Namely the probably most promising genre in the world right now when it comes to games - MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). So many things can be done, so many new opportunities of game play where you can be solo or play with many people at once. Strangers, friends alike. Character progression, equipping your character, modifications, customizations, being unique among a horde of other players. Some games do some of those things better than others.
EVE Online offers quite some customization for your "character" visible for others, but all customization ends up as a simple tiny portrait. On the other hand, if offers a rather complex skill progression, marketing system and combat. World of Warcraft offers remarkably little when it comes to customizating your character - either you get the best items or you suck. You don't decide what items you want, the game developers decide that for you. Guild Wars offer almost no customization at all, just a few different costumes to choose from, whicNamely the probably most promising genre in the world right now when it comes to games – MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). So many things can be done, so many new opportunities of game play where you can be solo or play with many people at once. Strangers, friends alike. Character progression, equipping your character, modifications, customizations, being unique among a horde of other players. Some games do some of those things better than others.
EVE Online offers quite some customization for your “character” visible for others, but all customization ends up as a simple tiny portrait. On the other hand, if offers a rather complex skill progression, marketing system and combat. World of Warcraft offers remarkably little when it comes to customizating your character – either you get the best items or you suck. You don’t decide what items you want, the game developers decide that for you. Guild Wars offer almost no customization at all, just a few different costumes to choose from, which all look rather pretty but you’ll end up looking much the same as everybody else anyway, except for the look of your super hero cape. Then we have City of Heroes, which really makes it possible for you to look unique, and as there are no different weapons or armors in the game, you can choose to look as buff or thin, evil or fairy-like you want.The reason why I mention the customization part of MMOs first is that it’s a big thing. Progression, also known as “leveling up”, and customizing your character with new skills and/or items, is a really important element in an MMO to make you feel unique among all the other players… and to show off how cool you are that have gotten all those hard to reach skills and items. Competition.
There is, though, the other large part of an MMO, or of any game really – the game play. What do you do in the game the majority of the time? Mostly, it’s about fighting. In most games the only way to progress and make your character stronger is to fight, and in the absolute majority of MMOs, everything you do when you’re not fighting is preparations for future fights. Crafting in games oftenly produce armor or buff items (such as foods, ammunition, etc) that improve your fighting. It’s a rather simple circle of life, so to speak. The game play is the core part of any game. It’s what you do in the game.
How come most MMO games have the exact same (or extremely similar) gameplay? I mentioned some games with very variying amounts of customization, where they really stand out as unique in the way they work, but why do all those games use the exact same core game play? To put it really simple; most MMO’s out there make use of a “select a target and perform actions upon it”-system. In World of Warcraft, you select your target, and perform actions (skills and spells) on it. In EVE Online, you target a ship and then you tell your ship’s modules (guns and devices) to do something to that target. In City of Heroes, you select your target and perform actions and skills on that target. In Lineage 2, it’s the same thing. In Guild Wars, the same, and the list grows long. Few games really stand out as different. An example could possibly be Neocron 2, which is a MMOFPS, where you have to point your weapon to try to hit your opponents, which really is a fresh air as it involves some aiming skills… but sadly, it’s a rather unknown game and thus haven’t got a massive pool of players. Among all the big titles of MMOs out there, there really are no (to my knowledge at the time of this blog entry) games that use anything other than the “select target and perform actions on it”-system.
Of course, a big reason to this sort of game play is (or have been) that it allows for a sort of illusion of action while it’s rather light on bandwidth. You select your target and perform actions. You select the troll, press the key for your fireball spell, and a simple calculation occurs: Is the troll in range, and in sight, then roll a dice to see if you hit or not. Compare that to a modern FPS, where you can launch a grenade. It flies in an arch and you nor the game knows if it’ll hit anything until it actually hits something. More tests have to be done, more data needs to be sent over the network, and the location of the grenade itself will become important to all players. In a game like World of Warcraft, it’s not important where the fireball is. The game already knows if the ball will hit or not and how much damage it will inflict. The representation of a flying fireball in those kinds of games is merely a pretty effect, a sort of timer to show how much time it’s left until the target loses health, and no matter how long you run or how much you try to evade, the fireball will still home in on you.
But, is this the only type of game play you can think of, that doesn’t require much bandwidth? Hello, look at Battlefield 2 or 2142, where 64 players can fight it out in tanks and helicopters and on foot at the same time on the same rather small area. Projectiles, homing rockets, explosions, particles, air-strikes. Sure, it suffers from lag now and then but it’s still rather rare if you have a good internet connection. And 64 players is usually more people than you’ll ever see at the same time in a zone in an MMORPG. So why don’t we see any Battlefield-like MMOs out there, where you point your gun and shoot, instead of select your target and then press the “shoot at target”-button? The latter has almost no interactivity or skill. What is it that game developers are so afraid of? To NOT be like World of Warcraft? Sad. Ok, many MMOs before World of Warcraft had the exact same game play so it’s not completely WoW’s fault, but it seems that every new MMO strives to copy them. Just look at Warhammer Online – they could’ve chosen a new game play, and their sci-fi future theme but… no. They choose to make a humorless copy of World of Warcraft. Great job. Hope you’ll die fast so that game developers and publishers realize that it’s time to do something new, to be creative.
Personally I think World of Warcraft is a great game. It’s got seriously thought-through game design and an easy to use and very dynamic interface. It’s got plenty to do and plenty of people to do it with. What I’m trying to say is; stop making copies of it, especially the washed out game play system. Many people have come to think that MMORPG stands for World of Warcraft, that they must have dragons and dwarves and elves, swords and axes, targetting and a row of action buttons and skills. And certainly, World of Warcraft stole mercilessly from other current games but they perfected what they stole and made it their own, which is far better than to just steal without knowing what you steal or how what you steal will work in your game (and far far far better than not stealing something that probably works better than anything you could come up with, with is what Blizzard probably did with World of Warcraft).
So, what about the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre? Real-Time Strategy (RTS)? Card games? Racing games? (Ok, Auto Assault dies in a month apparently, but it’s rather niched towards people who like strange cars with lots of guns mounted on them) …or Harvest Moon-like games? Sports?
Save us from boredoom. Please.
(by hiring this guy as game designer)
Oh, and I have to add another rant… I’m so damn tired of game developers calling their games MMOs just because they have pretty graphical lobby’s where players can meet up, to then go into completely instanced dungeons. Instanced dungeons mean that when a group of players enter the dungeon, they will get a private and isolated version of that dungeon where noone
outside their “party” may enter. However, others may enter the same dungeon, but they’ll also get private and isolated versions of it. To clarify what I mean with pretty lobby’s I’ll give some examples. Guild Wars call themselves an MMO, just because you can run around in towns to meet people but you’ll need to get into an instanced dungeon to fight. Look at Diablo 2 – you have a lobby where you meet up with people, you chat with them and decide to meet up on a server to play, which will act as an instanced dungeon. Is Diablo 2 an MMO? Well, they don’t call themselves one. Battlefield 2142 doesn’t call themselves an MMO, even though the amount of players on one server there is enormous compared to the amount of players at the same time on a battlefield in Guild Wars, for example. So, does MMO mean any game with many players that play online? Then I’d say that Internet Hearts (Microsoft) is an MMO, since probably very many play it and they play online. Oh… and it has no subscription fee…
Images: Screenshots (in order: City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, Windows XP games) – images currently broken due to recent site move
Tags: Uncategorized by KarmaSlave
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