The Unfulfilled Potential of MMOs
October 11th, 2008 . by Roo
The very first graphical MMORPG I played was Everquest, way back when the premise — a game with thousands of people playing together — was something most people had no idea existed in video games. Everquest wasn’t really the first to do what it did, so why does every MMO since still feel like Everquest?
Recently, at the request of some friends, I tried Warhammer Online. At first there was no appeal to me at all. I haven’t even played many post-Everquest MMOs (RYL, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Phantasy Star Online) and yet it still seems to me as though nothing has changed fundamentally: Tedious quests, loose combat controls, awful collision detection, and all the telltale design choices that have come to represent the flow of the MMO as a genre (rather than a technology), like the “aggro/de-aggro” modes of mobs, universal movement speed, and restriction after restriction on every piece of equipment (now worse than ever), skill, and action you could attempt to do are all present in all of these games. If you’re an MMO connoisseur, I could probably understand if you said these games have little in common, but I can tell you that back when I quit Everquest, I remember declaring, “This game has its flaws, but it’s only a matter of time before MMORPGs make everything else obsolete.”
Generally I would still say the potential is there. Over the years since Everquest appeared, there hasn’t been any movement in video games with more potential left unfulfilled than MMOs. I wish I could say it’s the unavoidable restrictions of technology that are keeping things this way, but that’s just not the whole story. What began as one game has become a recurring theme for nearly everything after it, and I want to try to cover, concisely, what is being shockingly overlooked.
I wish I could’ve been around during the peak of Ultima Online. But I have mentioned MUDs several times here because I’ve learned so many lessons in game design and social player interaction through them. Anybody who’s familiar with MUDs will notice right away how heavily the modern MMO was inspired by them. But it’s an esoteric niche in gaming, and there aren’t nearly as many players on any MUD as there are on a commercial MMO these days. Let me put it this way: There are too many people playing these games (MMOs) at any given time. Rather, the target audience is too large. Or maybe, the server population targets are too large. However you want to look at it, it amounts to the same thing: The more people playing, the less intricacy for the individual, the less mystery.
SOYLENT GREEN: THE MMORPG
I used to think that more players in a game meant a merrier time. But even with MMOs aside, any game — even a first-person-shooter — loses emphasis on the individual as more players are added to the scene. When playing with 32 people and 15 teammates in a CTF match, how much of an impact can you really make by yourself when teamwork is the name of the game? Multiply those numbers and factor in complementary RPG classes, and you’re sadly just an accessory, no matter your skill or feats.
A persistent, seamless game world like the one seen here allows so much freedom. But with public wikis, ebooks, and fan websites that can solve any of your quests with a three-second search on Google, the game can’t offer much reward for finding a hidden area. Any secret item won’t be secret for long, but only rare once it’s publicly discovered, and rare items are made rare by the frequency in which they “drop”…not by the depths of which they’re hidden in the world. Warhammer does attempt to give reward for discovering new areas, but that reward is an amount of experience points that won’t even make a visible change on your EXP bar.
With fewer players inhabiting the world, items could stay rare just because no one knows about them. And secret areas? When they don’t appear on public databases, they could actually be kept secret.
Imagine a game with no map of the world other than what you’ve seen yourself. Picture the intrigue in wandering off the beaten path to find a concealed cave, and then reporting back at a local tavern to a group of adventurers in awe. One skeptical character swears it’s nothing but a natural land formation like so many others, worthless for raiding of treasure. While another heroic soul tries to organize the exploration of it, a shadowy couple has already slunk out the door without a word, on their way to make certain that by the time the rest arrive, the cave will be as empty as the skeptic warned.
For all the freedom dangling in front of us, some very simple but deliberate game rules prohibit true player control.
NOT THE REPTILIAN VARIETY
Because it’s all about scale. If an MMO is commercial, they want as many subscribers as they can manage. The game, and everything in it, must be made to scale. In Lord of the Rings Online, any player could own a house. Certain locations within the house could be adorned with decorative items like trophies and tables, and you could even select music to be played while inside. It was really a nice feature, with the notable exception being that houses weren’t really used for anything.
Being that so many houses were allotted to so many people, every housing development was placed in an instance separate from the main game world. Some clans would hold meetings in their clan houses, but there were no problems solved by doing this, and very little atmosphere was created as there were few customization options and no interaction with the house’s items, not to mention there was no convenience in gathering everyone in the house. In the end, you had to convince everybody to go out of their way to visit you, give specific directions, and then, when they arrived, do nothing differently than you did anywhere else, but try to enjoy the fact that you were in a house you kind of personalized.
I think it was an unrefined draft of a fantastic idea, and maybe eventually, there will be more utility to it. But I insist that the worst problem is the isolation of the houses. It just wouldn’t be practical to fit every player’s house convincingly into the world, not as long as there are an indefinite number of players. But if they could? Then houses could have a true influence on the world. (I’m keeping a close eye on Playstation Home, the upcoming social network which furthers the personal housing idea.)
