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Do MMORPG's forget that they are MMORPG's?
Tsumoro
Member UncommonPosts: 435
I am not the most gifted with words, so I would like to marshall myself as best I can to really drive home the point I want to make and hopefully open it up to some form of discussion.
The first MMORPG I ever played was a small game called Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds which was a top-view game with anime-esque graphics and although at that time I was not a big anime fan, I was hopelessly in love with this game, but not for the reasons people might think.
This game didn't have dungeons or raids per se, it was a community driven game. It had (at that time) two major Kingdoms, Buya and Kugnae in which most of the interactions within the game involved dealing with other people. The Royal families were player controlled, the class givers and armies were all player controlled with just a few merchants being NPC's to buy and sell the basic goods.
In this game, once you hit level 99 your characters progression did not stop, you sold your gained experience to improve your characters stats and gear (although they did increase your stats) were not the requisite for progression, it was about individual character journies. What did you want to achieve?
Now, there were four base classes - Rogue, Warrior, Mage and Poet (which was the healer) however, you could invest into a sub-class, so Warriors could become a Barbarian or Mages a Geomancer. These sub-classes were not NPC's you would go to an established sub-path and you would undertake quests and trials under a mentor who would usher you into their fold should you pass. Your character would also continue to grow within, unlocking titles, legends, gear and abilities.
if there is a point I am trying to make it was that the game was completely run by other people and within the ten plus years that I played it I made many friends as well as enemies, lovers and rivals.
My personal journey into the game involved the following;
- At 99 I became a Baekho a rogue infused with the spirit of my totem animal which was the Great White tiger.
- I help found, and establish the Great clan of Destiny and became a Sensei to all new initiates. Something itself was a feat as it required 200 members to register and to argue the benefits your clan would have in the Kingdom to the Prince and his Ministers.
- I became a friend and patron to the Muses sub-path, spending many hours hosting events and games.
- I became part of the inner council for my Prince of Kugnae and reported under the Minister directly.
Now to some this might sound rather dull, but in honest it was very exciting and deeply personal and really brought our the RPG in the MMO. Something I truely believe is forgotten now in today's market.
Now, I remember going over a friends house, not long after Everquest had come out and watched my friends brother play EQ, where he was with around 10 people, pulling mobs to a safe location where they awaited in ambush. I found the whole concept rather delightful, that this was what true adventure was, acting and interacting with other players, investing your time not in a gear treadmill, but slowly but surely progressing your character with other people.
These games werent about phat loot, they were about your own personal journey, interacting with the world and other people that inhabit it with you and having fun without this constant need to have shinier and shinier gear to validate self worth of your time invested.
Now when WoW came out, I fell in love again, but not because of its platform, but it really allowed you to spend time with other people, make lasting relationships, having that lock summon people for you, going to that meeting stone and banding together, duelling outside the gates of Iron Forge, going to the crossroads with the backing of a 100 of your alliance to lay waste to the Horde to kill Thrall where he rested.
But now... now, its about making sure that your interaction with other people is as minor as possible. It goes under the basis that people have an immediate dislike of one another, that we are untrustworthy or that we provide a somewhat mild irritance to those forced to bare our company. It is all about creating a platform where you can do everything without having to really interact with one another, all in the name of accessibility and I honest to God believe that this has lead to this now hostile attitude in games.
For example if you are in a dungeon and you screw the pooch your are slandered, or kicked rather than communicating with one another. Now, I know I can't cause a shift in conciousness to correct this, but games simply do not encourage players to interact and it seems that in this age of social media people struggle more and more to simply communicate.
Because of these reasons I honestly feel that games that are designed with the MMORPG in mind identify the genre as a game with a roleplaying concept or mechanic (typically the ability to level) with MMO meaning lots of people online, but they do nothing to merge the two together (unless its dungeon or raid related, but even then people don't communicate). Its like MMORPG's no longer exist it should be MMO+RPG or something of that like.
For me the genre was always 'one' whole entity with no real distinction between them, going together like guns would to an FPS or jumping would to a platform game. For now, my MMORPG experiences seem to be religated to either serving as an NPC to help progresss someone elses gear, or they to mine and it really shoulnd't be the case anymore.
Therefore I would like this thread to talk about one of two things;
either 1) Your thoughts about MMORPG's and the social dissonance
or 2) your own personal experiences where MMORPG's have fostered good positive community interactions.
Tsu
[Viewer discreation - Wall of text inc]
The first MMORPG I ever played was a small game called Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds which was a top-view game with anime-esque graphics and although at that time I was not a big anime fan, I was hopelessly in love with this game, but not for the reasons people might think.
