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Rethinking the MMOG
Gamasutra is running a piece right now called Rethinking the MMO. Game designer Neil Sorens takes issue with some of the consistent blights on the traditional Massive gaming experience, like the phenomenon of the 'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'. Though he doesn't offer a lot in the way of concrete solutions to these issues, his appraisal of the genre is sure to spark a few conversations: "As long as developers and publishers do nothing but copy what is successful, they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential. And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential."
It certainly brings up some interesting points. MMORPGs are a pretty young genre, if you go by just the number of titles. But even WoW pretty much just refines the same old design. I certainly feel some of its tenets could use rethinking. But perhaps some things, like the endless grind, are part of the business model.
'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'.
If you had an extraordinary hero who could do everything right off the bat, what would make him/her extraordinary then?
Monstar L
Ok. Lets rethink the MMORPG...
1. Level grinding sucks. We had to do it in Final Fantasy 1,2,3 and most of 4. Same with Dragon Warrior/Quest series. It sucks.
2. How do you deal with rapidly differing levels of experience? Many places have higher level only places and those aren't fun as they're only high levelers.
3. How do you manage quests for multiple people? This requires real DM's to do, and not set script spawn monsters.
4. Perhaps we ought to integrate a real-time element rather than "hit, hit, hit, chug pot, hit, hit...ad nauseum". I do like the tales of Phantasia RT element.
5. What about griefing? There's always idiots that do that. How do we deal with them? They are paying customers and these companies need the money... ??
6. Many MMO's prevent user-based content. Perhaps adding possessable units (think second life) will bring responsibility.
7. I want player-killing zones. Make certain areas with high resources heavy with pick pockets and pk'ers. Th
Apparently he's never played Test Drive Unlimited (an MMO Racer), Chromehounds (an MMO Mech game)... or read any previews for the upcoming Huxley (an MMO FPS).
Collector's Edition
And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential.
At this point the vast majority of MMOGs are RPGs. From where I sit it seems that all RPGs have always been about being a stats geek. I'm wondering what fundamentals he thinks are being overlooked.
Would they improve with a better story line instead of hack and slash? Potentially but you don't really see a lot of this in the pen and paper version of RPGing either. Sure, the GM can entertain and let the group run about with little crazy side adventures but in the end it always comes down to the same question: How much XP to the next level?
If there are any real thoughts on this there is nothing stopping someone from developing a game that strays from the beaten path but the world of MMOGs suffers, as was hinted at in the blurb, from having everyone being the hero of the game. IIRC, SWG tried to limit the number of truely powerful and progressive toons only to do poorly at luring in players.
Just for the record: I haven't had a chance to read the article. Take it for what it's worth.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Like he really just wants a single player RPG.
While TFA is about MMOGs, the bulk are MMORPGs so this is potentially valid.
Single player games play to the ego. YOU are given a quest of great importance. Only YOU could defeat the really f'ing strong bad guy. No one but YOU can organize a rag-tag bunch of badasses to smash evil and bring blah blah blah to the blah blah blah.
How many single player games are there that represent you amongst a whole group of potential heroes? If you decide to slack off and not do what you're supposed to, does someone else stand up and carry the torch instead?
No. The worlds and it's advancing timeline is on your whim only. MMORPGs will NEVER be able to capture that so long as the entire world isn't instanced to a specific group of players. And, even then, if the game does that what's the point of it being MASSIVELY multiplayer, anyway?
The fact that MMORPGs work at all are a testament to the addictive qualities of constantly levelling up for the next best thing and to stay on the cutting edge of new content. It's very "metagame" in that respect. But for the same reason not EVERYONE in real life can be a mover and a shaker, it can't really work online any better than it already does.
More Twoson than Cupertino
one thing I agree with in the article is that in the type of game under discussion a player's actions don't effect the world in a significant way, eg. killing a political leader results in a change in the game's direction. I understand the difficulty in implementing such a scenario, but it would certainly make the game feel more organic.
I signed-up for a 14-day trial of Eve Online. As a fan of Descent, Wing Commander, and Trade Wars I thought I would love this game. After a few days I realized the game was awesome, vast, huge, addictive, and... boring. I think the problem with Eve is that it is _too_ real. I wasn't playing the game - it was playing me. To make progress, I had to spend 15-minute blocks of time watching my ship fly from point A to point B. Or watching a meter count down telling me my character completed some task like building something. *yawn*
I keep hearing that classic linear offline games are boring and limiting and going away. But that's like saying that a book is too limiting because it only has one possible outcome. With a video game or a book, I want to be the hero, I want to see the journey. I don't want to be thrown into a world where my only goal is to make money or get bigger. What fun is that? I can do that in real life.
1. Level grinding sucks. We had to do it in Final Fantasy 1,2,3 and most of 4. Same with Dragon Warrior/Quest series. It sucks.
2. How do you deal with rapidly differing levels of experience? Many places have higher level only places and those aren't fun as they're only high levelers.
I would agree. I haven't played Ultima Online for about 7 years now (god has it been that long) but I really enjoyed playing it at the time due to the fact character advancement was based on skills and not levels.
Again, Ultima Online (in the past I can't vouch for it now because it became a different game) was fairly balanced in this aspect. You had what they called 7x Grand Masters who had maxed out their skills, but if he were jumped by a good deal of newbie players (say 5 to 10) he might face death if he is careless. Wheras a level 60 character in EQ (if he was theoretically allowed to pvp people at that gap) could basically lay waste to thousands of newbie players in less than 5 minutes duration.
But the real problem that UO was the greifing I suppose and the massive amounts of changes to the game in order to resolve these issues actually drove away many non-griefers (including myself).
