Since I started this blog in July of last year I've set a schedule of six MMOs per rotation, and since I'm stirring a couple of new titles into the mix each time around it does mean that not every game will get a slot in every rotation. Except for those that I've dropped altogether - and so far that's only World of Warcraft - I don't follow any particular rules for which games I go back to each time. If there is a particular factor then it's perhaps what's sometimes referred to as how 'sticky' an MMO is - how good it is at keeping a player coming back to the game. I can narrow that down to three things, for me at least - gameplay, progression and story.
Gameplay is easy to define. Despite the downsides of Mod 16 the gameplay of Neverwinter is still fun in and of itself. City of Heroes scores high in this as well, so I guess Cryptic - past and present - are doing something right.
Progression is less of a factor now than it used to be. When I started off I spent a lot of time revisiting old ground - content I may not have played through in years, but still not actually new to me. Now I'm ahead of my 'previous best' in most of these games, so there's always the draw of finding out what comes next. The prospect of new zones will never not be an alluring one for me. I always want to know what's over that next hill, and I always want there to be a next hill, which is one reason I don't rush to the endgame. I don't want to be finished. At least not until the end is quite literally in sight. Closing in on max level in Neverwinter did encourage me to push on to the finish line.
Yeah, that was a mistake.
Story, finally, is definitely linked to progression. There's certainly fun to be had in rerunning old story content but it doesn't measure up to discovering new stories, or seeing how the older ones resolve. This one is something of an achilles heel for Dungeons & Dragons Online and Star Trek Online, as they're both very episodic with a lot of natural break points, which is why they're both sitting things out this time around, and why I'm back in what's perhaps the story-based MMO, Secret World Legends.
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