Instancing - Panacea or Pandora's Box?
Chris 'Inauro' Penning, 2005-10-21

>Look

You see a door

>Listen at door

You hear nothing

Ready to knock?

Doors - they're about as ubiquitous in fantasy role-playing games as pointed ears on Elves, maidens in distress, and Dwarves with beards and hangovers. How many times have you come to that archetypal door and paused to decide whether to pick the lock, slip a mirror past the jamb, or have one of the brawnier members of your party bash it down, barrel on through, and save you the trouble of having to murder him later for his +2 Cape of Rushing-In-Without-Looking-And-Getting-Us-All-Killed?

These days, however, a door is as likely to disguise an instance as it is a merchant's daughter's room ripe for the pillaging. The room that is, not the daughter. You people. One. Track. Minds.

Instances, like many aspects of modern MMORPGs that we take for granted, are not a new thing. Historically, instancing has been used to provide players with access to content that does not need to be included in the day-to-day game world to be meaningful, or content that if it were included, might have a detrimental impact on the world as a whole. Player owned apartments in Anarchy Online and Moogle Houses in Final Fantasy XI: Online are good examples of this type of instancing.

MMOs that have not made use of instancing for player housing have often had to endure the scars left by urban blight (the ghost towns of Tatooine and Britannia spring to mind), or have turned to large scale housing estates such as those in use in Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) to mitigate the problem. It is worth noting, of course, that DAoC's housing estates are reached through loading zones and could almost be termed instances themselves.

But let's backtrack a bit. What is an instance anyway? Wikipedia defines an instance [dungeon] as:

In MMORPGs…a special area, typically a dungeon, that generates a new copy, or instance, for each group that enters the area.

This secondary, but now almost as common use of instancing is typified by the mission door. Again, the venerable Anarchy Online may have made the first truly mainstream use of this form of instancing. Take a mission from a mission terminal, head out into the wilderness to the co-ordinates on your map, open the door in some randomly generated landscape feature and, voila, a cave, sewer, or office is waiting just for you and those you've invited along for the ride. It is this sort of instancing that Richard A. Bartle (author of Designing Virtual Worlds and the now legendary Bartle Test - Explorer 80%, Socialiser 53%, Achiever 33%, Killer 33% if you wanted to know) commented on in a 2004 Gamasutra Soapbox article entitled, Why Virtual Worlds Are Designed By Newbies - No Really!:

Instancing looks very appealing on the face of it: groups of friends can play together without interference in relative tranquility. What's not to love?

The thing is, this is not what virtual worlds are about. How can you have any impact on a world if you're only using it as a portal to a first-person shooter? How do you interact with people if they're battened down in an inaccessible pocket universe? Where's the sense of achievement, of making a difference, of being someone?

Most players don't see it that way, though.

 Aye, there's the rub. Most players don't see it that way, though.

Most players, I'd argue, see instancing as a cure to the prime evils of MMOs. After all, instancing reduces competition for items and mobs within the instance and all but eliminates the MMO bogies of kill-stealing and spawn-camping. Of course, that other perennial favourite, ninja-looting, is not, and perhaps cannot, be eliminated by instancing. In fact, ninja-looting may be exacerbated by instancing in that players plagued by a ninja-looter are often faced with having to repeat the entire instance to regain that ninja'd item, rather than merely waiting for a mob to respawn, or a chest to be reset. The ninja, meanwhile, has disbanded, been automatically ejected from the instance, and is making his way to the nearest merchant or Auction House to pawn his ill gotten gains for gold.

Oddly enough, the part of the above experience that the players involved are most likely to reminisce about later is the ninja-looter, not the instance. Perhaps that's because no one likes a ninja looter, but maybe it's because, as Bartle suggests, virtual worlds are not about being isolated in pocket universes, they're about interaction, and the most exciting form of interaction is often unregulated contact with other players. Remember them? Other players? The people outside the instance that can't come in unless they agree to play by the rules…

Interaction of this type is something that instancing is working very hard to remove from MMOs. Hand in hand with game mechanics such as tapping and flagging, instancing is going a long way to remove all unregulated contact between players. Unregulated contact that often provides some of the most exciting, and frustrating, it's true, game-play to be experienced in an MMO; anyone run down by a group of howling barbarians while questing in a contested zone can no doubt testify to the error made by modern anatomy when it concluded that the heart is not located in the throat. Allow me to introduce, Messrs Mayhem, Chaos, and Fun!

Chaos and unregulated contact can foster the very sort of emergent gameplay that players frustrated by the limitations of scripted content and wanting to make their mark on the virtual worlds in which they've invested so much time and, let's face it, money, frequently for. The desire for gameplay that doesn't fit within the designers' original plans can be seen in the rise of in-game casinos, the fashion for BASE jumping in many games, and even good old fashioned player killing.

The recent affliction that has been welcomed by many World of Warcraft players as a world event of the type that the developers had long said was impossible to achieve, might not have occurred if the Zul'Gurub instance had been "working as intended". For some time now the World of Warcraft forums have been abuzz with players pleading with the developers to turn the unintended plague into an official world event, and to add more unscripted content. Does this sound like the sort of action that players want more of, or less?

Without the ability to act outside the box players are limited to those areas and experiences envisioned by the designers during development. This means that the allowable forms of gameplay begin and end in places planned for by the developers, and do not take thought for the changing wants and needs of the players.

What happens, then, when the players have exhausted all of the allowable content? Do they create an alt and play through the game again in the developer-prescribed manner? Do they wait for an expansion pack which is likely to contain more of the same, only different? Do they complain endlessly on the message boards that there is nothing to do once the endgame has been reached? Or do they move on to another game? If current MMOs are anything to go by, the answer is all of the above. How much better might it be for the ongoing state of the game if players were offered a chance to leave the instances and make their own castles in the developers' sandbox?

So where is this current love affair with instancing taking us? If the success of World of Warcraft and the proposed design of Dungeons and Dragons Online is anything to go by, to a destination that will be arrived at through an instance portal. Both MMOs make heavy use of instancing, with World of Warcraft's developers adding new content via the expedient of slapping down a portal in an existing area, and adding yet another raid instance beyond, while Dungeons and Dragons Online's developers, it appears, intend to make the entire world a latticework of interlocking instances over which travel will be represented by a red line.

Hey, Dr. Jones, no time for love.