Things are interesting when it concerns the landscape of the
MMO world. In the current MMO age, everything is set to a level of hand holding
and made so ridiculously easy that any sense of gratification one might feel
for having accomplished anything is nearly lost almost as instantly as it is
accomplished because things were just too easy. On the other hand, the concept
of a living, breathing world that players could interact in and be a part of
has been neatly swept under the rug and replaced with essentially single player
games trying to pass themselves off as MMOs. The world we live in, as far as
the gaming world is even concerned, is not an MMO world. It’s just businesses
trying to cash in on the actual MMO genre without understanding what truly got
people so interested in it in the first place.
I’ve been sitting back and just thinking, mostly. And so far
I realize that I miss the young nature of the MMO industry. I don’t mean WoW;
that pretty much heralded in the current generation of single player games
disguising themselves as MMOs. No, I mean the games that came before, like UO,
Dark Age of Camelot and so forth, where the world was more determined by the
player than the players waiting on the actual world to get updated in expansion
packs.
For me, the best world was always UO. This was a world that
was determined by the players, and events and such were only small hallmarks. I
wasn’t required to be a fighter of any kind. I could just spend my days being a
crafter, making things for other players, and I know the things I made would
actually be desired. Crafting in today’s MMOs is such an afterthought, I am
left wondering why they even bother having crafting anymore, because it’s
little more than lip service in the end instead of actually being something
that players can aspire to or want to desire in the long run of the game.
I guess it might be nostalgia talking at times, but it
really is something I do desire; a return to what an MMO was truly supposed to
be about. Something more than just creating a specific character class and
going out and bashing monsters continuously over the head until they relented,
that has just never really struck a chord with me. And even as much as I love
protecting the team, that role itself has been becoming less and less needed as
developers continually push their MMOs to be more single player than ever
before.
No, my best time ever that I can honestly say I’ve ever had
was sitting, as a blacksmith, at the Britain forge in UO just talking with
other players, repairing their goods and even making armor. You didn’t feel
useless because the stuff a crafter made was actually on par with the stuff
that could be found. Very little was actually needed to actually improve upon
that, though they could have done so without destroying the actual integrity of
the game. I don’t even think I could possibly describe how much I would love to
go back to UO right now and engage in that world again. But, unfortunately,
that world is gone.
If I were to show people UO now, they would probably just
imagine it as another Diablo dungeon romper, as the crafting professions
themselves are pretty much dead. Though socializing and such still exists, and
from I’ve seen, a strong commitment of the RP community, in the long run what
UO is now and what UO was just are two different entities and what I would
desire just won’t ever come back. Not without basically a complete and drastic
reboot of the entire franchise, and doing that to a 15 year old game would
pretty much just require a new game at this point.
So what is it about this game that I always end up pining
for in my mind? What keeps making me pine for it in ways that no modern MMO has
been able to fill the void in? I don’t think the answer is simple. Parts of it
can be describes as nostalgia, parts of it may be described as mechanics, and maybe
even parts of it can be described as the community itself. But I think what
really attracts me, and I think a lot of people actually remember, is that you
truly could decide your own fate and how you actually wanted to spend your time
in the game.
Ultima Online wasn’t just another game, and while the
learning curve for getting into it was steep (nowhere near as steep as other
games mind you, but it definitely was not newb friendly) once you got into it,
the possibilities of what you could do became wide as all can be. There was a
lot to do in UO, from owning your own house to being a tailor to exploring
dungeons. And none of these activities, believe it or not, required the player
to take up one offensive weapon or spell in defense. If you were skilled enough
or planned yourself well, you could play the game without worry of ever having
to cross swords with another player or monster in your gaming life.
Of course, if you were to look back on history, the one
thing that would probably be noted as infamous about UO was the fact that
player killers were rampant in the game. The original premise for UO was that
it was a social experiment. Believe it or not, the grand-daddy of the modern
MMO movement wasn’t expected to last 6 months when it launched. But when it
did, it pretty much exploded onto the world. And what was remarkable about this
simple looking game was actually how complex it turned out to be. I know people
think that the 250,000 player subs at UO’s peak means it was a failure of an
MMO, but most people are also too young to remember or even know that until WoW
came along, the largest MMO on the market only peaked 500,000 once and quickly
declined.
