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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."
5. What about griefing? There's always idiots that do that. How do we deal with them?
America's Army has the best solution to that - the in-game Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.. "If a player violates enough ROE he is transported to a virtual jail cell at Fort Leavenworth with nothing to do but clink against the bars, pondering his sins. As if to create remorse, one can view the tip of a sunset from the lone, high window the cell but only if one is standing on the toilet."
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.
The interesting thing about WoW is that it didn't refine it more than it dumbed it down. Everyone else was fighting to make their game more challenging, more epic in scale, and more intense graphics. Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics.
In turn they opened the door to the average Joe who always secretly though D&D and online gaming might be fun if it wasn't for the "nerds" and the amount of time it would take out of their life. They also set the system specs low enough to where anyone with a somewhat modern computer could play it. However, through this "dumbing down" (which I'm not using as a derogatory statement, I'll be the first to say that a lot of MMO's are unnecessarily difficult in a lot of respects) they alienated a lot of the original core audience of MMORPG's. For every WoW player (well, maybe not every seeing that there's so many of them) that makes an joke about EverQuest players, you can be assured that there's an EQ player that's making a crack about WoW "carebear" players.
The core problem is that you'll always have 3 core audiences: Casual players, power levelers/stat whores, and RPGers who are all looking for distinctly different gaming experiences and because of this there's never going to be the typical progression path for the genre. I think because of this, articles that talk about "rethinking the genre" have it all wrong. How do you rethink a genre that everyone wants to jump into, yet appeals (in different ways) to such a diverse audience? Do we rethink the genre or do we finally give up on trying to appeal to everybody and focus on certain core audiences? I think that's the one thing that Blizzard did get right on WoW...they went out of their way to appeal to the casual gamer. Until someone designs a game grand enough in scale to encompass a caste system to divide and account for different play styles or creates a game with seperate servers that drastically alter the game play for each type of player, I think we're better off picking a target audience and sticking with it.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
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.
He also doesn't seem to realize that a single player RPG is very different from a MMORPG. For example:
Trust your ability to balance things later. That?s the easy part.
No. It most definitely is not. Example: I'm a relatively new member of the dev team at Eternal Lands, an open source, free (as in beer) MMORPG. Early on, the dev team had added in a sword worth an utter fortune to an NPC. It could be crafted, but took an obscenely high level to craft. Eventually (after some similar problems on a smaller scale), the devs came to the realization that once people reached that level, the market would be flooded: people would make those swords in bulk, sell them to the NPC, and completely destroy the game's economy. Fixing it got on their TODO list, but wasn't a top priority item. There was so much else to develop, and hey, nobody was near that manufacturing level yet. A minor oversight, though: you can get blessings from your god (including the manufacturing God) to temporarily up your levels -- all for just a 50 gold fee. The high level manufacturers started making and selling the swords in bulk and threw the economy out of whack.
Now it's out of whack. How do you fix it? Not only do the manufacturers now have obscene amounts of money, but through their purchases, they've messed up the amount of money that others have. Do you just roll back the entire game to a few months prior? Good way to lose almost your entire player base. It took a long time for them to rebalance the game, and they lost a number of players in the process.
In short: NEVER trust your ability to rebalance things later. That's the HARD part. Plan everything to death before you hook it in.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics. Making it accessible and dumbing it down are completely different things. An intuitive GUI is far more complex than one that is "dumbed down". I do realize you're not using that as derogatory, but it's difficult to separate the two. It's really quite complex the way they handled it. In addition, they made the interface nearly completely programmable, which allows gamers to truly geek-out and enhance their own experience.
Blizzard graphics in WoW are actually quite intense. They have their own style and incredibly complex textures. They use fewer polygons in some areas, but are not blocky because they avoid the blockiness by reducing the number of 90-degree angles. (Thus, things don't look blocky to the eye -- cf: City of Heroes.) Many small items or sections use lots of polygons to give it a "full" and complex feel even when surrounding things are relatively low poly counts.
The main gameplay thing that wow mostly eliminated was camping global spawns. If getting rid of what most people consider an utterly stupid concept is "dumbing it down" then I want to play that dumb game. Some people actually enjoyed that aspect of competition in EQ -- but most people who have outgrown pimples eschew such games. Blizzard took most of the best parts of many games, and did it right, making a fun game and hoped people would play it instead of implementing cheesy tricks to keep people playing longer. They also know their audience isn't the hardcore kid with nothing better to do than call his 20 friends when a spawn happened. It's now the somewhat richer adult, often with a wife and kids, who has a few hours here and there to play, and most importantly is willing to pony up $15/month to have fun during that time.
They also have some of the "hardcore" kind of things that others have grown to recognize, and love/hate it. I'm talking 40-man raids (recently changed to 25-man), which are difficult.
The only thing that's actually dumbed down is pvp. And even that could be changed, if they wanted, without affecting other worlds. There are actually only 2 groups of people - casuals and powergamers, and people fall between those two. PvPers are often a subset of powergamers, and RPers may be anything.
Of the three groups people you discuss, no matter what game, the casuals will always bitch about the powergamers who will always bitch about the RPers, who will always bitch (in ye olde english) about everyone who doesn't RP. But WoW actually caters to the three groups much better than other games, and I'd even say succeeds quite well. You can accomplish something as a casual, and you can accomplish something as a powergamer. And there's a little corner for thee, Master RPer. Goeth now and stand there and leaveth the rest alone