Weighing in slightly on consoles, and why modern MMOs "fail"

Well before I get into the parts of this article I am going to go on a tangent about, I guess I should probably weigh in on the whole console war debate and winning E3 thing. Honestly, the whole console war thing is now getting ridiculous, and the fact people are throwing in their lot with X or Y brand in something that, if it doesn’t change how it operates soon, will be a relic of years gone by is astounding to me on many levels.

The fact that this year’s E3 was “won” because one console sucked the least is even more astounding on so many levels, and the fact that things like console exclusives and such to try and bait people to their specific name brand is another nail in the coffin leading towards the next video game crash. In short, I think it’s time consumers started taking a step back and stopped letting consoles and in other cases publishers, try to rule developers lives with what they are creating. It’s gotten to the point that a game that sells a million copies isn’t good enough anymore is a pretty pathetic state of affairs as far as the video game industry goes, and just shows how far it has fallen.

But now that that is out of the way, let me talk about the other issue that’s been creeping into my mind lately; why have modern MMOs been “major” flops since World of Warcraft launched? Why is WoW the only game that the average consumer thinks can succeed and ever beat itself? Actually the answers fairly simple and by how simple it is probably also demonstrates why Blizzard doesn’t get it either. Now, some may recall an article written by some big wig over at 2K games or something like that (the parent company maybe?) and him trying to tell the world at large that North Americans do not like MMOs. This statement is baffling on many levels because they are popular, to a point.

So what is the point that an MMO is popular in North America? Quite simply, a North American player will only tolerate playing the same game so many times. For the last nine years now, developers have been pushing out the exact same game since World of Warcraft launched, even some other companies attempting to try and reformat older games to be just like WoW, and gamers take notice of this. It doesn’t matter how much you change the paint job, the overall gameplay experience doesn’t change, a players interest is not going to last months. It might last a few weeks at most the more like WoW the game actually is.

Innovation is a word I rarely like to use, because generally when innovation is involved companies don’t know when to pull the reigns in an analyze if their innovative idea is fun or not. You can pretty much run down the list of every MMO game you’ve played since World of Warcraft launched, and you would find precious little difference between each of them. And this is the very reason these new games with big budgets and multi-million dollar devs team behind them fail. They don’t fail because the games were bad or had poor launches, those are just excuses of the players, they fail because they’ve done absolutely nothing different from World of Warcraft.

To be blunt, North Americans don’t like being told how to play the game, if I were to make an observation. It’s most common questions asked, can I explore, can I build the character I want, etc etc, and the answer in every one of these games is a resounding no. Developers try to say you can, but if you have a class lock system picking trees isn’t changing much to the formula. Changing how the bland kill X enemy quests to be local area isn’t changing up the formula either. And offering nothing else as an alternative style of gameplay, such as crafting, isn’t going to get much enthusiasm in the end. Hell, when you shove your PvP into secluded and segregated areas, you have also pretty much made two games, and promising people these things is both a lie and a slap in the face.

MMOs are meant to be emergent worlds where the actions of the players dictate how things can go. The modern MMO is a rather pathetic mess, a single player game forcing a player along a specific route, and North American players are very capable of seeing this crap that they’ve been there and done that already. They want something new. The markets outside of North America, are they just more tolerant or are they just accepting of any mediocre thing that’s put in front of them? Who knows? But I think it is safe to say if you want to get in on North America, you can’t make yet another clone of WoW. People will just stick with WoW in that case.

Rinse and Repeat: The De-Evolution of MMOs

Sometimes, you keep wondering to yourself why you always feel meh about things and when you keep searching long enough the answer actually presents itself to you in an unusual way you didn't expect. For a long time I have been pretty meh about the state of the MMO market as it stands. Now while people will say WoW is as good as it's going to get, and people that say that are going straight to Hell for lying, I on the other hand have been around to know that MMOs have been better and that WoW, regardless of mass media appeal, is actually a large step backwards from where things originally started from.

Now while I expect people to come around and try to explain to me why World of Warcraft isn't much more than piss wiffle, I am just going to put forth why I don't care. I've been playing MMOs far longer than most of the 'internet celebrities' with opinions actually have. I have actually been around this particular bush many, many times. And while the average WoWonaut will probably tell me how much skill it takes to down a raid boss that performs a repeated pattern, I will just remind them to keep listening to the bells and whistles of DeadlyBossMod to tell them how to play like a well trained terrier.

Needless to say, I am not going to sit here and try to claim WoW is a bad game, it's just not anywhere as great as people think it is. In fact, the whole genre has been stagnating thanks to that behemoth because everyone is trying to be just like them. But I digress, this is about the revelation I came to a while back ago and how I came about it.

The reason the current and has been for a while generation of MMOs has been one massive train of disappointment for me after another is plain and simple actually. For all the boasting of choice these games falsely spout, there is no choice in them. No matter if I am making a mage in Warcraft or a blaster in City of Heroes, the end result is the same; I am building someone to kill a specific group of dudes. There is no difference between either, and the solution is always the same; build up power to be able to kill more dudes.