This is why I am disappointed on the announcement of Elder
Scrolls Online. When I heard the rumors, I actually thought, Maybe they might make a sandbox game like
classic UO, and of course I set myself up for disappointment. But I was
using my knowledge I had from the fact of how the previous Elder Scrolls games
had been created. But, instead, they flat out stated it’s going to be yet
another theme park MMO, a single player game disguised as a multi-player game
with classes locked in and such. So, players will not have choices and such.
Now, one of the things they cite is the difficulty of balance in a freeform
system, and I don’t disagree that can be hard, but that is just dumb to ignore
the one core facet of your entire legacy, not to mention why can’t I be a
bloody werewolf? Again something that was core since Morrowind.
I just don’t understand developers who want to jump into the
MMO market, with their famous products, but not stick to the core fundamentals
of the product that made it great. Elder Scrolls would have been perfect to
usher the MMO back into the living, breathing world set up that MMOs use to
espouse to. Giving players the ability to be whatever they wanted, play how
they wanted, without forcing them into a set class. Let them be the blacksmith
and forge weapons. But instead, we are given yet another theme park loot hunt
game that will probably have yet another tacked on crafting system that means
jack shit in the end, except for maybe the one that is all important (probably
the potion maker) if they even bother with crafting at all.
In short, I believe Bethesda is making a big mistake. They
are shunning the fans of their game to appease the lowest common denominator.
They are looking at WoW and going, let’s be like them because they think
copying them but changing the wallpaper is just going to be enough. It really
isn’t. This was the perfect opportunity to take MMOs back to their roots at
what they were all about, to allow people to actually be a part of a living,
breathing world, and allow them to play it how they wanted to without always being
forced to play some form of damage dealing character and always having to hunt
and kill monsters, or other players.
So, what would I have done differently? Well, I would have
incorporated a skill system. No levels. I would have looked at classic UO as
the basis for the design. I would have then decided how I would have wanted it
to pan out, how crafting should work, and built the world around the idea that
crafters are important to the game. I would have let the player decide how they
want to play, if they want to mine, or be a blacksmith and hang out and repair
gear for the adventurer players, let them. Allow them to enjoy the game as they
see fit.
How I would have handled crafting would have been done thusly;
the skill of a crafter determines the quality of the items, with a highly
skilled crafter making the nearly best items. I would have incorporated a type
of enchantment system that would allow for prefixes and suffixes that give
special boosts to items as well. Items found in the world could potentially be
slightly better than what a crafter could make, but it would be very rare. A
gatherer would be just as important as someone who goes out and slays the
rampaging dragons that swoop down on the world. This would help to create an in
game economy and such that would actually help promote trade and commerce and
yes, items would have durability maybe even requiring replacement in the end.
Speaking of items, I would finally get rid of the stupid
bind system. It was novel, but now it’s just a ridiculous control system that
has done nothing but hurt community and promotes elitism in the worst ways.
Elitism is not a bad thing, but the type of elitism that spawns around it is.
Item loss from death is a bad thing to deal with, but I think some items lost
from death should occur, but other things like weapons and armor can probably
stay.
Death would be something that would need to be handled
carefully, but I don’t think the game should be easy, and I do think that a
death penalty of some kind is a necessary evil in an MMO. Otherwise you just
end up with the death zerg. A loss a consumables on death, and possibly gold
should be a good start with ways to get them back. Primary items like weapons
and armor I would consider as well, since in order for an economy to thrive
there needs to always be a constant demand for things. I know people would hate
that, but economies don’t really thrive when there is no reason to repair,
replace, or sell items.
I also probably would have pissed off a lot of people that
enjoy their ranged classes by bringing ammo back and of course, with mages,
having reagents again of some kind, just like in UO, for their spells. I know that’s
probably not very Elder Scrolls, but it would have helped balance things out in
the long run where the warrior types would have to constantly run in melee
while the ranged can just plink away at range.
Another thing I would have brought back is limited pack
space not based on arbitrary slots assigned by a bag type, but by actual
carrying capacity. The weight in your pack and how much can be carried would,
in the end, determine exactly how much you can carry. This limit could be
determined by strength, of course, but wouldn’t restrict players based on a
slot system but more on just how much they can actually physically carry.