This game didn't have dungeons or raids per se, it was a community driven game. It had (at that time) two major Kingdoms, Buya and Kugnae in which most of the interactions within the game involved dealing with other people. The Royal families were player controlled, the class givers and armies were all player controlled with just a few merchants being NPC's to buy and sell the basic goods.
In this game, once you hit level 99 your characters progression did not stop, you sold your gained experience to improve your characters stats and gear (although they did increase your stats) were not the requisite for progression, it was about individual character journies. What did you want to achieve?
Now, there were four base classes - Rogue, Warrior, Mage and Poet (which was the healer) however, you could invest into a sub-class, so Warriors could become a Barbarian or Mages a Geomancer. These sub-classes were not NPC's you would go to an established sub-path and you would undertake quests and trials under a mentor who would usher you into their fold should you pass. Your character would also continue to grow within, unlocking titles, legends, gear and abilities.
if there is a point I am trying to make it was that the game was completely run by other people and within the ten plus years that I played it I made many friends as well as enemies, lovers and rivals.
My personal journey into the game involved the following;
- At 99 I became a Baekho a rogue infused with the spirit of my totem animal which was the Great White tiger.
- I help found, and establish the Great clan of Destiny and became a Sensei to all new initiates. Something itself was a feat as it required 200 members to register and to argue the benefits your clan would have in the Kingdom to the Prince and his Ministers.
- I became a friend and patron to the Muses sub-path, spending many hours hosting events and games.
- I became part of the inner council for my Prince of Kugnae and reported under the Minister directly.
Now to some this might sound rather dull, but in honest it was very exciting and deeply personal and really brought our the RPG in the MMO. Something I truely believe is forgotten now in today's market.
Now, I remember going over a friends house, not long after Everquest had come out and watched my friends brother play EQ, where he was with around 10 people, pulling mobs to a safe location where they awaited in ambush. I found the whole concept rather delightful, that this was what true adventure was, acting and interacting with other players, investing your time not in a gear treadmill, but slowly but surely progressing your character with other people.
These games werent about phat loot, they were about your own personal journey, interacting with the world and other people that inhabit it with you and having fun without this constant need to have shinier and shinier gear to validate self worth of your time invested.
Now when WoW came out, I fell in love again, but not because of its platform, but it really allowed you to spend time with other people, make lasting relationships, having that lock summon people for you, going to that meeting stone and banding together, duelling outside the gates of Iron Forge, going to the crossroads with the backing of a 100 of your alliance to lay waste to the Horde to kill Thrall where he rested.
But now... now, its about making sure that your interaction with other people is as minor as possible. It goes under the basis that people have an immediate dislike of one another, that we are untrustworthy or that we provide a somewhat mild irritance to those forced to bare our company. It is all about creating a platform where you can do everything without having to really interact with one another, all in the name of accessibility and I honest to God believe that this has lead to this now hostile attitude in games.
For example if you are in a dungeon and you screw the pooch your are slandered, or kicked rather than communicating with one another. Now, I know I can't cause a shift in conciousness to correct this, but games simply do not encourage players to interact and it seems that in this age of social media people struggle more and more to simply communicate.
Because of these reasons I honestly feel that games that are designed with the MMORPG in mind identify the genre as a game with a roleplaying concept or mechanic (typically the ability to level) with MMO meaning lots of people online, but they do nothing to merge the two together (unless its dungeon or raid related, but even then people don't communicate). Its like MMORPG's no longer exist it should be MMO+RPG or something of that like.
For me the genre was always 'one' whole entity with no real distinction between them, going together like guns would to an FPS or jumping would to a platform game. For now, my MMORPG experiences seem to be religated to either serving as an NPC to help progresss someone elses gear, or they to mine and it really shoulnd't be the case anymore.
Therefore I would like this thread to talk about one of two things;
either 1) Your thoughts about MMORPG's and the social dissonance
or 2) your own personal experiences where MMORPG's have fostered good positive community interactions.
Tsu
Comments
The reason people tend to like newer titles is because of the structure of the games emulating other genres from which they've been drawn from into MMOs.
Axehilt had an inadvertent example of this in another thread where he said "Many veteran gamers wanted modern style MMORPGs back when MMORPGs were created as a genre."
Ignoring the obvious issues with his comment, there is a realization that it's an example of something a bit more concrete.
That is, gamers from other genres want to see an evolution of the things they enjoy. Traditional MMOs didn't fulfill that because they were experimenting with a different concept of how the world-space, community, and mechanics would play out, and when we progressed into modern MMO we saw a shift towards a stronger implementation of mechanics and design principles that were more familiar to non-mmo players.
The result is that you see the MMOs launched playing less to the community and more strongly to the way a title from a different genre would work, such as the focused player storylines and focus on "delivering" an experience (most often this meaning a focus on combat, though there is the random examples of titles with ulterior forms of entertainment or a differing focus, but that's it's own tangent about where those exist in the market).
