Back in the 1980’s I was a big fan of the music group The Police. As a big fan of the band I devoured everything I could get my hands on and I became fascinated with the charismatic lead singer/bassist Sting.
I enjoyed reading interviews with him as they were far more erudite than the typical drugged out, decadent rock stars of those times. One of the interviews I recall dealt with one of the eternal questions of art — where does inspiration come from? In particular the interviewer was trying to pinpoint the source of inspiration for Sting’s brilliant songs. Being that I was a musician, one of his quotes in particular really struck me and has stayed with me all these years later.
He said something to the effect: “If you want to write great music, go out and get some pain…”
While it’s a cliché that great art is produced by tortured souls I do think it’s true. When you are full you don’t feel a need to get food; when you are hungry you seek out food. Necessity is the loving mother of invention.
I think this is true to a great extent for game designers and people who blog about MMOs. When I’m happy with a MMO I find that I’m in a glassy-eyed stupor and the result is that I don’t think about ways to make a better MMO. Ergo I don’t bother blogging. But these days, the exact opposite is true at least for me; when I’m playing a MMO after MMO that is a copy of EverQuest or WoW I become extremely discontent.
I firmly believe that great artists and designers are never truly happy or content. They are passionate people who are driven by a constant affliction and yearning that things could be done better — much better.
I freely admit that in the past few years, many of my articles have had a sense of despondency about the state of MMOs and virtual worlds. Playing the average MMO these days is painful for me. In the past Tobold has characterized me as “cranky”, well I suppose that I can agree with him there.
The reason why I’m in a perpetual state of angst is that I feel that the MMO industry has squandered all of the great potential that was evident a scant 10 years ago during the first MMO revolution heralded by Ultima Online and EverQuest. Sadly, things seem to be paradoxically devolving instead of evolving. MMO after MMO has failed to inspire me. There’s a creeping sense of complacency and predictability infecting this genre right now that worries me.
The purpose of this blog is to keep my dream of that ultimate MMO where even the smallest person can change the world by some act of kindness or bravery; the realization of a truly dynamic, living breathing virtual world where one person can make a difference. The powers that be say in the industry that it can’t be done but I don’t care. It is still my dream and the dream of many others.
But then I need to be realistic before I rush to grab a torch and pitchfork. The sobering reality is that only a handful of people in the world have the power and resources to make a MMO. We the players have little say or influence in the genesis of any MMO project. The only real clout we have is voting with our dollars. Tragically, we the players can only shut down a MMO, we can’t start one.
Hopefully someday, someone will have the resources and the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom and create a virtual world that is truly transcendent. The MMO revolution is long overdue.
-Wolfshead
To be fair, platforms like Metaverse will at least empower would-be developers to some degree, even if not to the point of being able to throw together an MMO at the same scope as a big-budget commercial venture.
I agree, the genre is stagnating. The competition is hardly trying, and the players are also obviously satisfied after years with the “best MMO ever”, WoW. Which is quite sad.
All we see is this “polish”, making stuff more “accessible”, aka dumbing down, and trying to reach every dumbass as potential customer. The gameplay is adjusted to be fitting for a dumbass, an entertainment park with constant rewards for being a good boy who gets called a hero over and over and over. This is WoW, this is modern MMO design.
New ideas are dangerous, don’t deviate from the formula that works and is based on addiction, gear, achievements.
Virtual worlds with a strong and rich lore are dead, WoW’s lore is something they adjust as needed and is aimed at a younger audience. Or it simply shows that Chris Metzen should have rather re-worked his oversized shoulders for WoW characters than having written a background story, as it is cheesy as hell. Think of EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. – the makers were also no storytellers, but I cannot help, they had a lot more imagination about their worlds.
So no wonder they rather show, than tell in quest design – who cares about the story of Cheesecraft and when the objective is to kill 10 rats anyways, that’s it.
I also found no particular appeal in Aion’s world, and many new MMOs rather seem to be games to me. But I play games and put them aside, while a virtual world has more staying power. It is rather poor that Guild Wars, actually designed to be put away and picked up again, had me play it over years. The story and world design/lore were quite good, even if the story was trivial, it is still miles ahead of WoW.
