A new MMORPG
2009-05-13
I need a new MMORPG.
Probably not a brand new one, it might be plenty for it to be new to me. Or maybe I could do with some way of finding a new lease of life for one of the ones I know and love-to-hate.
For me, MMORPGs need some main ingredients. I was going to say how many, but I suspect I'd change my mind while I write and I don't much want to come back and change it, or worse have a strikethrough joke. That's just the kind of mood I'm in.
They need to have fun multiplayer. Guild Wars essentially seemed to be a massively single-player game, and when that's the case I may as well play a genuine single-player game; one without network latency, or compromises made in pretending to be something else.
They need to be fun to play alone. No matter how good the multiplayer is, you can guarantee that I'll spend most of my time alone. That's partly because a vast majority of the players will be idiots, so unless your multiplayer doesn't require teamwork (and to be honest why would I bother if that's the case?) I'll be trying to hang out with just the people I know.
And that brings us to the crunch point, the one that developers really can't help with. I've become the kind of person who plays massively multiplayer games only with friends, and who generally doesn't have enough (or more to the point, has them spread out too much playing other games or even doing something productive). I probably wouldn't join a new one now unless I thought there'd be some folks I knew there.
The Guild Wars/Free Realms/RuneScape model of having multiple instances of the game with players free to move between them is very helpful in this respect, meaning that no friend is too hard to team up with provided you're playing the same game. The EVE model is great at first glance - everyone always in the same game world - but in practice the place is so damn big that you might need to book times and spend hours on autopilot beforehand before you can get together. At the other end of the scale World of Warcraft has a hard split between servers, and maybe that's good for their respective communities, but it does mean that even though dozens of people in my workplace play WoW I can't do any meaningful teamwork with any of them. One team has decided to start again together on a particular server, but I've just got too much time invested in my current one, not to mention some friends there who I currently don't have much contact with for other reasons.
Besides the abyss between worlds, World of Warcraft suffers from a great chasm between levels. I have a character at the level cap that I don't enjoy playing; I've done so much levelling that I can't really bring myself to get there again. Without that commitment there's practically nothing I can do with my friends in that game; I've never even seen the magical 'buddy' and 'apprentice' schemes that other games run, because WoW's solution to the level gap is to trivialise advancement in all but the last ten levels so that you can steam through it to catch up. It's something it sort of has in common with Guild Wars, although at least there it was part of the design from the outset; in Guild Wars you can get to the cap in a few hours.
EVE doesn't have 'levels', and most activities are structured so that even pretty new players can feel like they're making a contribution. It isn't a great place to go blindly looking for new friends, though, since the game and the developers have a realistic 'shit happens' approach to scamming, in-game violence and the like, so it pays to have a good idea who to trust.
As for other games I've mentioned, I haven't seen enough Free Realms to see what it's trying to do (although it's notable that in the couple of hours I have spent I've not seen anyone speak), and apart from a couple of the minigames RuneScape seems to have mostly single-player content.
I'm not playing WoW at the moment, for the reasons above. Granted, I could power on and get another character to 80, it wouldn't take long, but I've got different priorities to my guild now and I doubt I'd get much more of the kind of play I'm after even at the level cap.
EVE is quite good fun single player, but ultimately it will get boring if I'm not prepared to take the plunge and look for a corporation, because most of the stuff that really interests me is multiplayer.
Ah, well. If you know me and play one of those games, or want to recommend something else, by all means get in touch.
Probably not a brand new one, it might be plenty for it to be new to me. Or maybe I could do with some way of finding a new lease of life for one of the ones I know and love-to-hate.
For me, MMORPGs need some main ingredients. I was going to say how many, but I suspect I'd change my mind while I write and I don't much want to come back and change it, or worse have a strikethrough joke. That's just the kind of mood I'm in.
They need to have fun multiplayer. Guild Wars essentially seemed to be a massively single-player game, and when that's the case I may as well play a genuine single-player game; one without network latency, or compromises made in pretending to be something else.
They need to be fun to play alone. No matter how good the multiplayer is, you can guarantee that I'll spend most of my time alone. That's partly because a vast majority of the players will be idiots, so unless your multiplayer doesn't require teamwork (and to be honest why would I bother if that's the case?) I'll be trying to hang out with just the people I know.
And that brings us to the crunch point, the one that developers really can't help with. I've become the kind of person who plays massively multiplayer games only with friends, and who generally doesn't have enough (or more to the point, has them spread out too much playing other games or even doing something productive). I probably wouldn't join a new one now unless I thought there'd be some folks I knew there.
The Guild Wars/Free Realms/RuneScape model of having multiple instances of the game with players free to move between them is very helpful in this respect, meaning that no friend is too hard to team up with provided you're playing the same game. The EVE model is great at first glance - everyone always in the same game world - but in practice the place is so damn big that you might need to book times and spend hours on autopilot beforehand before you can get together. At the other end of the scale World of Warcraft has a hard split between servers, and maybe that's good for their respective communities, but it does mean that even though dozens of people in my workplace play WoW I can't do any meaningful teamwork with any of them. One team has decided to start again together on a particular server, but I've just got too much time invested in my current one, not to mention some friends there who I currently don't have much contact with for other reasons.
Besides the abyss between worlds, World of Warcraft suffers from a great chasm between levels. I have a character at the level cap that I don't enjoy playing; I've done so much levelling that I can't really bring myself to get there again. Without that commitment there's practically nothing I can do with my friends in that game; I've never even seen the magical 'buddy' and 'apprentice' schemes that other games run, because WoW's solution to the level gap is to trivialise advancement in all but the last ten levels so that you can steam through it to catch up. It's something it sort of has in common with Guild Wars, although at least there it was part of the design from the outset; in Guild Wars you can get to the cap in a few hours.
EVE doesn't have 'levels', and most activities are structured so that even pretty new players can feel like they're making a contribution. It isn't a great place to go blindly looking for new friends, though, since the game and the developers have a realistic 'shit happens' approach to scamming, in-game violence and the like, so it pays to have a good idea who to trust.
As for other games I've mentioned, I haven't seen enough Free Realms to see what it's trying to do (although it's notable that in the couple of hours I have spent I've not seen anyone speak), and apart from a couple of the minigames RuneScape seems to have mostly single-player content.
I'm not playing WoW at the moment, for the reasons above. Granted, I could power on and get another character to 80, it wouldn't take long, but I've got different priorities to my guild now and I doubt I'd get much more of the kind of play I'm after even at the level cap.
EVE is quite good fun single player, but ultimately it will get boring if I'm not prepared to take the plunge and look for a corporation, because most of the stuff that really interests me is multiplayer.
Ah, well. If you know me and play one of those games, or want to recommend something else, by all means get in touch.
Comments