And then there is the one thing that often gets brought up
in every MMO but either not implemented or very poorly done in the modern MMO
because there really isn’t a point to it, and that is housing. Housing was
perhaps one of those features of UO that basically added icing to the cake of
the fact that UO was a living, breathing world that people were a part of. You
could own a slice of the land and decorate a house. You could have vendors to
sell your goods for you while you were in town, and there were actual player
towns that sprung up like this. Space was limited, but players could buy or
sell houses as well, and later, were able to build the plot as they saw fit. If
you want a theme to build an inn, you were capable of doing that. This is
something I would do, but probably use a plot system similar to horizons, but
not as convoluted or restricting as that. That way the players can build how
they want.
And of course, the final part of the puzzle would be PvP.
PvP is important in a living, breathing world of MMOs. But there would have to
be some differences from the willy nilly gank style of old UO to today. Safe
areas, maybe kings territories, and of course probably special rules for PvP.
After all, today’s PvPers who’ve grown up in the safe world of WoW (yes, I am
calling WoW PvPers carebears) would probably froth at the idea that their uber
leet sword of pwn just got ganked from their corpse, but then again, I say the
one thing about UO’s PvP is that it acted as its own kind of stat loss as a
player went to regear. It was probably the biggest factor in helping control
the battlefield and keeping people from zerg rushing. It was probably one of
the biggest make people think things, the fact that dying could result in them
losing all their stuff. But again, it’s something that most MMO gamers just
wouldn’t accept.
In the end, I don’t expect much out of ESO, especially since
they made it clear they are just going to copy the tried and true WoW formula.
I can hope they will wake up in the end and realize that giving a finger to
their fans is a bad idea, but who knows. I would hope they might actually
experiment and try to make the MMO a true sandbox world instead of yet another
bloody theme park that we have entirely too much of on the market. I think that’s
what a lot of the angry posts are truly about in the long run. Who knows, I am
still waiting and seeing, I guess.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would probably
make a classic UO reboot with modern 3d graphics but keeping its classic
gameplay albeit streamlined and the isometric viewpoint. Hell, if I could
magically get it, I would use Blizzard’s graphics engine because that’s just
about perfect for UO, make the entire world of Britannia, maybe double the size
of the world and just go from there. But that’s a pipe dream, and currently
while most developers think that more theme park games are magic dollar signs, my
dream of seeing another game like UO just keeps becoming smaller and smaller.
But I keep holding onto hope. Maybe soon a developer will
wake up.
Well, more information is slowly coming out about TESO, so I
am wondering if I should start writing this more as a blog towards TESO.
Probably not, for now, since just posting random speculation is pointless as it
serves no real purpose other than making conjecture and non-sense about
something we know exceptionally little about other than personal accounts of a
private screening several months ago. However, there is probably one thing I
think that should be touched on with this blog concerning the expectations and
the divisionary line between a normal, single player gamer and an MMO player,
and the obvious lines of difference between the games.
One of the biggest hot topic debates is, of course, the
first person view debate. Now, first person view is a great little thing… for
single player title games where it works at. Why? Because a game built around
single player is designed and constructed where the player only has to deal
with those elements immediately near them and most often within their field of
view and control. Some may argue to the contrary but even things at range are
carefully designed so that players can still see them. In an MMO this is not
the case, especially with big complex boss battles. Things are happening that
the player needs to be aware of to keep ahead of the curve on because things
that happen don’t always just happen with the boss themselves. Sometimes it
might actually be the environment that you need to be aware of, and first
person perspective just doesn’t offer this. Furthermore, first person is just
plain inferior for basic surveillance. Yea, the argument is for immersion but
really, first person has its place, and it can help with immersion, but it
certainly doesn’t make feeling a part of the game any stronger since the hands
you see are still not your own.
That brings up another thought in general, something single
player gamers never really think about anyways; balance. Single player gamers
have options, a lot of them. In fact, you would probably be hard pressed to find
a single player gamer who hasn’t used a mod, console command or altered save
files to better suit their play style. Hell, even quick save and quick load are
things that single player gamers take for granted to remove unfavorable things
that happen to restore lost items. In an MMO these options won’t exist. When
you die, any items you used will be lost and any progress you made will have to
be redone to a point. You won’t be able to call up a console command, alter
save states, or install a mod that changes things to suit your play style. And
there is no quick save or quick load. What happened, happened, and the
consequences of your action are more readily apparent.