MMORPG Formula Running Dry

I'm writing this post up knowing that its content will be somewhat controversial. I just cannot help but wonder why more people aren't bothered by the repeated formula involved in MMORPGs. I suppose that part of my frustration is that I feel like the MMO genre is evolving much slower than any other genre I can recall, but perhaps I am just recalling things incorrectly. At any rate, I have some thoughts in the way of MMOs.

Let's start light and talk about quests. It's funny, because I've always played RPGs, and there was actually a time in my life where I didn't consider "Go kill x number of monsters" as a common quest line. But it just blows me away how many MMORPGs open with that exact quest. A certain number of monsters need to die, or a certain number of flowers need collecting, something along those lines. The main reason for this is motivation in design. When a game is built around a story, you likely aren't going to waste time having the player gather things or count monsters they've killed so they can get their starting gear. There is motivation to be doing other things! The MMO has two main problems when it comes to starting quests: With so many players, not everyone can truly be the hero, and with a vast, never-ending world, it is very difficult to push a final goal. Without a final goal, and with thousands (if not millions) of characters that aren't really main characters in any way, you have a lot of people going about doing silly things.

Narrative is an interesting thing in games. Sometimes you simply don't want it, and sometimes you hate the fact that a game's narrative falls short. And I don't think this is necessarily linked to genre, but it is certainly hard to push for a game that is normally considered heavy in the way of storyline when you have no story to tell. But when it comes to an MMO, there is simply not enough story to go around, no matter how much time the dev team pours into creating a detailed world. In part, this is why I think RP servers exist at all. People who really get into role playing their characters in MMOs are trying to fill this lack in narrative by generating their own. It is admittedly a limited group of people who play seriously on RP servers in MMORPGs, but all the same, this group exists and the fact that is does MEANS something.

When I was about ten years old I discovered MUDs for the first time. I immediately fell in love with the concept, despite the fact that MUDs were already starting to be considered dated. With everything text-based, and with some very dynamic options of communicating to the people around you what you were doing, it really felt like I was living the life of another person in a very real place. My MUD experience was cut short, and when I finally revisited the world of MUDs more than ten years later, I found things very different. People were playing MUDs just for hack and slash, and there was very little attempt at actually playing out the roles of the characters people were playing. It left me a bit discouraged, but I decided to really push to see if I could find something the replicated that old feeling.

After much research I finally discovered RPI MUDs. RPI stands for "Role-Play Intensive", and much of the design mechanics revolve around motivating players to actually play their characters as people who have motivations, emotion, even relationships. RPIs seemed to come about due to the fact that there was a rift in MUDs during the mid and late 90s. Some people just wanted to casually go about fighting monsters and maybe partying up to take on difficult challenges and nothing more, while others wanted to mix in role playing, much as was common in MUDs of the past. While these two groups had always existed, with the advent of action RPGs and graphical MMORPGs, MUDs found a whole new breed of player joining, and there became a need for separation. While RPI is a relatively extreme result of this schism, it is a very interesting one. A very rare one. One that suffers from extreme splintering and a very limited player base. But the fact that it exists at all is very indicative of something: People crave story, especially one they can be involved in.

With a good, single-player RPG, the story is easy enough to tell. The developers have a great deal of control over what a player will experience, and they don't have to complete for developer time, because the design is meant for only one person. The narrative, despite how dynamic it is, is much closer to traditional storytelling. In film, for example, you experience exactly what the director wants you to experience, especially when a lot of skilled people are involved in the production. Single-player gaming can be a lot like this, should the developers choose. But imagine, for a moment, a film that allowed for people to wander around the settings without constraint, without need to focus on the "main characters" or the major events that received the most time and dedication from the people behind it. Experiences would be very mixed, and it would likely be nothing more than an interesting social experiment.

But let us be honest. As much as many people like to see games as art, or a strong platform for storytelling, games always come down to gameplay. This is ultimately why games are so hard for some to deal with. Games require a certain set of skill and interest, and that is a very difficult hurdle for a lot of people to get over. Unless, of course, you make the hurdle smaller.

What started out as design decisions due to technical limitations has evolved into a surprisingly refined form of casual gameplay. MMORPGs have a simple point-and-click combat norm, where much of the process is automated in an auto-attack, with the rest of the player's skills capable of being used at will. Targets are always highlighted and locked in, area effects are simple, and the whole process uses surprisingly little data transfer, which allows for good server response even in poor internet connection situations. But there is a reason for this. Back before the days of "braodband" internet, the information sent between a client and a server needed to be kept at a minimum to allow for dial up connections to keep up with the action. MUDs were easy to do this with, and much of the practices from MUDs were used in Online RPG games with graphical interfaces. In fact, it can be argued that the early Graphical Online RPGs were simply graphical interfaces for the hack and slash aspect of MUDs and other games like them (and games that came before them) at the time, with the same routines and functions used, but with the parameters necessary to use them now provided through graphical interactions instead of the command line.

And so, here we are, more than 25 years after the first commercially avaiable online RPG games, and the combat systems have evolved very little. And I don't mean in terms of what appears on screen, but how a lot of the data is handled, and what kinds of calculations are occurring. Transitions to more dynamic systems have been attempted, but are usually heavily instanced and deliver inferior experiences to First Person Shooters, which have come a long way in the area of multiplayer experiences. Computer hardware and internet connections have improved enough, though, that some of these ideas need to start being developed by more companies, in my opinion (and in some cases have been, such as TERA). The genre is suffering from degredation with old norms.

So, in my opinion, the MMO genre needs to incorporate more role-play into design, or far better combat systems. It is too ambitious at this point to attempt both, but either of them will present a huge enhancement to the player experience. Unfortunately, the reason that MMOs have become stuck is because of the player-base, which is likely content with the old system. Here's hoping things change soon.