• DigitalFlux
• May 19, 2010    3:23 AM

I was just reading a short post by Michael Hartman over at his blog, Muckbeast about how Raiding in MMOs sucks.

Honestly, I agree with him so much that I have to go a step further and say how the current MMO framework should be changed. Many people have talked about the various ways that MMOs should be “fixed”, but should you cobble those complaints together, what you come to is the realization that MMOs are built on the same general foundation:

• Progress must be done through combat.
• The choices made in creating a character before gameplay even starts determine the destiny of the character.
• NPCs are vending machines for quests, or animated props, and little more.
• The game must ride on rails.
• There is an “end game”.

Going down that list, the first point is something that has chaffed at players of almost all of the popular MMOs. Whether you were a shaman, paladin, warlock, thief, or whatever, you cannot gain a level without performing some sort of combat. A shaman is a spiritual leader, a go-to man for his tribe for medicine, spiritual advice, leadership, etc. But in an MMO, he is a “themed” wizard. The same goes for a Paladin, which is a principled character who is rigid in his own beliefs and crusades for causes- or maybe he’s just a “themed” tank armed with a war hammer. Neither of those classes will ever get XP for playing their role unless the XP was built into the reward of the static-content-quest they are forced to complete. And let’s face it: The quests they’re given are crafted especially for their classes, so unless the writer makes it so, they don’t get presented with opportunities to truly play their role…

Of course, that’s not half as sad as the fact that your character already starts out as a shaman or paladin, and experiences none of the trials that it takes to be honored with such a title. Conan didn’t come out of the womb chopping people’s heads off with an axe- his family was killed and he was sold into slavery and then sold again as a gladiator who is taught to fight by masters. Pffft, why bother with petty details, like how a character becomes what they are, right? In fact, details like that are the meat and potatoes of a character’s destiny, where as the selection of a class at the beginning of the character creation process in a game is a lot like that “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question we all had to answer as children. Makes me wonder if getting what we had wanted simply by answering the question would have been as boring as becoming a paladin simply by clicking a button…

And while we’re on the subject of boring, NPCs are good for three things: Giving quests, granting skills, and vending items. Anarchy Online at least had the honesty to replace them with actual ATM-like terminals and vending machines. AI has not yet come far enough to give us character depth like the movies would have you believe, but it has come far enough to allow for deeper characters than what we have now. The best try so far has been reputation systems which are applied at the faction level, so that as soon as you kill enough of Faction X, you automatically become loved and cheered in every town of Faction Y. And somehow, not a single one of Faction Y thinks you’re an assclown. Push AI to the NPC level, and your trip to town will be a bit more uneven- a bit more real…

But when talking about making the experience uneven, we talk about how the game is played from beginning to end. From the start, once you create your paladin, thief, wizard, etc. and place them into the rigid class-based system of the game, the quests they encounter are predetermined. The player is forced to do the same quests and (in some cases) travel the same physical route in order to progress through the levels. Once you get to a certain level, entire swaths of countryside are no longer worth the time of day from you. The areas have been conquered, the great wizard in the tower terrorizing the townsfolk slain, and people freed- all because of you. And the guy who came before you. And that girl who went before him. And that other guy. And the guy who plays a girl in the game. Everyone in the game is the ultimate hero for that scene until it resets and the exact same scenario is played out, to the point where players line up and wait for one another to go behead that bandit across the stream from the abbey. They don’t even bother creating a name generator so that the name of the guy changes- he just keeps coming back to life like the world doesn’t end for him…

The world ends for you, however. It’s probably the one thing where I can sympathize with the current and past MMOs: Content. Even just in terms of text, you need a huge amount to satisfy the players who will consume it. So developers have come up with things to keep players occupied once they’ve done all of their quests and maxed out their levels such as “end game content”. The end-game usually means Raid dungeons and arena combat, allowing the player to withdraw from the rest of the world, which is now useless to them because they’ve “completed” it, and concentrate on the same dungeon over and over again, calculating the math it takes to deal just enough damage to take the dragon down without invoking too much of its wrath (or maybe wiping). Because in the end, that’s what you want, right- to just calculate the math to the point where the dungeon, setting, story, and characters have lost their meaning?

Of course not…

…to be continued…

• Tags: