The Stack

I still haven’t reached Combat‘s thirtieth and presumably final level. I think I’ve got up to level 29, but that one’s a real killer. Since all I likely have ahead of me is the end boss, let’s take a look at the other bosses I’ve encountered so far.

The first one you encounter is a spinning octagonal lump that bounces around inside a large square arena. It periodically extends four symmetrically-arranged arms radially until they hit the edge, then sweeps them around for a while, forcing you to circle around with them if you don’t want to get hurt. Each arm ends in a clearly-shootable pod, which explodes, destroying the arm, after a little persistence — the easiest approach is to follow one along an edge so you can keep it lined up with your gun. After all four arms are gone, they’re replaced with guns, which you also have to destroy one by one. It’s pretty straightforward.

Level 10 puts us in a sort of maze — not a complicated one, but large, in the sense that the hallways are wide and long. An armored contraption shaped sort of like a minibus patrols this maze, shooting barrages of unusually large bullets and moving far faster than you can go without a speed boost powerup (of which there are several to be found). Fighting it involves shooting from a distance and running away a lot — the temptation is to face off squarely against it, because that works on most enemies, but it’s just the wrong approach here. This is the boss that guards the first automatic save point, and I remember having a very difficult time of it at first, because I couldn’t tell if I was damaging it or not. Unlike the previous boss, it had no obvious vulnerable spots, and no isolated weapon bits to shoot off. All I could do is keep on pelting it and hope that I was having an effect.

The third boss is actually two, a pair of modestly-oversized tanks running on concentric tracks around a solid obstacle, circling faster than your tank can move. The floor drops away on either side of the tracks, as well as between them; there are only a few spots where you can stand with no danger of being run over, and if you just sit motionless on one of those spots, you’ll just get shot instead. However, killing either one of the two tanks means that you can move to its track and safely dodge fire from the other. This is one of the less-satisfying boss levels, mainly because it was so hard to avoid getting hurt that it didn’t seem worth bothering, but also in part because the enemies here just don’t seem as impressive as the others.

The fourth boss is essentially a very big turret, sitting in the void, stationary but rotating to face you as you move around on a U-shaped ledge. It has multiple guns, some firing multiple sprays of scattering bullets, some firing bombs that do splash damage, and apparently some firing souped-up jets, themselves capable of shooting at you. (This last touch was proabably necessary to keep the fight from getting monotonous. Without the jets, the focus of the action would always be on the turret, whether aiming at it or dodging it.) Mainly you pass this stuff by just constantly keeping in motion, which is a good idea in most situations anyway. After the last of the conventional guns goes down, the turret’s outer casing falls off to reveal the last line of defense: a sweeping beam weapon. Just like in a whole bunch of vertical-scrolling shooters, it takes a little while to power up, and then fires continuously for long enough to corner you if you didn’t rush to the other side when you heard the about-to-fire-beam-weapon audio cue.

Level 25 puts you in an open arena with a few unnavigable holes. The boss, however, it puts outside this arena. Just as the level 20 boss was a very large turret, this boss is a very large jet. It goes through a cycle of several attack patterns: zooming across the battlefield to ram you, summoning smaller jets, firing its scatter-guns, laying a line of bombs, using the same sort of sweeping beam as in the end of level 20. The scatter-guns can be destroyed individually, but this just knocks that attack out of the cycle. The peculiar thing is that it’s only shootable at certain moments in its routine. It only descends to tank-level when the attack it’s attempting makes it necessary.

My guess is that the final boss will be a massive tank, because the ending is the time to reiterate the game’s main theme, especially if you’ve been going with variations for a while. But that doesn’t tell me much about what the fight will be like. Because really, when you come down to it, the main thing that distinguishes the boss fights in this game from each other isn’t the bosses so much as the terrain, and the boss’s relation to it. That’s the thing that determines how the player can respond to them, whether it’s possible to dodge or hide, etc.

