When World of Warcraft came out, I thought it would die because it would be dumbed down for the MMO players who cared only for getting to the level cap, and the people who actually played the Warcraft series would chew it up and spit it out, then stomp on it, piss on it, and feed it to their dog, who would be so disgusted by it that they would never eat from that bowl again. As you can plainly see, I didn't have much hope for WoW.
Then it got big, and was suddenly everywhere. And yet, the content was just as I had predicted. There's some PvP, but mostly PvE. People running around soloing, not playing with one another, which completely defies logic: It's a freaking multiplayer game. Why would you play it alone? Would you play Monopoly by yourself if you were at a party? (Pretend you want to play Monopoly.) And yet, people do, and I never understood it. I never understood it when people grabbed henchmen in Guild Wars, when there are people shouting, LFG! LFG! Or GROUP DOING X QUEST!. If you want to play alone, play a single-player RPG that are more immersible than Guild Wars and have better gameplay like Fable or Neverwinter Nights. Better yet, go read a book, you'll get more faster that way.
And what really gets to me is monthly fees. Why pay for an unchanging world? Even if you PvP in something like WoW, your options for actually helping out your side of the war are limited, because there really isn't a war. You don't do much beyond play a match against another team. You're better off playing Counter-Strike. It's a fast-paced, arena-style game with objectives and other people with opposing objectives. But at least in GW: Factions, the border will change as you play. In Shadowbane, your guild will gain land and power. What you do actually matters, or at least contributes in some way. But if you kill seven million boars, what does that get you? 350,000,000 experience points. And what do these boars do? They respawn!
Now, if there's something that I hate more than anything else, it's grinding so that I can get to a point where I can progress. That's why I didn't play Shadowbane very long. I had to kill the same damn monsters over and over until I reached level 20 or so before getting kicked into the mainland. What I did like about Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa, however, is that I got ample experience points as I did quests and unlocked the story. I leveled up as I went. Many people are questioning the worth of levels in MMOs nowadays. But the problem lies in how we approach levels. People see levels as an end, when they are, in fact, a means.
Take, for example, Torment and Baldur's Gate. They use the same game engine. They both use AdnD version 2. Beyond a few visual and gameplay differences, they are essentially the same game at their core. They both use levels. Now, you have both games. What would you rather do: Kill monsters until you hit the level cap in both games, or would you rather play through it, pay attention, and immerse yourself in the story? Which is a better accomplishment? Which is the point of the game? Playing an MMO to hit the level cap makes as much sense as doing so in a single player game. There's so much to pay attention to, so much to absorb, to simply ignore it all and get the Death Knight Class just to say that you did.
Instead of using levels to measure a character, what we should do, instead, is measure how far they are in the story. It was pointed out in the comments in another blog, I don't remember which one, or by who, that Guild Wars' level max was the beginning, not the end. Surely, once you have hit the max in WoW, there is more to explore, more to do, than making an entirely new character and doing it all again?
In comparison to such games, I have found more fun in simple browser games like Astro Empires, CyberNations, Urban Dead, and Tribal Wars, though none of these games are friendly to casual players because you could leave for some time and return to find your nation or character(s) obliterated. That is because that I was part of something bigger, something truly dynamic and player-driven. The politics of each game were dictated by the guilds and alliances formed within the game, between the players, which is true Massive Multiplayer in my mind, where the players shape the world, the world does not shape the players.
Now Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Guild Wars: Factions take the best of both worlds, though not to the point that the aforementioned browser games have. Here, what you do matters, it changes the world to how well you do, and yet there is plenty of single-player campaign content to go through. There wasn't enough for me to do by myself in these browser games, yet in Prophecies, Flyff, and Tabula Rasa, there wasn't enough Multiplayer in it. MMOs should have both PvE and PvP to them that change the world, like dynamic borders and guild-owned and operated properties for PvP, yet also allow casual RPG players to go through a story and enjoy it. And for those that just want to smash and destroy, you can ignore the semantics of both and get right to it.
Now, I'm not saying stop playing WoW and start playing WAR. But as players, as consumers, we need to be aware of that which we are buying and spending our time on. Because if we keep buying and spending our money on something that isn't worth it, then we won't get anything new. Even though I didn't have high hopes for WoW, I was still crossing my fingers about it, that it would have dynamic borders, that there would be an actual WAR going on. But when I did my research into its PvP and found that it was limited to instances and duels, I gave up on it. Now I would just like to understand why it got so big so quickly when there are better-and smarter-alternatives out there to keep us entertained.
So that's how I see WoW and my vision of MMOs in general. I'd just like to see people think about their choices. Too few gamers think about it-they just do. If the story is the ends, rather than the means to the level cap, then gamers will start thinking about the game a little more, and maybe gaming will gain a little more respect from the mainstream, you know?
Also, I do realize that WoW is not unique, and has its share of precedent. I found Maple Story to be much of what I see wrong with WoW, as well as Flyff and Tabula Rasa. I would put Kingdom of Loathing in with that, but I quickly realized that was just a single player browser game rather quickly, and I highly recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment