I'm Still Waiting for My MMO

[Baralak]

But I'm surprised you mentioned no quest log as a benefit, how is that a good thing? Yes, having hidden quests is interesting and would reward exploration but really? When I have a lot to do in a day I'll make a list, so that I remember to get everything done, why would you not want that feature in your game. You can have multiple quests going at once, why would you not want a concise list to help you keep track of where you were in each one. I can just imagine coming back after a short hiatus to the game, forgetting what quests I was on and what I was doing, and then just turning it off again.

No quest log is one of those things that is a design flaw but also sort of feature but also definitely a flaw...

One of that game's quests, the rogue "epic weapon" quest (it was pretty epic ten years ago, they out a lot of work into those quests), has you working for dude named Stanos. He's in hiding, before you came on the scene he foiled an assassination attempt and made rather a lot of enemies. A dark elf general had hired one of the human rogue guilds to kill an ambassador in a human city, hoping to start a war. Stanos felt this would be bad for business, betrayed the assassin and now the guild and the dark elf both want him dead. Stanos has a plan for you to kill the dark elf and get the heat off him, and you can do that quest. You'll get sweet dagger for your troubles.

Or... Half the world wants Stanos dead, he's standing right in front of you, and you've got a knife. There's no indication you should follow this route, but if you've read the story it makes perfect sense, and it turns you can and it works. Kill Stanos and you can claim a reward from either the assassin's son or the dark elf (who is actually a raid boss who will murder anyone who tries to talk to him). It took ages for anyone to work this out, I think it was at least a year after the primary plotline was solved. It was awesome.

Now, you could theoretically do this with a quest tracker in place. But I honestly can't ever remember a game that let you just completely ignore your tracker and go do a completely different quest with the same characters. Quest logs are great when they remind the player what the player wants to do next. Except more commonly they just tell the player what to do, and that's sort of a shame.

I totally get that, but if it were me I'd just word the quest information carefully. Have something like "resolve the issue between Stanos and the guild." The straight forward answer would be to follow what Stanos wants you to do, but if you're the kind of person who thinks outside the box, then 'resolve' could mean something different. However you want to 'resolve' the issue is up to you, and depending on what way you chose the quest would branch in a different direction.
Or alternatively reward the player for exploration by having alternate outcomes come up in NPC conversation. Stanos hired you to kill someone, but on your way to do that you hear about what a douche he is, and how it might be better if he was the one that died instead. Then it gets you thinking, hey maybe I don't have to follow his orders, maybe I can take him down instead. There are options available, and all the quest tracker needs to do is keep track of what you've already done, and what information you've collected relating to it, rather than harping on what the game wants you to do next.

There's now a quest log in EQ, if it helps. but yeah, I hate MUDs, but since MMOs are totally text based, I loved having to talk to the NPCs instead of just clicking "Next" over and over. EQ 2 did get rid of that, but they really improved everything. There's even an entirely separate leveling system for your profession, totally different from your standard class. So you cam literally be a lvl20 Cleric/lvl 30 woodworker. Both are great MMOs, though. I think they do "hotbar" combat better than any MMO, bar none.

I actually have EQ2 but never got a chance to play it. I installed it, but gave up after two entire days of patch installs and I really don't want to download a game that big. So I guess I'll never know the potential awesomeness~

Really? I just downloaded it from Steam for the first time on my new laptop, and only had the latest update to download, which was about a gig. Try getting it from Steam and see if it goes by faster.

I mean I bought a physical copy of the game from a store about say maybe two years ago, and it just was so much epic fail. Just tried to reinstall it now, nothing doing. Looks like that was a waste of money but whatever, I downloaded their FTP version from the website no problem. But it's not even playable even with everything set to minimum so it looks like ass, the lag on it is outrageous and I know my computer is better than that. How the crap are you running this thing on a laptop?

I admit I gotta cut the settings down, but this laptop is pretty new and runs it fine, but my gaming PC runs it at max settings no problem. Sony assumed graphics would go in a different direction when they made the game.

 

[Dastardly]

I was only talking about FPS games specifically, and why I give them leeway which I do not grant to MMOs.

While this wasn't directed at me, I wanted to ask: Do you feel that some of that "lack of leeway" is owed to the pricing structure of MMOs versus your standard FPS? What I mean is that you're expected to pay continuously after your initial purchase.

To me, this means the game grows in cost... and may or may not grow proportionately in value.

This. Think about the crafter in Star Wars Galaxies and then think about persistence and consequence.

God knows I do. I wasn't the best overall weaponsmith, but I did craft the fastest pistols I'd seen on my server. So while I wasn't raking in the dough, I made a (very small) name for myself through my own effort -- effort that had nothing to do with killing critters.