I described the look of Combat as Tron-like, but the first two batches of levels are relatively subdued about it. The floors are concrete-textured and the walls look a bit like painted metal, just laid out in a blatantly non-representational way and floating in space. Starting at level 21, however, the game takes on an even more self-consciously artificial tone: the environment is all flat black with faint grid lines, brightly-colored edges and occasional stripes, like neon lights. I wish I had a screenshot to share — the game is resistant to the usual ways of producing them, probably consuming all keyboard input before the OS gets it. At any rate, it’s a striking look, reminiscent of wireframe models, but also basically a look we’ve seen before, in Tron and elsewhere.

The third batch also ramps up the difficulty a great deal. I managed to get through level 20 on the same day that I got through level 10, but progress through the remainder is slower, and requires more adaptation to special situations. But before I describe them, I should describe the types of enemy.

Before level 21, there were basically four categories of enemies. The most basic ones are missile-like things that spawn, launch themselves at you in a straight line, and explode when they hit a wall or when you shoot them. Next, there are jet-like things that glide about within a plane and can go off the edge without falling; they try to damage you by bumping into you, but tend to go zooming past if you keep moving. Like the missiles, they can be destroyed with a single hit. These two types form the main grunt forces of the game. Next level up, and relatively rare, are the enemy tanks, which come in various varieties, some faster, some with greater firepower, some with more hit points. And finally there are stationary turrets, which are best taken out from a long distance.

Level 21’s high concept is that it’s highly constrained. You’re in a small arena where multiple waves of jets spawn and must be dealt with from close up. After the first few waves, they’re joined by a new type of enemy, a roving bomb that homes in on you and damages you if you’re too close when you destroy it. This quickly becomes the most annoying type of enemy in the game, the sort of thing that you’d genocide if you were playing Nethack.

There’s one level based on the concept of lack of railings. Throughout the game, some areas have low walls around them that your tank bounces off of, and others just let you drop off into the void. So there’s really nothing new in the level I’m describing, except its eagerness to make you fall. There are infinitely-respawning roving bomb units that you can only get past by moving quickly, but they’re located on narrow catwalks where moving quickly is dangerous. Also, it’s on this level that we learn that the explosions from the bombs are capable of pushing you short distances.

If I sound like I’m griping, let me offset it by describing one level I quite like. It’s all one big open space, except for a walled-off room in the middle where the exit portal spawns after you’ve survived long enough. In this room, dozens of those jets are spawning all the time, along with an occasional tank. There are power-ups scattered about, including the one that lets you fire three shots at a time in different directions, the one that makes your shots bounce off walls (which can be used in conjunction with the three-at-a-time one), and, most importantly, the one that grants you temporary invulnerability. The power-ups are so crucial, and time out so quickly, that you’re constantly seeking more of them, which means you spend your time zooming all around, sometimes invulnerable. It’s a nicely chaotic battle, a big adrenalin surge in a very adrenalin-oriented game. This game got poor reviews, but here, it satisfies.

I finally made some permanent progress in Combat (2001 Infogrames remake). There was none in my previous two sessions. This game doesn’t have a save/load mechanism, and to a player starting from the beginning (and who hasn’t read the manual thoroughly), it’s not at all clear that there’s any saved state between sessions at all. In fact, beating the first ten levels (including two boss fights) permanently opens up a passage in the starting area (like the passages that let you access the different worlds in the original Quake) that lets you skip to level 11 in the future, and likewise beating level 20 lets you skip to level 21. But there’s no recognition of this in the game itself, no notification of any kind. Only after your game ends (presumably in defeat) and you start a new game do you see that you don’t have to start over from level 1 again. And you’re probably not going to see it immediately. You’re probably not eager to launch into a new session immediately, given that you’ve just got through 10 levels in a single session, something that takes about a half an hour and leaves your hands wrecked, and that you don’t know the first time that you won’t have to start over from level 1 again.

It didn’t come as a surprise to me this time, though, because I remember getting past level 10 in my original attempts at this game, years ago. And in fact now that I’ve gotten that far, I’ve also managed to keep going and breach the second checkpoint — apparently I’ve learned the basic skills needed by the game, and will probably finish it soon. (The main necessary skill, it seems, is assessing when you need to stand and clear the room of enemies and when you need to just make a break for the exit. Either approach is imperative sometimes.) But also, I’m kind of cheesing out. The options menu lets you choose whether you start with three or five lives, and whether your shields at full can withstand three or five hits. Both settings default to 3, and I’ve turned them both up to 5. Without this, I would be starting over from the beginning a lot more, and enjoying the game less (even if I would also be keenly honing my tank-battle skills in the process). But then, a more typical modern game would be giving me infinite lives, or, equivalently, a save/load feature, so all I’m really doing by selecting the easier options is bringing the game closer to being in line with today’s expectations.

