Endgame

Video games, for the most part, tend to have a defined start or beginning - as well as an end. You beat all the game levels, you completed the main story arc, you reached max character level and finished your build, you saved the world or the princess and defeated the antagonist or the final boss, you achieved the goal you set out to do at the very start - or even more.

Sometimes you can continue playing - like to see if there’s some more side quests, or other areas left to explore. Other times you can replay the game at a higher difficulty level, or in a “new game+” mode, or with a different main character or class or faction - or replay following a different story path (many games have a “good” and an “evil” path for example).

But the main story problem has been solved, the narrative climax has passed, the MacGuffin has been found and returned, the catastrophe has been averted, the end has been reached. The conclusion has been achieved. You won the game.

Perpetual Games

But not all games are meant to be that way. MMORPGs especially are meant to be played on and on, continually, theoretically forever - or at least as long as you’d like to. These games are not meant to end, to be finished, and to be something you are done with and move on.

In an MMO the other players matter. Or at least they should - I call those games where they don’t “massively singleplayer” for a reason. You are part of a community, probably member of a guild, you’ve made friends (and maybe enemies as well), you might have regulars buying your crafted goods, and suppliers that you regularly buy materials from. You might be part of a roleplaying troupe. Or something like that.

You form real connections to other players - and those human relationships don’t come with a built-in end, or a “best-before” date. The ingame economy doesn’t just “stop”. You cannot “win” these things either. You can only be part of them. For as long as you want - and they will go on and continue to exist, even if you drop out. They don’t end.

The Discrepancy

But for some reason, many of these MMORPGs are made up of parts that are still designed the same way as singleplayer games are: They feature a 3 act story arc with a climax and an end. (Yeah, there might ultimately be no really satisfying conclusion, but rather something cliffhanger-ish, so they can keep adding expansions to it… but for the time being, the story ends right then and there). They feature character progression that stops at max level. They feature worlds split into zones for specific level ranges, and you will reach the end, after you’ve been everywhere and seen it all.

You’ve done all the quests, completed all the zones, level-upped all the levels, collected all the items… and the game should end - but it can not. And that’s awkward. The game is not meant to end, but many of it’s design-parts do end… but things should go on, but you also want a satisfying conclusion… and it just doesn’t really work out.

Of course you can make expansions that add new quests, new zones, new character levels, new story arcs, and… a new end. These expansion take many months to create - but only a few weeks to play through. And while they do “extend” the game a little, they still don’t solve any of these problems caused by the game ending, despite it shouldn’t.

The Attempted Work-Around

Just give the players something they can (must) do again and again and again and again. Repeatable daily quests. Repeatable weekly quests.

Switch from character-level based progression to item-based progression and hide those items in raids that have a very low %-chance to actually give you the item you are doing them for - forcing players to repeat them a lot. Make tiered item-sets where having the previous set is pre-requesite to farm the next one. Make all these items soulbound, so that everyone has to repeat all the raid-dungeons many, many times.

Introduce PvP matches that are infinitely repeatable, and give you some sort of faction points or currency that you have to slowly build up, by playing the same matches again, and again and again.

Why That Doesn’t Truly Work

This is what they call “endgame” - and it is immensely different to the early game. It’s all about repetition, slow grind. Doing instanced “content” again and again and again. All those things like story arcs, open world zones to explore, level ups and skills to train, etc. fall completely by the wayside after hitting max-level. It’s like an entirely separate game, that is all about completely different things.

And there is even player demand for (and games exist that do offer) skipping the early game entirely, and creating a new character at max level right away. Just, ignore all those early game parts that have an end - and jump into the perpetual endgame right away.

And games do exist, which do away with that early game all together. Which remove the open world, the character levels, the quests, the story arc, and all those things - and only feature the repeatable matches, the raids, the PvP, etc. Games like Moba’s, battle arenas, or coop-raids like Helldivers, and so on. Pure endgame. They only thing lost in the process, is being an MMORPG.

