My Ideal MMORPG
Email thisI’m going to hop on the bandwagon because I feel like I have something important to add to the conversation.
I haven’t enjoyed a single player RPG game on a regular basis since I was…14? So, about ::mumblecough:: years ago.
But I love playing MMOs as a single player experience. Summed up by Azuriel:
But there is nothing worse than getting stranded 2/3rds of the way through an otherwise good story with gameplay that has ran out of steam. MMO combat systems, even the ones that feel “off,” convey a depth far beyond the average RPG. They have to.
I think I played WoW almost exclusively as a single player experience, with the odd group here and there (mainly through Vanilla). But that wasn’t why I did it. Sure, I played the game as a single player game, but I did it because of what I could be in the community. High level. Powerful. A hero. Great at pvp. The first [something] to do [something]. Most of the times I got frustrated with MMOs because I wanted to have the multiplayer RPG experience, but I didn’t want to deal with the other people, because their goals/objectives/desires did not mesh with mine. This is almost a negative “Show & Tell” loop, as Azuriel points out.
Show & Tell can be (and has been) implemented in bad ways. I am not a huge fan of arbitrary Achievements, for example, and I think focusing on the latest gear rewards is a bit crass. Transmog and costume options, on the other hand, are much better. Being able to invite you in to see my living room skull pit in Skyrim?
166 Human skulls. All legitimately obtained, I might add.
Would have been epic. The mere possibility of being able to eventually post the above screenshot, and having someone able to appreciate it on some level somewhere, generated dozens of hours of additional gameplay. In a single-player game. MMOs generate gameplay in this fashion all the time, of course, and I am here to confirm that it works for single-player games too. And, by extension, MMOs that are played as single-player games.
Now, it’s different. All of that remains, but I finally realized the joy I got from playing MMOs (or the joy I WANTED from playing MMOs) was not in achieving the end goal, or even playing the game, it was being able to play the game in the way that I wanted with other people who wanted to play the same way.
Like creating one of the most powerful characters I can. I play MMOs instead of FPSs because of the depth and complexity that can be added to the game. It’s not just a canned environment of playing round after round. It’s growth and evolution.
It’s this complexity and depth that makes sticking with a character for a long journey fun and rewarding. It’s why these characters often feel more alive to us than those of long-dead games that existed for a brief flash. It’s why any time a new game is announced, the first thing I want to know is just how much I can customize and tweak when it comes to my character.
I would also add to this the lore and non-game character developments that go into creating a character. The character becomes a piece of the player, and vice versa. Hence why I can get very attached to names, as many others can.
So I have this wonderful character that I have created. It is dear to me. But, what does that matter if I cannot actually use this character for what I would like?
That’s where I leave a game. I create a wonderful character within a confined space of a game, and then stop playing never to see the character again because there is no longer anything for me to do once that character is as powerful as it can be.
I think MMOs have figured this out. They took the single player RPG, let people create their hugely powerful character, and at the end of that story arc they added “end-game content.” PvP, Raiding, gear grinds, vanity pets, mounts etc. Players now had something to do with their hugely powerful characters. Their characters could be paraded around with other powerful characters, and they could kill more powerful characters (human or NPC) to establish their dominance.
But now I’m bored again.
The current trend of what to do with the “end game” in MMOs is a hot topic right now, and I don’t think anyone has any definite answers.
I can tell you what the wrong answer is:
Ze Grind! I Goez nowhere!
The grind. The skinner box. Giving me something shiny for pushing a button.
I don’t want that anymore. I can easily get the social aspect, and the concept of leveling a powerful character, without grinding, can’t I?
Give me the choice of grinding if I want. Don’t make it a necessary time sink. I want to play the game (with my friends), and be powerful. I don’t want to kill ten rats after I just spent 20 minutes killing rats.
Competition and Community
Those are the key aspects, and that is what motivates me to play any game I pick up.
What makes MMO’s any good at all are the multiplayer elements. Take those away and what are you left with? A game worse than the one you could have made if you actually made a single-player RPG.
I wish to play a single player RPG to become powerful. I want to do it along side others. As friends and competitors.
I wish to build a team and have that team be a close knit community. Have it be truly multiplayer.
I wish to take that team and compete against other teams. Or join up with other teams to create a giant team and compete against the other teams.
Truly make the MMO a world that is there to explore and participate in. Multiple times. Over and over. I think WoW did this, but it has moved away from the world aspect to a focus on collection and grinding of pets and gear (LFR, cross realm dungeons, cross realm bgs…but that’s a whole different discussion)
Basically it boils down to:
Grinding bad.