Mind you, lives were already retro in 2001, when this game was released. Functionally, their purpose is to make the player start over from the beginning every once in a while and thus extend gameplay — a goal somewhat undermined by the checkpoints every 10 levels. But extending gameplay by making it more repetitive was more excusable in the old days, when games were fewer and shipped on less capacious media. The weird thing is that, although this is of course a deliberately retro game, the game it seeks to evoke isn’t that kind of retro. The concepts I’m describing here are completely outside of Atari Combat‘s ludic vocabulary. In this context, limited lives are both retro and whatever the opposite of “retro” is. They fit comfortably in neither time.

Spectromancer‘s single-player campaign consists of a series of maps with assorted enemies on them. At any given point, you have several available choices of who to fight next, under differing conditions and for differing rewards: some grant new spells, some extra hit points or additional starting mana, some give stranger advantages. You ultimately have to defeat everything on the map to finish it, but the ordering can make a difference to how easy this is. In other words, it’s basically the Mega Man formula, although not nearly as pronounced here as there.

The campaign is pretty short: as I’ve observed about other CCG-derived computer games, it’s probably best regarded as a tutorial for two-player dueling. It provides some nice twists on gameplay at the end, though, such as when the victory condition is to hoard mana, or when you face an opponent who can only cast fire spells but gets five fire mana per turn instead of only one, or when you suddenly have to play a couple of matches as a Spectromancer. Being a Spectromancer means you don’t have the normal fire/water/earth/air elemental spells at all, but instead get five specializations: death, holy, mechanical, illusion, and control.

Illusion had been my own character’s normal specialization, and seemed to be the only one I could choose on my first play-through (probably because I hadn’t yet found the place to enter my registration key and the game was playing in demo mode). The others in that list (as well as a sixth, Chaos) were things I had encountered in enemies — Control seemed a particularly fearful thing to me, because its focus is on depowering the opponent and preventing you from doing stuff. But these are not the only specializations in the game: apparently the Steam bundle that I bought included some DLC defining a few more that I hadn’t seen at all, such as Sorcery and Demonology. Now that I’ve completed the Campaign mode once, I can start over with any of them.

But you know something? I’m probably not going to spend much time with these new options, or with the various other game modes. I’m trying out the remaining specialties in tournament mode (challenging a series of computer-controlled opponents without a plot) to see what they add, but other than that, I’m feeling like I’m pretty much done with this game. I’ve seen what it has to say.

It does have some pretty good ideas. If the campaign took me longer to complete, I could keep writing about one interesting twist per session and not run out of material for some time. I particularly liked the mechanic of the Elementals, a common highest-level summon: their attack power is equal to your mana pool in the corresponding element. This means that their strength is potentially unbounded, but only if you don’t weaken them by spending the mana. So once you have elementals in play, they distort your decisions. Also, if you summon an elemental as soon as you have enough mana, you spend all the mana in the act of summoning it and leave it with no attack strength at all — but it’s usually worth it anyway, because elementals also increase the rate of mana gain for their element.

One more thing I’d like to comment on before closing this: the plot. The campaign mode’s story is mostly forgettable, just your basic dark lord destined to rise again and chosen one seeking out the scattered fragments of an artifact in order to battle the encroaching darkness. But at the end, it manages a twist on the idea that I don’t recall seeing before [SPOILERS]: it ultimately turns out that, in the previous age, after the Sauron wannabe lost his bid for world domination, he repented and started to seek redemption. The player character has forgotten that he is none other than the same dark lord, risen again for the purpose of stopping what he put in motion a thousand years previously. I think the last game that I saw do something this clever with a Chosen One plot was The Longest Journey, which went in a rather different direction. Why are we not seeing more variations like this? Would they grow tiresome if we did?