At the moment I am playing LOTRO. I somehow feel that Turbine was made cautious by the Asheron’s Call 2 failure that they sticked to the old level mechanic and just put their half-hearted and rather bad trait system on top of it, instead of trying something new. They played it safe, a wasted opportunity. Especially LOTRO would have been a very good scenario/world for an alternative progression system.
But as long as fresh new bodies can be sent through always the same basic DIKU-mill and pay money for that, who cares about MMO players who experienced all that and ask for more? Naming your horse is a big thing in LOTRO, a feature of the upcoming expansion. I did this how many years ago already in UO?
I wonder about SWTOR, if it will be DIKU: now fully voiced! Or if Turbine’s plans for the future will be focused on trying various payment systems…
Brilliant comment! You need your own blog my friend 🙂
“I somehow feel that Turbine was made cautious by the Asheron’s Call 2 failure that they sticked to the old level mechanic and just put their half-hearted and rather bad trait system on top of it, instead of trying something new. They played it safe, a wasted opportunity.”
You, my friend, have not played DDO.
If DDO never was a huge success, it’s that it took too many risks and thus appealed only to a niche group. Turbine took chances, just not with LOTRO.
I’ve been writing about this, too. I think it’s pretty clear the direction MMOs need to go in.
I don’t think that the exploration has to be done by huge studios. The revolution should happen with smaller devs writing smaller MMOs with limited scope that do one or two revolutionary things very right. You don’t need fancy 3d graphics, a wide-open world, and 15 servers to make this happen. You can create a game that is happy and profitable with 200-500 players playing 30 minutes to an hour a night. If the small project succeeds, you can always expand it with the money you’ve made. If it fails, little is lost but time and the lessons learned will be monumental.
What a great article. You’ve really articulated how I’ve been feeling lately. I’m pretty cranky too about how a lot of things are going. The industry is bigger but each game doesn’t seem to be making any more money than before. It seems as if instead of breeding loyal customers we’re just looking for quick in and quick out.
I miss the old days where an MMO meant a multi-year commitment.
I don’t. I like the option to join a community and call it home if I feel like it, but I have no interest in making an *online* game (likely with a subscription) into a commitment. I have better things to do.
On top of that, I don’t need more commitments, I need a break when I’m gaming. That’s sort of why I game, and when it becomes something I commit to, the fun dies shortly afterwards.
GW works because it’s very easy to play casually *or* obsessively. Puzzle Pirates works because there are no levels, only player competence and plenty of short-session options in addition to long-session options.
That said, yes, I’m unhappy with MMO design. It’s just more of the same, with minor tweaks. Nobody is really leveraging the chaotically interesting, dynamic potential inherent with having thousands of people playing in the same world. I’m not sure if that’s because of hardware and software limitations or wetware limitations.
Yup. GW is really the only somewhat different design that was successful in the last years.
Guild Wars 2 seems to go a bit more in the more classic MMO direction, I wonder if this is a good thing. Because people who liked GW liked it because it was not like them.
SWTOR does not seem to be the big innovater, so all hopes are on GW2? Uhuh, I am afraid…
You and me both. I applaud the notion that the GW2 team is keeping the business model… but I’m prepared to be wistful for what “might have been” on the game design.
Cough, Eve Online?
I don’t think it’s just the MMORPG genre that’s suffering from this – it’s very type of game, from FPS to RTS to 2D/3D beat-em-ups.
I remember being thrilled by Doom and Command & Conquer, for instance, in the 90s and yet everything since then has merely been a pale copy. It’s the same with MMOs. Everquest and, even to some extent, WoW really defined the industry and it’s hard to move past that.
I don’t think it’s impossible though, it will just take a lot of courage from a games developer to really try and create something new and create a new breed of MMORPG with a twist.
it’s all about market maturity. When no one is entirely sure about what makes money, experimentation is the byword. When the market settles and some important groups have staked out their claims, the clones start rolling off the assembly line. Once businessmen find what people like, they squeeze it until it is a dessicated husk of soulless nothing.