I think the only way to police greifing and player content is to actually trust and empower the players and allow them power over the world itself.
I think that was Ralph Koster's original vision which he took from UO to SWG, but seeing how both have been changed into something neither they started out to be... well... it is a moot point.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
When I used to play chess against someone who knows what they are doing, I tended to get my ass handed to me. I didn't play chess all that often, so this should not come as a surprise. For one summer, I played chess a lot. I actually got pretty decent at the game and could hold my own against most people instead of the usual ass kicking I came to expect. Even today (now out of practice) I can put up a decent fight. The same goes for FPS, even ones I have never played. Why is it that I can pick up either of these games after having not played for a while and if not dominate, at least hold my own?
The answer is simple. These are games of skill. If I decided to play chess or Counter Strike against someone who had been playing it for 2 years straight, they might kick my ass, but not because they have a super Queen that can teleport across the game board while I only have pawns, nor because everyone else starts out with shoot-through-walls rail guns while I start with a knife.
Playing most MMORPGs is like playing chess against someone with a teleporting queen while you get three pawns, or playing Counter strike where you start with a knife and everyone else gets instant kill rapid fire laser guns. MMORPGs stack the game against you twice. First, people who play more will be more skilled at playing (make sense, eh?). Second though, the game also rewards them a thousand times over for playing a lot. So, not only do you play with people who are more experienced, but have the MMORPG equivalent of teleporting Queens against your two pawns.
Start a n00b off in Counter Strike or Chess, and the n00b at least has the possibility of winning. Take the most skilled WoW player in existence, give him a level 1 character, and make him fight a level 60 no matter what happens, the level 60 will always win.
This is the reason why a lot of people loath MMORPGs. I love the idea of a massive online world with other players to interact with, quest with, and fight with (or against). What I hate is that MMORPGs unlike most other multiplayer games, is that MMORPGs DEMAND that you spend thousands of hours of your life in them before you are even given something that kinda-sorta resembles and even footing with the top players.
Why can't we have an MMORPG where the older and more experience are not given the double bonus of l33t stats and equipment in addition to superior skill at playing that they should have developed?
Hell, I'll answer the question. The reason why MMORPGs used this worthless system is because they have simple and basic gameplay. If in an MMORPG your stats/numbers/equipment didn't constantly slide upwards, people would simply quit the game. The game play is so dull that MMORPGs need to rely on addiction to seeing stats go up to keep people in these games. Take out of the 'achievement' aspect that comes with killing 10,000 kobolds and people would not suffer the horrible and repetitive gamplay of an MMORPG. The gameplay of MMORPGs does not stand on its own for very long. Hence, we have piles of MMORPGs with atrocious game play that retain players by keeping them addicted to the 'achievement' aspect of their repetitive gameplay.
When you see an MMORPG that can stand on the merits of its actual game play and not rely on hopeless addiction to watching stats slowly tick up, you will be seeing the first TRUE second generation MMORPG... not the copy cat Everquest crap that is spaming the market right now.
Instead of having everyone have the same in-game ways to "get better" like lvling and getting better equipment and that's it, they need to design it differently. One way is make so many different combinations of factors that there's hundreds of thousands of possibilities so it's untrackable by any fansite or damage calculator and everyone can literally have a different type of character and have them all be good. Put in enough checks and balances and there's no "Epic Fireball is the best attack, everyone use that one if you want to win because nothing can beat it" mentallity. There can be unique attacks and skills for just a clothes-making/alchemy/paladin specialist in an MMORPG like being able to make defensive perimeter flags. Then have a unique skill set only for wizard/farmer/alchemy specialists like glowing, toxic carrot missiles. And telekinesis/blacksmiths could throw molten lead balls at you with their mind. With 100 different character types and skill areas, there would be millions of combinations and strategies and thousands of unique skill sets and everyone can actually make their own character type instead of just picking wizard, warrior, or archer and trying to beat the other wizard/warrior/archers at their own game by lvling higher. Everyone knows people who start games earlier and play more can beat those that don't play as often and that's just stupid. I'm sick of my fireball vs your fireball and the higher lvl always wins and if I want to beat you, I have to play 1000 hours. I'd like to jump in, dream up some new strategy that nobody's thought of before, and start kicking ass right away just for being clever. They'd have to balance it so it's not "wow, the toxic carrot missile is the most powerful" and everyone becomes a wizard/farmer/alchemist and throws weaker builds out the window. Simple MMORPG logic right now says I have to play longer for my toxic carrot missile to be better than yours. But what if I do some thinking and start launching flaming knives at you with my telekinesis/fire alchemy/cooking character and it destroys your carrots in mid air? huh, then what are you gonna do? It's all over, bitch! lol. It's so much more fair to have the system in general be, the more you play, the more skills you can use but your skills don't get significantly more powerful just by lvling up by grinding for hours.
Having played UO, EQ, SWG, Horizons, EQ2, Vanguard, WoW and LOTR:online all in beta, I am in no way qualified to comment about what the MMO can do to explore this supposed plethora of untapped potential. Nobody really is, so lets assume this is all just opinion...
MMO's are simple games at heart, they have to be. Grand adventures are reserved for single player games and that is a fact. Even if WoW managed to establish that extraordinary hero status that seems so elusive, the end of the day would leave you saying "I am special just like the other 8 million people who play! But check out this sweet helm that dropped!" Why focus on a pie in the sky idea such as making each player extraordinary, when you could just focus on making new loot, new monsters, and new dungeons... the only thing that keeps people coming back. The only way that an MMO appears flawed is if you compare it to a completely different genre; "These apples could be so orange-like if we just tried!"
