Farewell to Hyboria

[pyat]

My dad bought me a used IBM-XT clone for Christmas, 1989. Around that time, Omni magazine was carrying ads for dial-up MUDs, multiple-user text enviroments where you could hang out and pretend to be a dwarf. I loved this idea. I imagined making a con artist in one. I'd describe him as a wise old man, and he'd sit outside the town gate and sell bogus treasure maps to people. Indeed, when I eventually got onto MUDs and MUCKs, I did this sort of thing.

It's frustrating that I can't do that sort of thing in a much more advanced game, like the Conan MMORPG. I can't, because every character in the game is clearly marked as a player or computer character. And, no one talks to the other players, if they can help it.

I gave up on the Conan MMORPG about a day after my last review. I don't know whether this game in particular is just really badly flawed, or whether I'm simply not constitutionally fitted to play MMORPGs. Certainly they seem to require an investment of time over and above anything I'm willing to commit. I got to level 11, and the quests did not get any more epic. They just got longer, or more unrealistic.

At one point, a blacksmith asked me to fetch a crate of steel from a ship at the dock, in exhange for a pair of boots. I got there, and found the crate stuck in the crane. The crew told me I could have it, if I could get it down. I poked at the crane, and the crate fell to the deck and crashed open. The captain was displeased, but let me take the ore, though I'm not sure where I put it. But, this seems to have been an unavoidable scripted event.


_{Oops! Butterfingers! Can I still have my steel?}

It also explained the pile of broken crates on deck. Every few minutes, another player comes along to do this quest, and a broken crate is added to the pile. Presumably, they vanish after a while, or the ship would be nothing but a pile of broken crates. Also, that seems like an awful lot of steel for me to be carrying on my own.

But, really, this is just an example of how the MMORPG works against any kind of immersive experience. How hard would it be to designed a quest that doesn't end up with a stack of broken crates piling up in the same place? It's like everything in the game is designed to remind you that you are playing a game. It's like watching a movie in which the boom mic is constantly visible, or reading a book filled with editing markups. It's like playing an RPG in middle-school with guys who make fun of you for trying to act in character.


_Tortage

It almost makes me angry. Here they have created this enormous, beautiful world, with an engine for adjudicating relationships between players, with three dimensional cities and wilderness. This is precisely how I imagined computer games would be someday! Except, the reality is clunky and non-engaging.

You'd think I could wander through this world experiencing wonderful adventures, and meeting interesting people. But the game is specifically designed to defeat that. You don't go into the tavern and swap tales of treasure, or seek adventuring companions. You run pell-mell from place to place, following little arrows on the map and killing things when you arrive. The game does not encourage interaction. If you stay and chat, you get left behind.

The last quest I accepted involved killing 20 snakes, and 20 scorpions. I didn't even start on it. The one before that required me to kill 30 Pict tribesmen. Except, instead of killing 30 of them, I killed the same two guys, 15 times over... because they respawn in the same spot after a couple of minutes.

How is that fun? How is that immersive?

Comments

[elvishefer.livejournal.com]

I don't think you should confuse the time sinks in the game with the 'fun' in the game. As someone else pointed out, the business goal of the game is to keep a customer tied up in the time sink while improving their characters to have more fun while:

1) doing complex PVE encounters, as in WoW, or;
2) fighting other players, as in Warhammer Online, AoC (apparently), Guildwars, etc. etc. etc.

There is typically crossover between PVE and PVP in all MMOs these days, and I think they all share another common characteristic. The role play evolved down a developmental branch that serves a market segment with an audience large enough to justify the huge development costs of the games.

When WAR launched, for example, it had three "role play" servers where "role play" rules were in place. Names had to be in character. People spoke in character, and apologized when they didn't. Some acted as pseudo gm's and created quests for lowbies. Some held in-game weddings between toons. I went to three. For the same groom. (Different spouses!) But, when WAR launched its 3 RP servers were outnumbered by 20 or more non-RP servers.

I used to play Dark Age of Camelot. For a few months I ran with a regular group of seven other players. We gamed the system and circumvented most of the leveling time sinks. We geared our toons as best as was possible. And every week night when we could swing it, between 9 and 11, we would fight together.

We were almost always out-numbered. We had to learn every nuance of our character classes, their abilities and the game system around it. We had to learn the terrain we fought in, the tricks, the line of sight exploits, the escape routes. Every night we would devise strategies to beat the enemy zerg. Each of us had a specific role to play, and playing it right or wrong was the difference between winning or losing.

The fun - the truly addictive allure of it all - was when eight people scattered all across North America got so good at playing together as a team they began to fight as one.

Now, I've played video games since I was 12-years-old, and that's a good many years. I've played all kinds, and I love my digital entertainment. But nothing compares to how much I enjoyed running with that group.

It was definitely not a classic 'role play' experience. Yet, I certainly played a role. And I think that's what the words role play mean when used to describe today's big budget games like AoC, WAR, WOW, and others. Filling a role, moreso than acting out a role.

I think there are more consumers comfortable with the latter than the former. The former requires creativity and vision; the latter requires a mechanical understanding of process and ability.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Also, this game was marked down to $3.99, six months after release. That might have something to do with the suck. :)

[relee.livejournal.com]

The World of Warcraft 'endgame', Raiding, is basically a team sport. Between five and fourty guys all organize together and work as a team to overcome obstacles presented by the game. There's really no fun to it without other people, that's the key. The only reason I played World of Warcraft so long was that I had other people to play with. I stopped playing when the people went away.