the state of MMORPGs
The Gamer returns from a long absence -- with apologies to all who read the blog.
The current state of MMORPGs is simultaneously healthy (if measured in terms of people playing, aka the "subscriber base" of all the games out there) and dull. By dull, I mean utterly lacking in innovation, creativity, actual roleplaying, and anything that gives the players the tools to roleplay (which is more than just "talking in character" and only peripherally involves killing lots of things and manipulating stats).
Roleplaying in an MMORPG (or elsewhere) is the involvement of a player, through their character, in a setting and storyline. That's very, very basic, but it's a decent starting-point. I would measure involvement along a few lines:
1) are the stories and quests set up to allow the player to feel a sense of accomplishment, and more importantly to feel a sense of immersion? All things the players do, from the paltry to the significant, should contribute to that sense of "wonder", that feeling that they are actually there, doing the things their characters are doing. The more dynamic a quest or activity, the better. Static quests, like the infamous and far-too-overused "kill" quests ("bring me ten rabbits", followed a few levels later by the obviously-harder "bring me ten ANGRY rabbits"), do NOT create that sense of wonder or involvement. They have their place, which is to flesh out the world AROUND the core stories/quests, but they should NEVER be the mainstay.
2) is the world vast and open to exploration? This is a significant area of contention, since most games nowadays are responding to the morons of the world when they complain that they actually have to explore or walk between places -- they want their action now, dammit, and whine when they can't just go from fight to fight. This is most definitely CONTRARY to roleplaying, and contrary to the creation of a realistic, involving world. Characters should WANT to explore, to set out across the wastelands, knowing that there are things to see out there, places to visit, and possibly (and hopefully) special little places and people that aren't on "the map". Finding new places, finding new things, meeting that lone traveller on the road and exchanging stories to learn about some monument that points to a cave no one's visited -- these should DRIVE the world, create it, flesh it out... and these are things that the whiners and the FPSers (as I call them) ignore when they whine about how long it takes to get anywhere or about having to explore a world. Exploration is perhaps the most fundamental thing in roleplaying -- and it is under assault in the MMORPG world, because it takes EFFORT and TIME to explore, and far too many crybabies are out there wanting it all handed to them on a platter.
3) Do the character professions/classes provide any real chance to distinguish oneself from one's peers? Look at something like EQ2. Wanna be a wizard? Enjoy. The spells for you and the other sixty thousand wizards are all the same -- oh, we added "master fireball" instead of "baby-level fireball". Whoopdie-doo. I'd rather be able to CHOOSE to make my wizard specialize in cold-based spells and never touch fire-based; or lightning; or wind; or fire. CHOOSING for oneself is the key to differentiation. In EQ1, AC1, UO -- you, the player, chose what spells you bought and trained, because nothing was HANDED to you. You had to earn it, work for it, buy it. You molded what you became -- instead of just passing up the tree that everyone else passes up, with the only differentiation being an adjective that expresses superiority being in front of the spell's name. DULL. Try to specialize a wizard in EQ2 or WoW, and you wind up just having to ignore other spells and buy the one or two that would apply -- it's not a fleshed-out world, where the choice is up to you, and the game-designers put enough spells and variety out there to make whatever you chose viable. Sure, you can take a summoning class -- but again, you're forced onto the treadmill, where the only variation between you and the others of your class are adjectives deriving from the same base spell (baby cold snap vs master cold snap). It's called "lack of creativity" on the part of the designers -- and worse, it's also a factor of the masses who don't want differentiation, they just want to be able to get in and bash things and get lots of goodies... a group that, when catered to, dumbs down whatever game they're part of.