Point in this case being, there is a pretty big impact that the push to seek the greater gaming community has had on MMOs. In many cases the "MMO" part has become pretty readily muddled, with people confusing the term with inclusions of lobby-type games alongside just smaller scale multiplayer or weirdly solo experiences all together, with the infrastructure being the part that has the greatest impact or only full vestiges of an MMO through the organization of the servers and client/server implementation of the games.
There are single player games that have utilized the ability to access server data in order to deliver deeper experiences, such as the Dark Souls series, Spore, and Dragon's Dogma. They are fundamentally single player games (Dark Souls being excused for it's coop and invasions) wherein bits of the game are preserved from each player's activities and used to enrich the game world and subsequent experience of other players without them ever really having to interact with each other in a direct manner.
On the flip side you have games like ESO where the titles are billed as MMOs and their fundamental play-style is for the most part an open format in an environment with many other players, but so many of the supporting components serve to focus on the individual characters (and subsequently isolate them) that the only real advantages of being an MMO ends up being reduced to a sort of always-on social forum for arbitrary banter and asking to trade.
This isn't really a good or bad thing. It's something that has greatly impacted the way MMOs and other genres are treated and the chosen focus of them on the kind of games they will most commonly deliver.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
mmo-RPG are MMOs themed after RPG gameplay of character progression and story telling. Same rules of MMO apply.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
[mod edit]
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
How often do you read about a player joining a random group only to get to the very end and get kicked out cause 'you're a trash ranger'. Imagine that was the real world. You land a 40 hour a week job. You put in a solid 39.5 hours and just before you collect your paycheck your boss fires you cause 'you're a smelly Hispanic' and doesn't pay you. IRL that would place would be shutdown in a week and buried in lawsuits and fines. In game world, the developer just laughs it off and says the perpetrator can do it because he's group leader.
It only takes 1 bad experience where a jerk walks away unpunished for players to lose faith in the group system and become solo players. If developers don't want to pay for staff to police their game than they need to implement ways for players to community police the game. Archeage got it somewhat right, the prison system is a good idea but the punishments need to be much more severe and unavoidable.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
MurderHerd
There is a generational difference from us old farts who played pen and paper RPGS back in the 70s and 80s to those who grew up on video games. There was a social aspect to those pen and paper sessions that just didn't exist with mario brothers.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
People who don't know or don't understand the perspectives of others cannot see the changes in the same light.
And actually videogame RPGs started out close to what tabletop RPGs were at the time (focused on combat and dungeon crawling) and that focus hasn't really changed much since then. Whereas tabletop RPGs have developed a much bigger focus on the improv and story-telling aspects of RPGs.
But regardless of that, the genres are different and have offered distinct things for ~35 years. So the expectation videogame RPGs would offer a tabletop experience is unrealistic.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The genre has simply evolved. Any game which has a persistant online presence and RPG elements may be called an MMORPG. 15 years ago, there weren't many games that fit into that category, now there are 1000s. As with any genre of gaming, there will always be games you love and games you hate. Then there is always the back-of-the-mind attitude that you just want all games within a genre to be like the games you like. I know personally that I'd be over the moon if all single player RPGs were like either Final Fantasy 7 or Morrowind as those two games remain my favourite RPGs, whereas if all RPGs were like The Witcher series or Dragon Age series, I'd never play an RPG again.
Second, as to MMORPGs and community / social dissonance
I believe it is very difficult to build a good community in an MMO these days. 10-15 years ago, when MMOs were still pretty niche, the majority of players probably came from similar backgrounds and had similar interests. This made it easier to make friends and thus build communities regardless of the feature sets available in those games. Now, with MMOs being more popular and accessible, the community is more fragmented right from the start, so of course its going to be harder to build an MMO with a good community.
I do, however, think that many MMOs just flat out ignore the community when it comes to designing their game. Either that, or the features required for building a great community conflict with features for building a popular MMO. A good example of this is downtime. Downtime is essential for building a good community. Forcing people to do nothing for a few minutes (e.g. no quick travel, death penalties etc) gives them an opportunity to chat and be social. If you are constantly fighting, you can't be chatting and thus you can't be forming relationships within the community. However, forced downtime is a bad feature if you want to appeal to the casual / short term playsession types of players. If someone only has 30-45minutes to play the game in the evening, then 5 minutes of forced downtime is going to put them off. Unfortunately, this type of playstyle if getting increasingly more popular (and thus more profitable) and so devs are having to put aside community features in favour of pleasing more of the playerbase.
