Call me a horrible consumer of this “addictive” (lol) gaming, but I’m a fan of virtual worlds. So much so that I can’t really play a single player game anymore or do things on my own. I’ve eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, or something like that.

MMOGs have been around since, arguably, the MUD. MUDs, for those of you out of the loop, look something like this:

Bathroom
The stench here is overwhelming. Your nostrils are quite
literally on fire. That said, you wish you had never
stepped into the room to begin with.
You see a slime in the room.
> look slime
The slime seems to whirl about in a most uncanny way.
> go west

This is an approximation, of course. I don’t think any MUD truly plays that way. That exact way, anyway. But the idea was there. We all connect to one world and all do something together. Whether it was to chat, RP or share our furry fantasies (they have MUDs for that too. Frightening.)

So let’s go back to the beginning of MMOGs. The first “real” MMOG would be Ultima Online. It introduced the world to graphics. Not only to graphics, but to interesting combat. It felt more like a game and less like “you see a slime”.

That was still not quite the “outbreak” of MMOGs yet if you will. It took one thing before MMOGs could truly burst out and become what they are today: a change of the consumer’s idea of a game.

Suppose you went to the store. The year is 1994 and you’re an average “gamer”. Suddenly, Ultima Online catches your eye. Unlike other games, there are two thoughts that will certainly go through your mind at the time:

• “I need to be connected to the internet to play this” which at the time would mean you had to connect via dial-up.
• “I need to pay a monthly fee to play this” which at the time was unheard of.

For the first, we just had to wait until DSL became common. As for the latter, once we had the precedent, the rest was much easier. Then, we had to have a change of approach, that of the players’ towards the industry. It took some years of this before the MMOG market became what it is:

A MASSIVE FREE FOR ALL! MMOGs are springing left and right and some of them suck so incredibly hard. It sometimes feels like the Atari – with titles springing up left and right and they all suck about the same. Perhaps I’ll educate you, developers, and enlighten you about the things that really make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

We like ongoing plots

If I wanted a static world, I would have played Final Fantasy. No, really. People who play MMORPGs don’t play them to just have the same static world the entire time so they can grind the shit out of it. People get tired, oh so very tired, from doing that. Fact of the matter is, that content is sometimes not rolled out as often as we want it to be rolled out. Or alternatively, that it’s not presented in the proper manner.

Some players appreciate exploration. I would in fact go as far as to say that most players like it, just some seek it far more actively than others. We get a little disappointed when the only way to find out about the plot is by reading it on your site, rather than seeing it for ourselves.

Why do so few MMOGs have actual game masters and employees progressing the storyline? I would gladly take up such a job, and I wonder why companies don’t around ten of those per game server for the purpose of spicing up the world, even a tiny bit?

We like player-driven content sometimes too

Going back to the idea of the sandbox. The all too familiar theme park analogy which we sometimes take too far. I’ll assume that you already know of it by now. Myspace did not become a hit (rather, plague) solely by merit of social networking – no, it got there because idiots could flood their pages with shiny GIFs and piss poor HTML. Facebook is popular because you can add these backwards viral applications to your profile and write about your most private things on your friends’ walls. Expression became key on the internet. From an extension of the television (providing content) it morphed into an extension of our local neighborhood and circle of friends.

That’s why MMOG developers have got to get their game together and offer us customizability. Not just changing colors, I’m thinking shape the world we’re in. Build buildings, capture cities, and then – customizing them.

EVE goes halfway there. Yes, you can build space stations in places of space you own, and yes you can change the course of things. But still, it’s not as though one can jump into a new area of space and see marvels of construction put up by fellow players. Not so. Player owned structures are generally hidden way out there.

Different regions of the world play differently

There is actually a fairly large MMOG industry in the Far East. Nothing against these guys, but their games really, really don’t appeal to a western audience.

Let’s take Aion for example. Initial reactions were that it looked pretty, you could fly in it and whatnot. For a while it was hyped. 7 hour-long queues started. But then, a few months in, the novelty fades and it starts getting reviews along the lines of:

“I want to reiterate how bland PvE is from [level] 1-25. [..] Most quests are either kill 10 rats, collect 10 rat tails, or deliver ten rat tails. Considering how boring and unrewarding the quests are, it’s just more efficient to find an even-con spawn of squishies and let your eyes glaze over (i.e., grind).”

- Brooke Pilley, A retrospective of Aion’s first month (part 2)

Yes, a grind MMO with pretty animes and wings (zomg). I don’t think it’s unexpected. It’s nothing new, but the real question is why NCSoft (who put out other, better games) didn’t learn the lesson already. Edit: I almost feel as though I want to take that back. I was going by City of Heroes, which as it seems was developed by Cryptic who later sold the IP to NCsoft.

Or for that matter, why didn’t anybody learn their lesson? Now go kill 10 rats and leave a comment.