An Ongoing Tribute to my own lameness.....

General random thoughts about gaming, both within and outside of the MMO genre.

Author: Jimmy_Scythe

So I've been dividing my time between the original Metroid Prime and Etrian Odyssey. I never owned a Gamecube so I totally missed out on Metroid Prime 1 and 2, and I've wanted to play Etrian Odyssey ever since it came out. Both of these games contain an element that is sorely lacking from most MMOs: exploration.

Before I go into that however, I want to briefly touch on the lock on feature in Metroid Prime. What's interesting here is that you would think that an FPS would be totally ruined with the inclusion of lock on, but that doesn't seem to be the case in Prime. The overall feel of the combat is similar to Zelda in the sense that you strafe around the opponent or object that you're locked onto, taking the focus away from aiming and placing it on dodging and maneuvering for position. It's not uncommon to be locked onto an enemy and not damage them because you are attacking from the wrong angle, using the wrong weapon / visor, or because they moved behind an object. In the case of Metroid Prime, lock on provides a middle of the road approach between strategy and twitch that keeps you on your toes without demanding that you work solely with your brain stem. This kind of leaves me scratching my head as to why we haven't seen something like this show up in MMORPGs.

Games like Planetside and WWII online have shown that we've been able to do very basic real-time combat, complete with collision detection, on a massive scale for several years now. Why hasn't anyone else tried more than the tic based, skill spamming that all MMORPG combat is based on? Lock on isn't the problem. The problem is the fact that  you lock on, stand in one place and hit the same damn buttons, in the same damn sequence for every battle and your entire time playing revolves around battles. A little extra emphasis on "stick work" probably wouldn't hurt anyone....

Back on the subject of exploration, it seems that modern MMOs don't have it. Sure, you still get XP for going to an area that you've never been before, but when is the last time you actually had to make a map? part of the allure of Etrian Odyssey is that  you have to draw your own map. There is no automapping and objectives are NEVER marked. Given EO was deliberately designed to be olde skool, but that doesn't change the fact that actually exploring the game world and mapping it out can be entertaining in it's own right. In fact, early CRPGs were built on a foundation of exploration and logistics. It was all about seeing how far you could push ahead on limited resources. This aspect of RPGs has disappeared almost completely in recent times.

Even with automapping though, exploration can be a major part of a game's experience. Metroid Prime automaps and it still requires a considerable amount of exploration. The difference here is that Prime doesn't just give you access to the entire map like most MMORPGs do. You have to either find a map of the area you are in or explore every space in said area. MMORPGs give you a nicely completed minimap with a friendly waypoint indicator so you never have to wonder where you are or where you're going. Is it any wonder that players feel like they're on rails at some amusement park ride? Here's something to try in your favorite MMO sometime, turn off the minimap and try finding which direction is north. And no, doing this in a 2D game doesn't count since north is always up. In a 3D game you probably won't e able to do this since the devs didn't really give you any clues like a path for the sun and moon to travel along or constellations. Seriously, how hard would that be to implement?

Of course, exploration isn't just about geography. There is also the practice of exploring the game mechanics and the means with which the player can interact with the game world. It's in this department that MMORPGs (and single player CRPGs) are weakest. While MMORPGs have a large number of skills, items, and monsters, most of these things can be broken down to a series of numbers and their interactions reduced to equations, tables and charts. That's all great if you're a math geek, but not so great for the rest of us. Is is so much to ask that there be some kind of physics or non-combative obstacles in the game that can help or hinder us in way we can feel rather obligatorily calculate? Let me give you a couple of examples....

In Metroid Prime, there are half pipes carved into the landscape at various places that you can use while in morph ball to get to areas you wouldn't normally be able to jump to. You do this by using the boost ball ability to gain momentum that will propel you to the platform you're trying to reach.

In Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there were things that you could set on fire using the Diku stick and carefully placed torches.

The list goes on and on, but I think you get the idea. The more ways that the player can interact with the environment, as opposed to mobs, NPCs and other players, the more the player will experiment and the longer it will take before the player becomes bored. It's for this reason that many of the olde skool RPGs were technically perfect in their design. They gave you almost nothing and let you figure the rest out on your own. That's a far cry from the "Not-So-Thrilling Thrill rides" that clog the MMORPG genre today. Maybe it's long past the time to get back to basics.....