The Wanna-be Blog

Introducing Jairoe03. He's a wannabe writer, game designer, developer and sometimes even gamer of sorts. Overall, he loves the MMO genre and is here to share his opinion with the world. Follow him on his adventures of his MMO experiences.

Author: Jairoe03

 To me, it feels like the companies producing MMO’s seem to have this need to make us as players feel as heroic as possible from the beginning. This can be seen in their writing and focus on questing for character progression. It’s my opinion that the emphasis on making the players feeling heroic at the beginning takes away from any possible heroic feeling at the end when players have spent time and built their characters up.

Personally, I don’t feel so heroic after I cleared someone else’s tomb for the 20th time in my character’s adventuring career. I feel more like the cable guy or exterminator taking care of another customer. We wonder why people just skip through reading the actual quest content because it’s all more or less the same and they begin to feel like reruns of the same episode.

This pattern is fairly inherent within mainstream MMO’s and makes me begin to wonder: is this necessary anymore? I could understand if this was something that hasn’t really been done before, but these days it has been overused. Overused to the point where any potential feeling of heroism have been fully stripped away and you would figure the writers would of at least caught on to how played out the theme has been.

Why not start off as a lowly peon, as most of us players expect to start at...the lowest rank and then slowly progress the character into more and more heroic forms? At least this form of writing would at least give us a sense of progression within the environment, which leads to a greater immersion. Save the artificial forms of praise for when the players actually accomplish something rather than submerge them in never-ending praise which we could be spoiled with from beginning to end, where it eventually become meaningless. 

I want to end my long blog for this week with an idea. Reward different forms of progression outside of just the combat/adventurer related scheme that we all follow blindly. Currently, the game revolves around questing and following the linear cookie crumbs left behind by the designers which quickly become old and stale. It's like eating chocolate chip all day and having no access to thin mints, peanut butter or even oatmeal raisin  (hey, those are pretty good!). 

In a sense, I think this is a great direction Fallen Earth has taken in providing different forms of experience to develop a character with. I don't feel too rewarded crafting in WoW besides added stats, which again quickly become stale. If a system becomes implemented, especially for crafting, make it meaningful and more encompassing rather than a side treat.

Maybe Pre-SWG was ahead of it's own time and I think there were many pieces of the game which I took for granted and later realized how valued the MMO design would be in this day and age. The game rewarded all types of experience and it was specific to a path within each profession. No matter what you did, it is somewhat meaningful albeit repetitive at the time, it was still revolutionary. Imagine what that could of evolved into in this day and age. I think people would be less grumpy about the lack of diversity perceived within the industry itself in terms of game experience.