But to go further on the subject of persistence, that was what I loved about the housing. My house was always in the world, even if I wasn't. I had a real, visible presence there, whether or not I was logged in. And, with vendors working the way they did, people needed to travel to these houses to buy their gear, which meant you had walk-by traffic to appreciate all the work you'd put into decorating.

Now? If a game has housing (a BIG "if"), it's instanced. Nothing more than glorified storage. Further cementing the idea that we are no longer creating our own characters. We're just renting one of theirs.

EVE Online is currently the gold standard for persistence and consequence in massively multiplayer gaming.

Which shows us the dark side of consequence. Persistence itself is pretty benign (but incredibly valuable to players). Consequence can create problems. Basically, in a game like EVE, you need to maintain a population of players that are willing to pay to be the victims of your other players. That can be a tall order.

 

[Alexnader]

So how about EVE Online? And before you say it's boring, it is only boring to those who either don't have the time to understand its mechanics or are simply uninterested in advancing past the initial hour to two hour long tutorial sequence.

I think "two hour long tutorial sequence" should clue you in on why some would find it "boring". While complicated systems like EvE are great, they're not necessary in order to obtain the grand spectacle that is thousands of people interacting in a virtual space. Pardus, a browser based game of a similar vein to EvE though far more simple, offered a lovely vat of seething politics and BS simply by allowing players to build their own economies and blow them up given sufficient numbers and skill.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

I don't think MMOs have that much potential, at least not for me, because they can never be even a little bit immersive. There's simply *nothing* as immersion-shattering as another real-life person inside an otherwise believable/convincing virtual space.

 

[UzumakiGamer]

This article makes lots of good points, but the jelly on the bottom shelf remains the same: MMOs in their current state cost a lot of money to make. All the backers who pay for these MMOs to be made are not willing to bet their money on a crazy new idea, they want something safe like WoW. "WoW makes lots of money, make us one of those."

Until you get someone willing to back a risky venture, or a way to build a grand MMO for a lot less money we will not likely be seeing the MMO of tomorrow.

 

[Dennis Scimeca]

I was only talking about FPS games specifically, and why I give them leeway which I do not grant to MMOs.

While this wasn't directed at me, I wanted to ask: Do you feel that some of that "lack of leeway" is owed to the pricing structure of MMOs versus your standard FPS? What I mean is that you're expected to pay continuously after your initial purchase.

To me, this means the game grows in cost... and may or may not grow proportionately in value.

I don't think so...I mean, if I'm playing an FPS game and adding all the map packs I'm paying a lot more over time and the baseline experience doesn't change, just the environment within which that experience takes place. It's about extending value, not adding to it, if that makes sense...

I do shy away from MMOs which really don't grab me on account of the monthly fee not so much for the money spent but the pressure to play the game. "Man, if I'm spending $15 a month on this game, I'd better be playing it all the time." I play no video game I own all the time. I bounce around between titles. So when I'm paying a monthly subscription for an MMO and don't play it all the time, I feel like it's a waste of money.

I paid $15 a month for EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies for years, and paid for expansions on top of that. I don't mind spending the money so long as I'm enjoying myself. If I'm enjoying myself, I make time for the game. It's not an obligation to play, it's what I want to do.

 

[Shjade]

I played Everquest the other day because I'd heard so much about it, and boy was I disappointed. It's probably because its such an old game, but the controls, the interface, basically everything was crap. The screen is cluttered with a dozen boxes, it's hard to find what you're looking for, and even talking to NPC's a chore. If I've clicked on you, that means I want to talk to you, why do I have to type hello to start the conversation, and keep typing other words to trigger the rest of your dialog. It's not immersive, it's flow breaking because every five seconds, I get ripped out of the game to have to type in commands. I'm not talking with your NPC's I'm controlling them via text commands, which means all the NPC's might have well have been robots in game. I couldn't even get past an hour before frustration set in and I couldn't take it anymore. If EverQuest II has the same kind of systems then no wonder they didn't do as well as WoW, and it wasn't because of PC requirements.

EQ2 is pretty different from EQ, for what that's worth. I only played it for about a week, but it was enough to note how not-Everquest it felt (a feeling contributed to by the way zones with names I recognized in no way resembled the zones I remembered from EQ).

Unfortunately, no, it's not just because it's such an old game. I mean, sure, that may be a factor in why it was designed the way it was, but even when EQ was new the UI, quest system, controls, etc. all felt pretty clunky, unintuitive, and just generally hard to use. It was just that, at the time, given how this was still a pretty new thing and there weren't really better options around, these flaws could be more easily overlooked in favor of the big picture. For a long time I loved Everquest, in large part because of how huge the world was and what fun I had exploring it. I didn't really "connect" with the game until I found the right class for me, but once I tried out a bard and got their song of speed so I could start traveling wherever I wanted without being massacred by the baddies in those zones (because I could just outrun everything that wasn't an insta-gib caster type), that was it for me.