Why create an environment that nurtures the player to greatness, when it is more important when that player establishes that him or herself. For instance, ranking systems, battle ground stats, and arena placement. Being at the top of a server or battle group in WoW that has thousands upon thousands of players in it seems pretty extraordinary to me... maybe I am just too easy to please.
A repost of a comment I made on a previous topic, but still relevant here
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Perhaps a majority of the problem is the ridiculously unrealistic gap between an experienced warrior and one with relatively less experience.
I think the entire problem would resolve itself if the difference between a level 1 character's fighting ability and a level 90 character's fighting ability was significantly less.
In an MMORPG environment, if 3 level 1 characters could gang up and take down someone who has reached the highest point you can reach, then I think the entire concept of the grind would take a back seat to interesting gameplay.
PlanetSide is an MMOFPS that takes this concept and deals with it quite well. You can spend your points each level to gain the ability to use new weapons or vehicles, with some abilities having pre-requisite abilities. If you want, you can trade the abilities back for the points you used to earn them, but you can only 'sell' one ability every 6 hours. Once you're level 8 or so, you have access to pretty much everything the game has to offer, and further levels only serve to expand the number of things you can do at once -- essentially expanding your flexibility. But by no means is a level 20 character STRONGER than a level 8 character, they simply have more venues of attack.
Original Comment: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=222646&
Well said sir... well said...
I will need to borrow a page from your lexicon the next time I need to give a speech.
I can't RTFA right now because I'm at work and they block "Gaming" sites at our proxy, but based on what I've read from everyone else's comments it sounds like they're looking at the wrong problems. There are certain things that players have always griped about, and I should know, I've been a player in a lot of MMOs, including the pre-cursor to modern MMOs MUDs. The problem is, what players gripe about, and what is really wrong with current MMOs are two very different things. Players don't really mind the level grind all that much, it's part of the point, if you had a button you could push that would instantly take you to max level with full skills no one would bother playing because there was no challenge. What keeps people coming back is the reward of all that effort paying off. In traditional linear games the payoff is getting to the end and killing that last big boss, saving the world. In an MMO the payoff is the accolades you get from the other players for reaching end game, and being able to play your character in a skillfull way. This is part of the reason why many MMOs have ridiculously hard end game content, so that it weeds out the average players from the great players, and provides incentive for the average players to get better.
If you really wanted to improve an MMO, the thing is not to do away with things like the level grind, but to provide more interactive persistant environment in a way that dosn't destabilize the game. Now, I never said it would be easy of course, because if it was it would have been done already, but if it can be done, the results will be amazing. What players want more than anything else, is to feel both powerful, and to have an impact on the game world. They want that feeling of walking through a town filled with lower level players, and everybody going "Oh man, there he goes, he killed an entire battalion by himself." or even the respect of there fellow equals (or enemies). At the same time they also want the ability to do something with an impact on the game world, they want to be able to have at least a semi-perminent effect on the scenery and creatures around them. Even if it's only something minor like wiping out a colony of pesky kobolds that have been harasing a nearby town (and not having them all immediatly respawn for the next player). Now the tricky part is that you need to do this in a way that dosn't ruin things for the next player either intentionaly or un-intentionaly.
Which brings me to one of the biggest true gripes players have, which is of course, other players. The problem is, no matter what you do, there will always be those that will be determined to ruin things for everyone else, either by exploiting a flaw in the game, or by harasing other players. The only real solution to this is to provide some way for players to police themselves. This is part of the reason I play on a PvP server, because if someone is harasing me, I can always call on a few of my friends to kill him a few times, and that usually gets the message across that they should go do something else.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
The best massively multiplayer online game I've seen or heard of, bar none, is Tom Vogt's BattleMaster. (Said Tom is actually a Slashdot regular, too, and with a 3-digit UID ;-) ) While it is not perfect (as what can be?) and is more or less in a state of perpetual beta (which I find a great deal of fun, but others wouldn't), it does a great job, in general, of dealing with the powergamers who want to turn the whole thing into a numbers game, and does its best to give even casual gamers the chance to participate meaningfully (ie, invest ~15 mins/day, and keep up pretty well with those who invest 15 mins/hour).
BattleMaster is a roleplaying strategy game, where the player has a small family of nobles who can command troops in any of several different classes. The real key here is that in BattleMaster, there is precious little centrally-provided content: the interaction between the players is, essentially, the whole game. Which isn't to say that it's pure, text-based roleplaying (though the game is entirely text-based, aside from the maps); it has a relatively comprehensive system that helps to model a medieval European setting, complete with diplomacy, battles, wars, etc. But all the story is created by the players.
It's a heck of a lot of fun, and I've been playing it for the past 3 years and more. I don't explain it too well, so take a look at the site, linked both above and in my sig.
If someone were to take the concept and make a commercial MMORPG out of it, I dare say they could do pretty darn well--at least, once they had enough players signed up to populate a large area. The fun is directly proportional to the complexity of the system, which grows out of the number of people playing...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
If you're really interested in ideas about reinventing the genre, look to the inventors themselves: read the mud-dev archives, a now-defunct mailing list populated by the likes of Raph Koster and developers behind DAoC and shadowbane, as well as a few who've been in the online virtual worlds game since the days of 300 baud modems.
There may be archives of the handful of conferences they held as well, which were filled with a bunch of great talks and new ideas.
My experience with MMOs is pretty limited: I played some UO during the launch, played YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates for a few months, and tried Second Life once. My understanding is that, for the most part (and particularly WoW) they're about dungeon-leveling. Kill monsters, level up, kill bigger monsters, continue. There's not much variety in what you can do. The Ultima series (and to some extent Bethesda's Elder Scrolls) gave you some variety: you can spend hours, if not days, not killing monsters and still enjoy it. As the article mentions, there's other MMOs: puzzle ones, racing ones, sports ones, FPSs ones.