But then what solution is there? Like I’ve said in previous articles, independent game designers may be the only ones to look to. These games are called “massive” rightfully, and being commercial, there’s no sanity in telling people they can’t play your company’s game because there are already enough people. So how about smaller servers?
Here’s an interesting reminder: Dungeons & Dragons Online originally planned to do exactly that. Long before the game was released I remember an interview with the developer who promised the DDO world would be smaller, more intimate, where “everybody knew everybody” on their server, and reputations could be built. I played the game during the beta, but wasn’t impressed enough to continue because the atmosphere and players seemed no different than any other MMO. A year later I tried again, even researching to find the most roleplaying-oriented server. Same thing. So maybe the developers and designers aren’t completely to blame. By now, players already have a predetermined expectation when trying any new MMO; they expect it to feel at least some degree of familiar. They expect to be able to choose a character from archetypes of tank, healer, DPS, etc., and to tear through one-dimensional quests without even reading what they’re about, until finally reaching the “endgame”. It has undoubtedly become a genre.
TO BE FAIR…
Yeah, there are many differences in modern MMOs compared to Everquest, with the most noticeable to me being the abundance of quests, whereas Everquest’s leveling relied almost entirely on killing mobs. A novel idea demonstrated in Warhammer is leveling through the PVP/PK scenarios, which are available pretty frequently. Leveling your character in a way that’s actually fun? I hate to sound cynical but I never thought I’d see the day. I had been commissioned enough in my life with grinding through quest after quest of either killing a specified number of targets or retrieving an inconsequential object. It’s gotten to the point that you’re now shown exactly where you need to go for every single quest:
And yet this is necessary, because you’ll find yourself pursuing hundreds of them.
FUN WITH LVLING
So PVP in Warhammer is very fun. And yet these PVP portal scenarios make no sense to me whatsoever. Capture the flag? In an MMORPG? Somewhere along the way, the original inspiration was lost, contorted, and resurrected as something completely different, and now instead of plunging ourselves into a massive, living world we could try to be a part of, we instead focus on raiding for “epic gear” and capturing flags in instanced areas. I try to be impartial when writing these articles, but I just can’t hide my disappointment.
Warhammer Online is mostly a fun game that’s growing on me, despite being made from the same mold as many others. I don’t see myself playing long-term, and I still await the MMO that returns to what I think was the original vision for this MMO platform, and that is an immersive environment which covers an array of paces, shifting from action-oriented adventures built on meaningful interaction between friends, to true exploration and quests invented by players themselves, not handed from forgettable NPC characters. It will take a cooperation between some daring designers and open-minded players before it happens, and maybe even a very specific type of player to meet the game half way. But it will happen.
Meanwhile, drop by on the Grimnir server and say hi. My name’s Rattata, and you’ll probably find me hanging out with Vaporeon and Growlithe, lol.
P.S.
Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed! Hate this post and want to write a better one? Join us!
Very good post. It reminds me of the Shadowrun Mux I played for a short period. Everything was based around role playing. Just to get an account players had to type up a serious backstory for their characters. Missions came through calling up your boss on a cel phone and finding out what he needed you to do. Karma (Xp) was rewarded by GM’s for roleplaying.
It was a very exciting concept to me, but unfortunately my boss was never on. Hardly anyone else was either.
MrAdventure
I’m going to be honest when I suggest you should check out the tabletops instead of the MMOs. I swear I’m hearing everything you WANT from a game in tabletop roleplaying. Barring not having enough people who want to meet and bullshit about characters for a few hours per day, or just not having enough time to check it out, you could always try RP forums, as MrAdventure suggested. The Master Zen-Dao Meowmeow forums is STILL alive in this concept, though the heavy intertwining of everyone posting about everything makes me shy away.
A comment about your section on innovation re modes of PvP: I think the word you’re looking for isn’t resurrected but zombified, though that is my Christianity side talking there. I’ve always seen resurrection as something indicating a glorified raising from the dead, not something as annoying cropping back up.
SecondLife offered personal housing that you could go to, and while I think it’s a novel concept that not everyone gets awesome housing, and some people instead have land on which others can meet and hang out, the COMBAT is a bit unrefined, mostly because there are multiple systems to work with and some cost money and none of them work with each other; sometimes different VERSIONS do not work with each other. Still more disappointing is that items is a very tricky matter- how do you make gear that people can wear to increase their stats? Right now, I don’t see systems that can handle it aside from guns, and thus I run around with free weapons and animations that make it look like I attack even when I do not. Then again, I don’t see SecondLife as a game but as a meeting place, but I know others who do see it as a roleplaying game. (With my sub-interests, it’s hard to find places that aren’t dominated by idiots)
MrAdventure, Shadowrun is one of my favorite themes ever (and cyberpunk in general), I’m way impressed you mentioned that! But the problem you noted — a shortage of participating people — is the downfall of so many things, and that’s what makes me concerned that there aren’t too many who have the patience for something like that.
