How Blizzard Changed The MMO Genre

06 Apr 2010 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

This is a surprisingly important topic, and I know I should have written about this weeks ago.  Nevertheless, it still needs mentioning, and no one seems to be grasping the significance of this.

A bit of background:  those enthusiasts who play tabletop RPGs are a bit of a contentious lot.  The disputes and debates tend to be amiable, but they exist.  These gamers are divided into a number of factions, and they don't all see eye-to-eye.  It's been that way since the beginning. 

One of the big points of contention is the 'role playing versus dungeon running' debate.  On one side, you have the role players.  They enjoy the parts of the game where you all meet up at the tavern, interact with the locals, pick patrons' pockets, and flirt with the women.  They love quests, and missions, and clues that are discovered over the course of multiple play sessions.  They also love any game that has some collaborative storytelling features built into the system.  For the role players, much of the fun is all about the flavor.

On the other side of the game, you have the dungeon runners.  When the adventurers meet at the local tavern, these guys are likely to interrupt the GM:  “Yeah, yeah, the merchant's daughter has been captured by goblins, blah blah blah.  Just point me at the dungeon where they're keeping her, ok?  I've got killing to do.”  Aside from cutting through any of the colourful content, they want to get right at the action.  For them, a pen-and-paper RPG is basically an action game, and all that role playing stuff is just slowing them down. 

Tabletop game designers are very much aware of these two camps, and design pen-and-paper games accordingly.  There are games that are very heavy on the role playing, and these tend to have few rules.  It's all about creating atmosphere and encouraging your players to act out.  These games tend to emphasize the social experience.  Of course, there are action-oriented RPGs as well.  These games are very light on the role-playing aspects, they streamline character creation, they cut through most of the setup, and they get right to the action.  Once you design a character, you'll be inside an abandoned crypt killing mummies inside of 5 minutes.  Among the tabletop role-playing crowd, the two camps are about equally divided, and there are games specifically designed to cater to each group. 

For various reasons, MMOs have really leaned very heavily toward the role-playing camp, not the dungeon running camp.  In almost every single MMO on the market, there is a lot of questing.  There are elaborate story lines that unfold as players level up.  There are scripted sequences, chatty NPCs, and entire cities filled with vendors and townsfolk and auction houses and ports and zeppelin towers and banks and and trainers and other whatnot.   Heck, you can bake pies and cakes and cook up some chicken, and you can make furniture and put it in your house.  If you're particularly generous, you can put furniture and trophies inside the bigger house you and your buddies built for your guild. 

Now consider a game like Diablo.  Every town or city consisted of six people, and they weren't very chatty.  If you got a quest, it inevitably pointed you to the bottom level of a dungeon. You didn't craft anything, you didn't build a house and put trophies and furniture in it, and you certainly didn't bake anyone a pie.  You sold your loot, repaired your gear, turned in your one quest, and then picked up another quest.  That all took about 10 minutes, total.   And guess what?  Your quest was to kill a boss at the bottom of another dungeon.  The game was all about the action.   

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