The Basic Problem with MMORPGs
Having just read a little tidbit about the new Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG, a thought struck my mind, one that’s been dawdling around for some time now: What the hell is wrong with MMORPGs?
I’m going to offend a lot of you right now by saying that MMORPGs suck. Every last bloody one of them. I don’t care what you’re playing, every last MMORPG has the same bloody formula of fetch quests and open-ended, “we can’t be bothered to give you an actual story so there’s no real ending” gameplay. There are certain exceptions where the formula is made tolerable (ie: EVE Online) or at least a few components work as they would in an actual game (ie: Final Fantasy XI’s central quest and party system), but the sheer amount of work it takes to get anywhere in these games makes them less entertainment and more tiring repetition. I for one won’t stand for it.
MMORPGs are hampered by being stuck in the bloody dark ages of gaming, back in the realm of the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games. It doesn’t matter how large or complex your item catalogue and quest system is, without certain modern advancements from modern RPGs, these online atrocities are decidedly un-modern and rather dinosaurish.
You see the major “thing” most modern RPGs accomplish is good storytelling. In most MMORPGs, you’re lucky if you get a story at all. And don’t start with the whole “oh it’s too much work to do that” nonsense, it’s not. BioWare made Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate, Atlus made Persona 3 and Ogre Battle (all right that was Quest for the latter but whatever), and so on and so forth. It’s not like a good, open-to-multiple-players narrative is hard to make.
World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI both attempted to install technologies that would allow the player to more fully grasp the narratives presented. In this manner, FFXI’s instances with cut-scenes as opposed to WoW’s rather gameplay-driven instances were actually more successful because they add a degree of virtual acting. If all I wanted was gameplay I’d be humping The Orange Box in its Portal all bloody day, but that’s not the only thing I’m after.
It’s an RPG, online or not, give me a bloody story. FFXI is probably the best in this regard because it provided something that wasn’t completely half-assed. It wasn’t great and some might argue it wasn’t even good, but it was a story complete with cut-scenes and bad acting, and that’s the important part. The fact is that Penny Arcade has a point: If you really look at it, most people who play MMORPGs have been duped into paying to do virtual chores. We’re just one bloody towel traded in for a battleaxe away from having to do the dishes.
Now someone get out there and change this frivolous shit. Pirates of the Caribbean as an MMORPG might actually be a good start, but that yet remains to be seen. As it stands, all the released games out there need a swift injection of plot, and we as gamers need to stop settling for this menial-task-in-pixels-and-polygons bullshit.
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Skh said,
January 20, 2008 @ 6:29 pm
You expressed my exact thoughts on the matter. I never played MMORPGs and never will, but watching some of my friends play to them sometimes is more than enough to realize how uninteresting they are. The word ‘chore’ is an accurate description of most of the quests, and always crawling in the same dungeons beating the same bosses is not my definition of a good gameplay.
And playing with other people is not a redeeming point: doing stupid dances and repeating ‘lol’ every 2 seconds while being spammed by chinese players selling gold is not my cup of tea. NPCs in Oblivion have more conversation than the casual MMO player.
IKnight said,
January 20, 2008 @ 7:38 pm
This is why my tastes tend towards MMOFPS games. There aren’t many, but in (for example) Planetside, while the level of conversation is usually worse, and there’s still no plot, one sure as hell isn’t paying to do menial chores.
Real plot in a persistent, many-user world is probably hard to pull off. But it’s well worth trying.
IcyStorm said,
January 21, 2008 @ 12:04 am
Good article… I play World of Warcraft, and now that I think about it, I don’t exactly know why. I do have fun, of course, and I take satisfaction in leveling my character or gaining new armor or something. But I disagree with your opinion of Blizzard’s handling of WoW’s story. I think there is a choice of whether or not you will immerse yourself in the story by reading all the quest logs and following along with all the lore. Some players do enjoy this and many of them play on RP servers with established RP guilds.
However, some people don’t want to dive too deep into Warcraft lore and learn about the intricate backgrounds of each race and faction. And with certain updates (particularly the Before the Storm patch and the Burning Crusade expansion), they did incorporate story-driven quests that revolved around the current time of the WC universe. A new upcoming instance in patch 2.4 will also end the Burning Crusade storyline.