Spectromancer gives you a random assortment of 20 spells in each match, in a grid of four levels and five elements. The levels just correspond to increasing power and mana costs, and in the single-player campaign mode, you don’t have access to the fourth level at first. The elements are fire, water, air, earth, and a specialty that varies with the character — possible specialties include Cleric, Illusionist, Mechanist, and a few others. Each element has its own mana, which builds up at a constant rate of 1 unit per turn, unless altered by magical effects: certain creatures aid you by accumulating mana faster, and at least one creature decreases it for the opponent. This is a mechanic that would probably be unwieldy in an actual card game, but it’s fine when a computer is keeping track of it.

Note that I describe continuing magical effects as properties of creatures. That’s because summoning spells are the only continuing effects in the game. Anything that isn’t a summon is an instant. This is one of the game’s the most severe bits of streamlining. The effect on the design is that things that would be enchantments in a more M:tG-like system are instead things with hit points, and have to be put on the board, where they can be attacked and destroyed.

The board consists of six columns and two rows, one row for each player. When you summon a creature, you choose a column, and for the most part, it doesn’t move from there. This placement takes the place of assigning blockers. When your creatures attack — which they do every turn, with no option of holding them back — they’re blocked by the opposing creature in the same column. I remember seeing a CCG prototype with a similar board mechanic a number of years ago. For all I know, it may be commonplace in the more advanced sort of CCG, but I thought at the time that adding a board to a CCG seemed overly elaborate, too rules-heavy. The difference is that in a tabletop game, you have to read and understand the rules (if not their implications) before you can even begin playing. In Spectromancer, you can just play and learn the rules by observation. The ordering of the columns is usually unimportant, but some creatures have effects on the adjacent columns, which is the closest this game gets to a targeted enchantment. Also, combat gets resolved from left to right, which, in rare cases, can be important: if you kill a creature with a global effect, the combat in the remainder of the columns is resolved without that effect.

Combat is done in a similar manner to M:tG, but with one important difference: creatures have hit points, which persist from round to round. The middling-hardy creatures are effectively impossible to kill in a single turn, and have to be killed by degrees, which means that their owner is guaranteed at least one turn of whatever effects they have.

The other day, Play This Thing featured Spectromancer as their game du jour. Since I already had a copy from one of those holiday bundles on Steam, this seemed like as good a cue as any to finally give it a try.

A glance at a screenshot is enough to make it clear that this is a Magic: the Gathering imitation, but that’s a misleading thing to call it for a number of reasons. For one thing, it carries the connotation that the designer is riding on Richard Garfield’s coattails, trying to find an untapped vein of the gold mine he discovered. But Spectromancer was co-designed by Richard Garfield himself, apparently with an eye towards correcting the flaws in the original, or what he perceives to be the flaws. The result is something that shares certain mechanics with M:tG, but not the really important ones.

This isn’t really a CCG at all, you see. It’s more accurate to describe it as a CCG-themed board game. Controversially, there’s no deck-building (just like in Duels of the Planeswalkers — perhaps they’re aiming for the same casual used-to-play-Magic-a-little audience). There isn’t even a deck. I once described how Etherlords simplified the “deck” concept into something easier for computers to deal with. Spectromancer takes this a step or two further. The cards that are available to you are chosen at random at the beginning of each match, and every spell that’s chosen is always available to be cast. The only limitation is your mana.

The gameplay does have a very M:tG-ish feel, but it’s almost unbelievably simplified. In M:tG, turns can run pretty long: you untap your cards, perform any upkeep resulting from continuing enchantments, draw a new card, tap lands to get mana, cast spells, choose creatures to attack, resolve combat, cast more spells. Obviously some bits of this can be simplified by a computer interface, but there’s a tendency for certain cards to mess that up, forcing you to make decisions during the upkeep phase or whatever. Here’s what you do on a turn in Spectromancer: You cast a spell. That’s it. You usually have to choose a target (in the case of a summoning spell, a target location), but that’s the only complication. Turns are short and sweet.

There’s more to say, but I’ll say it tomorrow, after I’ve played a bit more. It’s engaging enough that I’ll probably stick with it until I finish it.