And investors won’t go out on a limb to try something different because MMO design is too expensive to gamble much with.
With the quality of graphics going up, the cost of making games went up as well and the cost for failure has also gone way up. Your modern MMO is a whole 20 million dollars or more, and took about three years to develop. Other triple A games are not any much cheaper (if any). Failing is painful.
I also find myself being rarely excited by the latest games. It just feels like there is too little innovations going on, but I do feel that the MMOs are the most hit by this.
For console and offline games, that is less of a problem. If the game is bad, you just need a little more advertising. For an MMO, you need to keep your playerbase as long as possible to maximized your profits…
It really is truly sad that we have spun off in this pure Monty Haul, loot grind, DIKU style direction with no other options. You prompted me to blog about this in general – specifically discussing how we got where we are with nothing but DIKU style MMOs and nothing from the more world oriented LP tree.
http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast/game_design/the-squandered-potential-of-mmos.html
I absolutely recommend Muckbeast’s blog entry regarding DIKU / LP Mud.
The sad thing is we might see it, but we, or at least most of us, are not the guys who would be able go give things a kick in the other direction. 🙁
MMO’s became simpler so more people could play it, so now the expectations of the masses are so low, that nothing creative or exciting will ever be released into the genre?
The industry has de-evolved so there can’t be any forward progression because people are so use to easy they don’t want hard and therefore, hard, creative insightful games won’t sell, ergo, companies won’t spend the resources to start the cycle spinning back the right way?
I’m just making sure I got this right?
I’m not sure I agree that the expectations of the masses are low because the average gamer is less sophisticated, less cultured, etc. What the average MMO gamer may not possess is the sense of perspective that veteran MMO gamers like myself have. Many of us know what came before and we feel it was far more superior then the mass-market pablum that Blizzard and friends are dispensing.
The truth is that the public doesn’t know what they want. Actually that’s a famous quote from Steve Jobs and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Looking for positive change from the gaming public is a lost cause. True change will come from out of nowhere. Perhaps it will come as the result of a indie MMO dev reading an article by a passionate blogger. Who knows…
However, I think if the public was presented with a revolutionary MMO that provided an alternative to the parade of WoW clones that they would respond to it in droves.
The MMO industry is in a creative slump. Many industries go through the same kind of trends. For example, a successful movie will come out of nowhere and win acclaim and public support and suddenly you have 5 years of clones being released by the motion picture industry.
We are at the 5 year mark now after the release of WoW with nothing new or innovative in sight. It can’t last forever and when it crumbles it will crumble fast.
A bit similar to that Steve Jobs quote, I remember a designer saying that true revolution, in gaming, only comes when someone offers something nobody knew they needed up until then.
I think there is a lot of truth in that statement. the thing is, how do you know what the public want that it does not know it wants?
Personally, I think that the problem is that MMOs try to be the most profitable by appealing to the most people as possible. I would love it if studios just picked a niche, found their niche and made an MMO 100% focused to appeal to that niche. I think that is where we would see innovations coming from.
At the moment, we’re continually exploring the same design space and trying to refine it. We’re slowly establishing rules about what works and what does not, and sticking to that. I’m sure that if any of us think for a few minutes we’ll be able to come up with a few “universal truths”.
What about purposely breaking one rule and trying to make an extremely fun game built around that? I’d love to see that.
Considering the expense of making these things, and the investor risk aversion, we’re pretty much stuck with any big titles being clones with minor innovation. They can’t afford to be different.
Smaller, more agile games will be where the next wave of interesting design comes from… or a big name studio that isn’t beholden to stodgy investors and has some guts.
I don’t think so. Sure, the hardcore community of gamers might, because it would be a breath of fresh air in a stale room, but the masses, would probably stick with WoW or the WoW clones, because that is what brought them to the genre and they aren’t going to be too eager to give it up, unless Blizzard does something so unlike themselves and piss a bunch of people off. Its the fast food of gaming. People eat it up and it’s going to have to be some kind of revolutionary game that will pull that kind of support away from a game like WoW. I mean, even the WoW clones can’t pull enough players from WoW to bring them even close the giant.
