Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
MMORPGs are monstrously complicated things—they run on huge, easily DDOSable servers, they have economies that can easily get knocked off the rails, are designed to run for decades, and require constant balancing and fine-tuning. If you work on an MMO, you are Sisyphus trying to get a boulder up a hill, except you also have a bunch of angry forum users calling you an idiot the whole way up.
I’ve talked about difficulty on this very column before, but through the lens of the hardcore/softcore divide and the perspective of tradition; Why those of us from the old are no longer satisfied with the ancient ways.
But after speaking to The Elder Scrolls devs earlier in the week, who highlighted overland difficulty as something nightmarish to balance, I’ve been thinking about it again. And you know, taking a long view of it? I’m inclined to agree. It’s basically impossible.
Boulder, meet hill
I cannot think of a single genre that is so burdened with the design challenge of difficulty as an MMO is, because no other genre has to worry about it nearly as much. The MMORPG is almost unique, because it carries an implicit promise: You are going to be here for a while, and there will be something for you to do.
MMOs are designed to be digital third spaces, places where communities thrive. As such, they need to be tailored for everybody who might conceivably find one of their mechanics charming enough to build an entire gaming habit out of them.
Take WoW, for example: There are WoW players who quite literally stick around just to play pretend in Stormwind, there are WoW players who are just there for the fashion, there are WoW players who complete the main quest, fiddle around with a patch some, and then dip. Some play the game solo, some only do PvP, and so on.
Even if we shear off all of that and only pick up the raiding slice—the players actually doing difficult stuff—we’ve got gamers who only tackle high level delves with a couple of buds, Mythic+ speedrunners, casual, midcore, and hardcore raiders. At the very top of the pyramid, you’ve got your World First teams, people who make a career out of playing World of Warcraft. And they’re all hungry, too.
I mean it completely, as a fan of both games, when I say that I’m pretty sure designing a soulslike difficulty is a piece of cake compared to this non-euclidean nightmare of people-pleasing. Everyone needs to have something, or they’ll start gnashing their teeth. But it’s not just your demographics that give you trouble; it’s assumed knowledge, too.
They’ve gitten too gud
Most of the MMOs that are still surviving after 2025’s MMO-pocalypse are old, dividing up some of these categories even further. A casual player who has been playing a game for 10 years is likely better at it than one who has just joined: Even if they aren’t the kind to really pay attention, you can’t avoid getting better at something you’ve sunk a couple thousand hours into.
We can see a lot of these games moving towards a “choose your own difficulty” system. WoW’s getting Prey, which’ll be putting optional hard encounters in the open world. Final Fantasy 14’s designing all of its content with scaling difficulty in mind, and now The Elder Scrolls Online is adding difficulty options to its overworld and questing content.
In other words, MMO difficulty is becoming less about what you’re doing and more about what level you’re doing it at. Raids are now also for casuals, and open-world content is now also for sweats. Which also means it’s becoming something altogether more videogamey—a setting.
MMOs hide this fact in other systems: Opt-in challenges with their own rewards, filled with special little items you need to get to access harder tiers. But let’s not kid ourselves, these are very fancy ways of putting ‘easy, medium, and hard’ in the options menu, even if I have to get a handful of fairy offerings to give at the shrine of unworthy darkness or whatever—it’s a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go. It’s all kayfabe.
But let’s not kid ourselves, these are very fancy ways of putting ‘easy, medium, and hard’ in the options menu.”
The question is: “Will this work?” And the answer is only “sorta”. Doing this solves problems while creating other ones. It moves the design challenge of “how do we keep everyone happy” to a woeful workload. While I rolled my eyes at Yoshi-P for saying that Creative Studio 3 might need to trim future patches if they kept on with this ‘choose your own difficulty’ thing, he’s not entirely wrong, is he?
On the one hand, if everyone can do everything at their own chosen difficulty level, you’re getting more bang for your buck—if WoW: Midnight’s Prey system works, then a hardcore raider will get to chew on difficult fights while doing open-world content aimed for the most casual of scrubs.
On the other hand… MMOs are complicated, expensive machines designed to be played forever, and if you can’t keep up with the kind of content cadence players expect—especially with a monthly subscription—then people like me might write opinion pieces about it.
Learning phase
There’s also another issue MMO designers have to solve: Tutorialisation. Even if you perfectly nail the difficulty thing, you still need to figure out how to instruct your players. This is referred to as a skill ‘floor’, the base amount of competency someone needs to actually understand what they’re looking at.
This is a particular problem if you’re making previously-sweaty content accessible to your scrubs. Take WoW’s Mythic+, for example. This system has a lot of assumed knowledge baked in. You must be familiar with a dungeon’s bosses (the entire seasonal eight dungeons, as a matter of fact), and you’ve gotta know the most optimised route, on top of playing your class well.
It’s a huge chunk to bite off right away, and it’s no coincidence that Blizzard is experimenting with ways to ease players into it. In the Midnight beta, a new affix literally does the dungeon pull equivalent of yellow paint, suggesting a first-timer route for the first few levels of Mythic+ difficulty.
My personal prediction is that we’ll start seeing a lot more of this, and soon. If every MMO is moving to a structure where most of its content has variable difficulty, then they’ll need to introduce ways to ease people into those difficulties, too. A player brave enough to try Mythic+ in its least friendly form is self-motivated enough to do the learning themselves; a player trying it out for the first time on a whim is not.
All of this to say—figuring out MMO difficulties is impossible. It’s a gargantuan, herculean task from a designer’s perspective, and I both pity and admire the kind of chutzpah required to even tackle it in the first place. It’s also vital for a game’s survival—in a world of live service mania, every MMO is fighting desperately to keep your attention.
A bored player is a death knell for these old games with an ageing playerbase—and it’s no coincidence they’ve all turned their attention to this core issue at the same time, give or take a couple of years. An MMO dev cannot make a game designed to please everybody, and yet, they must.