use them in PvP just as much as you could in PvE. And there was a huge upcry of people who didn't like that mechanic because it meant that people who had the means to get a bunch of crystals in their inventories before a match started were at an advantage over those who didn't. They envisioned competitive players grinding for hours to fill themselves to the brim with every conceivable skill to prepare for every eventuality. That they'd have a leg up and everyone who didn't would be out of luck. I was one of the people calling for moderation, saying that the ability to sample and try spells and the diversity a 9th skill - which could be from any profession, not just your own - added was a good thing, favored simple measures like disabling them during PvP matches but, eventually, it was decided they had to go. Too much grind. Too much accumulation of power, not just options. Just not the kind of game that Guild Wars was trying to be. And, now? Well, it's pretty sad that it turned out to be that kind of game after all.