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I’m following a lot of MMOs right now. Elder Scrolls Online had a great update with The Imperial City, The Old Republic I’ve been talking about, Wildstar’s F2P conversion went live, Destiny’s Taken King expansion has been very well received, Final Fantasy 14 has a major update coming, but not until November… there’s a lot going on in the existing space.

These established MMOs have some room to experiment, and in a lot of cases build further towards the vision they were going for, or refine a vision that didn’t quite work out. In a lot of cases, it’s highly successful, and for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on around the internet about “failed” MMOs, there are very few that actually shut down. Even SWTOR, after suffering from brutal layoffs and being left with a skeleton crew for a while, has managed to come back and launch some honestly excellent content, as well as make a bunch of needed changes to the game itself.

I keep coming back to this, but the trend I see is that these games push more and more towards the singleplayer aspects, making it easier or more convenient to play alone rather than with the rest of the server. I can’t help but wonder if some of these games would have benefitted from a different model– rather than the server-full-of-people model, having characters saved on a server (see: Borderlands) and have drop-in small group multiplayer. It’s what Destiny did, and with its latest update that brought story more forward than it’d previously been, there’s a lot of love for the new stuff.

Much as I wish there were a more “world”-like MMO to play, I’m also just a fan of good games where all the design pieces come together elegantly. Several of the games I’ve mentioned would, I think, have worked better as smaller, more intimate affairs with more leeway for high fidelity content (because making content that works when 30 people are all doing it at once is tricky at best).

It’s honestly something I expect to see. Destiny carved the path, but I’ve noticed that after being quiet for a while, The Division has been distancing itself from the “MMO” side of things and focused more on the small group play; I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s made a similar shift. There are very, very few MMOs on the horizon that fit the bill of the “classic” style– I’ve talked about Pokemon Go here as the future of the genre, but otherwise you’re looking at a pretty short list of mostly Kickstarter or other small projects and larger projects that are distancing themselves from “MMO”.

I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing from a “fun games to play” perspective. That being said, I keep looking for an MMO that scratches that “world to hang out in” itch. A lot of people will hand-wave that by saying that what I’m looking for is a sandbox MMO, but that’s not actually true (at least, not with the current offerings). The concepts of “sandbox” and “pvp playground” get conflated a lot, and it’s somewhat striking to me that there hasn’t been a large-scale sandbox PvE game. If there were, I’d be very interested.

Consider: a game where the world, not other players, is the most dangerous thing out there. You can build and fortify cities and structures, but the world will try to reclaim them, actively in some cases. Cities would be well-defended, and ultimately able to handle their own upkeeps with enough players moving through them. You could pretty reasonably create a game economy that’s relatively stable, without the spiralling inflation of most MMO game worlds. As an adventurer, you’d have plenty of stuff to do keeping cities and villages safe or going treasure hunting out in the wilderness– it’s the same kind of gameplay that some people thrive on in Minecraft, and seeding the world with treasure and resources would make things very interesting. You could play as a guard captain or a city coordinator, keeping things going at a macro level. You could be a crafter or merchant, with people constantly needing your goods and services to make things or repair things. There’d be space for socialites, bringing players to cities for everyone’s benefit. You could make it your goal to go out into the world and bring back new skills and knowledge, or find new resources, or what-have-you.

Found on google image search, couldn’t find original artist to credit :

It all hinges on the world being genuinely dangerous and scary. I’m not saying Dark Souls level of dangerous (though, maybe if you get far away from civilization), but scary enough that you’re happy to see another person out fighting enemies, rather than worrying if they’re going to “steal your kill”. I imagine seeing a campfire in the distance and being happy to find other players there, who are taking some time to rest while out in the field. There would need to be a lot of different forms of progression, so there’s something valuable you can do while sitting around a campfire and not-fighting. Crafting comes to mind, learning/practicing new skills, repairing/upgrading gear, as long as these things are interesting gameplay, you could create these kinds of situations.

Really, what it comes down to is having more interesting verbs. We currently have “fight” as our sole interesting verb in most MMOs, with the occasional “craft” in certain games. “Move” isn’t generally all that interesting, and we could do a lot of things to make that more fun, and pretty much everything else is just a click on a UI pane or in the world– these could be much more interesting.

The difficulty is that it’d take a serious commitment to make something VERY different from what we’ve seen. Exploring the world to find hidden libraries, ruined cities, caches of treasure, all relatively unknown and often in very scary places would be fascinating, and having teams of elite players coordinating to raid a ruined city and take it as a new hub for players would be exciting, possibly a lot more exciting than simply beating a raid boss. Being the first player to discover a new skill, or the first one to open a school to teach rare skills would be compelling, I think, and there are enough systems that have already been experimented with that allowing NPCs to do a lot of automated work while you go off and do other things would be entirely possible.

Napkin-designing a bit here, but it’s been on my mind for a while.

