Have we developed the perfect formula
Bildo left a nice comment to my Classic MMO Formula topic and in it he said, without taking it too much out of context “You don’t want to break what’s not broken”. And this got me wondering have we found the ideal formula for a MMO? I mean, have the basic game ideas changed that much since Ultima Online. Is our group dynamic the best it can be now? I know that all of us can think of any MMO we’ve played and thought the developers could do this better, or that better. We want better combat mechanics, better graphics, a better way of story telling, a more immersive quest system, better and more important social system and so on. But these are just tweaks to the game model. What would truly be an evolution in MMO gaming?
Now I suppose one could argue that games such as Pirates of the Burning Sea and Eve Online don’t follow the classic MMO formula, but I don’t think that makes them evolutionary. These games have just shaved off a lot of bits that didn’t fit in their game model and focused on what did.
So I ask you, what would be evolutionary?
Comments
Comment from Bildo
Time: February 15, 2008, 8:57 am
Personally, I think there’s plenty of room for change. But blue-ocean strategy might not be the best way of going about it. Instead, I’d rather see incremental changes that actually BETTER the genre over the next 5-10 years.
Things like TR’s combat, Warhammer’s Public Quests, and AoC’s Mounted Combat or Siege Warfare are all steps towards bettering the actual gameplay of MMOs. So I think developers are doing well in this regard.
But like Hexx says, there’s plenty to do that could bring MMOs up to par with offline RPGs or just plain adventure games in terms of narrative. Like he says… the player winds up being more responsible for immersion than the devs are. To really “get into” the world in an MMO, you usually have a to have a pretty good imagination.
That shouldn’t be the case. Like movies, or more accurately like a good BioWare game, the story should be second nature along side the gameplay. I don’t want to have to convince myself that what’s going on is meaningful, I want to be convinced by the developer.
Comment from Thallian
Time: February 15, 2008, 5:29 pm
I think these are good things to discuss. Some work with layered instancing can make what you accomplish appear to “matter” but you really need massive amounts of branching options to make yourself unique. I kind of think Baldur’s Gate 2 and Harvest Moon had a good idea with multiple romances possible with very different results and even different kids.
Comment from Hexx
Time: February 14, 2008, 3:02 pm
I think the next evolutionary step is to create an MMO where the players can be heroes, or villains. Nobility, or commoners. Carried along with the crowd, or movers and shakers.
I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but there needs to be a way for your character to matter.
Quest chains are currently: kill 5 mice. Ok, kill more mice, and bring me back their whiskers. Ok, use the whiskers to create a mouse mask. ok, infiltrate the mouse king’s lair and bring back his head.
And all the while, despite the quest giver saying ‘good job killing all those mice, and the king’ you know full well the mice and the king are still there, and you can kill them a million more times, you just can’t get the rewards again.
It would be better, if instead, you not only had multiple ways to resolve the quest (sure you can kill the mice, but you could also trap them, charm them, polymorph them, whatever) but you could also take the mice’s side, convince the quest giver the mice aren’t a threat, become champion of the mice, moving the mice out of the area, whatever… multiple ways to move the story forward, with the methodology following how you want your character to progress.
Of course, even if you made a game complex enough to allow you to write your own story in that way, you’ve got to put that in an MMO where you’re not the only one questing… and if I become the Mouse Champion, showing that the mice and we can live peacefully, and you become the Mouse Scourge, and kill them all… well, those world views fail to correspond.
So, until there’s a way to resolve that issue, MMO won’t be able to tell stories that are truly compelling with the player as Protagonist/Antagonist, because the only way the world makes sense is if everyone does the exacct same thing (or at most chooses not to do anything at all). And with that homogeny, you get the current crop of standard quests.