Doomy, tabletop games always seemed strangely cool to me, but there are too many obstacles to getting that together. But you’re basically right, and in fact taking a tabletop intimacy and cooperation and incorporating it into a video game presentation is the best way to explain what I’m yearning for. But for one, people want instant gratification from games (and who can blame them) plus tabletop games don’t have the best reputations. I purposely didn’t mention game-masters in this article because it’s something I want to touch on separately later, but it is integral to this.
I had no idea Second Life even had combat, but you’re saying there are totally different systems of how combat works?
Second Life as a meeting place, as you called it, is probably the way it’s meant to be taken. These types of games are starving in their social networking quality because of people who jump from non-social games like first-person-shooters right to MMORPGs just to head into their pvp/pk competition. Which I guess further worries me that it’s not the games with the problem, it’s the players.
It is amazing how overtime the MMO genre has moved away from player association over time. Things like global chat channels, guild housing where you need to go nowhere else, instances, global chat, instant travel, etc. Actually seperate players more than brings them together. People get more meaning out of being closer to each other than they do when talking on the phone, but MMOs is all about talking on the phone. Imagine how much more use player housing would have if players couldn’t just type in /gu. All of a sudden a need for an area to congregate becomes necessary. As would the removal of LFG and Auction Houses. But the modern MMO doesn’t want players to congregate (I am not being overdramatic, it is bad for the servers if they do). Thus we are left with a wide vareity of ways to split the player up from one another, and thus end up more playing single-player games online than MMOs. At this point in the genre, NWN (Bioware’s) is just as much an MMO as WoW.
I also miss the concept of Dynamic Content that UO once had in beta. For instance the Virtual Ecology meant that if players overhunted deer then we would have to defend the towns from Dragons attacking due to starvation. It made for a far more interesting game than the scripted events we now live in. At one time dynamic content was the buzz word. Now the buzz word seems to be “easy breezy brainless”
This is an awfully odd argument to make: commercial MMOs lack a sense of mystery because too many people play them so their secrets are all over the web. The solution is simple: avoid reading spoilers on the net. One of the great things about the new generation of MMOs is that it is possible to play them essentially as single-player games for a goodly proportion of your journey through the world. There’s nothing to prevent you from playing WOW as a leisurely exploration of Azeroth by yourself, reading up the quest lore that groups often skip and enjoying the little Easter eggs and story moments the designers have put into the game.
Razakius, funny you should mention people turning MMOs into single-player games. The very next comment from Wan encourages it. But personally, I just don’t understand that.
The bit about dynamic content being all the rage is super interesting. I still can’t believe how easy MMOs have become, but it was necessary for a mainstream attraction (for better or for worse?). Since first writing this I’ve spent a lot more time on Warhammer and it became a lot more enjoyable for a time, but eventually it became exactly what I thought it would, so I’m done for now.
—
Wan, with all due respect that’s not much of a solution, lol. As I was saying, I don’t know that I blame the players or the design of the games, but even if I avoided looking stuff up myself, that won’t change the fact that the game designers still cannot offer great rewards or retain rarity for DISCOVERY in the game. Take a game like Morrowind, where some of the most powerful items could be found by just knowing where to look. Now if I had read a strategy guide and found everything, of course I would know I was spoiling it for myself. But in an MMO, there’s no way they could tuck great items just sitting in a cave in a less-traveled field; they’d be selling for pennies on whatever auction channel by the end of the day.
I understand that you’re asking me not to worry about how everybody else plays the game, but I can’t justify playing any of these alone. The game mechanics themselves are just subpar to me compared to true single-player RPGs (which I almost never play anyway because of no multiplayer) and for good reason — they’re made to be social! There’s no way I can encourage people to play these games alone instead of upbraiding what I think aren’t just problems, but bad trends.
Obviously for balance reasons, the designers can’t place powerful items in odd locations to reward exploration, but items aren’t the only possible rewards of exploration. WOW does this well, placing Easter eggs and bits of lore at various points for explorers to discover. For example, if you visit the throne room above the Undercity and just turn your speakers up and stand still for a moment there (something that 99% of WOW players will never do), you can hear a ghostly echo of the events that took place there, as portrayed in the famous cutscene in Warcraft 3 of Arthas killing his own father. It’s more subtle than hiding a powerful sword somewhere, but certainly more emotionally engaging.
As for playing with people, well, you might think about playing on the RP servers and finding a good RP guild. I can’t vouch for WOW in this respect because that wasn’t how I played it, but I stuck with an RP guild throughout the time I played Anarchy Online. These were players who were more interesting in exploring the game world together and discovering the stories of the people who lived in it than simply gaining levels and getting drops. I’m sure that there are people like that in other games if you just take the time to look for them.