Progress, Casual & Hardcore Players

The casual/hardcore divide plagues a number of games. "Balancing" appeal to the two audiences is difficult, and games often come under fire for pandering excessively or exclusively to one crowd or the other. In this article I go over a few of the factors I'm taking into account while building Worlds Apart.

I'm not going to attempt to canonically define Casual and Hardcore. A lot of other articles have tried, and the terms are often either misused or have vastly different meanings depending on context. I've heard occasional Civilisation 4 players describe themselves as "Hardcore", and 40-hour-a-week World of Warcraft players call themselves "Casual". For the purposes of this article I'm going to consider the following factors:-

• Time - A hardcore player might spend more hours playing a game in a week than a casual player. In addition, while a casual player might spend a large number of hours per week engaged with a game, they're likely to do so in shorter sessions (fifteen minutes before and after work, and before bed each day compared to a single four-hour session on Friday night). A hardcore player is also more likely to allow the game to dictate their schedule to some degree - e.g. arranging times to play with friends - whereas a casual player is more likely to slot the game into holes in their schedule rather than "make time" for it.
• Attitude - A hardcore player may take the game more seriously than a casual player, they're more likely to learn the mechanics or take an efficient path through the game.
• Motivation - A hardcore player is more likely to take a competitive approach to a game, a casual player is more likely to be playing for the sake of playing.

Obviously it's not so clear-cut as that. A player might describe themselves as hardcore or casual when only a few of these factors apply. Similarly, a player might be "ticking boxes in both columns" - e.g. playing competitively under very strict time constraints.

The important thing is that if you want to appeal to both casual and hardcore audiences, you need to take all of these factors into account.

The most important thing, and the factor I'm trying to emphasise in my design for Worlds Apart, is to avoid putting roadblocks in the path of your player. A roadblock in this context is a challenge, which some of your players will not be able to complete without changing the type of player they are.

For example, World of Warcraft - while being an MMO - is full of soloable content. At least, until you get to maximum level. At that point, you need to group up with four friends to enter a dungeon to "progress". After that, you'll need to group up with maybe nine friends to enter a bigger dungeon, then twenty-four...

The problem here isn't that large group content exists. The problem is that it only exists at maximum level, and that nothing else exists. Recently Blizzard have done a fairly good job of providing solo and small group content at the end of the game, but still in order to really "progress", you need to step into those raid dungeons - and that's a barrier of time, attitude, and motivation that a large chunk of more casual gamers won't overcome.

Now, the usual response to this is "Warcraft is an MMO, if you want to solo you should play a different game". While that may be correct, it also misses the point. World of Warcraft allows you to solo, but then asks you to change into a different type of player once you reach max level.

I believe that the game should cater to the needs of the player, not the other way around. Thus, it is a mistake to ask the player to change their play habits for the sake of the game.

That's not to say that every game needs to set out to cater to everyone. Worlds Apart is not for players who exclusively play first-person shooter games - however, this will be quite clear from the onset. If I wanted to make a game only for the very hardcore, that would be fine. However, it would be poor design (and poor manners) to then pull the rug out from underneath their feet and ask them to change the type of people they were for the sake of playing my game.

If you allow a player to set out on a certain "path" of progress through your game, you should allow the player to continue to progress on that path.