Well... what if all those were one and the same? More on that in a second. A quick look at MMOG Chart reveals the market to be, at most, about 15 million players. Considering the increasing popularity of the genre, increasing access to broadband worldwide, and economic conditions worldwide, the market will be increasing. Maybe some day there will be 30 million or 50 million MMO players.
What this means is that there's room for other types of games (I can see a Cabela's Big Game Hunt MMO as being appealing). If Ultima Online can survive a decade on 100,000 subscribers, we could see an explosion of focused , low-population MMOs if the overall market keeps increasing. It would just be a continuation of what we see today.
But back to my earlier question? Why do these all need to be separate games? Why can't they all be in one?
What if there was a game that combined all of these elements and let players decide what they wanted to do? I'll put my example in "real-world" terms but this would obviously be modified to sci-fi or fantasy terms as needed. Let's say you've got a dog breeder that wants to breed his prize dogs with a specific type of wild dog (this player largely plays a Nintendogs-type of sub-game). This wild dog is only found in a very dangerous nature reserve (dungeon) controlled by an enemy territory. He'd have to hire mercenaries to infiltrate and capture this animal (traditional combat MMO players). The enemy territory also has players protecting their resources.
Let's say something needs to be transported. Ordinarily, you might be able to use in-game methods (CPU controlled) but you may need to hire a smuggler to take it (combat driving game). The goal of this, the end result is to have a lot of different sub-communities while on the larger scale, you've got a lot of players you're interacting with.
I think that's the "next level" in MMOs and it would solve a lot of the problems with current ones (albeit introducing new ones).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
PlanetSide's numerous other gameplay problems notwithstanding, PS had a great leveling system.
It worked like this: you earned battleranks (BRs) for capturing bases and killing enemy soldiers and vehicles. The BR cap was set at 20 last time I played.
BRs allow you to purchase various equipment and vehicle certifications.
The only thing a higher level gives you is more versatility. A battlerank 20's chaingun is not more powerful than a battlerank 6's. In fact the only difference (on paper) between a level 1 and a level 20 is how many weapons/vehicles he's able to use with one character.
Contrast this with other MMOs that give high-ranking players uber weapons that are impossible to beat. Unless you invest tons of time into the game, there's simply no way low level players can stand toe-to-toe with high high levels players and their godly weapons.
That pretty much sums up Eve. There's even a few fan-made trailers for the game that poke fun at the points you mention.
The first thing you learn to do when playing Eve is how to hit "alt-tab" to go and do something else while your puddle-jumper is navigating warp gates in controlled space - Eve's audio will still play in real time when the game is in the background. If you're anything like this AC, that means that "playing Eve" is really just replaces the "mess around on the web" portion of my usual evening programming stint.
Also, the free demo for the game just isn't long enough to get you to a point where the game isn't so laid back. I tried it a while back and have found little to call me back to a getting a subscription.
i think a great idea might be to create an mmo where pc's can affect the world. that would be a huge undertaking, but think of the possibilities. you could have players creating laws in a working democracy. you could have lumberjacks, miners, rocket scientists--the possibilities are really endless. it would be like The Sims meets SW:Galaxies meets Civilization. that seems like it would be fun. although, it would require a huge amount of resources and time to create.
a really good way to do this would be to set it in the old west or feudal japan. which makes me wonder why this hasn't happened yet. it seems obvious. if Gun had been an mmo, no one would be playing WOW.
One of the points the author makes that I agree with is that most of these games have too many damn rules outside the "physics" of the gameworld. Too many rules mean you really can't have the emergent behavior that is really the potential of these simulations that involve thousands of people. The way you get thousands to interact is to well...interact. The fact that there's someone on the other side of the person I'm chatting with, be it monster, salesman, king, leader, etc. makes it that much better. A lot of games have missed the mark on it. I've tried a bunch of different MMOs and never really found one that suited me because of this. One of the best experiences I've had was on Asheron's Call PK server. The rules were pretty much "anyone can kill anyone anytime". That meant that if you went into town and were talking to the barkeep, someone could walk up and quite literally stab you in the back. Different gangs of players used to hang out in the various towns and basically control the place. If you didn't pay them an entry fee, they wiped you out. Going into town wasn't a routine levelquest dumping exercise, it was a cautious affair with excitement about whether or not you were going to survive the encounter. Eventually, rules built up around this where players really had to forge alliances with other players, lest they be hunted down for killing someone else. Chaotic yes, but definitely a fun play.
Obviously, that's one extreme. You could have a more moderate experience by letting noobs get capped in the safe zone but an efficient police and judicial force (hell, even a bounty hunter class that does something instead of the lameness that was Galaxies). Taking an emphasis off retrieving "phat l00t" might help as well, as you'll cut down on some crybabyness if it didn't take 40 hours of play to get that firesword +18.
The point is, the more restrictive the environment, the dumber the experience for the player.
Overall, I thought the article was rather well written. There were certainly parts of it that I disagreed with, but as someone who has played MMORPGs for years (including currently WoW), I can see a lot of the points he makes.
One idea that popped up while reading this, was varying quests by level in an MMORPG (addressing points #1 and #2 of the article, namely boring gameplay and grinding). Anyone who has played WoW knows that most of the quests boil down to the following archetypes:
1) Fetch X number of Y objects
2) Kill Z things
3) Escort X from point A to B (keeping it alive)
Then there are quests that combine the above (such as fetch X items, but you can only do it by killing Z creatures).
First of all, there really needs to be more variance in the type of quests that are available. The Burning Crusade expansion for WoW started seeing more of this (the bombing quest comes to mind).