Going back to try EQ again after having played WoW for about a year, however? It was impossible. Literally, it was impossible for me to play Everquest for more than about three hours. Even though I was already familiar with the interface and its various foibles (though some I had to learn, since the game didn't even HAVE a map function when I was playing it before, for instance), I just couldn't stand trying to play a game that was so much less user-friendly, so punishing to play not from a gameplay challenge sense but of mechanics that were just not fun as part of a game, that I couldn't do it. By modern MMO standards it's practically a broken game. (Plus it's, y'know, ugly.)

One point of disagreement, though: I actually liked the dialogue interaction with NPCs. Sure, you could just give them one or two word responses and make it as robotic and anti-immersion as possible, but if you did it that way that was your fault, not the game's. You could get your responses just as well by actually writing out full dialogue with the characters as long as it included the key word. For instance, if you came across some NPC, hailed him and he said:

"Hail, Jackal. I am Niclaus Ressinn, loyal Paladin of Life. I am scouting the Qeynos Hills on orders from High Priestess Jahnda. We have received reports of [undead] prowling these hills of late."

You could just say "undead" and get the next bit, or you could say something like...

"There are undead on the loose? How could these hills have become so corrupt?"

Or whatever you'd want to say in playing your character (Le gasp, role-playing in a role-playing game? Perish the thought!), and you'd get the same next-part-of-dialogue response. You could at least make the semblance of a conversation rather than a data-input function.

 

[Dastardly]

It's about extending value, not adding to it, if that makes sense...

I can see that, but what I was getting at was more akin to this:

I do shy away from MMOs which really don't grab me on account of the monthly fee not so much for the money spent but the pressure to play the game. "Man, if I'm spending $15 a month on this game, I'd better be playing it all the time." I play no video game I own all the time. I bounce around between titles. So when I'm paying a monthly subscription for an MMO and don't play it all the time, I feel like it's a waste of money.

Which is why I enjoy your column so much. Not only do we often share the same feelings on things, you often word it exactly the way I do.

But that feeling of wasted money is what I'm getting at. Paying continuously raises the pressure to play continuously... or feel like you're leaving money on the table. The pricing structure directly impacts the feeling of play.

I paid $15 a month for EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies for years, and paid for expansions on top of that. I don't mind spending the money so long as I'm enjoying myself. If I'm enjoying myself, I make time for the game. It's not an obligation to play, it's what I want to do.

Same for me, on both. I didn't mind paying rent in a virtual world. And that's what both of those games offered. They were some of the last real roleplaying MMOs, to me. I could play a multitude of roles of my choosing.

Our choices now revolve around what particular method you want to use to hit things with sticks, how many or what size sticks you want to use, and how you can hit the right things with those sticks to get bigger, better sticks. Basically, it's all Viva Pinata.

(And on payment, I think I find myself coming down (personally) against pricing schedules of any kind. You know what kind of things I pay on monthly schedules? Bills. If I had to go to Busch Gardens at the same time every month in some use-or-lose deal, I think I'd probably start to hate the whole park before long.)

 

[Earthmonger]

I prefer MMORPGs that play like shooters. A fluid gameplay mechanic is key to my enjoyment. No button-spamming targat-lock garbage. I need to be in control. I need every action I take to render immediately. This has severely limited my options in the MMO scene.

I've tried many games, but I keep returning to an MMO that reared its head in 2003: RYL. The horribly titled "Risk Your Life", for which no official servers still exist. It's now just a scattering of pirate servers, some with the hand-written homebrew tools to develop new aspects for the game. And thousands of us are still captured by it. By its gameplay mechanics, its upgrade system, its fluid PVP. No other MMO plays like it.

The sad part about it, of course, is that the lore of the game has not survived. With every iteration something is lost, and now only the core remains.

I was looking forward to The Secret World until I saw the videos, revealing the same target-lock button-spamming bullshit that 95% of the market insists is gameplay. Hell with that nonsense. Give me freedom and control, not a prison. No desire for a graphically impressive game of chess with the algorithms of crochet.

My search continues.