Of course people will always try to point out the extreme cases, like the hopeless person who made it to level 85 without doing a single quest and just leveled up on gathering experience. I just shake my head though because those are called fringe cases, and are exceptionally extreme. People who point that out as alternative ways to level in these types of games are just desperate and wrong no matter how they try to slice it. Just because someone did it doesn't make it viable. So quit trying to pass off that extreme nut jobs doing something like that is a viable leveling tactic, in other words. If a person can't play the game like that normally and have equal returns to someone just pounding away on critters, then it's not a viable leveling tactic and trying to pass it off as such just shows how much of a moron you really are.

So, back on point, again. Recently I got my hands on the third installment of Deus Ex. I won't say the game play was wildly phenomenal or even superior to anything else out there, but I will say the game reminded me of what I was actually missing when it concerned my MMO gaming; actual game play choice. What do I mean? Well minus the obvious boss fights in the game, throughout most of Deus Ex I had multiple choices to actually handling almost every situation. I could be the gun ho shoot 'em up type, I could be the sneaky avoid them type avoiding violence where I can, I could go into ducts and avoid stuff, I could be more direct but still sneaky, I could even hack computers and turn the defenses against the enemy. And as small as those choices were, by contrast to where I am going, this was still way more choice than the current generation of MMOs has offered in a very long time.

Let me try and qualify that. Now, I've basically admitted that I've played UO since December of 1997, which makes me a fairly old MMO gamer. Now while certain groups of people hate on MMOs for being grindy or whatever common denouncement they are given, MMOs back then were started to be their own little, breathing worlds where the player could freely do what they wanted. Though by technical standards, UO was pretty inferior, you could still be a warrior, mage or rogue in the traditional sense, but I could also be a blacksmith, a tailor, a fisher, a house builder, a treasure hunter and many other more options that did not involve me once picking up a sword or casting a hostile spell at monsters. There was true choice in the system. I could decide to spend all my game life, if I wanted to, mining a mountain and forging the material into armor and weapons for others to buy. That was the game I fell in love with and got me into MMOs, a system on true choice.

But, as I stated before, UO was inferior, but in many ways, is still the superior game when compared to the current market of games (if you compare classic UO before itemization to what is offered on the market now). What limited the game was it was a sandbox with no real framework. There was no story, though many of us actually made up quite a bit of it. The adventure was to be had by the whim of the players, and the whim of the players could dictate many things in the world. There were events held by GMs that created many unique features on different shards and the results were fascinating as there was actual history and weight to each individual shard as it grew and became its own entity. UO was truly alive, even if technologically inferior.

However, the market has since changed and de-evolved, as I will put it, into games that hand hold and pretty much tell people what to do and disguise the lack of choice behind mountains of speech bubbles and false choice systems. The end result is always the same, no matter the path taken and it's just one boring mess. Most people know they are bored but they've tricked themselves into believing it's fun and exciting. And it is truly a sad thing to me to watch these games try and pretend they have these great communities when nothing in the world is like how UO was. Nostalgia might be powerful but when entire shards would come together for events and help to do things, that speaks many volumes of words.

Honestly, I want an MMO that gives me real choices again. Not some faux talent system that still only leaves me with one way to handle every situation; mass genocide. I want to be able to go into a game world and actually play different ways, not have to slaughter most if not all the critters in a single location just to achieve something. Multiple avenues and objectives work out way better. Hell, even awarding players for not killing everything or being stealthy would be way better.

I don't expect a return to crafting style game play, that would actually require that developers actually care that much about the game they are developing that they would want to see the world to become a living breathing entity, but I would actually want a real choice system in playing and creating characters. I want the option to be able to stealth through the wave  of baddies with an objective that rewards me for thinking outside of the box instead of only giving me the pay off if I spent several minutes chipping away at a bosses large health pool. Methods that reward me for either avoiding the fight, using the enemies against one another or just plain being smart would go a long way. The current MMO gaming formula rewards the dumbest ideas for the dumbest players in the dumbest ways. It's grossly pathetic to be blunt.

I don't know what to expect out of the new games on the horizon. They are touting voice over's and stories as the big things, which seems all and well, but what about the real game, the real choices? Can I actually sneak into the big base and get the data file or do I need to kick down the doors, and fulfill the 100 dude smack down of the standard MMO?

In closing, I will reiterate my basic stance on the current two MMOs that are coming out in the near future; TOR and TSW. TOR will just be more of the same crap. TSW on the other hand, looks like it might offer something, but I am afraid it won't do it quite as I expected and it will also fall into that trap of doing more of the same. In short, whether people believe it or not, for the past decade every big name game with the exception of one or two has been the same game constantly remade with a new skin by a new company, changing very little of the formula and forgetting what made the granddaddy, UO, so popular. How I wish UO2 was being put back on the burner to be cooked and made with some updating and definitely a graphical over haul.

Guess that leads back to the UO2 emblem on the top. Now, back then the idea was to include story in a 3d version of UO with an actual change to the world. But the story would not come at the cost of everything that made the original UO great. In fact it would build upon it. But, as all things went, something happened and EA closed it down. I don't ever expect EA to try again, but I think it would go that a UO2 using modern graphics, built on what UO started, adding story and and streamlining the game play would most definitely attract a crowd.