Spending dev time on community features is also a risk and thus harder to get funding for. Asking a publisher for £1m to build a new raid which you know will be played by 200k people and keep them entertained for an extra 3 months is an easy ask, because the cost is justified by the reward. Asking for £1m to improve community features is difficult because there is no way to quantify if you have achieved anything or whether you will get a ROI.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The modern solo friendly environment is a direct result of the older MMOs. This isn't some sudden and diametric break from what they offered, it is an evolution of what the older MMOs offered due to the issues that style raised and the interests and time available of the paying customer.
The old system prevented players who had other commitments (which is most of the gaming audience barring children during summer and adults without jobs) from easily enjoying the game. It was a massive time investment that meant something real, something vastly more important was being neglected such as; your job, your children, your wife... or even just yourself or your living conditions. It's a well known meme of the obese, junk-fed, and inactive MMO gamer that's been reflected in many caricatures or the MMO gamer. And while this image may be somewhat hyperbolic there where those that fit the image.
The change to a solo friendly environment allows more people to play for just an hour or two (which was about the same amount of time the old systems used in just finding a group) and keeps their lives meaningful, yet still allows them to enjoy their hobby, and by extension support the game developers.
Additionally, while a group focused game prevents the soloer from enjoying the game, a solo friendly game does not restrict the grouping player. The methods of finding a group have just changed. Join a guild, find friends outside of the game and then group with them in-game. If there are enough people that think as you do and lament the loss of group focused activity then it should be easy to find a group.
You control your playing environment in an MMO far more than the developers do. That's the very definition of 'emergent gameplay'. So seize that initiative and make your own group to play, stop trying to make the soloers play your game... or worse force them out to the detriment of the developers income.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
Unfortunately, developers made the mistake of equating this casual crowd with solo. Casual = solo, grouping = guilds.
Terrible, terrible mistake. Playing with other people online and building relationships is where the unique magic of an MMO comes to life. Otherwise it's just a multiplayer game with pretty lobbies and/or instances. Nothing wrong with that, I'm currently enjoying the hell out of a game called Warframe that's really just that. Fantastic game. But it's not an MMO as I understand it - that is to say, it's not a game that pursues what's unique and interesting about MMOs, the thing that only MMOs can do.
Initially, when MMOs first came out, the mechanic that fostered this kind of community was: everything's so hard that you need and want to group up with other players whenever you can.
Obviously this mechanic was downplayed with WoW - at first, WoW retained enough of it to still be a genuine MMO, but over time, it got easier and easier, and more solo friendly.
But there was another way, a road less travelled, that only one MMO really showed: City of Heroes. City of Heroes was a game that had lots of casual players, but in the case of CoH, while you could still solo, and soloing was fun enough (for most classes!), the game was set up in such a way that the casual player would find themselves teaming up with people as a matter of course.
CoH was PUG heaven.
"PUG heaven" was the other way forward for MMOs - a way to retain the fostering of community, but not by the mechanic of making open world gameplay that was so hard you had to team up.
But that road was not taken. Instead the casual=solo road was taken. The emphasis on "story", on being a special snowflake. And then, eventually, the emphasis on collecting shinies.
Now, the MMO is virtually dead as a genre. The only real MMO that's still up to date is EVE Online - but that's a sandbox. The last proper "themepark" MMO to die was Vanguard.
But the way forward that CoH showed is still possible. In fact, it's eminently possible because people are used to multiplayer games, used to PUG-ing. The thing that's missing is the sense of a virtual world, a persistent virtual world.
What's wanted is the combination of big virtual world feel, and the easy PUG-ing of most a contemporary multiplayer co-op game like Warframe. CoH had that, and developers ought to have iterated on it, and tried to meld the two things together even better than CoH did.
But it didn't happen.
Maybe it will happen in the future. Maybe sandboxes will make a big return - but that's doubtful, because they require a lot of commitment, and requiring that degree of commitment is precisely not tapping into the huge casual market. More likely, I think, is the following type of scenario: a multiplayer co-op game like Warframe could gradually move more of its action to servers, have more large persistent spaces, and while retaining the easy PUG-ing feel, transition more to a full-on MMO.
We can only hope.
I almost take that time between pulls as a break from playing to socialize a bit.
(Every player that doesn't play My Game [x] or does play that Evil Game [y], for example. Every solo player ::hiss, spit:: Every "casual". Every group outside my own that I can blame for the Decline and Fall of Camelot. All these damn kids, console players, pvp players, etc.)
And they really cannot see the inherent contradiction.
We do have a really, really, REALLY weird definition of 'Social'. That happens with self-awarded labels.
That's my opinion from a player perspective.
The devs on the other hand these days just don't give a damn about delivering a good game, they are just thinking "how can we cash in as fast as possible before the game crashes out?"
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
OP got it in one, its not that modern games minimise social interaction. They minimise any sort of interaction between players at all. These are solo games played online. SPO, not MMOs.