 

[Skratt]

I'm right there with you. I want more out of MMOs. I think it is less a function of lack of developer creativity than it is that we are constrained by Human Nature. People seem to love the shit out of grinding. Take WoW for instance. How many times do you see a player doing the same thing over and over and over and over just to get some certain piece of armor or 100% faction? The critters they are fighting pop up in the same place every time like clock work and if you don't grind them there is content you never get to see. They are so proud of their new shiny and they got to watch the entire 7 seasons of Buffy while grinding to get that one piece of phat lewt. *sigh*

I think EVE is attractive to people like us, even if we don't play, because it is based on PVP. It is based on the idea that the game is constantly being changed through conflict. We are FPS players not because we are "grinding" the same map over and over, we are playing in an environment with other people where the important things are constantly changing. That guy we saw in the hall on the left was only there when he was there. Next round he'll be somewhere else. Granted it is the same map / world / planet - but the content is the enemy (PVP or PVE) and the enemy doesn't just hang out in a spot waiting for us to "get within aggro range", they are always actively hunting you from the start. Imagine if an MMO could pull that off, where the AI learns and starts to hunt you? What if in an MMO players could play as one of those monsters and you'd never know if the next random monster you saw was an AI or a player? What if a player who plays as a monster got to level up just by spending time as a monster and the higher level they got, the more choices of monsters they could play as?

But, that would probably alienate a large number of MMO players. They aren't twitch gamers like us. So, I propose that we don't change the MMO development, I propose that someone make an MMO for us and push the boundaries by eliminating quests and replace them with dynamic content. Want to be a trader? Running goods from city 1 to city 2 avoiding the static mobs is mind bogglingly fucking boring. But having to deliver trade goods to a town that was just devastated by war or famine and getting there is never the same experience twice? Once you get the town up and working again, there might be somewhere else you need to take stuff to. You can sign me up for some more of that shit for sure! I'd probably be a caravan guard, but whatever, at least when I take my 2nd and 3rd characters through the area I'm not doing the same goddamn quests again and again and again.

The tech will get there, but I think we're looking at 2020 and beyond because even if they started this project TODAY, it seems to take 5 years to produce any game of size and sometimes you just go broke because you took money from Rhode Island...

We're here Dennis, we just need to wait for the next great genie game designer to try and make this game.

 

[Skratt]

I actually have EQ2 but never got a chance to play it. I installed it, but gave up after two entire days of patch installs and I really don't want to download a game that big. So I guess I'll never know the potential awesomeness~

You didn't miss much. EQ2 was a series of linked hallways and small playgrounds. I use the term playground, because that is what it reminded me of. Maybe a zoo without fences is more appropriate. "And over here we have the turtles, and over here we have the lizard humanoids, and up there on the cliff we have a stronger lizard humanoid...". The areas were so small in some cases surrounded by cliffs and such that you felt like you were playing in a terrarium rather than a living breathing world. Technology limitation, yada yada, but still.

 

[Skratt]

This article makes lots of good points, but the jelly on the bottom shelf remains the same: MMOs in their current state cost a lot of money to make. All the backers who pay for these MMOs to be made are not willing to bet their money on a crazy new idea, they want something safe like WoW. "WoW makes lots of money, make us one of those."

Until you get someone willing to back a risky venture, or a way to build a grand MMO for a lot less money we will not likely be seeing the MMO of tomorrow.

I think part of the problem may actually be in choosing the safe route. The difference between success and failure is sometimes the choice between what is right and what is easy. WoW wasn't safe, it was WoW. They attracted people based on the past Warcraft RTS franchise and overall Blizzard popularity.

You are right, if an MMO publisher wants to make money, they NEED a dev that can innovate. Trying to be safe doesn't work. And that's not hind-sight talking, I said that when WoW first came out and it was basically a copy of EQ (game mechanic wise - quests, zones, levels, etc), it's just that I'm a nobody. Even though I wasn't alone in my statement, I would not have been qualified to give an opinion of that magnitude anyway. I would just be another speculative prick like the rest of the jaded player base. I am indeed sad that my prediction was correct because that means it took many many studios 5-10 years to come to the same conclusion and the only innovation the MMO market had was the Free to Play business model. It will be another 5+ years before any type of MMO game play innovation sees the light of day.

 

[W3rK]

There is actually an MMO (although light on the first "M") that was sort of a "prototype" for Minecraft, founded by Notch himself (although he doesn't mention it much at all) that's actually very different from the usual stuff. It's hard to get into and is still rough in some aspects, but it's being actively developed and - in all honesty - no other game I played gives you such amount of freedom, at the same time driving you to cooperate with others. Terraforming, construction, farming, hunting and, of course, fighting others - it's all there.

Maybe it's not "Minecraft with millions of players collaborating" but it get closest to that from them all. Look for Wurm Online to check it out.

 

[Jet_02]

Ima gonna be over here, playing my Guild Wars 2

 

[2xDouble]

You know, there's something available right now that blows virtual reality completely away. It's called actual reality. It's not cheap (definitely pay-to-win), and I hear the consequences for failing at it are pretty severe, but it's easily the most realistic "just a dude" experience you'll ever play. It has infinite content in it, as new content is being added literally every second. (I'd like to see any other developer keep up with that pace...). I suggest you try that instead.

Spoiler

Seriously. Go outside. There are things there.