The 2001 remake of Combat could have easily gone another way: attempted realism. Given the theme of tanks, the developers could have tried to make a tank simulator. Any commercial remake would have had to expand greatly on the original in order to justify the price they intended to charge for it, and going for a detailed depiction of realistic military hardware would be one way to do that.

But they didn’t. They instead chose to make it about videogame tanks, blatantly unreal things that exist nowhere outside of software, gliding around on a sequence of floating platforms and ramps that have no history, serve no purpose but to host tank battles. These tanks don’t even have treads. They’re hovercraft, essentially, zipping along on some kind of glowing antigravity engines. This means that they’re capable of strafing left and right — often a useful technique, I’m finding, as it lets you dodge fire from an enemy you’re facing and at the same time saturate the area in the general direction of said enemy with bullets. (The bullets themselves are essentially sparklers.) You can’t aim your gun independent of the direction you’re facing, but at least you can face in a different direction than you’re moving. Not just by strafing, either: you can build up momentum and then spin around without affecting your trajectory. Sometimes the game feels more like Spacewar or Asteroids than Combat.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. The original Combat, and the arcade game it was based on, were, presumably, designed to give an experience that was the closest thing to a realistic tank battle that their programmers could create on the hardware at hand. The end result was highly stylized, but it was stylized by necessity. It isn’t until you have hardware that’s capable of a more realistic simulation that it becomes possible to choose a stylized approach, and this makes the stylization more conspicuous, even though in absolute terms it’s less extreme than in the original. I recall observing something similar with respect to the King’s Quest series.

I recently read Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam, a book about the Atari 2600, with a particular focus on how the games written for it were affected by the limitations and affordances of its rather odd hardware design. I highly recommend it to anyone who reads this blog. The Atari 2600 was my childhood console, and reading about it made me nostalgic enough to pull out a game written specifically to prey on this very nostalgia.

The original Combat was the first cartridge to be bundled with the 2600, and, along with Pong, one of the two games that the platform was specifically designed around. Apparently it was an adaptation and extension of an arcade game called Tank, although the cartridge also featured airplane modes. It was a 2D shooter that required two players — there was no expectation of computer-controlled opponents in those days. Matches lasted exactly two minutes and 16 seconds — I have no idea why they chose that specific number — at the end of which whoever got the most hits on the other guy won. Some playfields had obstacles that blocked movement and fire, others were completely open. It was all very simple and abstract: the tanks were single-colored and blocky, the walls even moreso.

But that’s not what I’m playing. I’m playing the 2001 remake, part of the wave of “classic” game remakes that hit the stores around that time. And of all the remakes I’ve played, this is probably the one that has the least to do with the game it’s based on. It’s a single-player level-based 3D shooter, where the goal on each level is to reach an exit point. The designers kept the tanks (and ditched the airplanes), they adapted the simple abstractness into a sort of Tron-like stylization, and they kept the complete lack of backstory (a laudable decision, and one made by too few of these remakes). Everything else about the original, they just ignored.

And honestly, if it had been up to me, I’d probably have made similar decisions. I suppose that Team Fortress 2 has proved that pure time-limited PvP combat is still viable, if you’re willing to spend years honing it. But this game was made with the constraint of trying to be recognizable as Combat, and that must be difficult for a modern game. Even the most formulaic adaptation possible (which this one is pretty close to being) has to add an awful lot. Heck, a formulaic adaptation has to add more than a clever one, because the original was made with a mindset so far-removed from where the game industry eventually wound up going. I’ve joked before that the general formula for the remakes churned out during this period was to just support 3D acceleration in some way and add power-ups, but the original Combat doesn’t just lack 3D and power-ups, it lacks basic concepts like levels, and lives, and an ending.

There’s been some discussion lately about the role of pre-scripted narrative in MMOs. A lot of people see it as a cheat, a gimmick that only provides pseudostory, and desire a story that’s more reflective of what the players are doing in the gameworld. The WoW model is of course the one most familiar to the greatest number of people, and in WoW, the scripted storylines are, in effect, static features of the environment. The unit of plot is the quest, and quests get done over and over by different players, and that takes away from the sense that you’re participating in the story in any meaningful way: can you really say that you’ve defeated an enemy if you can stand there and watch it respawn and get defeated over and over? (In one extreme case, I was doing a quest that involved leading an NPC around, and was startled to realize that there were multiple simultaneous instances of that NPC simultaneously following different players.)