So give me everything MMOs have been trying to give, but stop treating the players like they don’t understand the mechanics of what’s going on.
That’s the dream of an MMO for me. Give me a platform, a wide open space of challenges to be overcome with my friends. Let the challenge be to build an impenetrable base. Then have some people from another server come around and try and take it down. Then they do, and we have failed, and then we build it again, and better. Or we go and take down their base this time.
tl-dr
Stop making me grind. And give me a single player RPG experience that I can play with my friends, against my friends, and against different communities.
The Frankenstein of MMOs!
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What I dislike the most about endgame in MMOs is it usually is completely different from the leveling experience. A player who enjoys the leveling part might hit endgame and hate what the game offers at that point. It has happened to me many times.
No, players can’t just keep leveling forever so this is probably done out of some sense of necessity. Still, I wish they’d stop making endgame so radically different. in most cases.
Yeah, I completely agree. I enjoy the exploration part of leveling, but other than that it can feel very repetitive. I really liked getting loremaster on my druid at max level because I could just fly over all the mobs to do learn the stories of all the quests.
But yeah, the thing I enjoy most really is pvp, and there isn’t much of that leveling up, but it’s one of the only things to do at max level, so you’re right.
I guess I just don’t like the railroad of things to do, I want it to be much more fluid in terms of what paths can be taken.
Most of the things you like to do I dislike doing. I’m not much interested in my character becoming more powerful, I don’t much want to build a team or a community and I very definitely don’t want to compete against anyone.
On the other hand I love “grinding”, which I would call “hunting” and I love collecting. I’d be quite happy for my characters never to level up or get any more powerful, so long as there were always new places to explore, new things to collect and the look and feel of hunting remained comfortable and enjoyable.
I like Kill Ten Rats quests because they give me a peg to hang my grinding on. Even better are numerical kill targets like faction grinds or Slayer titles. I never work towards these but the little pop-ups when a benchmark is hit is like your auntie popping a fruit pastille into your mouth.
My problem with end-games in MMOs isn’t the repetition. I like repetition. It’s the way the options about where to go and grind close down, sometimes to just one or two zones or instances. That’s the best part about the mentoring systems that are coming in all over the place nowadays. I can do my “end-game” anywhere.
Well that’s good
I wish I still had the energy and desire in me to grind like you do.
But yeah, you make a good point about areas “closing down”. I wish that didn’t happen either. It’s like most of the world becomes off limits or boring. With the mentoring systems, hopefully the rest of the world becomes much more explorable for longer periods of time.
The only time I ‘enjoy’ grinding is when the task coincides with several other tasks; e.g. kill 20 rats for 1 quest, while a 2nd quest requires 5 rat claw loot drops. Knocking down 2 birds with 1 stone feels overwhelmingly (and stupidly) satisfying lol. It’s this illusion of accomplishment that makes grinding, in whatever aspect it contributes to, bearable for me. In all other instances, I very much dislike grinding.
It feels like the nature of a successful MMO game, in the sense that it contains a lot of people, forces developers to cater to players of every stripe and taste. If the game didn’t have something for everyone (or most people), the game won’t reach that self-sustaining critical mass of players that keeps the world and community alive. Whether it be story and lore, graphics and environments, progression and competitiveness, guilds and social elements etc. a wise developer would do well not to neglect any one of these elements.
If I were to develop an MMORPG, I would make it so that all players, despite their play preferences, would willingly intermingle and engage with players of other preferences to reach a universal/shared goal. This is easier said than done, of course.
One example I can think of is vanilla WoW’s Gates of Ahn Qiraj world event. The sense of teamwork was just unparalleled! especially when server progression could be publicly monitored. Most players could play the game their own way (and at their own pace) yet contribute in some way, shape, or form to the event. You personally did not have to care about the event itself, but your inadvertent contribution was appreciated and sought after nonetheless, and I think it is this kind of social valuation that makes an MMO great.
A recent example is GW2′s dynamic world events; serendipitously bringing players together for a cause that was not necessarily clear at first, but the benefit becomes apparent after the fact. This idea is even extended to the realm of PvP where the dominating faction can gain access to a special PvE dungeon only if they control a certain area.
Similar to my aforementioned grinding analogy of killing 2 birds with 1 stone, if players can be brought together to achieve a task who’s success coincided with the completion of another task(s), it would make for one great game! An MMORPG that achieved this would see a certain player type enter the game and evolve/change/open themselves to other play styles as part of the experience – which just basically means more ways to win/succeed!
tl;dr – A good game will try to individually cater to each players’ preference(s). A great game will non-forcefully change a players’ preference(s) to whatever the game offers.