Grinding Narratives

Grind is feared by developers, avoided by would-be buyers, but secretly loved by gamers.  It's a controversial little thing that has emerged from the most addictive and most played genres in gaming history.  Game developers are constantly trying to find ways to eliminate it, but all they end up doing is changing its nature.  In this collection of words, I'm basically going to defend the Grind.

With Diablo 3 about to arrive, I've been considering whether Blizzard will be making any bold steps to defeat the Grind.  In making a prediction, we have to look back at how developers have tried to tackle the problem over the years, and the easiest way to do this, of course, is to look at MMORPGs.

Everquest 1, by modern standards, was very light on questing.  Most of your time in the game would be spent grinding with a group of players at the bottom of some dungeon somewhere.  The game made no attempt to guide you there with narrative, and your time there wasn't spiced up with story events, NPC dialogue or fanciful set pieces.  It was just you and a handful of players alone with the rawest of gameplay mechanics.  Class interaction, group roles, combat, survival and loot.  The original grind.

This minimalist gameplay is directly comparable to how things were/are in Diablo 2 on Battle.net.   Where do many players spend most of their time as their character progresses through the levels?  Tristram runs, tomb runs, cow runs and finally baal runs.  Maybe some meph/diablo gear runs along the way to hell.  Was there any narrative here?  Any attempt at storytelling?  No - the narrative exists in the quest progression, a system that sits separately from these runs.

Back in the world of MMOs, we start seeing quests becoming more and more the focus.  Anarchy Online uses a random mission system as the main source of XP and loot while leveling.  A few years later WoW is released with 2 big steps taken to reduce the grind further:  First, enough unique quests are designed that the player can reach the cap just by following them (*not strictly true at launch). Second, dungeons became linear instances with a start and an end point, and played more like levels from traditional games than MUD/EQ-style dungeons.  In many ways, the rest of the Everquest gameplay remained untouched (avoiding a debate on death penalties or travel); it was still a game of levels and loot.

Nowadays, most will agree that the "collect 10 bear pelts" quest structure is a grindy mechanic, and some will also agree that running the same instance 50 times to progress is just as grindy.  So what did these mechanics actually solve?  The grind is still there, but now there is pointless fluff the player has to constantly discard as they optimize their playtime to progress at the fastest rate.  Now, rather than efficient play being purely about a how well your group of players can kill and survive, it's also about knowing which trash mobs you can walk around by glitching up the side of the map, clicking through NPC dialogue as quickly as possible and knowing where those 10 levers are that you need to pull in order to complete some repeatable quest for the 500th time.

So what did Bioware try to do with SWTOR?  Mask the grind even more.  Add more narative.  Now not only are dungeons linear instances that you'll run 50 times, but each time you run them you get a re-telling of the same story, with small superficial choices thrown in to further make people feel like theyre playing a traditional game rather than the the old, grindy MMO of the past.   Did this cure the grind?  No.  People were grinding Black Talon constantly for "social points", skipping through unnecessary dialogue and cut-scenes as fast as possible to maximise how many points they could get per hour.  Daily flashpoint quests mean long term players are seeing the same key characters follow the same set pieces over and over again , skipping through them because they lost interest in that microstory a long time ago.  Unless people are only running these instances once with each character, they'll inevitably become grinds no matter how much money you throw at voice actors.

Ultimately, in these games, a lot of people will do whatever it takes to progress quickly and effectively.  More than that, entire meta-games will emerge based around quick progression.  Throwing narrative fluff in the way of them just makes this experience less genuine, and somehow more tedious.  What would you rather do?  A load of aimless tomb runs, where it's just you, your allies and constant combat and loot? Or repeating the same directed storyline many times over (NPC talks to party, party skips cutscene, party kills monster, NPC talks to party, etc)?  The former is pure gameplay; it is the essence of the game, uninterrupted and undirected.  The latter, in contrast, quickly becomes a frustrating experience.  Closing dialog boxes or pressing ESC to skip a cut-scene simply isn't gameplay.

From interviews with the Diablo 3 dev team, one of the biggest differences between Diablo 2 and 3 will be the stronger emphasis on storytelling.  Which leads me back to my main point.  By all means, tell a story as the player progresses through the acts.  But it only needs to be told once per difficulty - per playthrough.  Nobody needs to hear some small part of the story repeated 500 times a week just because it happens to exist at a particularly farmable point in the game.  Nobody wants to farm Black Talon endlessly.

Diablo was always, first and foremost, about the pure loot-hunting experience:  The original grind.  This author hopes that Blizzard has embraced this, and that we won't find ourselves forever stuck in narrative deja vu while searching for that Windforce.