World of Warcraft. MMORPG* Suckage. And Other Stories

* Massive[ly] Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (i.e. games like EverQuest)

A while back I saw an interesting diatribe on brokentoys.org (Lum the Mad's blog) about how it would be nice if there were a critical mass of gamers who wanted to play something other than mage / tank / healer games (pretty much every MMORPG out there, and any vaguely successful one, falls into this category) amd proposed some kind of amorphous global diplomacy thing which made no sense but had its heart in the right place.

I would actually settle for something far less ambitious -- a mage / tank / healer game that didn't suck.

(For those of you not accustomed to MMORPG jargon, a mage is someone who is fragile but does a lot of damage (usually from a distance); a tank is someone who can stand toe-to-toe with an enemy in a fight, not die, and be able to hold that enemy's attention; a healer is someone who makes wounds go away... Every major MMORPG to date, including those featuring superheroes and "science fiction" settings, is essentially designed along these lines. If you think of these three archetypes as forming a triangular spectrum (like a color gamut) every character option more or less falls somewhere on the triangle).

WoW (World of Warcraft) is shiney and new and we haven't started to comment on the suckage yet (aside from the obvious -- lag, crashes, and downtime), but there's still plenty of suckage to go around.

1. As your level increases, content is doled out with a lot of hamburger's helper, in the form of tedium. I.e. instead of "go kill 20 mobs, collect 15 items, and come back for a reward" it's "go across the continent to fred, then go across to BFE, kill 200 mobs, collect 10 items, and then go to wilma (in BFE2) who sends you to barney (in BFE3) who gives you a not to take to betty (in BFE4) for your reward."

   This isn't clever. This isn't fun (not the fifteenth time, anyway). This is just EQ with better graphics and dialog boxes instead of /hail.

2. The reason for the hamburger's helper is that if you gave people stuff at a decent rate, you'd run out of content. When you run out of content, people stop playing. When people stop playing, they eventually stop paying. Then you go broke.

Is there a solution to this dilemma?

I think there are several, and WoW intends to utilize one of them (by imitating DAoC) but not the others.

• Make PvP a feature. Folks in my office still play Quake II because PvP never, in a sense, gets old. DAoC didn't have an end game besides PvP, and WoW will probably be a solid implementation of ideas others have already demonstrated will work.

  But what about...

• Making the world a little bit dynamic. Not a lot, but a little bit.

  E.g. if everyone is killing monsters of type X, maybe make them scarce. Have quests impact the world in non-trivial ways. Put a tiny bit of state in the world Not a lot, but a little bit. Just a tiny amount would make the world SO much more interesting. God forbid, one server might seem a little different from another.

• Make quests a little bit dynamic. Not a lot, but a little bit.

  Imagine if all newbie quests weren't identical. Suppose player A goes to NPC B and asks for a quest and then gets a "slaughter 10 pigs" quest. But player C comes up and gets a "collect 8 eggs" quest. OMG! This could even interact with the oh-so-slightly dynamic world. (When pigs get scarce, more hungry bears and wolves and bandits appear.)

• Maybe design it as a multiplayer game.

  It's amazing to think that after all this time and effort has gone into designing competing MMORPGs, that they're still fundamentally single-player games.

  E.g. if you are assigned to go kill Fred Bloggs, so are fifty other people. Since there's only one Fred Bloggs, he/she just "respawns" and can be killed over and over again. Why kill him? He just comes back? Why rescue the princess? She can just kill herself and respawn back safe in the castle? In any event, killing Fred Bloggs does not rid the world of him, so why bother?

  It's about time someone actually designed one of these games so that this kind of idiocy didn't exist. Random name generators aren't that hard to write...