It’s no secret that I’ve been putting a lot of time into SWTOR lately. I talked about it a bit last week, and I want to delve into it a bit more. In about two and a half weeks, I’ve done the following:

• Jedi Shadow from 50 to 60
• Commando from 1-38
• Smuggler from 1-15
• Jedi Sage from 1-34
• Sith Warrior from 1-16
• Imperial Agent from 1-51
• Sith Assassin from 1-53

I’ve created a Jedi Knight and Bounty Hunter but haven’t played them yet. Several years on, I feel like SWTOR delivers on one of the promises it made back before it launched: it’s very much now eight KOTOR games in one, and as such it’s a lot of fun. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m enjoying going through the game, seeing the story content, and taking advantage of the vastly increased levelling speed to take the story at a better pace and do only the sidequests I’m interested in, rather than doing everything possible for experience just to keep up in level.

It’s made me a lot more forgiving of a lot of things as well. When I originally played, I was turned off by what felt like tepid storytelling in a few of the classes– when I’m spending hours grinding levels to be able to do that next story mission, I really want that mission to feel like a reward for all of that grinding. Now, the stories feel well-paced for the most part and make sense– there are highs and lows but each piece feels like a part of a story, not a reward for doing unrelated chores. It reframes the experience to be more like a single-player game, so I can enjoy the stories without needing every one of them to be a fantastic ride.

Similarly, the new speed of levelling means I don’t get tired of planets and can actually enjoy the biomes, rather than being forced to explore every nook and cranny just to move on. I actually think I’ve gotten a better feel for what’s going on in some of the planets because I *don’t* have to do all the quests on them, and I’ve been interested in finding out what’s going on even though those quests aren’t as efficient or as high fidelity as the main class stories.

That being said, wow does this game not feel like an MMO anymore. I previously mentioned that I hadn’t interacted with any other player in my entire time playing, and that hasn’t changed. The other people running around the fleet (which is the only time I see other players) might as well be NPCs with broken pathing AI for all they matter to my play experience. In focusing on a high-fidelity story, which I feel the game delivers fairly solidly on, there’s pretty much no reason to do anything with any other players. At this point, a number of my friends have jumped in to play the game and despite us all having characters in the right places and the right roles for it, even when we’re all playing at the same time, no one talks about playing the game *together*. This is incredibly strange for our group, but I think speaks to how strong the shift to single-player has been.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin, which I also talked about recently. The story in that game is subsumed by multiplayer– the storytelling creates a tension between the players that’s easily fixed by ignoring it and going out fighting. Even the best storytelling with the best multiplayer mechanics seems to have the problem of you needing to wait while someone finishes reading or finishes a cutscene, which is where that tension comes in. Storytelling in Divinity:OS feels at odds with a good multiplayer experience, and the same is true in SWTOR and the other modern story-forward MMOs that I’ve played.

To me, it speaks of a gap in our collective game design knowledge. We know how to create and deliver excellent multiplayer experiences, both cooperative and competitive, and we know how to deliver fantastic storytelling, but there are precious few games that manage both at once. Honestly, the only game I can think of that successfully delivers story while being a coherent multiplayer experience is Borderlands, which is a game that suffers greatly from having a relatively poor singleplayer experience. We don’t seem to know how to make games that are fun for both one person and groups of people while still telling interesting and compelling stories, and we shortchange one to bolster the others.

To go back to my comments last week about the modern MMO, I think it’s that shortchanging that’s caused post-WoW MMOs to flounder. There hasn’t been a big breakout hit since WoW in the MMO space, and I suspect that there won’t be. MMOs want players who will hang around for months, rather than playing for a few weeks and leaving. You can accomplish this by making it take a very long time to level up and see everything, but as games have sped up their own levelling process to get players to the new content faster, it’s made tolerances for long levelling times drop hugely. It’s possible at this point to have a game where you can reach max level and see every scrap of content within the first month of play and STILL have it feel grindy by comparison.

The goal of players in MMOs has become consumption rather than creation– the game has content that you as the player want to see, and you’re done when you see it all. It’s the single-player game model, but it’s at odds with the idea of a game that you log into regularly for months or years– it’s simply not possible to create content that quickly. The fastest pace I have ever seen or heard of for creating content for an MMO was about four months for an hour of content, start to finish, from nothing to ready to launch. My friends reading this who have worked in the industry are probably cringing at that number and imagining the crunch that would be required to pull that off– it’s not a small amount. That ratio of dev time to playtime should make it clear how impossible it is to keep up.

A few games (notably Cryptic’s games) have tried their hand at player-made content to fill the gap. It’s a neat concept and often beloved, but it adds a ton of overhead to the game and creates a huge signal-to-noise problem; it’s very hard to find the good content amid all the mediocre-to-bad content. I think it also continues barking up the “story content” tree, where it’s trying to keep up with the content consumption rate by throwing more people at it.

