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The Ultimate MMORPG
MMORPG.com has up an editorial looking at one man's vision of the perfect Massively Multiplayer Game. From the article: "I have read about the new games on the horizon, and they seem to all have one thing in common: They focus on a few key features, and leave out brilliant concepts that have already made it in to modern games. That means that in order for the players to get all the features they enjoy in a game, they would have to play more than one MMORPG, if not many MMORPGs. I do not know about you, but I struggle with playing one at a time."
I personally completely disagree with the article. The articles argument is basically that in order to build the ultimate MMORPG, you just need to combine all the best points of the current MMORPGs. This is complete and utter crap.
MMORPGs are currently suffering from unoriginality. No, I am not talking about the setting. I am talking about core game play. MMORPGs boil down to one thing. If you don't think watching your levels go up and collecting better equipment is awesome, you are going to hate any MMORPG, even a combination of them all, in a few months, if not weeks. What MMORPGs need are some fresh ideas. The sad truth is that to this day UO has a monopoly on originality. How can a game nearly a decade old have more originality then all the current crop of MMORPGs combined?
What MMORPGs need are some real changes. I suggest the following.
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve. The fact that a level 50 could go to sleep and a level 5 couldn't even land a hit destroys the ability to produce content, slaughters the enjoyment of casual players, renders PvP impossible for anyone not at the cap, and results in a content being completely inaccessible to most players. Further, the exponential power curve really is just a substitute for content. You drive players forward to mindlessly kill NPCs because they think they are working their way up the curve. Kill the curve and find another way to entertain your players.
Dynamic Worlds:
No, I do NOT mean monthly or even weekly events. I don't mean GM run stories. I mean true living and breathing worlds. Start an undead army in the artic of your world and have it march south into inhabited regions. Have it physically march. Have it set up camp at dawn, and march at night. If it comes to a city, have it lay siege. If it runs across a corpse, have it raise the corpse into another soldier. The army might not be completely running on auto polite. A GM might lay out way points for it follow each week. From that point on though, the army moves on its own. Make it a long term event. So, at any point, you could ride out from your city, kill some forward scouts, then run off. If someone tries to 'camp' the army, make it behave realistically and swarm. If people in small groups are only willing to do hit and runs, then you did something right.
Build the world to be as dynamic as possible. This should be priority number one. Build it so that GMs can jump in and tweak things, but the real goal is build a world that naturally constantly changes. This in it of itself should do a lot of content building for you.
Let Us Lose:
You know the worst thing about MMORPGs? The absolute inability to lose. If you play for a month in any MMORPG, at the end of the month, you will be better and more powerful then you were the month before. This translates into two things. First, you degrade any sense of accomplishment. Second, you condition the player to go absolutely nuts whenever he does lose. Imagine the army of undead scenario again. What if the army kept marching and took over city after city? What if it boiled down to just a few cities left and they were forced to pool their resources to make a last ditch stand? What if they could actually lose and have the entire world taken over and the force the game to reset? That would surely suck, but I bet most people would kill themselves to be apart of the final battle to save the world, and I bet they would feel pretty damn good if they actually won. Any real sense of accomplishment is lost in MMORPGs due to the inability to actually lose. Let people lose.
Politics, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Dear God, Anything But Grinding:
Build a game with TRUE content. Arenas for PvP, politics for socialites, trade empires for merchants, and some mundane hunting to fill in the niches. If people run off to go kill stuff to get exp and l00t, something is deeply wrong with your game. Bui