So, I’ve always been caught between two MMO communities. The FFXI players that have come to know me via my Renkei Chart (look for it to be back up by the end of the week) and the WoW players that I have known from the webertrons long before there were things like MMOs or 56K modems. And I’ve dabbled in several other MMOs, from my brief fascination with City of Heroes to the painful loss of Earth & Beyond (where the first pangs of, “I can make video game guides!” were birthed) to the mind numbing, dream crushing paralysis that was Star Wars Galaxies. I knows me some MMOs. And I can see the progression of the genre and the subculture very clearly, how each franchise tried to sculpt the very basic organization of Tank-Healer-Damage into a unique but somehow familiar system. I’ve seen class balance and class upheaval. I’ve seen expansions and time sinks. And I’ve seen where MMOs are going, what Blizzard’s juggernaut has done to the market, and what we can expect from the next several years. With that in mind, may I present Aden’s MMO Construction Bible

Time Sinks: Every MMO is going to have time sinks. Both the easiest and hardest games on the market feature them prominently. Whether it’s a matter of repeating quests, gaining faction, grinding crafting materials, earning money, raiding for loot. . . every game has them. They have to. Players who reach the last grindable content in the game need something else to do, or their $15 per month is headed for a new addiction. But what makes time sinks suck so very badly isn’t that they are time consuming. It’s that they are boring. Really, really boring.

No one likes to farm. Sure, once in a while it’s amusing to take your high level character back to the low level zones and destroy the enemies that once gave you so much trouble. But not for five hours a day for three weeks. WoW hides the level grind behind chains of seemingly important quests. All they really are is an instruction kit on what to kill how many times, and a reward for following that kit. But the hiding itself is done in an artful way, and the design of the areas can often interject a dash of strategy. FFXI handles things very differently, by simply dropping tons of enemies of various configurations into the world and letting players find camps to grind and grind and grind. They got better at designing those daily encounters in their last expansion, but the grind still looms.

There are a few time sinks, though, that need to be done away with. The worst of these is travel. Going from place to place isn’t fun. Sure, when you first get your Chocobo License or you ride your first Gryphon, it’s the coolest thing in the world. By the tenth time the novelty has worn off, and by the thousandth time you wind up going halfway AFK an reading a book en route. WoW adds the extra insult of making you farm cash for your mount, which you can then use to go halfway AFK and read. Some time sinks are acceptable. And others are necessary, even the travel sink. But game content that is alt-tabbed out of is not good content. Period.

Class Definitions: Every MMO I have ever played has had class problems. Damage classes are too populous, Tanking classes are too death friendly, Healing classes are too boring, and the latter two get more or less shafted if they try to do anything without a group. In fact, the entire DTH system has always struck me as an artificial creation. One of the reason that most MMOs fall apart in PvP is that the entire battle system is based around a small number of characters taking all the damage, a small number of characters healing all the damage, and a much larger component of characters dealing all the damage. But things like aggro and threat and hate don’t exist in PvP, and thus, Tanking and Healing classes (which are already in short supply) are denied yet another aspect of the game.

The way to fix that problem is to allow Tanking classes to mitigate such damage that their reduced damage dealing is on par with those attacking them. The same goes for Healing classes mitigating damage through self heals. A Damage class attacking a Tank or Healer needs to find their own Damage severely diminished. As for Healers and Tanks fighting amongst themselves. . . that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Whether that means there need to be offensive tanks (like FFXI’s WAR/MNK) or solo capable healers (like WoW’s Holy Paladin), I’m not sure. It might depend greatly on the structure o fthe game itself. It fits nicely in our label-happy brain that Healers can only Heal and Tanks can only Tank (and, really, that Damagers can only deal Damage), but it has ruined more games than I care to count. The MMO that does away with the DTH architecture while still providing for a solid group combat experience will own the market, Those that have tried thus far, quite honestly, have failed.

