MMO thoughts
Saturday, June 28th, 2008I saw some trailer for Warhammer Online, and my first thought was “Why do all MMOs look more or less like ass?”.
City of Heroes- Was actually rather attractive, but even something attractive loses all appeal when you copy and paste it across the universe. Initially I was like “The characters are awesome looking, and the actual levels are really good”, but like everything else about the game it all became dull and repetitious eventually. Animations were good, but used without variation ad nauseum.
EVE Online- EVE has the distinction of being one of the few MMO games, in my admittedly limited experience, to improve it’s looks over time, but it still lags pretty far behind. Ships got prettier, and maybe bases, all well behind what you can really do, but acceptable for a smaller company, but things like planets, stars, and various cosmic phenomena never really went anywhere.
Ryzom- Not the ugliest, but not pretty. It had a stylish design going for it, but precious few polygons to render it. The ability creation was very interesting, but the grinding was akin to sand blasting your own rectum.
Guild Wars- This game was actually pretty attractive, but the animations were terrible. Then there was the play mechanics, which became so overbearingly awful that it was enough to gag me. I feel bad to this day that I talked two friends into playing it with me, based on my short couple of hours with it, during the fun part.
World of Warcraft- Is colorful, I’ll give it that. That’s all I can give it though. Suffers from massive cookie cutter syndrome and poor animations.
Anarchy Online- Is hideous to look directly at. The only thing I’ve seen that’s uglier is Second Life.
Sure, these games all need a large player base to thrive, I get that, but graphics are adjustable. I’m just suggesting that the art departments should shoot higher.
Apparently this was percolating deeper, however, and started me thinking of why these games always frustrate me into leaving. It hit me suddenly, just minutes before this post was started.
They aren’t games. At best they are free-form play. A game has a rather singular defining characteristic- at least one win condition. You get to level 80 or whatever, and have you won or lost anything? No, not really. You’re better than people that haven’t been playing as much, but that’s not winning really, it’s more like a bizarre twist on the way seniority works in unions. In EVE you can lose assets, but to most players it’ll never set them back enough to matter. In City of Heroes it’s not like ignoring Perez Park meant the gangs would get stronger, or flood into the city, nor could you ever make any sector safe, regardless of what you did or how diligent you were. These games are only games at the individual combat scale, which are only there to feed the mechanism of leveling/gearing up. There is no super game to it, just one tiny game that you repeat over and over.
Another massive issue is that combat is incredibly similar to rock paper scissors. Guild Wars actually had a lot of interesting ways to get around this, with a very malleable approach to abilities, so you at least had the swarm of interacting options you’d find in most RTS games. Such as this power trumps that power, but not when you back it with this other power, and so on. Not perfect, but at least it was an attempt. City of Heroes had a lot of this issue. I mostly played what was called a Fire Blaster. He was a devastating gHod of atomic flame, but anything remotely like cold killed him within a couple of hits usually. This would have been acceptable to me if I were resistant to fire, but fire just did normal damage, not extra damage like cold. Still, with a couple of varigated teammates and some fast reflexes for running away, you could mostly cope. Far from ideal, but not absolutely crushing. EVE is probably the worst offender. You don’t know it, but when you leave the station you’ve already won or lost your next combat. Without a well honed fleet there was nothing but raw chance of choice to decide it. If you took one defensive item, you couldn’t really take another, or you could but at the expensive of a very significant chunk of offensive ability, and it wasn’t just that it would be hard, it’s that it would be over.
The last really big issue, that I can think of now as sleep looms large, is that these game worlds are called persistent, but really they should be called static. Nothing can be changed by you except for some minor conditions with other players, such as killing them and looting some stuff. EVE tries to get around this with player owned stations and uncharted systems, but it’s such a massive pain in the ass that you have to be in a really big group to even think of it. Every other game, that I can think of right now, does dumb shit like give you an apartment or headquarters to decorate. Oh, thank gHod, I can fling fire from my eyes or summon demonic servants, allowing me to make my big impact on the world by choosing a floral wallpaper print.
So, what should be the goal, in this asshole’s opinion? Well, for one thing, do a good job on the art. Don’t waste time testing the bleeding edge, but for fuck’s sake try not to make your game look dated right out of the box. The next is that there has to be something like large scope win/loss conditions. I think some companies should setup a massive game with a definite lifespan. Say two or three years. Then you make it very dynamic, and very much leading to various points. Don’t force a conclusion, let the play decide how it goes. Something much more like a traditional pen and paper approach, at least in spirit. Make it a story. Remember that soap operas go on and on repetively and that stories have endings, because they actually make an impact when you experience them. After those couple years, have something else in the pipe ready to go, rewarding your players with bonuses or whatever based on their characters from the previous game. My next idea would be to embrace the sandbox. Acknowledge that it’s free form play instead of overlaying ridiculous crap to pretend it’s a game. In theory you could say Second Life tries this, but it’s too awful to qualify as anything but waste heat. Seriously though, give the players a toolset that’ll yield unpredictable results and let them do to each other whatever they can with those tools. Lastly would be a sort of pendulum status game. You start of weak, then scheme, bluster, or power through until you’ve built something up, only to lose it when another player usurps or destroys you. This is something like what EVE does, but it’s important to remember that games, while based on winning and losing, need to be fun. Make it so that being clever can win the day, incorporate some of those sandbox tools and ideas, but within a larger playing field.
Ok. Bed now.