MMOs: The Rebirth
Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, or MMOs if you're super lazy, was an epic celebration of gaming about 10 years back. Since then people lost their jobs, their marriages and their lives to MMOs. To even out the odds many actually found their soul mates in games too.
MMOs are essentially this alternate reality for people to become someone else entirely, represented by their virtual characters or Avatars. It was the first time ever people can enter a virtual world, interact with each other and become someone they never thought possible in the real world. Mail sorters can be all-powerful wizards and geeks can slay gigantic dragons.It was the best thing that happened to gaming since Final Fantasy, Wolfenstein and KKND.
This was a world filled with mythical monsters and gigantic castles. Wars were waged between sentient races ( I say sentient because playable characters are also divided into fantasy races like Orcs, Elves, Dwarves and Humans) and against the sudden emergence of hostile monsters threatening to drive the world into extinction. You appear in a town filled with other actual human players. Interact with them like you would in a real world. Explore the many depths of the world created, and help NPCs (non-player characters) solve their problems by taking on quests.
What Made MMOs Good
Sandbox: Grind and grow. Get to know friends and build your very own community. Create a legacy by making allies and enemies. MMOs were initially made to be a completely free roaming sandbox gaming platform that anyone can be a part of. Some want to become the strongest fighter in the game and some want to be the richest person. Check the guidebook for a specific boss-type monster, find out how to get there, gather a hunt party and be on your way.
True Multiplayer: Then there were a few huge servers housing massive amounts of players, giving a true world-like community. Strap on your weapon, go out on a hunt by yourself and chance upon some friends along the way who'd help you out.
Interdependence: Balanced characters and jobs that are highly dependent of each other bolds the term 'Multiplayer' in any MMO. It also creates a healthy diversity of different races and jobs because a strong raid party cannot do without it.
Business Model: The best MMOs are Pay-to-Play. Because we have to eventually come to terms with the fact that if you want something good you got to play for it. But what makes this option better than Free-to-Play business models that make money out of the sales of godlike items? When richer people start pwning everyone else not because they're better but because they spend more cash. Pay-to-Play models create a more balanced environment where everyone have 'equal rights', if I may, within the world.
Hacking: There are always people who want to win irregardless of the consequences. It's no different in the virtual world. Hacks and Programs are often used to speed up the money-making and leveling process of gaming, which ultimately kills any MMO no matter how good they are. The result is a world full of automated characters that will not respond to their environments, which defeats the idea of an MMO. In the end we will have complete obliteration of gamification and the lost of interest for the game altogether.
Why MMOs Started Sucking
Simple; the undoing of all of the above qualities that made good MMOs in the first place. I don't know how developers came to the conclusion that these fancy ideas could work but I'm glad they know those ideas were all fatal mistakes.
Linearity: Instead of dumping players into a massive world for them to find and fend for themselves, developers line them up with countless quests. It makes it easier for players to level and at the same time easier for developers to cluster players according to subsets for better resource management. We can all agree that there can almost always be ten times more players between levels 1 through 20 than there are 70 onwards. The result is a completely brainless gaming system that removes the fun of an MMO.
Fragmented Servers: I bet you've all seen a game with 10 servers and 20 channels within each server. This makes it easy for developers to manage their server capacity, which was suppose to limit the latency and lag. I say they're just being cheap. In what language is it 'Massive Multiplayer' when the servers are so fragmented?
Generic Copycats: There was a time when every bloody MMO developer launched a game that looked almost like the other one, with disgustingly limited imagination in-game and completely uncustomisable characters. Even Tetris uses more brain cells than those idiotic sad-excuse for MMOs. There were no passion in these developers, only people looking to make a quick buck.
The Future of MMO
Game developers need to revisit the true meaning of MMOs in order to come up with something worth the time and money of gamers. Everything that needed to be done has already been done by everyone else right now, and everything new 10 years ago is beyond stale.
We gamers need something epic and mind-blowing to sweep us off our feet again, much like how the first MMOs came to existence. We want the actual materialization of theories from animes and games like the (dot)Hack Project and Sword Art Online. We want Virtual Reality. So what should you developers do? Develop a game using the Oculus Rift! And give us pure MMOs again, we beg you! We WILL pay, I assure you that!