And with Blizzard reinventing themselves with Cataclysm, they are pushing out a new game right under peoples noses. How many blogs have you read where people will go back just to see a Heroic version of Dead mines or to see the destruction of the old world? The revolution may come, but it might be Blizzard that brings it, and WoW will be the delivery system.
Actually, there is quite a bit of change in the MMO world, RPG or otherwise. I realized this when my wife and I went back to EQ2 (which we originally slighted in favor of WoW) in our perpetual search for a team-friendly game. EQ2 is firmly rooted in the EQ mindset. After playing Conan, WAR and Champions, I was surprised by how much was different in all those “new” MMORPGs. Many of the “problems” people talked about in 2002-2004 have “solutions” in the MMOs released in the last 1-2 years. Whether the solutions work is another matter entirely – it’s obvious that developers ARE trying to make games better. And they’re trying to avoid tossing out babies with the bathwater.
As for truly original MMOs, those exist as well, but not all have done well. Not all original ideas make good games, or make good business sense. These failures are also educational, as they warn developers and publishers away from dangerous cliffs.
The truth of the matter is that creativity takes time. The original EQ formula took six years and many improvements before it was “perfected” in WoW. Large numbers of MMOFPS titles are arriving just now. It will take multiple generations of games before they too are perfected. A few MMORTS attempts are out there, and some major efforts are now in progress. Kids’ MMOs with extremely lightweight gameplay are out there too, with more on the way. Heck, there are even X-rated MMOs, with predictably scummy gameplay (or lack thereof).
The trick is to look under the rocks and into the dark corners of the internet. You’re not going to see EA blow $80+ mil on something experimental, so don’t wait for some big PR campaign to shove the game under your nose.
Instead you’re going to have to go out there, hunt things down, and be prepared for some less than stellar gaming experiences. It’s kinda like listening to garage bands – most sound horrible, but every so often you hear something interesting…
Arnold has just said pretty much what I was going to say.
There are a lot of different MMOs with varying degrees of innovation.
At one extreme you have games like Runes of Magic. It’s WoW with less quality. Same engine, same type of quests in the same quest-based levelling system, more attractive pricing model, lower polish.
Then you have games that copy WoW and add a twist. Lotro is basically WoW with an all-pervading Tolkien theme that permeates everything. Even hit points are now morale. Very high quality, a good pick for those who like their WoW Tolkien-flavour.
Champions Online is WoW-in-spandex for people who want to play WoW while wearing tights.
Then you have games like Eve, Darkfall, Fallen Earth, and arguably even DDO. These are not WoW in any shape or form. Most games like this don’t do very well.
The venture capital and hype follows the market and the paying public tends to spend most money on the second category. This means we see evolutionary change not revolutionary change. From a money-man’s perspective this would probably be the best thing to risk capital on because the evolutionary games have generally worked well. Evolutionary games that are considered to have in some ways failed like AoC and WAR had implementation problems not design problems and in any event are to some extent considered failures because of unrealistic expectations.
I’m sure the future holds more of the same. Star Wars WoW will bring us the voice acting evolution, an attempt to make the WoW model even more fun by throwing money at it. Star Trek WoW will bring us the ship to ship combat evolution, showing the WoW fans what they’ve been missing all these years by not playing Eve.
And some things look really different and new. I expect genuine genre-shattering evolution from This Secret World, from CCP’s vampire game and from (ironically) Blizzard’s new secret MMO project. After all why would Blizzard do another WoW game?
Most, perhaps, I don’t know.
But of the four you cited, the first one is doing extremely well, constantly gaining new subscribers. It now has more than 300k users. Firends who tried it weren’t thrilled, but those who stay stay for a lifetime, and player retention is a very good thing.
The second seems to be doing quite well, having opened a second server some months ago. I ‘d like to try it, but am afraid it’s not for me. So, not without a trial.
The third is receiving quite an amount of praise from our fellow bloggers. I haven’t tried it either.