I think there's a lot that can be done, if there were more class-specific quests. One of the reasons why the current quests are so generic, is because they have to be solvable by anyone. It doesn't assume quests are done by any particular class. Well, why not? As a rogue, I have a ton of interesting abilities at my disposal. I would love to have quests that forced me to use some of the lesser-used skills and talents that I have, as it would certainly mix things up. (And I might learn a new thing or two)
Once you have more variety in the types of quests available, I think the next thing you want to do is disperse them. I think the simple "kill X creature" quests are actually fine for the initial levels, because you're still relatively new to the game, your class, how things work, etc. That's why a lot of people roll alternate characters so frequently, because there's a lot of fun in "figuring out how X works". Unfortunately, after 20 levels or so, the newness wears away and there's not much variety anymore in killing creatures. That's when you then start introducing the more varied quests, such as the ones that encourage you to try different spells (or maybe a new one that you just picked up), etc.
-- jchenx
they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential.
He is talking about the most successful new genre of games, isn't he?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I think the author fails to acknowledge some of the changes that are already coming down the pipe in this respect.
It may seem unrelated but I think web sites like MySpace and YouTube have opened a LOT of eyes (read: pocketbooks) in terms of understanding how much people want to contribute to an online community. Look at Sony's upcoming entries, Home and LittleBigPlanet.
For those who don't know, LittleBigPlanet for the PS3 is a 2D side-scrolling platformer where every level is built with an included level editor and shared, YouTube style, with the player community at large. Home is a similar concept wherein you create a 3D environment for you and your buddy-list to hang out at, a la The Sims Online.
That's just a couple of examples of a changing attitude towards community gaming.
I believe that WoW represents the last giant of a dying breed. The term "WoW-Killer" is used a lot, but I don't see WoW being killed, just dying off slowly as it's replaced by more evolved options.
It seems to me like there should be some way to give players freedom and escape the grind at the same time. I want a way to get away from classes, factions, and anything else that pre-defines who you are in game. I would want a game that is entirely skill based, in order to get away from a level/numbers focused game. I think something closer to an online version of Oblivion would be really fun. I think it should be one EVE style single world. I want to be able to kill any NPC if I have the skill. For instance, if I have a decent amount of skill in stealth and archery, I want to be able to assassinate a shop keeper, steal what I want, and escape into the night. And there should be consequences to my actions as well. I think the idea of player bounties like in EVE is a great idea. Again, I think the punishment system devised in Oblivion is great. If you can commit a crime in secret then there is a good chance that you can get away scott free, but if you go killing NPCs or players in front of others you should get reported and have either a bounty put on your head or be pursued by the authorities. If you are caught, you go to jail and you loose a good deal of money and equipment and, on top of that, your skills decrease. If you continually grief OPENLY, you are going to be right back at newb skill, so griefers would have to get better and quieter, but that is fine because every would needs its murderers and thieves.
I would like to see an MMO that tried to reflect a realistic world instead of settling for the status quo. Let the players do whatever they want, just like in the real world, but have laws and consequences, just like in the real world. Let the players define who they want to be and how they choose to act.
I also think there should be a world story arc, which changes as time passes. The players could both participate in and disrupt the story. And maybe civilization crumbles and the world spirals into darkness, but online games are, if anything, evolution in progress. So maybe a year or so down the line a player decides to unite the people and rebuild the kingdom, a kingdom run by the players. And then it would be the players' job to protect civilization from demise. Or, maybe, the NPC heir to the throne rises and gathers a group of NPCs to help bring order back to the land. Who knows? Said ideas would require a group of GMs to help guide the world and keep things interesting.
One thing about traditional MMOs, take WoW for example. There is no way to become the most famous or most powerful person. Even the highest level players are only known in certain circles. You could complete the biggest, hardest quest, no statues are erected, no stories are told, and only a few people know who you are. The world needs to reflect the actions of the players and reward them for great deeds.
I am sure it sounds like I am just spouting off game ideas I would like to see, but I don't think it is beyond a developer's reach to achieve. Granted it would take a lot of time and forethought and it would not be easy to implement. But I think it could be done. I think if an online game could be made that had people coming back not to get the next best weapon or next level, but to participate in the story and in the world, it would be a very successful game. But that is just my opinion.
Future indie game developer of America (and possibly Canada)
One of the big issues is instances. Instances make developers lazy. They dont' have to develop that huge of content because they can just make stuff spawn over and over and reload content so everyone gets a "fair" shot.
Worlds need to be persistent. This is huge and will revolutionize things. Yeah..it means you have to make a huge world to support a lot of players. Guess what? That will make it awesome. The greatest MMORPG that will come along will be one that will have a land area that is equivalent to a large portion of the earth. Put in the ability to have players shape the world (politics, trade, construction, etc) and let them have at it. creating ecosystems for "monsters" and resources will stop the grind. Make skills use based, no levels. It'll never happen because companies are chickens.
Really my biggest complaint with WoW is that your quests don't change the world at all and that there aren't enough of them, especially at higher levels. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to auto-generate quests from a large set of templates. That way you could customize them to a character or party and that particular quest would never be offered to any other person or party. Then completing it or not completing it would have a much more realistic impact on the world.
It'd also be nice if someone could do a decent NPC AI. A relatively simple chatbot whereby a townsperson could answer questions about his area of expertise would be a step in the right direction. Having a monster that might notice that its friends are dead and behave appropriately would also be nice. Hell even having the monster say "Wow... Earl and John are looking kind of dead today. Maybe I should do something about that... ooo... flowers..." would be ironic enough to be amusing, at least for the first couple of times.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I played WoW a lot. 14 characters over level 60, 2 at 70. I've been all through MC/BWL/Naxx and later most of Kara in TBC. I just recently quit because I had the epiphany that it was all exactly the same. WoW was my first MMO and from what I've gathered most others follow a lot of the same development ideas and the ones that vary from it were plagued with a multitude of other issues.
