Kill or Be Killed
This week I’ve been playing City of Heroes. I also tried out Revenge of the Jedi, a MUD set in the Star Wars universe. In each of them I experienced multiple play styles, and my experience with each of the games varied depending how I chose to play, though in very different ways.
In City of Heroes, I first started out as an achiever. Before recently signing up to try out the game I hadn’t had much exposure to it. When I created my first character I wanted to level up as quickly as possible so that I could gain new powers and abilities for my Scrapper. The power I most desired was my movement power, which is only accessible at level 14. I started out questing right away to get there as quickly as possible. I’ve found I initially adopted an exploratory mode of play in previous MMOs I’ve tried, including World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. However, in City of Heroes questing is relatively easy to get into. Most of the quests involve killing a certain type of enemy repeatedly. Sometimes I had to resort to exploration in order to find these enemies. For example, in one quest I had to kill some mobs that only spawned on rooftops so I tried climbing to the tops of buildings by using fire escapes jumping up on window ledges.
I had been doggedly working my way towards level 14, resorting to exploring and killing when necessary, when the game play shifted. The quest suddenly became much harder so I had to group with other players in order to move on. Once I started joining groups, I took a more active interested in socializing with other players and suddenly leveling up wasn’t as important. I started using the in-game emotes more, and occasionally complimented other players on cool powers or spiffy costumes they had. In all, I found socializing with players made the game more rewarding and took some of the pressure off of constantly having to level up.
During my 45-minute stint in Revenge of the Jedi, I went through three different game play phases. I began as an explorer. Since my only experience with text-based RPGs had been limited to a brief foray into LambdaMOO, it took me a while to get my bearings. After about ten minutes of fumbling around in the game world I made my way to the training area for new players. Here I met up with Oscar who was also trying out the MUD for the first time. As we progressed through the training area we adopted more of an achievement-based play style. A pattern developed. We’d enter a new room, kill whatever was in it (usually a training droid), and loot the room for items. After about 20 minutes of doing this we hadn’t gained much experience and my items had started to disappear randomly from my inventory.
At this point Oscar and I decided to start player killing, hoping that would prove more exciting. We teleported back to the main player area and tried attacking one of the NPC who happened to be a defenseless little girl. Unfortunately we failed to notice a guard standing nearby, who put a stop to our murderous attempts by killing off Oscar’s character. I guess even killers can use a bit of exploration now and then.