So here I am in my third “massively multiplayer online game” and I’m getting a bit of an idea about the ruts folks have dug in for themselves.

A Brief History

In the beginning, there was Ultima Online. It had brand awareness and a rather neat idea: play Ultima with a bunch of other people around. How cool was that? But the graphics kinda sucked, and k3wL haxX0R d00dz were hated and feared just about everywhere. You’d spend several days improving some craft skill only to get jumped by a hyperactive twelve-year-old.

Then somebody said “People like Ultima Online” and put that together with “People dig half-naked chicks” and “People dig 3D graphics” and thus Everquest was born. Or should I say EverCrack. Several of my coworkers, including some of the people I pay D&D with are abjectly addicted to this game. There have been several for-pay expansions to it, bringing with them a mindboggling array of items, step-and-fetch-it quests, and a stunningly large number of websites whoring out maps and step-by-step instructions for completion of some rather arcane tasks necessary to get some “prestigious” items (having such an item means you were willing to do all 37 things involved in getting you the item, nevermind that 5,000 other people have pulled it off).

Microsoft saw the popularity of Evercrack and Ultima Online, and started what has become a Video Game Development feeding frenzy: 3D MMORPGs clones. Microsoft’s Asheron’s Call had all of the key features of Everquest, but added the following features that all MMORPGs have to one degree or another, followed suit with:

The Variations

A number of gripes came up with EverQuest and Ultima Online that have met with some odd “improvements” in later MMORPGS.

• Movement Speed

  In EQ pretty much everything moves at the same speed. Asheron’s Call and others have all allowed for variable-speed characters, generally with the base speed of a character improving as he progresses. Ultimately you end up with swordsmen in armor running at 80 miles per hour without magical or technological help. Odd

• Skill Advancement

  There are a couple of schools of thought on this, ranging back to the tabletop RPGs of past and present. The major schools are Class-based skills (with competance improving as a character goes up in “level”), Use-based skills (where skills advance when you successfully apply them: several of EQ’s skills use this system, as did Chaosium’s original Call of Cthulhu and R. Talsorian’s Cyperpunk), and Level-based point-distribution (3rd Edition D&D uses this, as do Earth & Beyond and Anarchy Online). Every new MMORPG peddles its particular blend of skill advancement techniques, spinning the wording to make theirs look to be the proper choice.

• Hiding the camping

  It’s bound to happen in any game that encourages continuous activity but lacks a continuous input of new things to do that seem worthwhile: A new opportunity to kill something and take its stuff is automatically created by the game server at some interval. In EQ it’s on a clock. In

• The “no, it’s not like EQ” catch

  Asheron’s Call did this by allowing more customization of character features and by randomizing item generation: there was an effectively unlimited variation in magical items for you to covet. Also of note (I recall that it was on the packaging) was that AC doesn’t have zoneborders. You can run from one end of the continent to the other without hitting a magical “swapping you to another computer” wall.

  Anarchy Online takes place in the future, so instead of Wizards casting spells, you have Nanomages casting spells… I mean, running programs with their nanobots.

  Shadowbane seeks to accomplish this through an advanced guild system that will encourage cooperative character versus character conflict, all the way down to building, fortifying, and beseiging towns for fun and profit

  Earth & Beyond tries to accomplish this by having much of the action take place in spaceships. This changes the feel a bit, and discourages the tendancy of lonely 13 year-old boys to pick a shapely female character and stare at her butt for hours while she kills bad guys

The Problems

There are expectations from a video game consumer public of a degree of spark and verve in a video game. Such a spark starts to disappear when going to webpages to find walkthroughs becomes a regular, expected aspect of play. The sense of adventure goes away when ten people are waiting in line for a bad guy to “spawn” so they can vanquish it.

What we need is a game where you get to play a Orc Cheiftan that spawns every 10 minutes. You will then be beset upon by 10 to 20 people. Each individual opponent can safely harm you with little actual chance of harm to himself. This is the other side of camping, and ugly practice in each of these games.

All of this is merely hightened when the means of character-to-character communications is treated as a general support forum by the player population at large. Talk about the latest patches and web addresses flies back and forth in the “general chat” that was originally intended to be a means of letting your character speak to the characters in his vicinity… Maybe they need some thought police, smacking down those who talk out of context in the in-character communications mehods?

More on this later. I’ll be wanting to break this down a bit