The State of MMO's

MMO's are currently always in development, but the discussion around them is a maelstrom that needs a unified voice. Perhaps, then, I will rise to the occasion.

Author: lifesbrink

Waking up (logging on), I got up from the bed and peered out the window of my apartment. The City of Terra greeted me with its usual vastness. A complex network of arcing buildings and futuristic flying vehicles was laid out in a vast expanse as far as I could see, a busy hub of activity. Of course, it was neverending, as the city was encompassing an entire planet. I had purchased a decent apartment here and used it as storage, among other things.

In the sky, I spotted a ship floating with a banner that read: Totayaka Enterprise - Keeping Terra Safe, Secure. I shook my head, as that was a big lie. The company was headed by a player named Ketsune, and although his name sounded Japanese, no one really knew his ethnicity, except perhaps some of the higher members of the company. His organization was vast, and had spread across the entire planet, gobbling everything in the industrial and commercial sector. Although his company had claimed to have unified the planet, especially as a means of uniting all military units in the planet to fight against the threat of the Oroks (a race of zerg-like monstrosities that were claiming a frightening number of planets), many other players have complained on forums across the Net that he had nefarious means of keeping the planet under control.

My name is Kirnan, and I am a human pilot. As you might be able to tell by now, this entire planet…in fact, the whole Galaxy of Estraza, is a game. Originally developed as a single planet, the games creators started with simple systems of building and character development, and later added in infrastructures allowing for complex economical and social organization.

Sandbox, it could be called. It was all laid out on a single server, made up of thousands of clusters by this point. The players took years to really develop what was seen now, and real world corporations had involved themselves as well. Artists, musicians, families, every walk of life had invaded this game. This was in turn due to the open development, and allowance of inclusion of music, scripting, and graphics by anyone. Everything that would allow for customization could be uploaded under terms of virtual world creation, provided the player had a right to be uploading it.

Of course, there was a story that was based in this galaxy by the developers. Humans were the first and only race that were allowed to be created, but later on, other races were allowed too. By this point, one could be virtually any sentient creature out there among the game's 27 planets (with more out there). Humans, like in all games, were some of the most popular, followed by the Oroks.

Oroks. They were almost the yin to the yang, and were deadly. Creatures that worked like nightmares, they were united under the leadership of Ka'ris'deks, another famous player that others flocked to for invasions. Thirteen worlds were under the Oroks' control, and had been kept that way, almost as if to signify something ominous to come. Many feared that Terra might be invaded at some point, though that might seem foolish, as Totayaka Enterprise had the planet under very tight control and bristling defenses. Still, attacks on other settlements on the other planets were common. Wars between other races and humans were dying out as alliances were made to defend against the enormous threat of the Oroks.

If some of you are wondering about population, by 2024's count, 43 million players were or are involved in this game.

I made a preparations for leaving, and left the apartment to take a skycar to one of the cities many spaceports, to board my ship, the Wraith. This was not a permanent ship, by any means, but it was my first purchase, and many modifications had it outfitted to run about any mission I needed without being disturbed much, hence the name. My chosen career in this game consisted of doing scouting missions for certain military groups, as well as bombing runs, escorting people to various places, a few assassinations here and there, and so on. In this game, permadeath is concrete, but there are no levels, and your character's assets were inherited by the next character you made, although with certain taxations by your last place of residence.

As I boarded my ship, I contemplated my goal for this evening. I had found something of a special place at the edge of the galaxy, and I had plans to do more exploring, but the last time I had gone out, I found that I had been followed. The tagalong was nothing more than a probe, and I had deactivated it and attempted to capture it, leading to an explosion that almost had severe ramifications on my ship (shielding almost broke). I didn't know who sent the probe, so I suspected I had made a few enemies somewhere, and I needed to find out who. As usual, inquiries on the forums had been met with little results, so I needed to be cautious on this run as well.

After the needed checks were complete, I fired up Wraith, and my ship blasted out of the sky into space, hanging in orbit around the planet of Terra, letting me make more preparations to cloak and conceal before warping, and giving me a final view of the planet. It was strange, seeing this global city revolve around me, making me wonder if Earth would one day be so consumed by technology...

The worst things you see in any game through skilling up are macros or repetitive movements that level skills. This destroys the whole idea of skilling up altogether, but can easily be fixed. Most games have soft caps on anything that levels, and any game could do something similar but allow for a system that prevents abuse at all. Hence we have degrading of skills on the basis that they were skilled too much. Example as follows:

Jumping is essentially a skill, in a sense, but it is tied very heavily to strength, stamina, endurance and agility. So to skill up jumping, you are essentially working to be able to jump higher and farther with less stamina loss. Typically, though, you could have a player macro jumping, go next to a wall, and come back hours later to have maxed jumping. Reality can be applied though, and this can be remedied. In the real world, if you were to jump in one spot for hours, you wouldn’t get very far. Further, you couldn't max in a day either.