Is there hope? Sure. Games like Horizons, which is a terrible game otherwise, make some efforts in the right direction. Horizons has the best crafting of any game I've ever played. The players have a vast array of choices to make when crafting -- so that no two swords will be the same (from something as simple as dying the metal a different color, to adding small enchantments, to choosing to use mahogany for the wood instead of oak and having that "look" actually be different on the item), etc. THAT'S how it should be. And they have serve up this complexity in a very easy-to-use interface -- the perfect combination. The game lacks substantially in every other aspect of an MMORPG -- but must be acknowledged for getting one thing, Crafting, right. Or AC1, which eschewed the "hit buttons in a sequence to fight" theory that dominates most of the games out there. In AC1, you select at what height to swing your weapon (thereby choosing whether to go for the head shot or sweep them at their knees); you choose how fast/what force to put in the blow; and YOU have to maneuver yourself in combat, otherwise something like a shield won't count (if your shield is facing east and the attacker is to your west, the shield doesn't help you -- unlike in virtually every other game, where the shield's value is simply added to an abstraction that is Armor Class and therefore counts even in absurb situations like stated above). Dark Ages of Camelot brought us involving realm-versus-realm combat, complete with destructible environments; and it also brought us a differentiation between quests and what they call "tasks" -- which is to say, the "kill quests" are all "Tasks" in DAOC, and you know that ahead of time, so you can choose to do tasks or not... but when you choose to start quests, you know you're starting something more involving and less throw-away. AC1 has captured the spirit and design of believable gameworlds from the single-player RPGs --not simply "the floorplan is believable", but something in the design simply sparks. I believe I'm delving into a strange stronghold, and within the "instance", if you will, are not only other players (not just the ones you came with, the way any instance should be), but a design that incorporates traps, locks, creatures, etc laid out in a challenging way. Something like WoW doesn't understand that basic fact: it's not about having thirty enemies in an inn, just randomly put in; it's about putting a few by the fire, another few in the various hotel-rooms, and a boss with a few guys he's talking to downstairs.
What every single MMORPG should is to capture the single-player RPG worlds, with their involvement, scripting, dynamism, their vastness and playability, and "write it large" onto a stage where the "massively multiplayer" part comes in.
More in the next issue...
The current state of MMORPGs is simultaneously healthy (if measured in terms of people playing, aka the "subscriber base" of all the games out there) and dull. By dull, I mean utterly lacking in innovation, creativity, actual roleplaying, and anything that gives the players the tools to roleplay (which is more than just "talking in character" and only peripherally involves killing lots of things and manipulating stats).
Roleplaying in an MMORPG (or elsewhere) is the involvement of a player, through their character, in a setting and storyline. That's very, very basic, but it's a decent starting-point. I would measure involvement along a few lines:
1) are the stories and quests set up to allow the player to feel a sense of accomplishment, and more importantly to feel a sense of immersion? All things the players do, from the paltry to the significant, should contribute to that sense of "wonder", that feeling that they are actually there, doing the things their characters are doing. The more dynamic a quest or activity, the better. Static quests, like the infamous and far-too-overused "kill" quests ("bring me ten rabbits", followed a few levels later by the obviously-harder "bring me ten ANGRY rabbits"), do NOT create that sense of wonder or involvement. They have their place, which is to flesh out the world AROUND the core stories/quests, but they should NEVER be the mainstay.
2) is the world vast and open to exploration? This is a significant area of contention, since most games nowadays are responding to the morons of the world when they complain that they actually have to explore or walk between places -- they want their action now, dammit, and whine when they can't just go from fight to fight. This is most definitely CONTRARY to roleplaying, and contrary to the creation of a realistic, involving world. Characters should WANT to explore, to set out across the wastelands, knowing that there are things to see out there, places to visit, and possibly (and hopefully) special little places and people that aren't on "the map". Finding new places, finding new things, meeting that lone traveller on the road and exchanging stories to learn about some monument that points to a cave no one's visited -- these should DRIVE the world, create it, flesh it out... and these are things that the whiners and the FPSers (as I call them) ignore when they whine about how long it takes to get anywhere or about having to explore a world. Exploration is perhaps the most fundamental thing in roleplaying -- and it is under assault in the MMORPG world, because it takes EFFORT and TIME to explore, and far too many crybabies are out there wanting it all handed to them on a platter.