My own take on the question is a little more complicated. First, let me point out that there are really two separate stories going on in WoW. There’s the pre-scripted story, and there’s the story of the players playing the game — call it the mythos layer and the game layer. The mythos story contains events like the betrayal of Lady Sylvanas, the attempts of both Horde and Alliance to gain the support of the centaur tribes, and the defeat of the Lich King at the hands of a large band of heroes. The game story contains events like druids getting nerfed, the auction price of glyphs going up, and the Cthun raid being successfully completed for the first time. The two layers do have some points of intersection: the Cataclysm, for example, was a major event with wide-reaching consequences in both. But they’re mostly independent, and players can only have a permanent effect on the gameworld at the game layer (and usually only in the aggregate, at that).

Secondly, the above is not at all unusual. Most CRPGs have such a split, including single-player ones. This very blog contains numerous posts analyzing mythos in CRPGs, and also numerous posts recounting my particular experiences playing the same CRPGs — my exploration of their terrain, attempts at making the most of their combat systems, etc. — and they are, for the most part, different posts. Furthermore, I’ve made comments about how the two layers contradict each other, so that aspect of WoW isn’t unique to the mechanics of trying to shoehorn a single-player storyline onto a multiplayer environment; it’s something that can happen whenever the mythos and game layers both try to depict the same kinds of events. But perhaps something about the MMO paradigm makes it more obvious when it happens.

Now, you may object that the game layer isn’t a story. And I agree. It’s a story-space, a set of constraints and opportunities in which stories can happen. These stories aren’t entirely fictional, because we’re into the realm of what Jesper Juul calls the “half-real”. If my character gives yours 60 gold pieces in exchange for a piece of armor, neither the gold nor the armor actually exists — but the exchange is nonetheless a real event, something that occurred between two actual human beings, rather than just described by a storyteller, or played out repeatedly by a couple of automated NPCs like figurines on a cuckoo clock. But we do have a notion in our language of “true story”. Arguably, real events only get transformed into stories after the fact, when they’re recounted to others, but some events are more inevitably story-like than others.

Let me tell you a story that happened on Everquest during my time there: the story of the Naked Troll Run. Once upon a time, a bunch of players on the Rallos Zek server decided on a whim to make new level-1 troll characters, ditch their starting equipment, and run from the troll starting zone to the human city of Freeport to see how far they could get before they were killed. On their first attempt, wandering monsters slaughtered them all before they got far, but they just respawned back at their starting zone and tried again. As they did this, more and more troll corpses piled up along the way, and other players took notice and asked what was going on. Some of them joined in. Eventually, there were enough trolls that the combined efforts of the wandering monsters and the Freeport city guard were not enough to kill them all, and a few managed to board the Freeport ferry and continue their run as far as gnome territory. This all happened without the participation of the Everquest developers or mods. All they did was provide an environment in which running a naked level-1 troll all the way to Freeport is difficult, and the players came up with the rest.

Let me tell you another story, which we might call the Gaming of the Marble. This one happened on A Tale in the Desert. In ATitD, a combat-free game, combat is replaced by various “Tests” that increase your rank in the game’s various Disciplines. Some of the Tests had other gameplay benefits, and some of the Tests were competitive, and one Test in particular had both of these properties: a two-player mini-game that affected the player’s ability to detect deposits of valuable stone. The mini-game had a ranking system like Chess or Go, and specific types of stone were tied to specific ranks, the higher tiers being types of rare marble. Months after this system was introduced, there was still no one with sufficient rank to find the highest level of marble, and the players grew frustrated with this. So a bunch of them decided to game the system by means of a rigged tournament. A largish number of people got together to play the minigame, but there was one pre-designated champion, and anyone playing against that person would deliberately lose just to raise her rank. Other people would be chosen to win for a while to get their rank up just to maximize the effect when they lost to the designated champion — people had worked out the ranking formula and knew exactly how to optimize it. The end result was that, for a little while, the player base had access to every kind of stone in the game. But the devs knew what was going on, and they soon responded by moving the goalposts, adding several new types of marble that required even more elevated ranks.

