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The Game Archaeologist and the NeverEnding Quest: Your journeys
I have to say, this month's been everything I'd hoped it would be for EverQuest. As with many of these older MMOs, my working knowledge of EQ was spotty and anecdotal at best, and I'm personally glad to rectify that. EverQuest's always felt like a "You had to have been there" club to me, one that stopped accepting members a long, long time ago. It's great, therefore, to see that there's a thriving community, a rich history and an uplifting future in store for the game. Above everything else, I've come to realize just how crucial EverQuest was -- for better or worse, depending on your perspective -- to the development of the MMO genre for the past decade or so. If SOE never created EQ, just how different would our games be today? It's incredibly hard to imagine. As we continue our EQ month here at The Game Archaeologist, we have two things on the immediate agenda. The first is to share a few of your personal journeys that you emailed my way, and the second is a look at how you can plug in with EverQuest if you've never done so in the past. It turns out, quite fortuitously, that this is looking to be one of the best times to do so. Read on, courageous gamer!
The elusive breed of the console MMO
Much like the Loch Ness Monster, the console MMO is a rarely-seen creature which nevertheless has captured the imagination of many. (Unlike the monster, console MMOs are not admitted hoaxes perpetuated by willing disbelief and a lakeside town's need for tourist revenue.) We've yet to see much progress made toward console MMOs, despite the huge available market (see also: China) and the increasingly robust hardware of consoles. Even more notable is the fact we've already seen publishers promising the game for consoles without it happening, with Age of Conan and Champions Online being the biggest offenders. What's the problem? Syp recently asked and tried to answer this very question, noting that most of the problems come from the console hardware, both its short lifespan and lack of several input devices. Still, it hasn't stopped many from playing and enjoying Final Fantasy XI on the Playstation 2, nor does Sqare-Enix seem worried about placing Final Fantasy XIV on a console. The lifespan of consoles can also be somewhat elastic -- almost anyone who plays console games holds on to their systems longer than their market lifespan. Gordon at We Fly Spitfires believes it may be a split in audience, since computers are more ubiquitous than consoles -- but computers capable of serious gaming are far less common than the PS2. Whether a hardware issue or one of audiience, the breed remains elusive, though the subject of far fewer undewater searches and TV specials than the aforementioned lake monster.
MMOs and tribal thinking
Tobold of Tobold's MMORPG blog wrote an interesting post this morning on a phenomenon that pretty much everyone in the gaming community is familiar with: MMOs and tribal thinking. You know the deal: "x" game sucks, therefore anyone who plays it clearly sucks as well and must be informed at great length of the error of their ways. (As Tobold pointed out as well, if you write about that game in the bargain, you are obviously receiving kickbacks from the developers. No amount of boring old facts can stand in the face of those accusations.) Your favorite MMO is a bit more of a commitment than choosing to eat an apple or banana. An MMO is a heavy time and cash investment, and as a result people get more attached to their favorite and more worked up when they feel someone is slighting it. The reverse is true as well: if you choose not to invest your time and money in a game, you can just...not invest your time and money in it and move on. The end. We all know, however, that a huge percentage of gamers are unwilling or unable to do so. A comment from We Fly Spitfires put it very simply: "People love to belong to one camp or another and irrationally abuse anyone who doesn't agree with them." It's that sort of tribal thinking -- you're either with us or against us! -- that Tobold explores in his blog entry. It's an interesting read, and worth the time to take a look at.
Evolution as it does and doesn't apply to MMOs
A few days ago, we discussed the lack of innovation in the MMO market at the moment, as well as some of the underlying reasons behind it. The topic prompted We Fly Spitfires to postulate the idea that we needed an MMO that broke most if not all of the established and accepted rules of the genre. In his own parlance, we needed a mutation instead of a steady evolution. Those of you familiar with evolutionary science might be quirking your eyebrow a bit, as did Of Teeth and Claws, where it was pointed out that mutation is a part of evolution. Continuing the analogy, it's a part of the slow improvement we see in our genre of choice, as the source leading to feature implementation and improvement. And as Killed in a Smiling Accident added, evolution is not a straight line, nor does it select features based on inherent quality -- the current "standard features" have evolved because they're best at succeeding in the current environment (that is, the market). Ultimately, aside from fascinating extension of the analogy, the biggest point to be taken away from both this discussion and the previous one is that change in the genre isn't something which will happen overnight. While the powerful influence that World of Warcraft has placed upon the genre is beginning to abate a bit, it'll be quite some time before it's discarded wholesale.
