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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."
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.
1. Yea, it sucks. MMORPGs are designed to be the only game you will play for months. A typical RPG game has about 20-30 hours of gameplay, and took about a year to make. Try to scale that to people who play 20-30 hours per week and keep them occupied for several months, without grinding and you will find you will never complete the game.
2. High level areas are fun for the first few times you do it. They are designed as a real challange. But once you figured out the challange, yes they can get boringin when you are forced to run it time and time again. But these areas are the limit point of content, where there just isn't anymore. So these areas have to strech out the remaining content as long as possible.
3.People are attracted to MMORPGs due to their low cost, at around only 15$ per month it can save you a lot of money on buying games. Professional GMs will drasticly increase the game cost, and you have the problem of some GMs being "easier" than others. In pen and paper each GM can run their own world with their own rules. Try to scale this to an MMORPG and the GMs world will collide in horrid ways.
4. In WoW different encounters require different stragities. Pretty much every boss end level, you are either going to wipe several times on the first go, or you look up what stragity to use. For most people, the AI stragities and the counter-stragities are well known. If you want something more intresting, go and create a smart AI... tell us when you are done, so we can nominate you for a Nobel Prize.
5. Most games give ways to avoid griefing. In WoW... don't play on a PvP server; if you are PvP just wait 5 minutes before resurection. If its a quest NPC... do something else. This is a sacrifice by letting players have more control over their enviroment; some abuse this feature.
6. MMOs can have their own content, but it could not be connected to the real content, as in you could not simply allow a player to create a monster that drops some awsome uber item. Runescape does allow player made dungeons (although a bit limited). You can create your own content without limitation in Neverwinter Nights, but characters in different user's enviroments cannot interact without GMs permission (like in pen and paper games).
7. Yep... several MMORPGs have that. Runescape has that in spades. And Eve is entirly based around that.
I agree with you completely, and perhaps that's why Guild Wars has been the only MMO-like game that I've played regularly. It has its issues too, mainly surrounding its social aspects, but its chapters feel more like a single player RPG than anything, plus there's no monthly fee. There's no telling if you'd like it or not, but your problems with Eve are the same ones I have, so it might be worth a shot.
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.
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.
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?
I think this varies a lot from DM to DM and system to system. White Wolf in particular has a system that really doesn't push for stating. In fact, the thing that made each of the White Wolf (VTM and WW) campaigns I've played in so much fun WAS the story. I'm a geek, through and through, I have geek friends. I used to go to hang out at a local Perkins and recap the game, in story format, to some of my geeky (but not geeky enough to dice) friends. Heck, you kick back in the smoking section and tell a chapter of an epic story and people get interested. I had one guy ask me if I was talking about a movie script. The retelling of those stories was often as much fun as playing them the first time too.
In a MMO video game, I don't think it would have much of an impact though. For two reasons:
1) The games are stat dependent. It doesn't matter how well you know the Barron, his aura is going to smack you and you need the gear (stats) to survive it.
2) As soon as anything is done once, instructions are posted on the web. It doesn't matter if you spend 4 days in the libraries learning all you can about the boss, when it comes down to it, someone can just look up the encounter on thottbot or wowhead and know it all.
Think about it, if you're telling a story from a pen and paper game to another gamer, it's new and different. If you're telling a story about how you took out a boss in WoW to another WoW player, they're going to respond with "Oh yeah, my guild took him out last week."
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I think that you need to take a slightly different approach to MMOG's. To me, more than anything, they're social games. EvE is just a big universe full of spaceships and such that serve as ways of getting people to interact. The generally slow pace of the game (with the occasional flash of hectic mayhem) gives groups of people a lot of time to organize or work on strategy or just socialize. There are people who sort of do their own thing all by themselves, and if they're having a good time then that's great. But what makes EVE really interesting is the other people.
Keeping that in mind, EvE does not do a very good job in terms of plugging new players into any social settings. An organized and even mildly sucessful corporation/alliance in EVE is bound to have an active TeamSpeak server going, and most likely does a lot of communicating through their own external forums. But for a single person, just starting out all alone in the EVE universe, that part of the game isn't always immediately visible or reachable. CCP needs to do more to help with that.
All that said, that sort of social gameplay isn't for everybody. Maybe you're constantly dealing with a bunch of people all day at work, and want to turn that part of your brain off and relax while playing video games at home. That's fine, there's still plenty of room for both types of games. And both directions should be able to integrate some of the MMO possibilities in cool ways.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.