Now, both of these stories involve player-initiated events involving large numbers of people. The Naked Troll Run happened in a game that worked on more or less the WoW model (except less questy and more grindy), and it didn’t have any permanent effect on the gameworld. The Gaming of the Marble took place in a game designed with the explicit goal of involving the players in a larger story that developed over the course of play, and it had a permanent change in the global game-state as a result, both before and after the devs intervened. If you take the people who say they want more meaningful interaction with the gameworld at their word, the latter seems more like what they want. But the Naked Troll Run was far and away the more satisfying experience.

Ultimately, the game doesn’t have to make stories happen. There’s nothing stopping the players from making stories at the game layer if they want to. But a lot of people don’t want to. A lot of WoW players don’t even want to engage the mythos layer, and being part of an ongoing creative process takes a lot more mental effort than being a passive audience to something pre-scripted. With power over the gamestate comes responsibility, and responsibility plus persistence equals obligation, not fun. Perhaps MMOs that seriously attempt to provide a more genuinely interactive world are doomed to be niche things, not because they do a bad job of it, but because that’s not actually what the majority of the players want, even when they say they do.

So what do the players want? As far as I can tell, the main thing is just harmonization of game and mythos. Give us a game where the NPCs don’t lie to us about how we’re having an impact on the world. Stop trying to pretend that every single player is the hero of the story. Find a fictional premise that acknowledges the truth of the situation, that thousands of people are going through the same experiences.

Or, alternately, do away with the mythos altogether. Hey, it worked for Minecraft.

Bosses in WoW dungeons are generally easy to spot, even if you’re mainly concentrating on healing your party. They generally take two forms: the big boss, and the talky boss.

Talky bosses are people. They’re humans or undead or whatever, just with high class levels and one or two unique skills or spells. As such, they don’t necessarily look all that imposing. If the grunt forces of the dungeon are all members of the same army, the boss will probably look more or less like his underlings, just with more swagger in his bearing, and a slightly more impressive uniform with bigger epaulets. (WoW is very big on epaulets.) So they identify themselves as bosses by means of pre-fight monologue and/or continuing banter throughout combat, possibly including cries of disbelief at their defeat.

Big bosses, on the other hand, need no such verbal reminders. They’re just big. Many of the monsters in the game are substantially larger than the player, but whatever has been established as the usual scale for the dungeon, the big bosses will be something like three times their height (or length, or other appropriate linear measure). They’re appropriately impressive, and often take the form of horned demons or dragons or something of the sort, as appropriate to the dungeon’s theme. The game is saying to the player, “You are now facing something ultimate, something apocalyptic. Fear it.”

The problem is, it starts saying this somewhere around level 25. And the fiction supports it: you’re already starting to challenge gods at that point (even though you continue to also get routinely defeated by mortals). Bosses of higher-level dungeons are no more impressive than earlier dungeons. You know they’re more powerful, but only because the UI tells you so. It’s all just a numbers game.

It’s easy to blame this effect on the expansions: originally, the level cap was lower, and each expansion has raised it somewhat, so that the enemies that previously were in fact ultimate, the toughest monsters around, no longer hold that title. But this explanation would be wrong. The maximum player character level was originally 60, and the effect I’m describing takes hold long before that. No, this is simply a matter of the designers not leaving themselves room to scale, and also of the utter arbitrariness of power levels endemic to CRPGs.

There is one boss that stands out, though: Deathwing, the massive dragon released by the Cataclysm, as depicted on the game’s launch screen. I’ve had one run-in with Deathwing so far. Apparently every once in a while it just flies through a zone and kills everyone. It doesn’t even seem fightable; it manifests more like a weather pattern, or a sunset. You get a certain amount of warning about this — possibly enough to hightail it out of the zone if you know what’s coming, which you certainly don’t the first time it happens to you. That’s how you make an enemy feel epic: you make it completely beyond the normal rules.