In my humble opinion

One players opinion on why everyone is doing it wrong.

Author: Daelus

MMORPGs: Genocide is an amusing pastime...

  MMOs are, by and large, combat centered games. They are usually a game containing X amount of levels, and you kill monsters and complete tasks (which are usually built on killing monsters) to increase your level and attain equipment. And... well, that's about it. That's generally the core of any MMO. After this, you throw in the ability to attack other players, add some simplistic crafting, create a compelling story to run behind the core mechanics and you've got the general MMO.

  Why all the combat? Why do we need to slaughter hundreds of woodland critters and murder the firstborn of a nearby village to advance? Last time I checked, there are hundreds of ways you can advance yourself in this fantastic place called reality. While not all of them could be considered entertaining, with a little skew on it, and enough ties into other mechanics, it doesn't seem that it would be very difficult to pull off.

  I understand that combat is a simple and exciting way to create conflict and competition between players or between the player and the environment around them, and I am not suggesting creating an MMO with zero combat. What I'm suggesting is that you shift the focus away from combat somewhat and make a game that intertwines several aspects and creates multiple ways to play the game effectively.

  There are all sorts of things that you could use to augment a game without resorting to simple, meaningless genocide. I've yet to see any MMO with a political system, where the players could be elected or hold a government-styled position. Also, I've seen very few games with a compelling crafting system; most of them follow the one click craft system WoW uses. Even if they are deep, even fewer games make the crafting world linked to the adventuring world. Usually the player will buy something generic from the crafter, later throwing it in the trash for something looted and never even speak to or see the crafter himself.

  Another thing, if GTA has taught us anything, is that crime can be entertaining. It would be an incredibly easy thing to tie into a combat centered MMO. I remember a long time ago, playing a game called Baldur's Gate. When you were too evil, killed innocents and the like, whenever you turned up in a town you were chased off by the guards. You had to be careful and do any business you had to away from town if you could. Few games really have a system in place that lets people be evil to their twisted hearts content.

  I'll sum this up and finish it off with an example (keep in mind this is just a rough example). Imagine a game world composed of two cities. These two cities are balanced by conflict, trade, and politics. Players can be elected as the leaders of various aspects of the cities and do as they please to a degree, whether it is to declare war, change taxes, or maybe change the laws themselves.

  Everything these elected officials do would affect trade. If you declare war, suddenly the traders don't like you because they can't ship goods there (or perhaps they will make a killing smuggling in goods?). If you raise taxes it's more expensive to sell something or buy something. If suddenly it becomes too expensive to sell in one town, perhaps they might find themselves suddenly short on high quality weaponry and leave themselves open to war?

  Everything the politicians can also create conflict. If they make trade too difficult, or outright declare war, corruption will reign, and soldiers will be battering down your walls. However, if you support free trade too much, you will likely create a population of bandits seeking to steal from the travelling traders, blossoming crime and conflict.

  Likewise, the interests of the traders, the soldiers, the criminals, or even the politicians themselves will effect who gets elected, and in turn the outcome. As I hope you can see, by creating alternate ways to advance oneself and linking it all together, the results and intrigue are exponential, rather than a static, "Add 10 more quests" sort of progression. It’s time we asked for something more than putting the pointy end of a sword into our enemies until they fall over.

Tom "Daelus" Pettus