The fourth wouldn’t have seen my coins some months ago. Now that it is F2P, me and 3-4 friends get together once a week for 2h. I would not pay 15€ for that amount of action. But a friend recently paid some euros for store points. I will, but not so much for the points as to send them something, just as I do for Kingdom of Loathing.
As for WoW, been there, done that, will never go back.
So, yeah, the future holds more of the same for those big MMOs that are here to bring in the big money. But the future also will (should) offer niche games that will not only survive, but also thrive if done right.
Yes, as Arnold said, roaming the dark corners of the Internet is needed to find them. And yes, some are terrible. But we have blogs, and twitters to make people know that there are lights in the darkness (and not all of them are to make your boat crash on rocks so they can stab, pillage and rape you). So, heads up, hope is never lost !
Is there any way to do something about this ourselves? I know none of us can fork out $20M to do something like this, and nearly as few would be able to persuade a bank or other investors to do the same, but it seems like there should be something we can do other than just blog our hearts out.
I’m a writer, an illustrator and an MMORPG veteran. I have written out megs of ideas in scores of documents focused on one conceptual game and compartmentalizing my creative energies so I don’t get confused later. I do character design and some Lightwave 3D for fun. I have a very clear picture of all of things I dislike (or like less) about any and all of the games I have played, MMO or not, and an equally clear idea of what I consistently like.
In short, I am an ideas man, a concept designer, and while I understand the basics of coding well enough to follow a conversation and even make suggestions, I am no coder. I am no pitchman. I am no accountant. I am only one bristle in the paintbrush, but overflowing with great ideas, and I am NOT ALONE. I keep well up on MMO news, and I am very aware and abreast of the vast collection of wisdom, insight, analysis and opinions from my fellow gamers online (and a few friends closer to home).
There MUST be some way we can do more than sit on our thumbs and await Blizzard’s next “hoo-ah!”…
I feel your pain Bob. Hopefully someday soon MMO tools will come into existence that enable passionate people to create their own MMO. Then what people create will be based on the merits of the concepts and design instead of the ridiculous barrier to entry of having to come up with millions of dollars.
The thing is that a lot of the people reading these blogs are ideas people. That’s not a bad thing; with enough will, sure, we could go find accountants and coders. But how to convince them to work on this project without that $20m? If you go open-source you wind up like Planeshift (http://www.planeshift.it/about.html): several years in development, nowhere close to a final product. Maybe I just don’t know how to make an open source project sexy.
The other problem with having bloggers be ideas people is that, with so many of us, we’re probably going to disagree. So even if we start up a project, effort gets split.
The thing about MMO creation tools, on the other hand, is that the ones I’ve tried (all two of them >_>) have just been clunky. I tried Three Rings’s Whirled, which was based on Flash, so as a content developer I would’ve had to learn how to use that first. And let’s face it, I’m lazy. Also with the not being a coder. (You mean I have to learn Actionscript to make my avatars do anything? Bah.) Plus the whole two and a half dimensions thing was not exactly enticing. Raph Koster’s Metaplace, while lovely and ambitious, was also just not quite what I was looking for. But then it’s very young, and maybe it’ll get better. He does want to integrate 3D worlds into Metaplace, but, looking at the current state, probably not soon.
And maybe the MMO creation tool I’m looking for is too heavy to be embedded in a browser, and needs something more like Steam to connect and advertise the game worlds it’ll allow player/creators to make.
I really don’t know.
I love Three Rings, but just didn’t get into Whirled, despite prowling around in its beta. I didn’t want to mess with the Actionscript. I *do* want to learn coding to make my art and design better and more holistic, but it’s very back burner at the moment. Well, that, and I don’t want to buy Flash. I can’t stand the program.
Update on the Headless Horseman event in Goldshire:. About 20 of us have tried to put out the fires but we keep failing and this is in prime time. I just started doing these events this year so I have no idea what the “success” number of participants is.
The worst part is that there were at least 10 people hanging around not even bothering to pitch in and lend a hand to put out the fires. Naturally when we did put out the fires they smashed the pumpkin for the reward.
End result: Blizzard penalizes people that participate when not enough show up and rewards lazy players who don’t contribute. Brilliant scripting!