MMO Weekly: Is Everything Getting Easier?

13 Jul 2010 at 15:51:47 by Jeff Hollis

Hello there, my fellow sojourners in virtual space, and welcome to this week's edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's episode,we'll explore a recent trend in MMOs, and its effect on the genre overall.  I'm referring, of course, to the “making everything easier and more convenient” trend in MMO development.

Let's go waaaaay back to the beginning, to the game that started it all:  Ultima Online.  UO was crafted by none other than the father of the MMO genre, Richard Garriott.  Garriott had been working on single player RPGs for many years, and he was a very old hand at making quality RPGs.  In fact, he was at the top of his game, and was an industry leader in the genre. 

And yet when UO launched, it was one heck of a dangerous place.  You couldn't go outside the city for fear you'd be immediately murdered by your fellow players.  That alone made playing the game very, very brutal.  If you managed to survive the gauntlet of player-killers, the game didn't get much easier.  You worked for *everything*. Quests were handled in such a way that you could only complete one at a time.  That is assuming, of course, that the game was actually not crashing.

Now, let us consider UO's successor, Everquest.  EQ was the love child of Brad McQuaid.  Brad is the former favorite son in the industry.  While Brad is now reportedly a deeply troubled guy, he understood certain things about RPGs very well.  For example, Brad was the guy who most clearly understood that players absolutely looooooove to have a lot of choices in terms of races and classes.  In EQ, he put lots of them in there to choose from.  It was one of the reasons that EQ came to dominate the industry, way way back there in the dark ages.

And yet, when EQ first launched, the quests were so freakin' hard, you could barely complete one unaided.  In fact, the game didn't tell you who the quest givers were, generally offered you no hints whatsoever, and honestly expected you to figure out completely random sets of events on your own.  Brad himself even decried “spoiler” websites, in that they ruined the game for everyone.  “Ruined the game”?  I have to tell you, these quests were so hard, and involved so many random, disconnected elements, that virtually no one could figure out the quests without help.  Let me give you an example. 

When you're out hunting goblins in a certain big goblin zone, you begin to pick up some warbeads.  The goblins drop a lot of these, and have no idea what they're for.  Somehow, you're supposed to find a random dwarf in a nearby city.  I think the game actually expected you to randomly talk to every freakin' dwarf in the whole damn place.  Anyway, if you were lucky enough to stumble onto the right dwarf, you could give him some warbeads.  He then told you he wants more of them.  This went on and on and on, for seemingly ever.  One day, he suddenly became very friendly with you.  He told you of his sister, and how she was wronged by her fiance, who left her broken hearted.  He wants revenge.  This seemed to be another part of the quest, but you weren't sure.  Basically, you were completely on your own again.  No further information.

If, by pure luck, you happen to travel to the other side of the world, you might run into a dwarf in a far away city.  If, again by luck, you start buying this guy drinks, he'll get good and drunk and stumble out of the bar.  You can then murder this drunk and cut off his head.  Yes, really.

If, somehow, you're the most intuitive person on the planet, you might take the head back to the original quest giving dwarf in the faraway dwarf city.  Guess what?  The head belonged to the guy who hurt his sister's feelings.  The original dwarf was thrilled, and he gave you a magical hammer. 

Please understand, there wasn't a single indicator in the game that any of these two dwarves were connected in some way, or that they were even involved in any quests, much less connected to one another..  On a planet chock full of dwarves, you were simply expected to somehow find these two.  Also, you were expected to put together their relationship/connection, figure out the whole “get the guy drunk” thing (the quest would fail if you didn't get him drunk), and complete the quest.  It was so random, it would make your head spin.

Remember, there was no map in these early MMOs.  If you wanted one, you had to draw it on a piece of paper yourself.  There was no compass.  There was no way to tell if an NPC was a quest giver.  There was no convenient transportation system.  There were no mounts.  When you played the game, you often ran into some guy in the middle of a swamp and found yourself saying, “What the heck was that NPC talking about?”  If, at some point later in the game, you managed to kill an ogre on an island in the middle of the sea, the necklace he dropped might be the necklace that the NPC in the swamp wanted.  Of course, there were very, very few clues to help you figure that out for yourself.  Oh, and good luck finding that guy in the swamp a second time. 

Nowadays, the trend in MMOs is to make things as easy as possible for players.  Questing?  There's a mapping tool to point you in the right direction, every step of the way.  Player killing?  That's only allowed in certain zones.  Transportation?  You have a lot of choices, from mounts to mass-transit ships and zeppelins.  The death penalty?  Laughably light.  Quest givers?  Clearly marked.  Need a group?  Just push the “LFG” button.

Of course, I could go on and on.  I have to say that I prefer modern RPGs and MMOs to their older, much harder cousins.  The games are just much more fun to play now.  I also like the fact that I can log in, punch up the dungeon finder, and be in a group inside of 10 minutes, tops.  I can play for 30 minutes, and be done with the game for the night.  It's very convenient, and I seldom experience the harsh, mind-cracking frustration that the old MMOs made you feel almost every day. 

However, I have to say that there is something I miss about those old MMOs:  the sense of danger and mystery.  They were brutal, and without a map or compass or any way to figure out where you were, you were likely to stumble into something much nastier than you.  The games had some edge, that's for sure.

Is there any way to bring back that edge, while retaining the convenience of modern MMOs?  That's a tough nut to crack.  I'd have to suggest that the only way to do that is to include some hidden mysteries into a modern MMO game.  These would have to be dangerous episodes, possibly quite rare, and elements of the story that you discovered by yourself; not something that some quest giver pointed you to. I'm the first to admit, that's very hard to write into the overarching story of any game, and even much harder to execute. 

Will this “make everything easier and more convenient” trend in MMO gaming continue?  Almost certainly.  Future games are already incorporating these convenience features into their designs, and talking about them openly.  It's definitely a positive trend.  However, I'm not alone when it comes to missing the sense of mystery and danger inherent to the old MMOs.  A number of designers over the years have attempted to recreate parts of that feeling in various ways.  (Garriott's use of symbolism/hidden language “logos” in Tabula Rasa springs to mind.)  Sadly, the attempts to bring back the sense of mystery, the danger, and the hard edge from the past and incorporate them into modern MMOs have almost always failed.  In fact, I can't remember a single instance in which something like that has succeeded. 

And on that convenient note, it's time to wrap up this week's edition of MMO Weekly.  If you found this scribble-fest entertaining, please feel free to visit us over at Coolorama.com, where we scratch out this kind of low quality tripe each and every day.  For now, ciao!

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