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?

Before bed, I fired up Conan one more time, and took on an additional quest. I went back to where I'd found the tailor and blacksmith who'd given me the dead-simple quests. There was a fisherman, and he was starving to death. He'd been chased away from his fishing gear and catch by pirates. His quest?

Bring him four fish, so he could eat.

I had food on me. Specically, bananas, dead rats, and a piece of carrot cake(?!). The game did not provide the option of giving him food, or money to buy food. He didn't ask me to retrieve his fishing rod, or his nets. He wanted me to go to a basket of fish he'd abandoned days ago, and bring back four of them.

I agreed to this rather short-sighted request, and ambled over to the lighthouse. There, I was horribly slaughtered by the band of 10th level Pirates who were guarding the fish. Maybe they had another reason for being there, but they were also attacking me for approaching the fish.


I came back and tried to sneak up on the basket of fish, using an Apocalypse Now-style approach, and sneaking up under the docks. I crouched low and hugged shadows, and came in sight of the fish... and got shot dead by a dozen arrows. At that point, I decided the fisherman could just jolly well starve to death.

Also, consider the moral implications. He wanted me to go and kill six or seven men, in order that he could have breakfast. I suspect the fisherman was actually evil. I should go back and preach at him. Seriously, though, if that scenario arose in a tabletop RPG, players would walk away from the game