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The Daily Grind: What outdated game mechanic should be retired from MMOs?
Returning to an old game is like hopping in a time machine and surveying the horrible mistakes made by MMO studios a decade ago. Forget those five guys who still murmur the word "permadeath" wistfully; we're talking corpse runs, vitae penalty, corpse looting, tank mages, experience loss, holy trinities, zone walls, hybrid class level penalties, and tree-top cities without railings, all as a matter of course for the games of the day. Nowadays, these mechanics are abandoned in a field somewhere by all but the most retro game studios. I have to wonder what we'll look back on in another 10 years with the same feeling of "wow, I can't believe anyone thought that was a good idea." Cash shops? Flying mounts? Faction-grinds? Classes? Skill bars? Questing? Tree-top cities without railings? (Seriously guys -- stop making those.) What game mechanic is so outdated and so abhorred that it should be retired from MMOs right now? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Are you obsessed with jumping?
I suspect that if you polled players about their biggest Guild Wars pet peeves, the lack of a jump ability would be toward the top. The game world just isn't built with a Z-axis. Even if you could jump, there'd be nowhere to go. ArenaNet has been quick to assure fans that the sequel will in fact have jumping. Jumping! You'd think there were no other important mechanics, like crafting or travel or guilds! Besides, if you build your world for jumping, you also build your world for falling... like off of City of Heroes' tall buildings or those obnoxious Kelethin tree platforms in EverQuest (seriously, learn2railings, Wood Elves!). Still we crave our spacebar jumping, so much that we demand it even in 2-D sidescrolling crafting sandboxes like Glitch (where jumping neither decreases aggro nor makes you harder to target in PvP, sadly). Are you one of those obsessed with jumping in MMOs, and if so, why? Is it a nervous twitch? A way to immerse yourself in the gameworld? Do you jump for attention? Or is jumping merely shorthand for an interactive three-axis world? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: The best MMO music
Here's a story for you: a certain blogger is playing The Lord of the Rings Online. He's in the Trollshaws, and he notices the music -- oft-ignored in MMOs -- is actually really good. It's classy and it's beautiful. Then he starts to think about the music in other games -- the gorgeous and mournful guild hall ballad of Meridian 59, the beautiful and muted arpeggios of EverQuest's Kelethin theme, and the dark and foreboding ancient instrumentation of Age of Conan's various Stygian pieces.Music is not usually the focus of a lot of discussion or attention in MMOs. A lot of people probably just turn it off and listen to terrible terrible pop rock in the background. But for those of you who actually pay attention: do any particular musical compositions in MMOs stand out to you? What's the best track yet featured in an MMO?