I liked playing the game but as you can see from my number of high level characters and my experiences in game, it was really just a huge time sink. In the real world, time invested = reward. This translates very well into an MMO, but the problem arises when people have real lives + MMO life. This creates a horrible duality in peoples lives where they end up sacrificing things either way. The developer that can work around this will be my hero.
WoW would be great if I could set my character to begin farming materials or working on professions while I'm logged out, allowing me to actually play when I have time to play and all the mats I need for consumables and other such things will be there. Additional things such as gold farming would be greatly enhanced with an investment system. In WoW the "bank" serves as nothing more than an extra few bag slots. You earn no interest in gold and have none of the "bank" features you would expect.
Something I've found in MMO's is how the devs are constantly trying to force the community into certain behavior. For example, not being able to sell enchants on the auction house (the devs have said this was to encourage player to player contact) or the recent removal of the global looking for group channel (to force people into using the horrid LFG tool they have). The devs always fall into a power craze trying to control everything. I never understood how or why they would want this to happen. The fun is in the freedom, the less freedom the less fun.
I could go on and on about other issues but these are the ones I care most about. MMO's right now have lost me. I no longer wish to sacrifice my grades and personal life to play them. I've actually found myself missing the old school RPG's like Diablo II where if I logged out I wouldn't fall behind. I suppose my issues with the genre wont be solved until someone has the foresight to higher devs who aren't completely arrogant (Do some googling on the developers of WoW and the all out wars they fought on usenet with Everquest developers). I just want to play a fun game.....
I have gotten into the same arguments with my friends, "What is wrong with MMOs?" My friends always kicked around the ideas of grinding, griefing and the shear time required. I, on the other hand, came up with a completely different idea. In every MMO I have seen or played, a player's character has no past. You do not have a family or history. Your character is just there all of a sudden. What's worse than this is your character can't really affect the environment. Every quest you have done, has been done and will be done again. There is nothing to tie you with your surroundings. This means that your character has no real future. So, in other words, you(as in your character) is just an outside observer with no real investment. People want these ties so they create them through guilds, corporations and RPGing.
..
I have found that, in pen and paper rpgs, the worst characters were the ones without a background. They were just a collection of stats and numbers that mindlessly went through the environment. The ones with the background had motivation and attitude. They were "real" and believable.
So, I have some suggestions.
The first is to allow a way for players to have a past and history. Let them have families and lineage. Possibly have characters age.
The second is to have a character driven, constantly evolving plot/story/history. Will the gnomes in WOW ever get their homeland back. I mean, after Thermaplug has been defeated countless times and they still haven't gotten it back? For once, I would like to watch the rise and fall of an empire.
The third is to make a random quest generator so not everyone does the same quest (Actually part of point 2 but hey). But at least then people have something to brag about that not everyone else has done.
The fourth is get rid of the chat channels/tells. I always thought Shadowrun would make a good MMO because the structure is there. Wristphones and the Matrix/BBSs is a realistic way for communication across vast distances and finding people. In WOW, they should not have tells or general chat but Mail and speak crystals...you know some magical thing that acts just like a cellphone? This would also make going to bars and inns important. Need to find a warrior, head over to the warrior's guild/bar.
The last is have the world enormous with multiple cities to where people don't feel boxed in and confined. The heros of any MMO easily outnumber the denizens of the land. So, I'm talking about huge here. Big enough where you will not run into someone if you are deep in the wild. But on this same note, travel must be fast and easy. Horses, roads allow you to travel faster, warp stones, teleporters, etcs. Easy to get from main city to city but not in the wild.
In other words, a dynamic/organic world.
I don't play MMOGs mainly because early game play sucks, and to have any fun one must progress to a certain level. My suggestion is to compartmentalize the game play, so that as players progress, they don't see those either far ahead, or far behind their current status. This way, they only deal with people near their own time / skill investment.
That way, newbies can play against and with newbies, and not get shafted by playing people who've been playing the game since dinosaurs roamed the planet. And more importantly the Dinosaurs can play with each other without having to deal with newbies.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
All the MMORPGs I've seen have had the same basic flaws, all of which have been eloquently listed above. Level grinding, massive power imbalance, farming... the list goes on.
I propose a fundamentally different approach.
* No NPCs.
* No set quests
* No XP.
* No treasure.
* Closed economy.
* No safe ground.
* Dying is hard (unless you're stupid), but also extremely nontrivial.
* User-persistent karma points.
What I'm suggesting, then, is something like a gigantic open-ended GuildWars mission.
There would be a single overarching quest, but the way through it would be up to the players. Let the *players* generate the quests. There's a well-guarded mountain pass that you need to get through? Fine. Round up some heavies, and come up with a plan to take it. You need it, you organise it, you plan it, you pay for it out of your own pocket. And you convince people you're not sending them on a suicide mission.
Effective leadership would become a valuable skill. As would, ferinstance, scouting - intel on enemy encampment/etc would actually become a valuable, marketable commodity. Imagine that: an RPG where your character class didn't just control your appearance and fighting style - it meant you actually got to play a specific role!
The permanently 'live' environment would make guards and lookouts an absolute necessity wherever people gathered - and could be a lucrative profession in itself.
