So I was reading back through a column I wrote a while back about Star Wars: The Old Republic and it got me thinking. In that column, I mentioned how the game had a tendency to favor short-term content in updates rather than long-term content, but it occurred to me re-reading it that I didn’t really talk about the difference between the two or even why both are valuable. And with Warframe having a big new update on the way that’s investing heavily in both, this sort of thing is on my mind.

The thing is that these kind of content divisions are not a thing in most video games. A single-player game doesn’t really have long-term or short-term content on a whole, it just has a series of experiences that add up to a game. But when it comes to online games, both of these are important elements in content delivery. So what’s the difference and why does it matter?

A simple and short version is that short-term content is stuff you finish. But that’s so simple that it kind of loses its value, so let’s actually pick out a different game, and it’s going to be one that’s extremely relevant to my life right now: Final Fantasy XIV.

What? I know, I usually pick other games, this one is easy for me. And we actually have a perfect example of this in the form of both types of content coming out with September’s patch

The September update will include the second half of the main scenario that leads into Evercold coming in January, and it is entirely short-term content. It will take you a couple of hours to get through it. The thing is that you can repeat the quests, thanks to the New Game Plus feature; you can actually repeat them as many times as you want, in fact. But this is content designed to be experienced and then put down. Repeated clears are an option, not an expectation.

At the same time, Beastmaster will be added to the game. You can absolutely be done with Beastmaster and you eventually will be; you will capture all the beasts and get all of the rewards from the limited job that you want. But it is something you are meant to log in, work on, and then stop at your own pace. It is meant to be content that lasts and has a certain amount of duration built into it.

In broader terms, FFXIV has a lot of long-term content, from raids to dungeons to crafting projects. It also has a lot of short-term content. I’ve talked a lot over the past year about how trials have wound up in an uncomfortable spot because the majority of trials are short-term content in practice that require the development effort of long-term content, and it leads them to seem like an odd vestige of older design that exists primarily to be there.

Short-term content is important, though. Case in point – and to go back to SWTOR – the class stories that the game starts off with are all short-term content. You do these quests and then you’re done. Flashpoints are long-term content meant to be repeated and experienced more than once. But what gets you invested in those is the short-term content giving you a sense of place that makes you want to explore the side story in the first place.

The point is not that one kind of content is automatically superior to the other. A lot of incredibly memorable experiences come from short-term content, and that’s not always in the form of quest lines, either. World of Warcraft’s Gates of Ahn’qiraj is definitionally short-term content that was meant to be done by a handful of people at most. The reward was the server unlocking a new form of long-term content.

Rather, the point is that short-term content requires different resources and different demands. Short-term content is the flashy bit, while long-term content is, well, the longer-term experience. The more long-term content you have, the more it feels like your MMO has for players to do because it’s almost definitionally the stuff you spend most of your time… you know, doing. You spend a couple hours on a questline and then weeks doing your weekly run for a drop from specific content, in other words.

Too much short-term content is a problem because it makes your game feel like a pretty hallway (a criticism frequently leveled at SWTOR) where very little of what you’re doing at any given moment actually leads into a coherent game experience. At its worst, you’re logging in and doing the new quests, and then there’s no reason to log in again until there are new quests. This is a bad thing for the game’s longevity.

But you can have too much long-term content, too, and then you have a problem where things all feel pointlessly similar. City of Heroes is perhaps guilty of that; there are plenty of story arcs, sure, but basically all of them wind up mechanically similar (click on a door, beat things up, get a mission clear message, repeat until arc rewards you). There’s less space to have something feel distinct or unique as a result.

No game ever perfectly hits the balance, in no small part because a perfect balance doesn’t actually exist. It’s easy to tilt one way or the other, but there is not a singular correct level for the two to balance upon. And it’s one of those things that players tend to pick up on subconsciously without always being able to articulate what the problem is. It’s easy to feel like there’s not much to do in SWTOR, for example, when the real problem is that so many resources get sucked up in making a big, epic story full of setpieces that there’s not a whole lot left over to make dungeons or regular content.

The reason I bring up Warframe is because the big, cinematic quests that it uses to anchor its updates are important. Fans love them, and that includes me; I’m fans. However, the quests also end and you’re left with the reality of the new content. Jade Shadows: Constellations actually consists of two mission nodes because that’s the long-term part of the update, and while the quest is good, you do it once and then you move on.

Does this mean I don’t want the big quests? Not at all. I love them. But it does mean that it’s a big deal when last year’s major content update added only two long-term, repeatable content stretches. And it’s why I’m excited that this year is promising a bunch more in terms of major long-term content for players to explore, because while the one-time experience is fun and important, it’s the lasting stuff that’s going to keep you coming back.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.