Roleplaying and the lack of it in MMOs
We refer to our genre as MMOs in shorthand, frequently, as an abbreviation of MMORPG. Of course, there are entries that don't fit the mold -- Planetside makes no pretense of being an RPG, for instance, while Second Life is really a virtual environment rather than a game per se. But the roots of the term do define what most MMOs are fundamentally aiming at: being an RPG with a massive component of players. Which is ironic, because as We Fly Spitfires points out, they're not really RPGs at all. They feature the stats and the leveling, but nothing of the larger sense of place and story that the genre hails as its strengths. Compared to games such as Dragon Age: Origins or Oblivion, it's clear that for all the strength of options we might have in some MMOs, we lack any sense of real character specialization or unique progression. Part of the concern, of course, is content -- you don't want to necessarily force any player who didn't happen to make the right choices in a dialogue tree to miss out on a major endgame event. The ubiquity of communication also helps herd players toward a specific set of specializations or ability tree, with little to no deviation encouraged. But there's more that can be done, and games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic seem to have a greater intent to focus on individual story and progression. Even if you don't necessarily like the impromptu acting which is usually associated with roleplaying in the genre, it's hard to deny that a greater sense of individual choice and uniqueness would be intoxicating.
The most efficient way to make money in MMOs
Cash flow in many games is almost as big a problem as it can be in real life. We've recently had our resident EVE Online column running a series on the best ways to make ISK in the game, and you can barely throw a stone without hitting a site offering a guide to make X ludicrous amount of gold per hour in World of Warcraft. But we may have reached the end of all this maneuvering, as We Fly Spitfires has recently posted the most efficient way to make money in every game, ever. Go ahead and take a look right now, but fair warning -- it requires some out-of-game work. And your credit card. Now, before you start sending angry letters, take a moment to consider the point. It's not that the author is condoning RMT, simply that he's pointing out how much we seem to want to streamline the process of playing the game when, really, we already know the absolute fastest way to increase our virtual coffers. That doesn't make it commendable or ethical, but if we're so keen on speeding ourselves up, we might do well to remember that the journey, not the destination, is more frequently our reason for playing.
The Daily Quest: Guild switching
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Everyone's playing guild musical chairs: Sheep Blink Invis just disbanded one of their guilds, We Fly Spitfires wants to find one, Nibuca's working on names for hers, and Hots and Dots is seeking mages for theirs. Hopefully we made at least one match in there somewhere. Good luck to you guildless folks! Grandpappy Frostheim says Hunters these days have no respect, I tell ya. Planet of the Hats has a nice long post up about "gear pollution," a growing problem in the game. And OutDPS tells you how to hunt for Heroic Northrend Beasts. The encounter, not the actual beasts themselves. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Why RMT won't go away
"Companies should just stop gold farmers." It's a consistent complaint in many games, with "gold" replaced by your game's currency of choice. As complaints go, it's right around "somebody should do something about all the problems" in terms of overall utility, but heck, no one likes the practice and it should just be eliminated, right? Well, as Scott Jennings has pointed out recently, it's not quite that easy. As Lum points out, there are several common misconceptions about the entire process. Among them are the idea that the game company doesn't step in because they're getting kickbacks, which is pointed out to fail the simple test of Occam's razor. When developers want to get more money from an existing game, there are usually better ways to run it, such as the Champions Online model or the Dungeons and Dragons Online approach. He also tackles the infamous statement that the farmers are paying customers and therefore the company has even less incentive to stop them. So if everyone hates RMT, why is it still around? The article briefly touches upon it, but We Fly Spitfires had a recent post that articulates more specifically: more people buy gold than would necessarily admit it. Since no one will admit to it, no one ever asks, and as a result there's a large culture of silence that publicly despises it and privately takes part. In short? As long as there's a customer base, the farming will continue. Food for thought all around.
Do we expect too much from our MMOs?
Gordon of the We Fly Spitfires blog wrote a post that has generated some pretty good discussion on this very topic. His original argument is that people don't seem to mind spending upwards of $70 on a singleplayer game that will deliver anywhere from 10-80 hours of gameplay, yet you will rarely find someone willing to pay $50 for an MMO to enjoy it for the same amount of time and then put it aside (insert unnecessary WoW tourist joke here).By their very design MMOs are built for long-term committment. How many times have you been able to hit the level cap in an MMO and experience even half of what it has to offer in a single month of play? The goal of MMOs it seems is to suck players into a long-term committment and get them to either subscribe at $15/month or spend money on microtransactions. Semi-successul MMOs can be quite lucrative, so maybe we aren't expecting enough? That said, a game like GTA IV has worldwide revenues of $1.1 billion (or more) yet gamers don't expect to get as much enjoyment out of it over the long term as they do from MMOs. One wonders how a game like Guild Wars fits into all of this.
