matt-wants-to-be-ganked
Latest
The Soapbox: In defense of consequence
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I've gathered you here today to present to you a defense for a feature that has been all but forgotten in recent MMOs, and which tends to solicit uproar from entire communities if it's so much as mentioned. That feature, as you may have guessed from the title, is consequence. One of the things that initially drew me to Massively, and inadvertently led to my writing for them, was Sera Brennan's columns, which frequently covered the topic of persistence in MMOs. I'm a die-hard, borderline militant advocate of increasing the levels of persistence in games, and I feel that implementing consequences for players' actions is a huge part of taking MMOs from generally mindless games to true persistent worlds. "But Matt," you say, "I don't want a persistent world. The one I live in is hard enough as it is! I just want to play a game and unwind, not have to master goblin economical theory as it relates to the sociopolitical climate of an imaginary universe." And that's just peachy! There are dozens of games on the market tailored to players such as yourself, but only a select handful tailored to players such as myself who desire a more immersive world to live in during their spare time. The incoming rant, obviously, is geared toward that type of player.