3) Do the character professions/classes provide any real chance to distinguish oneself from one's peers? Look at something like EQ2. Wanna be a wizard? Enjoy. The spells for you and the other sixty thousand wizards are all the same -- oh, we added "master fireball" instead of "baby-level fireball". Whoopdie-doo. I'd rather be able to CHOOSE to make my wizard specialize in cold-based spells and never touch fire-based; or lightning; or wind; or fire. CHOOSING for oneself is the key to differentiation. In EQ1, AC1, UO -- you, the player, chose what spells you bought and trained, because nothing was HANDED to you. You had to earn it, work for it, buy it. You molded what you became -- instead of just passing up the tree that everyone else passes up, with the only differentiation being an adjective that expresses superiority being in front of the spell's name. DULL. Try to specialize a wizard in EQ2 or WoW, and you wind up just having to ignore other spells and buy the one or two that would apply -- it's not a fleshed-out world, where the choice is up to you, and the game-designers put enough spells and variety out there to make whatever you chose viable. Sure, you can take a summoning class -- but again, you're forced onto the treadmill, where the only variation between you and the others of your class are adjectives deriving from the same base spell (baby cold snap vs master cold snap). It's called "lack of creativity" on the part of the designers -- and worse, it's also a factor of the masses who don't want differentiation, they just want to be able to get in and bash things and get lots of goodies... a group that, when catered to, dumbs down whatever game they're part of.
Is there hope? Sure. Games like Horizons, which is a terrible game otherwise, make some efforts in the right direction. Horizons has the best crafting of any game I've ever played. The players have a vast array of choices to make when crafting -- so that no two swords will be the same (from something as simple as dying the metal a different color, to adding small enchantments, to choosing to use mahogany for the wood instead of oak and having that "look" actually be different on the item), etc. THAT'S how it should be. And they have serve up this complexity in a very easy-to-use interface -- the perfect combination. The game lacks substantially in every other aspect of an MMORPG -- but must be acknowledged for getting one thing, Crafting, right. Or AC1, which eschewed the "hit buttons in a sequence to fight" theory that dominates most of the games out there. In AC1, you select at what height to swing your weapon (thereby choosing whether to go for the head shot or sweep them at their knees); you choose how fast/what force to put in the blow; and YOU have to maneuver yourself in combat, otherwise something like a shield won't count (if your shield is facing east and the attacker is to your west, the shield doesn't help you -- unlike in virtually every other game, where the shield's value is simply added to an abstraction that is Armor Class and therefore counts even in absurb situations like stated above). Dark Ages of Camelot brought us involving realm-versus-realm combat, complete with destructible environments; and it also brought us a differentiation between quests and what they call "tasks" -- which is to say, the "kill quests" are all "Tasks" in DAOC, and you know that ahead of time, so you can choose to do tasks or not... but when you choose to start quests, you know you're starting something more involving and less throw-away. AC1 has captured the spirit and design of believable gameworlds from the single-player RPGs --not simply "the floorplan is believable", but something in the design simply sparks. I believe I'm delving into a strange stronghold, and within the "instance", if you will, are not only other players (not just the ones you came with, the way any instance should be), but a design that incorporates traps, locks, creatures, etc laid out in a challenging way. Something like WoW doesn't understand that basic fact: it's not about having thirty enemies in an inn, just randomly put in; it's about putting a few by the fire, another few in the various hotel-rooms, and a boss with a few guys he's talking to downstairs.
What every single MMORPG should is to capture the single-player RPG worlds, with their involvement, scripting, dynamism, their vastness and playability, and "write it large" onto a stage where the "massively multiplayer" part comes in.
More in the next issue...
posted by Thurken | 12:07 PM
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