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| 03.27.2007re: the future of MMO article
I read with interest your article on redesigning the MMORPG. Lots of great ideas, some pretty unworkable ones, and I wanted to throw my ideas into the mix. I think trying to call them PEGs is just the writers attempt to coin a new phrase – every single player of them knows them as MMORPGs, and while the name may not perfectly describe what they are it’s what they’re known as, so I’ll refer to them as that.
I’m a former player of MMOs – a couple of years in World of Warcraft and a couple of months in Vanguard. I’ve been playing computer games all my life though, so I think I have plenty of experience of them.
The reason I stopped playing them has been pretty accurately summed up by your writer- the endless grinding, the reliance on massive groups of other people for the “best” content in the game, and so on.
The main reason, though, which ties into those two and was also mentioned, was the lack of any skill element to the game. Chances are the person who had the most time to sink into a game would be the best – the most kit, the most money. In a one-on-one fight, the skill element is almost zero, and that frustrated me past the point of no return. The sense of joy I felt after I’d quit, playing my way through “Resident Evil 4” and “Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes”, learning how to control the character and master the puzzles, was almost palpable.
So enough of my backstory. Your writer had one idea which I think smacks of genius – the Dungeon Keeper element. The Elder Scrolls games on the PC had enormous amounts of player-generated content, and while the system couldn’t be the same in an MMORPG (what if two people had different packs from different developers installed?) the developers of the game could completely revitalise the game on a regular basis, and I’ll try and expand on what I think they could do.
Have guilds design and build their own instances, and have them change on a semi-regular basis. Have them submit their ideas to the game developers, or publish the dungeon building software with a non-expert interface, and every few weeks, or every month, change it. At the end of every year, get the players to vote and the winning guild gets to name a new town, or have a massive statue erected outside the main city in their honour.
With the amount of money the developers of WoW are making, this must be possible, and would not only cause players to stop grinding the same old instanced content but would more than likely bring old players back who’d just got bored.
This idea would work, would probably be economically beneficial to the developers and would cure a great number of the problems outlined by the writer at a single swoop. Unfortunately, it is only cosmetic, and most of the problems with MMOs go far further than that.
The “treat dispenser” aspect of the game, for example. I was sat with a friend the other night, drinking a beer and chatting while he played through one of the new instances in World of Warcraft. We spent several minutes poring over the minutiae of several weapons, mathematically trying to work out which would be better to take along with him. That’s one of the reasons he, and hundreds of thousands (millions?) of others like him play the game, and one of the reasons I used to.
To remove that, or alter it, would alter the gaming experience considerably, and that brings me on to the wider point which unfortunately means a lot of the excellent ideas your writer had are doomed to never be implemented.
There’s a reason the current crop of MMOs are as popular as they are, and they’re the same reasons why so many people are unable to play them. They’re no respecter of skill – the least skilled player can beat someone with hair-trigger reflexes if he’s got better kit.
If a player kept getting beaten, or was unable to finish an instance because of his lack of skill, then he’d stop playing…and the developers would lose a source of revenue. It’s not like a console game, or an offline PC game, where you can put it down for a few weeks and go back to it – all that time, you’re still being charged for your account in the game.
So it’s in the best interests of the developers to do the exact opposite of what your writer is suggesting. I’d rather play one of the games he developed, but unfortunately there are millions of people who don’t want to- lots of these people have never even played video games before, if a casual round of questioning my friends who are WoW addicts is to be believed. Those small increments of added power, down the line, are what keep so many people coming back for more. It’d have to be a really, really good game with developers prepared to take a cut in profit to hire more programmers, to tempt significant numbers away. -Mark Longden
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Letters to the Editor
