MMO Gaming

I found this sitting here in my drafts, mostly finished. I don’t know when I started writing it, a while ago it would seem, judging by the timeline I set up in the post. I also don’t know why I didn’t finish off the last bit of it much sooner and post it. These are questions I will probably never be able to answer. That having been said, I figured now is as good a time as any to finish it off so here we go. A post from the deepest pits of GamingMMO.com’s long-forgotten drafts page.

Enjoy!

Ask any console gamer and they will tell you the joys of an exclusive title. Mario/Metroid/Zelda games for Nintendo, Metal Gear Solid/Final Fantasy for Sony or the likes of Halo and Gears of War for Microsoft, all selling points.

Exclusive titles sell systems. How many people got a 360 to play Halo and Gears of War? Probably quite a few. How many people bought a Wii to play Madden on? What about the number who bought it for the next Mario/Metroid/Zelda title? Significantly higher. And who bought a PS3 for…well…I got nothing. Anyone who bought a PS3 is pretty much waiting for their exclusive titles to come out, the must have Playstation games.

What does that have to do with MMO games, a market owned almost entirely by the PC? You’ll just have to give me a minute. I’m getting to that.

Everyone wants originality and ingenuity in games. No one wants to play the same thing regurgitated over and over again. Not a single person. That’s why, as MMO gamers we demand exclusivity from each game. It must have exclusive features. If it doesn’t we will (and do) complain. I’ve posted before already about not asking developers to re-invent the wheel with each new game, and I stand by that. They should, however, push the genre forward with each new game.

But what are the determining factors for what is “enough” ingenuity and what you can use from other games? Is there some magic number of features that are unique to a game before it can be considered original?

Take, for instance, LOTRO. Veni, Vidi, Bloggi had a post up a few days ago that said this:

I really have to wonder what players are expecting. Every game I’ve played (and I’ve tried almost all of them) has had unique aspects to them. But isn’t the basic core of an MMO always going to remain somewhat the same?

So…does the core of the MMO genre remain unchanged regardless of unique features? I don’t know, I guess that depends on what you consider the “core” of the MMO genre. I have yet to see anyone say “X, Y, and Z are core aspects of an MMO.” Probably because the hardcore MMO fans among us, you know, all those of us who actually take the time to write about the games, want to believe that our genre is different from others. We want to believe that we are on a higher plane of gaming than others. We are interacting in persistent virtual environments with thousands of other players. We are playing in worlds that change (quite frankly, this isn’t really true at all, but I have seen this said by people several times before.) We believe that the MMO genre is the true evolution of gaming in the future. We are cutting-edge gamers, leaps and bounds ahead of all those stuck playing their silly Halos or Marios.

Oh sure, if we want to veg out for a while we may sit down and rot our brains playing those single-player (or multi-player) games, but when we want to really play a game, a game that is beyond all others, we load up our MMO of choice.

The unfortunate problem with this attitude is we are becoming completely blind to a truth that many others, outside the hardcore fans among us, have continued to say. The “genre” isn’t moving forward. We aren’t going anywhere. The entire thing feels stale. If you’ve played one you’ve played them all.

Sure, there have been some recent releases which threaten to change the way we think an MMO must be made, Tabula Rasa the most notable among them, but on the whole, even looking ahead to 2008, the releases are giving us exactly what we already have. The core is remaining the same.

If we are to believe that the core concept of an MMO can’t change than it never will.

Look to single-player games. The core of the single player game has changed. Look to the beginning, the time of Atari, or even up to Nintendo. What was the fundamental principle of games then? Small, simple, fun, diversions. They were basically time wasters. Not that there is anything wrong with that, they were just good, old fashioned, recreational fun.

Now we can’t have that. We need huge worlds, epic stories and we need these games to be treated as an art form just as any great book or film is. There is a core switch of what is acceptable. We’re all about story in the single-player game now. The core of the game has changed.

Are we still to believe that the core of the MMO can’t change? Are we really so foolishly stuck on ourselves that we can say that a shift of focus isn’t necessary?

Do we wait and watch as the MMOG acronym suddenly changes to mean “Massively Mindless Online Grind”? The core needs to change. It demands to be changed so this can remain a viable, fun and growing genre. We can’t sit back, watching and waiting for these changes to come. We’ve got to start demanding them now.

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