A closed economy and no XP would rule out levelling and farming - a week spent bashing monsters would just leave you with a dented sword and a huge pile of mildly poisonous steak. If you really can't live without stats (seriously, how much stronger does anyone get in their lifetime?), then make your stats dependent on your progress through the main quest - this also rules out the power imbalance, since losing ground would take you back down.
Of course, people like neat equipment, and they should have it. They just have to trade up. Everyone starts out with bog-standard equipment and a handful of gold, and *nothing* else enters the game. If you want something better, you either trade with another player, or you get an armourer to melt down a couple of crappy swords to make you a reasonable one (or vice-versa). This means that if you've managed to get a +900 sword of wtfpwn, you've obviously earned it from a huge amount of services rendered to other players.
(discarded accounts might cause gradual inflation - one possible way to combat this would be to have them rise as powerful undead revenants, requiring the sacrifice of a player-worth of valuables to dispel...)
Expensive deaths and persistent easily-viewed karma would make for a useful asshole-filter. If you consistently bail on people, or betray them, or pkill/etc, then you'll just make yourself a pariah and nobody would help you. If dying were a major setback, it'd mean that the further you went in the game, the less people would suck.
I'd also like to see a combat interface that actually took a reasonable amount of player skill to drive, so a measure of success would depend on actual *human* experience.
One scenario involving a closed economy and a strong sense of teamwork-or-else might be an underground railroad. A train of escaped slaves trying to get the hell out of dodge, through vast amounts of increasingly hostile territory (away from the soft decadent lands of the capital, towards the wartorn frontier of their homeland, or some such).
Ooh. Idea. Players are actually bound spirits/etc that have to possess the body of an oppressor. As they get further from the source of their binding wards, they grow more powerful. If the body is killed, the un-anchored spirit gets dragged inexorably back to the beginning, unless they can repossess another (possibly quite different) body along the way. This would make for a cool new profession: professional soulcatcher. Hang around 'downwind' of a battlefield, and offer drifting souls the chance to take one of your fine captives - for a price. Or (if you're a bit evil) capture and ransom them - but this really wouldn't get you well-liked.
Now, which of you fine developers are going to go build this for me?
While I have not played WoW, I have played Guild Wars. Guild Wars seems to address some of the issues listed in this article. Example: grinding is used to help move the story forward more so then just leveling. Also, Guild Wars has more focus on how to use skills/tactics then the use of leveling to defeat your opponents. While it addresses several issues listed in the article, it has its own problems as well. On top of this, it's not an epic world game but more of an action world game. The article should have covered this or provided some analysis on this game, if the author wants to talk about moving/evolving the MMO. Since Guild Wars is one of the games that has attempted to address some of these issues like the other games listed in the article and it is doing it with some success, depending on how to view success, with out a monthly fee. Perhaps some insight could be obtained from the analysis of what Guild Wars and others have attempted for the next generations of MMO. Instead of going gush wouldn't that be nice to have in a game.......well someone else has done it so go check it out instead of reinventing the......or perhaps you all ready know this and are using their ideas to make you look good. I hope this is not the case.
"The problem being, starting today, it would take more than 5 years to train evey skill to max."
Try a bit over twenty. Also, how is this a problem? Aww, can't play kleptomania and get every last skill and item in the game? Most people consider that a good thing.
"Which means the people that started 3 years ago, no matter what, are going to be 3 years ahead of anyone starting now."
And? You might want to point out that those people who are three years ahead of you are going to be limited to having about a tenth of their skillpoints actually being used in any given ship they're flying. Older characters simply have more diversity, nothing more.
"AFAIK this kills eve for any new influx of players. And also means eve will experiance a slow death."
Really? You mean, the fact that EVE is one of the select few games to have continual positive growth since its release is going to kill it? Gee.
"Point being, joining EVE now leaves you out of the fun game play for at least 2 months. And to be run with the big dogs, you need 1 year or more in game."
If you can't find something to do with half a million skill points, I feel sorry for you. As for this 'OMG 1 year' bullshit, it's just that. An hour out of character generation and you can serve as a suitable tackler in any 0.0 fleet.
"The problem with eve is that to get to and stay in the parts that are fun requires a minimum amount of time per week invested"
Yes, logging on for three minutes to swap skills is absolutely horrible; I can't believe that. I so wish EVE were more like other MMOGs, where you have to spend 40 hours a week killing orcs to remain effective.
"long with AT LEAST 6 months of previous well guided Training."
Again, bullshit.
OK, the way I read this article, the author wants an MMORPG (Pages 2-4 focus exclusively on MMORPG elements) without the MMO (Page 4, Solution 3 shows this the most) or RPG (Pages 2-5 compare the RPG elements mentioned above primarily with single/limited-player FPS games).
I have a tip for the author: If you don't like that kind of game, don't play them. No, I'm serious. Go play Counterstrike Source, Gears of War, or Diablo 2. You can even play Counterstrike Source or Diablo 2 online with a limited number of players! That seems to be the kind of game you want, as you keep referring back to them.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
If you want a chess style MMO where you dont have grind to compete, go play Guild Wars...
Not everyone does. I typically just don't give shit. XP is something that just happens to increase, and at points you go "ding" and you get some new option that might change the way you play your character a little. Big difference at least in MMORPG land between a healer who can just heal and a healer who get his rez spell. "Oops, sorry buddy, didn't notice your meter there, *cough*, can I try my new rez spell on you btw?"
I have done a lot of MMORPG's as well as the western CRPG's and the Pen & Paper stuff on the occasions I have time available AND I do not GRIND.
I can understand the concept, it is possibly just a little bit like chatting up a girl, taking her out, pretending to give a shit for the potential future reward of sex. At least I think that is how it is supposed to go. Lets face this is slashdot game section.
But might I suggest that a possible path instead might be to actually have fun while doing this? That you enjoy talking with her, going out, listening to her?