I beat the “abolish levels” drum a lot, and part of why is this content consumption problem. When there’s a clear numerical “end” to a given progression bar, it splits players into those who feel like reaching that end means the game is over and those who feel like everything that happens prior to that end is irrelevant compared to the things that occur at that end. It fuels the consumption mindset and fragments players.

There’s a grand plan in there somewhere, finding a way to make an MMO that isn’t hamstrung by its own split foci, but it’s a lot of moving parts. We’re no longer in the era of high-budget experimental ventures, which will make implementing that kind of grand plan very difficult. I think that the promise of games like Pokemon Go is that they represent a push into a new MMO frontier, where there’s space for experimentation. To steal a marketing term, the current MMO market is a Red Ocean space, that’s crowded and hyper-competitive. Pokemon Go represents a push into a Blue Ocean space, where things are mostly uncharted and unknown. Different risks, different results.

It might be what revitalizes the genre.

A bit of a followup on this month’s GOTM for Aggrochat. At Thalen’s suggestion, we played through Tron 2.0, a game that regularly makes “top shooter” and “greatest games you never played” lists. You can listen to the show here — we had a lot to say about the “golden age of experimental video games”.

It’s something that I mull over a lot. For a little while in there, just as video games were starting to poke their heads into the mainstream, there were a whole ton of experiments going on as people searched for The Next Big Thing. Mostly what this meant were a lot of buggy, unpolished games with really interesting (if not entirely implemented) ideas were coming out, and a lot of big promises were being made. I remember it as the era of vaporware; games that promised big things but never really materialized, but I was playing MMOs at the time and for a while there in the early-to-mid 2000s, there were a slew of interesting MMOs, most of which either never made it to release or released and floundered.

There were a lot of experimental games in that time frame. Spurred by the first really off-the-wall experimental shooters (my favorites being two of the first: System Shock and Thief) and bolstered by top-tier productions like Half-Life, there were a ton of games that tried to deliver on the promises of great games that weren’t just “shoot all the guys in this room”. It’s the point where I really got into shooters; I never cared for Doom/Quake/Hexen and that era of games, though Dark Forces is an exception (and I adored Dark Forces 2 and the Jedi Outcast/Academy series). A lot of the groundwork for what are pretty standard features was laid in the years of experimental games.

A few things mark these games for me. A lot of them haven’t aged well. Some of the things that were really experimental were in the realm of graphics, which were amazing for the time but look brutally dated now. I remember just looking around the environments of Deus Ex in awe when I first got the game– there were REFLECTIONS and LIGHTS — now the game shows its age. A lot of these games have new, really interesting ideas– shooters started to pick up RPG elements and an open-world feel, something that you don’t see a whole lot of anymore as that kind of friction has given way to a more streamlined, action-heavy experience. A lot of these games can be very well described as “really great, there’s nothing like it, but it’s got some bugs and issues you’ve gotta work through”. The ideas were fantastic, but a lot of them reached past what their budget and time constraints let them actually make.

Tron 2.0 is interesting to me because I feel like it’s a game that came out about five years too early. It’s got a bunch of mechanics that aren’t quite fully thought out, and it tries to do a whole lot of things that eventually turned out to be good ideas but needed iteration to really shine. It’s also got a story that (I think) isn’t quite bold enough– it tells an interesting, very TRON-like story but it has/had the potential to be a seminal work in post/transhuman sci-fi, in something of the same way that Mass Effect revolutionized the space opera.

There’s a good reason Tron 2.0 makes the list of “greatest games you never played”; you can see the edges of the future, like stumbling in the dark watching the sun rise. Nearly every single mechanic in the game has survived in one form or another, which is not something you can say about a lot of the ideas that came out of that era of games. Even the other fondly-remembered games of that era– Deus Ex, Vampire: Bloodlines, Arcanum, KOTOR, Hitman 2 — all contained ideas and mechanics that were pretty rapidly shed.

At the same time, the mechanics that didn’t survive are very noticable. The ability to run completely out of ammo in places, reliance on quicksaving, non-regenerative health, all of these exist in Tron 2.0 and make the game feel a lot more dated than it otherwise might. As I commented in the podcast, it’s amazing to me how much the game shows how far we’ve come. We have better mechanics than we used to, and for as much as people complain about regenerating health or frequent autosaving making things “too easy”, it’s rather hard to go back to games that lack these things. Not because it’s too difficult, but because it’s easily recognized as unnecessarily frustrating by now.

I wonder, sometimes, if we’ll see another era of high-budget experimentation in games. Indies have filled the experimental games gap in a lot of ways, but there are things that indies just can’t achieve with their generally limited production values. I think that might be why I like Mirror’s Edge and Dishonored so much (and why I’m so excited about the sequels)– they represent new entries in the experimental, high-budget game sphere, which I see precious little of.