And doesn’t that kinda show, that MMORPGs stop being MMORPGs when they hit endgame? The early game - the actual RPG part - still ends. And what then follows… is something else.

Why is this being done then? It’s done because the actually important parts that keep people playing do carry over: the guilds, the friendships, the community…

The Actual Solution

It should be pretty obvious by now, what has to be done to avoid all these discrepancies and half-baked work-arounds and subsequent problems: design the early game to not have an end in the first place. D’uh!

That’s a lot easier said than done, though. And I mean, A LOT. Removing the things that must end or can be won like story arcs, quest-lines, character levels, level-restricted zones, strong power-growth, tiered item-sets, and so on, seems straight forward enough, but you also have to replace them with something else.

And that’s where things get a lot more challenging. Not because it can’t be done, but because how to do it has not been explored yet as thoroughly. We have decades of history and precedence of single-player games presenting finite, meant-to-end content, which in turn builds on centuries of similarly finite movie making, which in turn builds on millenia of literary story-telling. But for perpetual play, there’s a lot less precedence.

But I’ve already hinted at how community, friendship, guilds etc. don’t end. All gameplay systems that are designed to be player-driven can provide perpetual gameplay - and often without even relying on repeating activities over and over. Player-driven economy, player-driven politics, player-driven knowledge-sharing about ingame discoveries, player-driven socializing, player-driven ingame events, and so on, and so forth… most of these things have no built-in end (except for events), no defined conclusion, no win-condition.

The Elder Game

These things can go on forever. Almost all gameplay comes in nested loops - loops within loops within loops. The player-driven economy was an important piece of the special sauce of SWG. And it was all strictly designed to loop forever. Items had degradation, so you’d need to repair and replace them periodically. Specific raw materials would run out, so you had to create new blueprints and new versions periodically, using new versions of the same material type. No item nor item design would be “the end” - there’d always have to be another new version. Better or not.

Game design like that doesn’t allow for things to ever reach a final state. In a game like WoW, if you raid regularly, you will eventually end up having your full item tier set - the best of everything. You are done - you have finished the item progression. You reached the end. Until another expansion lands, adds a new tier of items and offers you a new, later end. But we’ve already talked about how that doesn’t really work. In SWG, there’s no clearly defined “best” item in the first place. But even if you get whatever the “meta” thinks of as the best item right then… it’s not gonna last forever. You will get good use out of it, if you maintain it well - but it will eventually break and need replacing. And this cycle of needing item replacements never ends.

And that is just one example. Economy is not the only way to achieve such perpetual cycles. It’s just the best known, most common and easiest to explain example. Another good example are the player-driven politics of EvE Online. Like them or not - they don’t have an end. Neither does player-driven roleplay. These systems are often hard to design for, and even harder to balance. And as mentioned before, there’s far less prior art to look back to.

But with those systems, you don’t have an early game that just ends, followed by an endgame that’s something else entirely. Players can keep doing whatever they like most, from early game deep into the elder game. Sure, there are still skills to train and professions to master and that progression will come to an end. But the gameplay activities that progression is in service of, will continue. That progression is the means to an perpetual end - and not the end in itself, like in mainly progression-driven themeparks - where players just rush through it to reach the endgame.

Conclusion

You can design a game so that there’s no hard break when that skill progression ends. The main gameplay (the perpetual stuff) can just continue on. And I feel, that’s a much better fit for MMO’s than the is progression- and/or story-driven gameplay that’s been perfected for single-player games.

Still, a large majority of MMOs are designed with an early game that ends, a hard break, and then followed by the (completely different) endgame. The term “endgame” has become so closely associated with that repetitive stuff that comes after that hard break, that I wouldn’t want to use it for anything else.

For games that do focus on that perpetual gameplay instead (including anything social and player-driven) and do allow players to continue doing whatever they like best throughout the entire game, with no end or hard break - for those I prefer using the term “elder game”, to more clearly signify that difference. And when it comes to actually being “massively multiplayer” and making the most of the unique strengths of the genre (i.e. the presence of other players) - I think these games are where it’s truly at!