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

[acegreco.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately there's a huge case in both camps for leaving things the way they are and improving them tenfold. As much as the world is beautiful, every unique item the developers include increases the server load significantly. If a MMO provides a unique quest that populates a random person in the game world that only you are able to talk to in order to fulfill the quest, all of a sudden that character needs to be seen on every system accessing the world, logic needs to be developed on the fly to determine player interaction with the object (or just have the object invisible to everyone else, which makes for people standing there talking to... well nothing) and all of this data adds to the game server. Ideally, the way the MMO industry needs to move in order to develop an immersive experience is to dynamically provide game worlds based around a group dynamic, sometimes providing public areas to interact in that are accessible to a number of players. RPGs actually skipped over this. It was called multiplayer gaming, such as Neverwinter Nights, where the interaction is limited to a few computers as opposed to giving everyone access to everything.

This is why MMOs are painfully repetitive and ridiculous. The limitations of technology demand it until someone figures out a way to do it different.

[acegreco.livejournal.com]

Here I go cluttering stuff up with comments again.

The one MMO that I recall actually LIKING for the strategy they employed was Auto Assault.

Roam around in a destructive buggy of death. Your sole objective? Destroy shit. Sure, everything respawns, but you're moving at such a high speed that you're often not there when it does. Crazy jumps off ramps doing insane stunts. Equipping your vehicle with cool weapons that may not be the best tiered weapons available, but you can watch as bullets and flamethrowers tear into your enemies' chassis. Once your vehicle is turned into a flaming wreck, the handy automated repair service comes out to trail you back to your faction's closest repair facility, for a fair fee.

The downside? They canned it. Gave you a Tabula Rasa account for the deal.

Tabula Rasa. Now that was a little more standard fare for MMOs. WoW in space, essentially. Sure, there were dynamic battlefields and such, but I wasn't as entertained.

Now? They've closed this one down too. Rewarded everyone with memberships to Aion. I've gotten off this bandwagon long ago. :)