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Year in MMORPGs Reviewed
Grimwell.com has an excellent piece on the past year in the MMORPG scene. It highlights the best, worst, and in-between as regards Massively Multiplayer Online Games. From the article: "I have never played so many different MMORPGs in one year before. This is one of the defining features of 2004: an abundance of choice in the MMORPG market like never before. While a few games, like Earth and Beyond and minor independent ones, closed their servers, most games from previous years are still available."
...are bad for you.
I enjoyed City of Heroes for a while, because I liked the genre, but it still ended up being "Everquest in tights." One oddity of CoH was that, like most MMORPGs, it gave no experience or rewards for defeating low-level opponents with a high-level character, so you ended up having hundreds of "heroes" in mighty-looking capes casually jogging by as old ladies getting mugged were screaming for help.
I now play World of Warcraft for the simple reason that most of my friends who play such games are playing WoW, and I would rather game with them than a bunch of strangers. There seem to be a lot of nice evolutionary touches, but it's still really just a new skin on the same old Nethack.
I'm still waiting to see what the "next big thing" in MMORPGs will be. I don't see much evidence that the answer is coming in 2005.
Then again, I'm one of those jerks who sits down at just about every single mouse-controled FPS deathmatch game, frags a few people, and says "meh... I played this game already, back when it was called Quake."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
With the vast selection of MMORPG games out (or on their way out), and the mentioned increase in total subscriptions, what is the public reaction going to be?
With violent video games, it seemed to be that a certain threshold needed to be crossed before the public outroar shifted from minor grumblings to a larger, more cohesive assault. I think this became most prevalent around the time of GTA3, and its general national popularity (and subsequent publicity). Is there a similar threshold for MMORPGs whereby if they become popular or prevalent enough, a contrary public outcry will appear?
I have already heard many of the minor grumblings about their (MMORPG's) supposed ability to reduce people's connections with reality, erode people's social skills, etc. etc. Can we expect to see the same kind of polarization that we're currently seeing with 'violent' video games? Are games like WoW and EQ2 going to start showing up on '10 games to avoid' type lists among parent groups?
On a side note, I have to wonder how much of the increase in overall subscription numbers is associated with actual unique users, as opposed to people deciding to play more than one game.
With the old pencil-and-paper RPGs, the levelling concept makes sense. The combat is all storytelling and imagination, and levelling allows a mechanism for your character to "get good" at fighting dragons or facing other challeges.
But video games have a proud legacy of combat and action simulations. There's no need roll random numbers to determine whether your character managed to time his jump right to get across the chasm. The player tries to do it, and succeeds or fails. Plan your tactics just right, and you (along with your friends) might have a shot at defeating the big dragon.
I completely agree with you that a game engine in which you do things (rather than hit a button and have the computer randomly tell you whether you did things, based on how many things your character has done and/or attempted) would be much more fun.
If the gameplay is sufficiently fun, no "rewards" system is really even needed. Given a choice between doing something fun and getting no artificial rewards, and doing something tedius to get some numbers associated with my character to become higher, I'd rather go with the "have fun" option.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Imagine if your thief character really had to sneak around like you were Garret from Thief. Imagine if swordplay was fast paced like Jedi Knight. Imagine if your archer snuck around firing and running like in FarCry. Then imagine after a hard day of fighting you could go kick it back in a bar or craft Puzzle Pirates style. Maybe for the economically inclined there could be an economic game like Rail Road Tycoon (or whatever) underneath. Perhaps there is also a A Tail in the Desert style player senate and politics. Maybe there is even a little Command and Conquer style tactical commanding.
In other words, "I don't want to play an MMORPG, but I want to play an MMORPG."
Half the point of the MMORPG is growing your character. That's half the point of any RP game. Throw out that part and what's the point, anyway? Imagine if in the Legend of Zelda you started out with all the items and heart containers! Wouldn't that be fun! No, wait, it would suck. Half the fun is watching Link grow and being able to take on larger and harder challenges.
If you really want to play games like Thief, Jedi Knight, and FarCry, then play games like Thief, Jedi Knight, and FarCry! MMORPGs evidently aren't for you.
Of course, there's also a technical reason why you haven't seen games like that yet - the technology just isn't there yet. Notice who most FPS multiplayer games limit you to something around 32 characters max? That's because that's the best they can do, currently. Much more than that and the amount of stuff the server would have to do makes it economically infeasable to run the game. Many MMORPGs will have on the order of 100 to 200 people in a given area at once.
How do they do it? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that MMORPG servers are usually actual server machines and not a desktop machine running a game server from some fat kid's father's basement. The other part is that they simplify things. Instead of worrying about what your shot of 20 degrees x spin, 50 degrees y spin, from 124.45,53.5,-23.56 hits, you instead target Mob 359, and use your Attack ability on it. Instead of tracing a path, it just sees if the mob is within your pathing area (in other words, you aren't shooting through a wall) and is a certain distance away.
If all you want to do is wander around a meta-verse, you might want to check out games like Second Life or Project Entropia.
Half the point of the MMORPG is growing your character. That's half the point of any RP game.
All of the point in a RP game is RP. If you don't find joy in roleplaying, you're just a lab-rat pulling on the lever which randomly rewards you with pleasure pills.
Levelling is meaningless. You get bigger numbers on your character, and fight pictures of monsters which require bigger numbers to fight, with a net change in the challenge of zero.
Roleplay is a fun pastime in which you and others collectively tell a story for each others' amusement. Levelling for the sake of levelling is an addictive (or rather, obsessive/compulsive) behavior which offers little to nothing in the way of real-life rewards.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Or maybe he's just looking for something without the repetition?
Killing hundreds of blue foozles just to advance to the point where you can kill hundreds of red foozles is not some golden game design. You know what the core difference is between an RPG and a FPS is? Nothing. They're not mutually exclusive.
An RPG is just a game with a strong story context. Look at Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, or GTA even. They're RPGs. There's just no level treadmill, and the combat resolution in each game is different from the D&D standard. But there's a strong story, character development, and immersion.
There's nothing wrong with the standard game designs per se. They're just wrong for some people. And when those people wish aloud for something different, it isn't any sort of threat to the established standard. No-one has to take your games away to make something new. So why do you care if they want something different; even if, in your opinion, it isn't an RPG or MMORPG that they want?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"