My resumé:
- Ultima Online
- Star Wars Galaxies
- City of Heroes
- World of Warcraft
- Saga of Ryzom
- Dungeons and Dragons Online
- EVE Online
This list is roughly chronological, which is somewhat telling. The MMOs that are most influential to my preferences are the first few, UO and SWG foremost. They definitely shaped what I consider an MMO, and what I want out of an MMO. We'll start there.
What I want: For me, an MMO is another world to live in and explore. I don't want the experience dictated to me, and I don't want to be constantly retreading ground where thousands of others have been before. I want it to be lived in, not a theme park where you're running from one ride to the next. Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies almost exemplified that ideal for me. EVE Online, were it not a ships-in-space game, would be an even better example.
Don't get me wrong. I don't actually dislike City of Heroes or even World of Warcraft. I've played both extensively and enjoyed them for what they were. But they're not what I really want out of an MMO, and they are excellent examples of what I don't want, which is theme park instances of infinitely retreaded content. Sometimes they're excellent content, but eventually it all starts to run together.
Let's get a bit more specific, though.
Dynamic Content: This is probably the hardest thing to do in a game, ever. But this is probably the biggest thing for me. I remember running around as a 20-ish Paladin in WoW, with my beer-keg-onna-stick. 5 levels later, I'm done with it, and I see another 20-ish Paladin with that same beer-keg-onna-stick... that's supposed to be a unique weapon, crafted just for me. I knew it wasn't unique when I got it, but the point remains. Before that, we "rescued" a town, just after someone else rescued it, and right before another group rescued it. It's fun only so long as you can ignore or pretend that you and your friends are the only heroes in the land.
Dynamic Content would create one-off unique experiences. They may end up being slightly generic a lot of the time, but at least you're not going to have the next group of heroes wandering into the area rescuing the same village you just did. There are a couple approaches to Dynamic Content which can actually work side-by-side, so it's not an either/or decision.
The first is content that is generated upon need based on a bunch of variables. An example might be a farmer with a bunch of variables defining resources he has. If he gets low on a particular resource, he may generate a request to get some of that resource. How the player chooses to get it is then up to them. That same farmer might have problems with bandits raiding his farm, so he'll generate a request to get rid of the bandits. Once the bandits are no longer a problem, maybe a bunch of wolves move into the area, so he may generate a request based on that.
The second approach is player-generated-content, and this one dovetails best into the various things I want in an MMO. I'm not talking about quest-creation tools like you found in City of Heroes or Saga of Ryzom, though those are pretty bad ass. The problem with those is that they're mechanically divorced from the rest of the game world. What I mean is that players should have some mechanically supported way to drive activity in the game, such as putting requests up on a message board. Such requests might be a smith wanting to buy ore, a miner wanting a mine cleared of threats, or a merchant needing goods moved from one place to another.
Living World: This obviously dovetails strongly into the above. I don't want a world where everything stays the same. This is a reason why, given the skills, the team and the budget, I would still never pick a licensed IP. I want the players to be able to shape the world to their collective will, and IP owners and fandom might get a little... cross about that.
I mean this on a pretty epic scale. Like, so epic that it might actually turn out to be completely impractical. The setting will have cities, but those cities will be capable of being conquered, burned to the ground, rebuilt, abandoned. Governments, countries, all will be capable of being taken over by players, and run as they see fit. The world on Day 1 will look very, very different from the world in one year.
I also mean it on a much smaller scale. You'll be able to build a house, set up a shop, and eventually build a tidy little mercantile operation, utilizing other players to help with tasks you can't or don't want to do. Maybe you'll build it in a prosperous city, where you'll have the protection of guards and laws, as well as regular traffic. Maybe you'll find a crossroads somewhere for your endeavor, which might in time lead to the birth of a village.
These are just the key concepts I want in an MMO, but there's a lot more, in terms of systems, gameplay and world design I want to talk about.
Next time, I'd like to dig more into the idea of a virtual world, economy and ecology, and how they all tie together.
What are your thoughts? Which MMORPGs have you played, which were your favorites, and why?
