If you disagree with these statements I’d suggest skipping the rest of this article and going straight to the comment threads to insult me. Or, better, we can agree that we have different approaches to playing games and both get on with our lives. My previous writing about MMOs has invited some charming abuse, so I figured I’d best get this little disclaimer out of the way early. For the record I’m not insulting anyone who plays these games, just the games they choose to play. Not the same thing.
And yet developers continue to fling themselves wholeheartedly into the MMO market, each hoping to achieve the level of success Blizzard enjoy. It’s no surprise, really: at the last count World of Warcraft boasted 10 million subscribers. This is the high point. Following that up are Lineage II – an extremely popular grindfest in Korea – with one million and the web-based Runescape with the same. Relative newcomer Age of Conan has claimed 700,000 subscribers in its first few months (of course, this figure will include players enjoying free trial accounts, and may yet decide not to subscribe), and long-lived space-based MMO EVE Online has about 250,000 active accounts. Yet in today’s competitive environment most MMOs crumble and fade into obscurity reasonably quickly, developers and publishers retracting support once it becomes obvious that the game isn’t going to prove a golden goose.
Many of us have gone through a very intense relationship with one MMORPG or another. Statistics make it clear that for the bulk of us it was World of Warcraft, whilst others found City of Heroes/Villains provided their poison of choice (I count myself among this number), or perhaps Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars and Anarchy Online offered some hours of fun. The wise and grey may have been around for the heyday of Ultima Online, Everquest or even Meridian 59. The really unfortunate have ended up miserably trudging around the likes of Final Fantasy XI, games either cripplingly repetitive or just crippled by design.
I digress: let’s get back to the MMORPG formula. Typically the player can be expected to spend a very large amount of time doing remarkably similar things. “Fetch me ten pains-in-the-arse,” many a local druid has demanded, and what choice has the roving hero but to obey? Sometimes the mission might instead be an off-hand “kill twenty suspiciously-similar squawking critters,” and off you go to maim and slaughter some endlessly respawning identikit baddies. Yawn. Even the NPCs seem bored. No surprise there: they’ve made the same demands hundreds of thousands of times.
So many gamers are now so vocal about how they’re bored with MMOs that it’s a common marketing line to promise something new. Okay, in terms of people who actually play MMOs they’re probably a minority, but they’re a sizable and vocal one, and clearly developers and publishers are picking up on this. Besides, quite a lot of gamers are lapsed MMORPGamers of some allegiance or another. Who wouldn’t want to draw this ready-made market back in?
So, with my feelings on the state of the MMO front and centre in your mind, and the hardcore MMORPG fans already determined I’m a clueless fool who just doesn’t get it, here are some MMOs that I think it’s worth keeping an eye on – because they’re promising something different, and they might actually deliver.
Love (aka For The Love Of Game Development) Love is an exploration-based MMOG. Almost everything about it is totally unique in the convention-strangled genre of the massively multiplayer online game. For a start, Love isn’t really designed for huge numbers of players; its creator, Eskil Steenberg, has even said that money isn’t that relevant to the project and he only needs about 200 subscribers to make it self-sustaining. It’s also being coded entirely by just one man using open source tools.
The game universe is mostly procedurally generated, which obviously helps when you’re working on a project alone, but which also lends an organic, naturalistic aesthetic to the game. The visuals are also gorgeous, looking for all the world like an impressionistic watercolour painting of an expansive dreamland. The bulk of Love’s content is to be user-driven, with player’s actions and experiences affecting the procedurally generated game content for all players. You’ll find no solo instances here.
Since Love is quite an obscure title I’ve collected a few links in case you want to read more. There’s an interview with the developer, an unfortunately jerky video, and some screenshots on Steenberg’s blog. Enjoy!
APB is a new project from Realtime Worlds, new darlings of the Scottish videogame industry, who are primarily known for their only previous release, Crackdown. Crackdown saw you adopting the role of an elite cyborg agent who had to take down the crimelords of a gang-infested city. In APB players will be able to play on either side of the law. With the designer of the original Grand Theft Auto onboard, hopes that the urban battlegrounds over which Enforcers and Criminals will struggle for dominance have some solid foundations.
On top of this the game promises continual, 24-hour conflict over territory, varied mission types to allow character growth (Criminals rob banks, Enforcers seek to prevent them; both classes are united by the need to fund their weaponry, vehicles and appearance, all of which change how they interact with the game) and automatic ‘matchmaking’ (so that players are matched against a group of roughly equal skill – which might mean two higher-level Enforcers against six medium-level Criminals, which will demand effective teamwork and tactics from both sides). The core gameplay is closer to action-oriented genres than traditional MMORPG stat-grinding, allowing players to focus on the ways in which they interact with the world and other users.
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Out of all the MMOGs I’ve listed here Warhammer Online is the most traditional. For some time after it was first announced it promised great things, including – most impressively – doing away with traditional levelling structures altogether. Unfortunately a lot of these early promises have turned out to be a bit Peter Molyneux (an industry euphemism meaning “to talk shit about your forthcoming game”, and also “to ensure that your game suffers unfairly from all the hype you generated”), but the game remains intriguing. It’s set in the ludicrously over-the-top Warhammer universe, which has always skilfully maintained a fine balance between the grim portentousness of its epic wars and tales of heroism, and the pure tongue-in-cheek glee of its bizarre inventions and high fantasy pastiche.
To keep me amused until the game’s release I have the wonderfully daft creative director Paul Barnett to keep me hopeful. At least one man at Mythic Entertainment clearly gets the Warhammer universe – and beneath the silly gags and cheap shots there’s a keen, insightful mind. Read a few interviews with the man to see what I mean.
Metaplace At any rate, that’s the idea here. A lot of people just play games and chat online, right?
Anyway, Metaplace looks like it intends to take the ideas developed during Second Life’s lifetime and bend them to new purposes. Basically it’s about providing users with their own tools and allowing them to do their own thing, building the world they’d like to explore and play in. Metaplace is the infrastructure, the umbrella environment – and users make games within this.
In terms of pedigree it’s worth noting that the team behind Metaplace includes Raph Koster, one of the creative minds behind Ultima Online. Whatever your feelings about the game itself might be it should be remembered that that was the first really big MMORPG hit.
If you’d like to read more about Metaplace then there’s an extensive interview with Koster to be found here.
Just kidding guys – I bet it’ll be the same old crap.
Let the two minutes’ hate begin!