Logic Traps: I can’t tell you the number of times in every MMO I’ve ever played when I spent hours of my time doing exactly the wrong thing because the game trained me one way and then suddenly – and arbitrarily – changed the rules on me for one given example or instance. It’s one thing when the goal is to get players to learn a new way of doing things (like using Gnomeregan to teach newer players about the importance of crowd control). It’s quite another when the shift is a result of poor design or poor developer-to-gamer communication. If I’ve run a thousand quests that require me to collect an item and then return it to an NPC, don’t drop one in the middle of a chain that needs me to behave in the reverse order, especailly if it’s for no apparent reason.

I don’t quite know if this sort of thing is the result of hidden time sinks or just inconsistent design, but it can be maddeningly frustrating for both new players and seasoned veterans (usually more so for the veterans, in fact). An MMO asks us to accept a created world as a real one, and cushions that world with sets of logic that act as analogs for real world experiences. A game like an MMO, where your existence is persistent and the consequences of your actions cannot be removed by slapping the reset button and starting over, players should not have to learn how to behave in similar situations entirely from scratch. Keep the logic of your world logical. If gamers have to spend time asking themselves, “What were the Devs thinking?” rather than, “How do I complete this quest?”, you fail.

Phat Lootz: Every MMO is going to have a gear grind. It just about has to to sustain an endgame content base. You can’t let characters become infinitely more powerful, and you can’t simply tell people when they max out their character that the game is over – especially if there’s not an actual way to win. But far too often, the time sink of repetition is inserted into the gear grind, and the system of acquiring the gear you want/need becomes disassociated from the challenge factor. That a player could down the endgame bosses a thousand times and theoretically never receive one piece of gear for his time and effort is just stupid. That the length and real life investment in an instance is more significant than the ingame challenge – ever – is poor design. I’m not saying people should be handed loot just for showing up. Far from it. But I’d rather die in nine raids and get my loot on the tenth than kill the boss ten times for a one in thirty chance of a drop. I don’t think I am alone in this.

Customization: People want to feel individual in video games. They want to be the hero. That’s always been the structre, from Zork to Zelda to Mario to Metal Gear. Even in RPG-style games, most people want to feel unique. This is very hard to accomplish in an MMO, because the world must remain playable for all characters at all stages of advancement, the character abilities must be strictly defined to generate content for it, and the gear itself at the upper levels must be precisely calculated and doled out. What happens is that characters are all built the same, gear is all structured and used the same, and players wind up feeling like they are controlling, not the hero of the story, but some random side quest NPC. “Oh look, another Samurai in a Hauby.” “Hey, check out the five billionth Warlock in his Tier 3.”

But it goes farther than that. Nothing in an MMO is ever resolved. You defeat the Ultimate Evil, and he’ll respawn in an hour or so to be killed again. You save a town from an invasion, and the inhabitants still live in fear. You cure a terrible disease, and the land is still pestilent and sick. These things have to happen, of course, because you share a game space with thousands of other players who may or may not have accomplished the same things you have. And if you couldn’t go back and replay old content, it would both rob people of group experiences and make it nearly impossible to accomplish anything in the game that could not be soloed. So much like your character, the world is as static and “default” as it can be.

Some people would argue that this is the nature of the MMO genre. I would argue that these are the people holding the MMO genre back. Why can’t the world change for one person but not another? Why can’t the leader of a group determine which timeline the group is going to play in? Why can’t someone save a city from a terrible monster, and come back to find the townspeople happily running and cheering on his screen, while his newer guildmate still sees them cowering in fear inside their homes? And why can’t that first player choose to roll back the experience so he can have it again, and perhaps help his guildmate with it? Gaming RPGs have featured timeslips since the original Final Fantasy (and used them extensively in brilliant titles like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VIII). Why does the MMO market simply refuse to take this step, when it could literally add multiple layers of content to the same created worlds? Why can’t I defend the doomed Tavnazian Safehold? Why can’t I rid the Ghostlands of the Scourge and actually notice the difference? WoW has taken its first baby steps in this direction with timeline defying instances, but until this concept expands to be a world reality rather than a sequenced encounter, the world itself will remain painfully static.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.