So to compensate in-game, we add two scripts. One ties jumping skill-ups to distance traveled, combined with factors of speed used throughout, and how tired you were. The second script would enact so that over time, if you jumped too much, you would start losing skill, and your stats would temporarily suffer. In the end with this situation, you would have gained nothing at all. This should be a generous amount, generally, like 6 hours of mostly jumping, a number that would increase at least, as the skill level and stamina levels approached superior statuses.   This idea could easily be applied in different ways to other skills, such as losing skill or stats with other physical skills, or simply putting a soft cap on intelligence-related skills.

Of course, this merely puts a cap on a bursting bottle, and doesn't truly remedy the issue. To do that, games need to have skills be interesting to level. To some extent, battling skills are inevitably tied to the combat system, so if your combat system is weak, so shall the skill leveling be tiresome. Crafting though, is another issue, for in real life, learning a craft is not very exciting either. So in essence, the key here is to keep it somewhat dynamic to maintain interest, as well as make a true crafting system that really rewards the MMO world as a whole.

Dynamic is not always easy though, as evidenced by the failure to really do so by any MMO out there. I would say it is still fairly simple though: let us take being a lumberjack, for example. Currently in any game you walk up to a pile of wood or a tree, and hit your gather key. This gets fairly boring fast.

Solution? Enable a combo mini-game, where timing certain clicks could give you bonus "swings" and thus remove time from harvesting. Also, making all trees harvestable would add a dynamic of placement with your harvesting, lest you depopulate the area too quickly. Crafting also commonly uses too much material, and with materials being able to be reused and less used overall, the system can stabilize a bit more.

This article will tie in to a future article that will be tied to how a world economy should work and what ideas should be done to prevent it from becoming boring or collapsing.

For that is the nature of what should happen with making a monster race, and why we have no games with monster races, for people playing them would not enjoy the lack of similar advancement that others like so much. However, if done properly, dungeons would appear in the world when a monster has a attained a sufficient level/skill mastery that allows it to hold sway over minions, thus building a kingdom. And so a kingdom should arise, one that is built on traps, chaos, powerful magic and despair. If however, this dungeon master should ultimately fall and lose its kingdom, it should remain a relic, there for others to take, or random monsters to inhabit.

Monster races should be able to spawn others of their kind every so often, increasing with level or skills, so that eventually, they can form their own population if possible. Their spawn should be partially AI-driven and also controlled by the monster character, similar to Warcraft or another RTS.

As an example, let me illustrate the idea of creating a spider-race. Typically, in any fantasy world, spiders range from the tiny to the extremely large within various races. They also can be fairly dumb, or intelligent to where they have their own language and culture. So to have a race in a game, you need to create something with its own culture, in order for humans to partially identify with the character they create. So we have a spider race that hatches from an egg in an environment full of other spider hatchlings. Immediately, it has to fend for its life amidst the hatchlings, as they tend to start out a bit violent.

After asserting its dominance, the player moves on to find a lair to inhabit and spin its web throughout. Now the process of growing begins, and the life of a spider starts out hard, beginning with simple animals and eventually growing in size and power to find more unpredictable prey. Perhaps the player will associate with a colony and train abilities or learn from other spiders. Or it might become a solitary creature until it raises its own army of spiders. Eventually though, the player will have achieved an epic spider that wants to create a dungeon to call home.

Thus the process begins in which the player will find a suitable place, perhaps a cave, or a dark grove of trees, to create its lair in. This opens up a new GUI that is akin to something like an RTS. The character resides at the center of the dungeon with minions, and the dungeon starts off as closed to the world, until the initial plotting has started. If you have ever played Dungeon Keeper, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper; the interface would be likened to this, where your dungeon has a control scheme to be grown and rooms created, or sections. Defenses, traps, monsters would all be set to be there, and then the player would click finish to start the dungeon.

At this point, the spider player needs to grow more minions, and expand the dungeon, as the likelihood of being attacked is inevitable. Defenses would have to be strengthened, and time and training would unlock more dungeon abilities. The player could switch between overlord of the Dungeon with the different GUI, or play as the spider and roam the dungeon, perhaps taking out would-be heroes with planned ambushes, or sending an army to attack at strategic points.

The final idea is that there is also the possibility of banding with other spiders or perhaps allying with other monsters to create alliances and hence dark kingdoms.  Treasure could be accumulated as loot, (every horde loves a nice treasure room of trophies), and kingdoms could advance their realm (or shrink).  Again, if they are ultimately defeated, the remains of their dungeon stay (which can at least be molded into something different by the next occupant) and would be automatically emptied and later occupied by NPC monsters if no other player claims it. 

