Random Dialogue: Universal Appeal
Dialogue, 2004-08-30

While I was pleased by this development, I wasn't terribly surprised. After all, this was a couple that had been playing MMORPGs for a while now. Then more folks started getting into the act. A gentleman who is an inveterate gamer but hasn't even had a focus in MMOGs picked up the game and within a week was higher level than I was. He dragged in his brother and his brother's girlfriend, two people who to my knowledge had never even touched a MMOG before. Just recently at GenCon, a pair of game snobs who have long shunned many aspects of the Massive genre were felled by the prospect of a free copy of CoH, given away at the NCSoft booth. Whether they make it past the free month is still up in the air, but the fact that they were willing to give it a shot says a great deal about the drawing power of this game.

What's the draw? What makes City of Heroes a massive game that people can get behind without trepidation, while EQ and SWG continue to have flagging numbers? As anyone who has read some of my previous columns can attest to, I've touched on this before. I think it bears looking into though, so I'll give a bullet point breakdown of the key features that I think tie this game into the popular consciousness -

• Easy Signup - Making an account and creating a character are intuitive processes.
• Pickup Games - It's incredibly easy to hop on and play for 30 minutes and then quit knowing you've accomplished something.
• Accessible Content - By placing the game in the modern age, Cryptic does away with any knowledge gaps that fantasy games can have.
• Personalization - The character creation process binds the player to his avatar in a direct and intimate way.
• Sidekicking - It cannot be overstated how much it makes a difference to be able to play with your friends.

The next game that takes root as a non-niche phenomenon will undoubtedly share some of these characteristics. As for improving on CoH's high points, there are a few areas that I think could be more fleshed out. The tutorial is where I think the most work could be done. There are many game concepts left unexplored by the tutorial that come up almost immediately upon exiting into the game world proper. The Everquest and Everquest 2 tutorials should, I think, be viewed as benchmarks for the industry in their completeness and ease of use. While EQ2's pervasive use of voiceovers is a larger choice, voiceovers in the tutorial (done in EQ, EQ2, and SWG) makes for a very human, very personal initial experience.

To steal from another game, the web-based components that World of Warcraft is going to introduce are appeal generating features as well. Detailed information about your characters via a web interface is a good first step. To take it further, allowing you to see which of your friends and guild mates are on at a given time via a web interface would be ideal. While there have already been discussions of developing external to the game text messaging services that could interact with in-game players, combining these two would allow a real world presence that I think would reassure people. The "IM" mentality is something that a lot of people already understand. Hopping onto AIM (or via cell phone?), having someone text message you from in-game that something big is going down would provide a sense of physicality that non-MMOG players may have trouble grasping.

In the end, the marketing of a game is only part of the reason that people buy it. Word of mouth advertising still counts for a lot. If your game is hard to explain ("You have to act out hamlet in a certain way in order to win the creature's trust!") no matter how enthusiastic your friends are, you're just not going to get into it. Accessible content and a good design mean that current players can enthuse to their friends in terms that are easy to understand. Universal appeal is not about building the greatest game, it's about building a good game that people can relate to.