Despite over a decade's worth of MMOs, one area where [developers] have consistently failed to maximize their games' potential is letting the player explore the world freely. Whether it's through features like invisible walls, or traditional "kill 10 rats" quests, these devs seem to think we want to follow the path they scripted. Why? Hand holding is for young couples in love, not a player and their MMO. Barring a full sandbox environment, there should be ways in this day and age to offer more options to the player. World of Warcraft had the right idea by designing the world to be seamless, thus allowing players who wanted a different experience to hike their asses to another part of the world map entirely and start on a journey of their own making.
That was in 2004.
Since then, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into MMOs to make sure they're played exactly how someone wants us to play them. They haven't advanced. Rift and SWTOR both have this problem; static starting worlds, limited actual choice but instead the illusion of it, the aforementioned invisible walls, the list goes on. My mind feels greasy and bloated after a few hours in a game that's supposed to be the ulitmate multiplayer experience, but in reality, I've spent that time running around looking for people to play with and having generally the same experience they had.
Two conflicting opinions I've had over SWTOR, for example, center around the fully voiced dialog and the options therein. On one hand, I feel that the developers made a good effort in disguising what is essentially Point A to Point B questing. It's new, it's fresh for a while and some of the answers your character can give are really freaking funny. Don't want to let that scumbag Imperial get away? Shoot him in the back! My friend, who was with me during that story mission where I chose cold blooded execution, couldn't stop laughing. I think he should be given those dark side points.
On the other hand, do I really think they should be rewarded for loosely covering up a flawed system? Apart from a good old fashioned dish of cold vengeance once in a while, SWTOR doesn't offer the most variety in story, and for the most part, you go exactly where the last person who played your class went. To do the same missions. I was at the point where I could barely make myself log in because of it. There's no real depth, and only the illusion of true choice, and that bothers me.
Rift is the same way. As is Aion. If I want to start out in a completely different starting area, I think I should be able to. I don't want to run the same hours-long warm up for every character I roll just to get to the point where I have a choice how I want to start my adventure. It's lazy design, and since WoW, a game released in 2004, was able to get that aspect of it right, there's no excuse for games being released in 2011/2012 to fail to match up.
Some promising 2012/2013 titles, however, look to take a note from Blizzard's behemoth (I feel this starting area feature is one of the things that keeps people rolling new characters), so we'll just have to wait and see if there's more variety in the future or if it's all just meaningless dialog choices and fluff.
- Eir
That was one thing cool about some of the older games was the freedom to explore and start the game where you wished to start. Take Vanguard(when it first released). You could take a human character and run north, then take a ship all the way to the lands of the elves. Then start questing there.
In WoW, you could start a Blood Elf in her homeland, then travel to Orgrimmar and start your journey there. Very few games any more allow for that kind of freedom.
Now is SWTOR due to the class story based system you are litterally forced to play out the developers story. Yes the story is cool, but I think that type of heavy story based game play is better served in a signle player game. Just my opinion.
But I agree. Corraling people and then running into the chutes makes for bad game experience. Sadly many newer games do this.
Sun Jan 22 2012 12:45PM ReportYeah, that's my issue. Games should be evolving in deep, meaningful ways, not just aesthetics. It's easy to lay the blame on TOR's door, because it's new, but other games do the same thing to an extent and should not be any more overlooked for their faults. It just seems that, more than any other genre, MMOs evolve really slowly, and it's more noticeable.
Sun Jan 22 2012 12:53PM ReportI've been around a while, long enough to say I was present during the creation of MMO's. While I personally find sandbox MMO's to be the way to go, it is unfortunate that the masses prefer to having their hands held.
Star Wars Galaxies was an extremely well designed game, in terms of player choices. Freedom didn't get any better then that and the crafting and resource gathering was phenomenal. If you never got to try SWG, I am sorry, cause I really feel you would have enjoyed it, a lot.
I see you are waiting for ArcheAge and GW2. I'm not sure how much freedom GW2 is going to offer, but ArcheAge is looking to have a lot of what SWG offered and more. Another game coming out, while not as "pretty" as most is another SWG offspring, called "The Repopulation."
Good write up though, I couldn't agree more with everything you said.
Thu Apr 19 2012 7:13PM ReportMMORPG.com writes:
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