Another thing to note though, is that an MMO's world needs to be big enough to support the chosen max number of players within it, so that expansion with both good players and evil types never completely overshadow the world.  Also, there should usually be racial cities that stay as is, to create some harmonious placement of places, and at least some familiarity.

How do I do them?  Is there a trick?  I just want to join in on the fun game of rating blogs, and I can not.  I have searched the pages hundreds of times, and still can not find the button!

You ever get tired of killing the orc that hangs out in the same spot under a tree, or loathe passing by the lost hobbit that needs help, despite the fact that you have watched her get escorted countless times? Maybe, maybe not. But if you are like me and the countless others who are tired of seeing static worlds, then you might be interested in hearing of a solution. This is a next-gen solution though, and is not a catch-all.

Currently, worlds are set to be static, because they are easy to pull off. But with a static world comes a loss of accomplishment. However, to make a world truly dynamic could be disastrous under the current construction of worlds, as they are small and packed with players. This would lead to many people going through content too fast to which others would be left out, not to mention the complexity of it would be difficult to pull off. There is another fix though.

Progressive servers could be the next logical step. To explain, the basic idea is moving from one world to another changed one after so many quests are complete. This would unlock the next set of quests, and going through the world, players would find that the quests they did had an impact, through buildings being different, people no longer being lost, monsters that were supposed to be dead staying dead, and so on.

Some people would see this as being an issue though, especially to socializing with newer players, or the Auction House (present in most MMO's). This is easily fixed though by allowing the player to go back and play with newer players on the old version of the world if they like. As for the AH, that should merely be allowed to span across the versions of the worlds.

Progressive servers would allow for new gameplay options by changing the dynamics of how quests could work with different environments (the old world vs the new). This is by no means a perfect solution, but it is better than the standard worldset we get now with any MMO. This server type would create an evolution in the step to a dynamic, breathing world that we can all enjoy someday.

In the game of Everquest, there is a little place called Crushbone.  It is a magic land, filled with desperate orcs, and it was lead by Emperor Crushbone himself….a magnificent orc who crushes all opposition.  Did I mention he is only lvl 18?  Did I also mention that his kingdom was apparently plaguing Kelethin, the nearby wood elf city?  Did I also mention that despite the fact that they were *under siege*, the common lvl 50 Elven guards could go in and wipe the place out over and over again….or that the common brownie skipping around the forest could also wipe out the kingdom of Crushbone?

Ah yes, the conundrum of lvls in an MMO.  Over and over, we have every world filled with kingdoms, dungeons, and other places that have monsters anywhere from lvl 1-1000.  Yet overall, the way that they are designed makes little sense.  Progression is something that is maintained at such a linear rate, but at the cost of making no sense at all.  Time and time again, we have every game plague you with endless quests to kill off leaders, armies, monsters and whatnot that could always be easily taken care of by some lowly guard that sits at the gates waiting for an attack that won't come.

What games need are dungeons and kingdoms and armies that adhere to some basic principles:

1. Skill Levels:  If a kingdom is taking over or a threat to another, then their leaders, generals, and such should be fairly powerful, and as such, should be progressive in the quests to hack at them.  At lvl 10, you should be striking at food supply chains guarded by lowly militia, at 30 you should be taking out their battalion of flying drakes and at 50 you should be going after the King himself.
2. Sensible placement of these places in relation to the city you are fighting for
3. Ensure that the character's city guards could not easily take care of the job, whatever it is.

Although these are not the only ideas that could ensure more meaningful questing, these are a good start for a game to follow.

When I was 10 years old (almost 28 now) and already somewhat influenced by games already, I laid my hands on something that changed my perception of games and ultimately got me into RPG's and opened my mind to wider horizons of beauty than many people ever notice - - Final Fantasy.   In the year of 1991, this game more or less epitomized a new era of RPG's that had initially been ushered in by Richard "LB" Garriot and his Ultima line.  You had 4 warriors that came from lands faraway and were to save the world from Chaos and despair.  After picking the classes and names, you were into it, leveling, completing quests and moving the story along to its epic finale against an enemy that was both unnerving and difficult:  Chaos itself.

Over time, there were more of these Final Fantasy games that gave the impression it would never really be final (although I severely hope I don’t ever see a final fantasy XXII or somesuch), and I grew more engrossed in them for various reasons.  The epic stories they contained, the world catastrophes involved, the character development, the character interaction, the occasional romance…the all too often tragedies, the music, the different styles of visuals and the wide range of combat possibilities.  All of these things kept me enthralled and at the same time introduced something of a standard in my life with games.