And since Warcraft began as an RTS, there isn’t a doubt it’ll someday return to its roots. So with that in mind, maybe the whole “end of the story” thing cannot be applied to WoW. For other MMORPGs, I cannot say anything since I have not played them.
As far as the fetch-quest crap goes, yeah, it is a bunch of bullshit. I have nothing against that statement. But I still find the game fun… as long as you mix it up with other parts, like professions, raids, and Battlegrounds. I think it’s mostly the feeling of accomplishment that I go for, such as finally getting an epic mount or reaching level 70.
Cameron Probert said,
January 21, 2008 @ 1:28 am
@ IcyStorm
There was an article I read a while back about tabletop RPGs (yeah, I’m old school) about how there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes from leveling or getting new stuff. But in a large part that might not be what pulls people into the game for the long haul. But it’s the reason why I still like Diablo 2, even though it’s essentially a plotless piece of crap.
@Hidoshi
I thought City of Heroes actually seemed to have some kind of central plot. I mean I do like the certain amount of freedom it gives you to form communities and have a certain level of autonomy outside of the normal linear plotline a lot of games have. Although really if I wanted that I’d pop in Morrowind and just play that.
Hige said,
January 21, 2008 @ 5:16 pm
I don’t know, I’ve never entered a MMORPG expecting anything but a glorified grind. The designers obviously aim for longevity above story, to keep people playing and the cash rolling in, and unless someone with a very sophisicated plan and the means to pull it off appears, I shan’t hold my breath for better.
The appeal of MMORPGs, for me, is the social aspect and what can spawn from it. I played Ultima Online for the longest out of any MMORPG and it’s one of my fondest gaming memories because the players themselves fashioned a story around the tedious gameplay. Player-ran towns, role-played events, all sorts happened on my tenure on the official servers, and then even more on private ones. Give people the means to do it themselves and a decent RP experience is bound to appear. Perhaps the downfall of most modern MMORPGs is that the experience is too regiment/controlled. World of Warcraft, in its defense, has shitloads of lore and story to be immersed in. Its folly, I agree, is that very little is integrated into the gameplay. How popular with it be if it was, though, really?
DrmChsr0 said,
January 22, 2008 @ 12:10 am
I’ve always thought most MMOs are a grindfest of epic fail proportions, and whatever small sense of accomplishment you get from such things are minor, at best.
I can see where the community comes in, though.
I still think WoW is a cheap attempt to make money off Blizzardtards and people who don’t know better. My brother played it for 2 hours and declared it crap. (And this is a guy who knows about crappy games, he played friggen’ Maple Story for a year or so before dropping out of the game.)
llyse said,
January 23, 2008 @ 10:53 am
I play two online games regularly–one MMORPG and one browser MMO–and I can say that the ONLY reason I play them is for the community. Every MMO I’ve ever tried, in the absence of a friendly community I stopped playing them very fast, because the grindfest gets really annoying.
I’ve always felt that the problem in many MMOs is the community itself. The game offers players the opportunity to interact with others, to party, to quest together, but go on any of these games and more often than not you’ll see people playing it like it’s a single-player game that happens to be online. Given the choice between doing something alone and doing it as a group people’d rather be alone unless they get some sort of benefit otherwise. Players that DO want to interact have a hard time finding people to interact with. Games that literally force people to interact do exist–the room-based ones like Gunz and stuff–but for some reason they’re more likely to be other types of games (rhythm, golf, dance, blah). And even then the ugly community problem rears its head: people don’t want to talk at all, they just want to fight.
So maybe tl;dr: online games suck because online gamers suck.
The browser MMO that I play is an interesting case, though. In its most basic form it is an extremely boring game–players get 50 turns a day to run around, shoot zombies and talk. There is no plot, hardly any background; the game can basically be summarised as “you the player are trapped in a city somewhere that’s overrun by zombies, do whatever you want”. The community, though, is actually one of the most vibrant and interesting that I’ve ever seen. In the absence of developer-given plot and characters the players themselves have, over 3 years of operation, created a whole game history complete with epic sieges, zany characters and historical events. Community, community, community. I love that game.