Mmm, yeah your right. What a load of nonsense.
MMORPG's are grinded because people grind them. If you gave players the choice between two quests, one "Kill 100 X" that gives enough XP to advance a level and one that gives 0 XP but tells a story that will move your soul and make you a changed man, all but a handfull will pick the second quest.
If you ever asked yourselve, how much does this quest pay, then you are a natural grinder. The game don't make you grind, you want to grind. What you should ask yourselve, how much fun is this quest, and see the pay, if any, as a bonus.
SWG the most reviled of MMORPG's did in fact have some nice story based quests in it. All but a handfull of players completed them however because the payout was frequently nothing more then a momento.
While some of us were having fun, others were killing the same mobs over and over to desperatly gain another level so they could grind a little bit faster.
At some point you got to ask yourselve were the fault for todays grind lies, is it purely bad design OR is it just that player when presented with a levelling system can't help but want to advance as quickly as possible?
When you see stuff like "Double XP weekend" you really got to start wondering what the fuck is wrong with people.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Unfortunately different types of game run in different times.
Taking it to the extreme, imagine trying to run a Civ style game where battles were played by other players as an FPS. The world outside couldn't tick on at a year per second while two players were locked in a 2-hour battle, so either the people fighting lose game time waiting for the battle to finish, or the whole world stops every time even a minor skirmish kicks off.
Moving back to the timescales you're talking about, dog breeding would either be a very slow job (if we assume in-game dogs to have a lifespan equivalent to real dogs) or a worthless job (if we shorten the lifespan of a dog in order that we can run through many generations quickly, suddenly the dog dies too quickly to be worth buying).
Things like driver-for-hire/gun-for-hire are just as bad -- because you could end up playing a jobless sim, where no-one will give you a job because you've not got a CV/references, so you can't build up a CV/references, so you sit doing nothing.
Also, the game can't be built to rely on having the correct balance of PCs of different professions, so you'll need NPCs. If the NPCs are any good, they take business away from the PCs. If the NPCs aren't any good, then the game becomes more difficult when there aren't enough PCs of a given class, meaning it's less fun.
Game = Fun
No fun = bad game.
What is holding this type of game back from more universal success? I'd argue 'nothing.' My god, what would we consider universal success? I think the top selling video games sell in the order of eight million copies (pretty sure there are around 25 that have done so (including Goldeneye) and around half of those are packaged games like Mario, Sonic and Tetris). Doesn't World of Warcraft have something like seven million subscribers? What degree of success does it take to qualify as universal?
Imagine... World of Warcraft... when a player gains a level, it only lasts until the player logs off. Easy... you'd have ten thousand people leaving their computers on for months at a time.
My term to describe these games, then, is Persistent Entity Game, or PEG. I accept it. Anything's better than MMORPG. And while the definition of this acronym, PEG, is essentially indistinguishable from RPG, I foresee the eventual designation of a lascivious action verb for this acronym... to peg. I approve.
Eventually, some developer will create a PEG that fuses enjoyable advancement of a persistent entity with a game that is also fun in the traditional sense. This is an explicit expression of my precise sentiment on the subject. DDO was reasonably fun and I was enthralled with EQ for a year and a half, but I'd characterize neither as consistently fun, per se. The attraction, as the author points out, is in the persistent entity aspect.
With apologies to the pen-and-paper role-players out there, this type of gameplay [die rolling whackfests~N] is not particularly compelling to the mass market. Yup. Outside of strictly turn-based game play, it's a quaint, awkward mechanism. And I f*cking love dice. Improvements have been made with respect to this (DDO is a reasonable hybrid, as is Oblivion), but neither of them really feel like action games - they're PEGs with klugy swordplay, more closely akin to Diablo than Zelda. And I firmly believe that the game I want is one that marries robust PEG-style development with kinetic, Z-Axis combat. Perhaps even a style similar to a toned down Tekken.
Listen to me, I sound like Comic Book Guy.
There is a reason that no one has tried to make a single-player game with "MMO" mechanics: few people would be interested. I disagree. The Elder Scroll series is up to episode four. Though they do feel a bit like deserted MMOs...
We see evidence supporting this hypothesis in Everquest II and Vanguard's crafting systems, where the designers have "improved" crafting by copying the arduous math-based, meter-centric mechanics used in the adventuring department. I remember a time, not long after Verant released the transparent GUI patch in EQ, when I sat on the beach in Ro for like 90 minutes, crafting arrows. It was a nice experience... once in a while I'd get up and rescue someone from that rotten Dark Elf, but mostly I just sat there making arrows and watching the sun set (three times). I didn't even talk to anyone. It was right around the time it was starting to feel like work to log in (though I played for another 10 or 12 months after that), but it ended up being one of my more memorable sessions. Which really illustrates the subtle point of this article - stagnant sentimentality is the lifeblood of all RPGs.
When players zip through the advancement system as quickly as possible, it hurts both the player and the developer. The player does not get to enjoy the ga
Skills, not levels, are exactly the reason I love playing Eve Online. Everyone can potentially take down every other player due to the fact that everyone can play effectively in PVP without artificial levels. The veteran player has a huge advantage in better ships, more gear, and more skills, but the new player is still effective. Plus new players can gang up on larger ships and win.
Eve isn't perfect, but the balancing is nice. The game trains skills in real time, so the only advantage in playing constantly is gaining more money and items. Anyone can compete with anyone, and there strategy is king, not an artificial level. I don't magically become able to use a different class of ship, I have to train for the skills to not only pilot it but to also pilot it effectively. It's a refreshing change from EQ, EQ2, WoW, IRO, CoX, and the like.