Of course, the Final Fantasy you will see coming out does a lot of fan-service, and the games are definitely in a bit of a different direction, but I think that like all series, this one needs to start winding down, instead of up.  But that is neither here, nor now, as my focus is on one particular point of this series.

What this story is getting at, is there is a certain lack of the epic feel to MMO's we see today.  Of course, when it comes down to it, there never was an epic appeal of any kind.  When I first entered the game of Everquest back in 2000, I was awed, but it was the fact that I was part of an online world, and that world was new to the real world.  But the stories, creatures, and environment were rather uninspired.  Of course, back then, technology was to blame, as there was only so much you could do with an online world at the time.

Fast-forward almost a decade though, and the problem remains, while we see more of an amazing polish to single-player games as time goes on.  Yet the market is swaying to MMO's, for when a single-player game is done, it is done, and people do not like to lose their time so easily.

I love a persistent world, but there has yet to be anything that amazes me like that first time that I rode a train through Midgar in FFVII, or first opened the door to the Esper world in FFVI, or came upon the floating isle of Bhujerba in FF12. (I realize that was laden with Final Fantasy references)  And that is with fairly archaic graphics in the first 2 examples!  Not to mention the stories themselves continue to amaze, mainly because so many earth-shattering events take place!  But in today's MMO, we have a story that is immutable, and repeated by all.  Not entirely so great in the slightest.

I really think it is time for MMO's to take cues from single-player games and give us stories and worlds that make us care what we are doing within it, and then maybe more people would consider them to be a second home, instead of that simple virtual world we waste time in.

For a long time now, I have played MMO's.  Over the years, I have gone from hating them to loving them many, many times.  My love comes from the idea itself, that of creating a character, an avatar of yourself, in a fictional world, and then doing what your character does.  The hate, however, is why I am starting this blog.  All of the games I have played, from starting in EQ to currently playing in LOTRO, have given me hours of fun and addictive gameplay, but always in the end, leave me drained and stressed.  Why, you might ask?  That answer is simple.  I have spent countless days in a world that has given nothing back, and thus I always leave the MMO, and move on, usually back to single-player games.

Single-player games are simple.  You play as a character in a story, and that is it.  In a sense, you are playing in something of an interactive movie, and the sense of reality there has grown over the years.  Once upon a time, you would jump over blocks and eat mushrooms in a side-scrolling world, all just to save a pixelated princess (and perhaps find she was in another castle anyways).  Later on, games became more realistic, and now you can enter into an immersive world of flying ships, dragons, various environments, and characters that have a fair amount of depth to them, all culminating in an epic battle and storyline that leaves you breathless for more.  The thing is, that is how it always ends, leaving you wanting more.

That is where we end up in an MMO.  There is always more.  Expansions see to that.  Hence there is the persistent online world that can enchant us to no end….but there is an end.  An end to patience. 

So what is the problem?  Well, that is not an easy answer, as we have a multitude of problems and a multitude of players that see different problems where others see nothing.  For the story I will be telling you all, my perception and those like me will see the problems that I point out.  I have a feeling though that what I say will make a lot of sense to more than those like me, and some might find sense in the empty feeling they have when they play online.

The biggest problem I think that IS facing all MMO's is the lack of real reward and freedom to obtain it.  This is something that will be haunting the genre for a long time until technology permits the characters in a world to chase their own rewards at whatever cost they may have figured out, and to allow them to use any means necessary to reach their vaunted goals.  However, you would think that companies would be bettering the technology in order to continue to make MMO's more and more complex and fun right?  Well, no.  The problem there is the mythical unicorn chase.  Imagine life-like graphics to be personified as a unicorn, and then imagine all the game companies as a mob trying to find it in an immense forest.  That is the state of all games right now, something of why people are slowly noticing the quality of games are dropping in favor of better graphics. 

Graphics are continuously the focus on game development, as processing power and memory increases.  As companies spend more on developing the game with the most epic graphics, they continue to use tired trends that have pervaded in the industry for quite a while that are typically favored by the mainstream.  Admittedly, I find myself drawn to games that showcase some fairly impressive videos, but when I play them, my attention inevitably falters, unless the story-line and music captivate me (Final Fantasy usually comes to mind there). 

Don't get the wrong idea, though.  That doesn't mean all companies are this way.  Through the likes of those like Valve, for example, there are those who experiment and try new things, such as playing with a unique physics system that sets standards within the industry.  It is never enough, though.  Unless, of course, you are the mainstream.  But in my experience and other people's whose minds are just as hungry, you get bored too easily.

So how do games move on to give real rewards and that complete freedom?  That is the real question that I will continue to explore in various ways.