Aggro Radius

Barely relevant and often uninformed ramblings on whatever the hell bobs to the surface of my thoughts.

Author: ElGuappo

The first MMO I played was Ultima Online and, in several ways, it set standards that have yet to be surpassed for me.

It had some brilliant concepts, like using music to control beasts and being able to set them fighting against one another. Treasure hunting, also, was endless entertaining, working out what part of the world the treasure map was describing then finding the right spot to go digging. Up comes the chest and, with it, a spawn that matched the level of the map, from 'meh' through to 'run awaaay!'. Of course, it was rare for a treasure hunter to not be a talented musician themself, or at least to go digging with one. They made the fight both easier and more entertaining.

But I digress, which is often what happens when I get nostalgic. Which is, in turn, the problem.

I've played a decent assortment of MMOs since UO, and I'm pretty sure only one of them will end up alongside UO as 'worthy of remembering later, usually for the purpose of an unfair comparison', which is about as accurate a definition as I can come up with for nostalgia. And that one is, of course, WoW.

Thinking about it, after UO I avoided spells and swords type games when it came to MMOs, preferring to play the likes of Planetside (which I thought was dreadful), EVE (which baffled me) and Jumpgate (entertaining but shallow as a puddle). Somewhere in there I had a brief dalliance with Matrix Online but I've managed to erase almost all of the memories of that shambles, which is a blessed relief.

Then WoW came along and then TBC and then WOTLK and somewhere in there was WAR.

In many ways WAR actually holds a lesser position in my my eyes than Matrix Online. Matrix was so almost comically inept in many of the things it did, it became entertaining on a whole other level, like watching a dribbling, cross-eyed inbred do a jigsaw. Matrix Online, figuratively speaking, was less about if he'd get two pieces joined together and more about taking bets on which orifice he'd try jamming them up next. With WAR though, I felt something like contempt, the shiny baubles of originality such as PQs etc soon wholly outweighed by the fact that, on so many levels, it just wanted to be Mini-WoW.

But in aspiring to such pallid mediocrity, WAR did at least make me realise the thing I missed most about UO and the reason why WoW got boring, too; the world they're set in.

You see for me before UO there was Elite and Elite 2: Frontier and key to both of those games was trade and exploration. You went to some obscure, backwater place and bought something cheap, took it somewhere else, probably with a bit of violence on the way, and sold it for a profit. I loved it then, I loved it in UO.

Except in UO, that 'backwater place' was a house a player owned, stocked with things they'd found on monsters or in chests or that they'd made themselves. In UO you bought a vendor, a little NPC that would sit on your doorstep that you loaded with bags containing what you wanted to sell. You set a price and then the NPC acted as a cash register.

So I would go wandering far and wide, visiting obscure islands, marking a rune if I found somewhere good. And I usually did.

From people that turned houses into rune libraries, allowing you to travel to exotic or almost impossible areas, to those that made Interior Decorator into a UO career and even the ones that turned their house into a museum of their rare and/or expensive posessions. If you were really, really lucky, you came across a house that was about to fall down through neglect, land you could build on being about the most valuable asset there was in UO.

In UO, the land was often little more than a canvas that the players themselves filled the fine detail in. What you dropped on the floor stayed on the floor for an age, meaning people made money from sorting through other players rubbish around banks. You'd walk through a forest and come across tables and chairs set out as if for a dinner party, but with no-one around, like a kind of woodland Marie Celeste. Bags and weapons laying on the ground, leftovers from a recent treasure hunt were common.

What you could find, and where you could find it, was both endless and endlessly varied.

But WoW doesn't do that. In WoW, the only thing on the ground are corpses that will soon evaporate. If you drop something, you destroy it. If you want to sell something you use the AH. If you want to build a house, tough. Truth be told, if you actually want to make it 'your' game, tough. As persistent as WoW or WAR are, they're persistent on their terms, not yours. You don't get to change anything, ever, except the contents of your bank and your stats.

These are such carefully controlled worlds that anything even vaguely creative is simply not part of the game mechanic. It's game-by-numbers.

Now I hear mention on the forums that an upcoming game, Earthrise, will/might feature player housing and I find that whilst I hope that the player may be allowed, or even encouraged, to make their mark on the gameworld in this way, the cycnic says it won't be so. The cynic insists that player housing in a modern MMO will mean that houses are limited and strictly controlled, accessed like an instance maybe, or confined to one place and one place only.

I'll play Earthrise (and Huxley, too) if only to see if either of them can pull of a proper FPS MMORPG (I'm a CoD4 addict, MOHAA before that) and help extinguish memories of the slack-jawed moron that was Planetside from my memories.

But beyond gametypes and settings, what I'm really hoping for is a bit of freedom. It's about the most neglected aspect of all MMOs as far as I can see.