MMOs: Past, Present and Future

23 Nov 2009 at 00:00:00 by Bill Vaughan

Were the old role play games ever that popular? I get an image of a group of people sitting in a darkened room, rolling their 20-sided dice and play-acting their characters as they venture through an imaginary world together. I know it went on, and still does in fact, but was it something that millions of people took part in on a daily basis? How, then, have MMORPGs become what they are today, and what will they become in the future?

Thanks to technology, those who like to imagine themselves in other worlds as other people no longer have to look very far to find others who share their interest. There's not a whole lot of imagining left to do either actually. Before the internet was the all-accessible entity it is today, the first role-playing games appeared on computers which allowed single players to take on the role of a character, team up with computer-controlled characters and accomplish their tasks. The first were text-based, but graphics evolved and brought a whole new dimension to 'digital' RPGs. Before long, online games such as Neverwinter Nights, Ultima Online and EverQuest allowed us to adventure with real people once again, reintroducing the socially-interactive appeal the first RPGs had.

But what started out as a fairly niche genre of gaming has now become a multi million dollar industry. Last year, gamers in the west paid out $1.4 billion USD on MMO subscription fees alone. Online role playing games are big business, but why have they become so popular?

I think it's due to the fact that we no longer have to imagine the characters and the settings in our heads like we did with the original games. It's all there on the screen in front of us. However, you do lose some of the magic in the cross-over from pen and paper to video game, and that's what developers have been working on the replicate.

Many of the original RPGs allowed players to design their characters from scratch. Depending on the game, players could choose the race of their character, their gender, appearance, mannerisms and anything else to fit in with exactly what they wanted. In computer games, players are limited to the content provided by the developer. The first games didn't allow that much choice when making your character, some allowed no choice at all. The adventures were still there to be had, but you lost the ability to look the way you wanted. As time went on, games began to give players more options. In some of the newest MMOs today, there are so many options available when making your character that it's highly unlikely you'll ever see another one like it.

This is something that's only really picked up in the last three or four years; If you look at World of Warcraft's character creator, once you've picked the race and gender, all that's left is the face, skin colour, hair, hair colour, facial hair/accessories. In newer games such as Age of Conan and Aion, slider bars allow players to tweak features on the face to the point where you can almost create a copy of yourself (I tried, it's true). Players can also change the character's body size. Many MMOs now allow gamers to choose what their character's armour and weapons look like too, either by completely re-skinning the items or by using dyes.

I feel character customisation is very important when it comes to games where you invest a lot of time, building your character up and interacting with others. In fact, the ability to make your character look the way you want it to look is so important, it's extended to single-player RPG games too, with great success. I recently tried out Dragon Age: Origins, and discovered that I had as many character customisation options as some of these new MMOs. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the character I created, as she took part in the game's cut scenes, even though I had no one else to show the character off to like I would in an online game. It helps the immersion, gives you a link with that person on the screen.

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