We’re continuing from Part 1: here. We left off with my gaming friend B-Dawg reporting that:
‘Online Games have expanded the experience beyond waiting for your friends to come over and play. Like, what’s Street Fighter without a human opponent?’
And I get where he’s going here. But honestly, Street Fighter without a human has really hard computer AI which will kill anyone, even me. I still remember playing Street Fighter II Turbo for Super Nintendo and trying to beat the game on AI difficulty level 8 without dying once, using the same character. This is before online even existed. Damn that was fun.
I’ve never found the point in playing Street Fighter with another human unless it’s in public for a pissing contest. Don’t get me wrong, I love pissing contests too 
And also, playing a game with your friends in the same room (on the same couch) or simply watching someone else play and enjoying the experience with them is still really fun and something that cannot be replicated.
For some reason, replacing your friend coming over to play with online gaming is kinda like saying a sex toy replaces sex. It’s still missing a real human body… and a face you can punch if you lose.
B-Dawg moves on to a different topic (the weakest one):
‘The numbers don’t lie, there are millions of MMORPG players! There must be some draw. When I tell you a possible reason why, you get bitchy.’
I don’t think I was ever bitchy. I think he’s missing the point. There are millions of people playing poker and slots machines in online casinos. I personally don’t enjoy that. That doesn’t mean I should understand why it should be fun or satisfying for me. Or why real, normal casinos should feel dead (I love Vegas!).
‘You’re the game-designer! Instead of denying something you don’t comprehend, why don’t you try effing absorbing it for one minute and make a Better MMORPG.’
I see we’re switching to and from topics here. But let’s reiterate that I don’t want to make a MMORPG.
Asking me to make an MMORPG is like asking Stephen King to write a children’s story involving bunny rabbits and gumdrops.
While I’m sure King could do a kick-ass bunny story (and I probably could manage a pretty decent MMORPG). I wouldn’t enjoy it myself (unless it fixed the major design flaws all MMORPGs have right now), so my heart wouldn’t be in it… kinda betraying the player, really.
There are millions of romance novels sold every day too. That doesn’t mean I’m suited to writing romance novels. I’m not going to design barbie games either. (Voltron or GI Joe games however…) 
Perhaps online games simply have some emotional affection* on its players? This caught B-Dawg’s attention:
‘I agree, it does have an affection, that’s what I was trying to figure out.’
This affection is something weird. I remember casually dismissing MMORPGs to a teenage kid in the Czech Republic. He went effing apestuff defending WoW like it was his own mother. Come to think of it, more than his own mother if I recall…
I never completely dismissed his B-Dawg’s original statement (‘I love the feeling of being connected online. Offline/console games feel dead’). The first sentence I agreed with. But he ruined it with ‘Playing a console game feels dead.’ I’m still in the middle of enjoying Dragon Quest IX and Pokemon Pearl (yes, I know… Pokemon) on the DS. Both offline.
He relented a bit here and waxed:
‘That’s the best way I could describe it, an affection. However, even to me, no online game can compete with Final Fantasy VII, because it had a beginning and an end to the story. It closed the loop, so to speak.’
‘But the fact remains I enjoy playing with other players, maybe it my competitive nature, but I feel “connected” when logged on.’
‘… There just haven’t been any good stories in a while. I don’t know.’
‘But more and more games are being made for online multiplayer, theres a reason why and that’s what I was referring to. The trend will continue…’
No arguments there. It’s great to play against people without inviting them over (just not in an MMORPG). 100% agree for many other types of games (puzzle games come to mind). Sometimes the sex toy is all you need.
Yet, you should keep in mind that games are also going the other direction. Lucasarts sudden interest in Monkey Island and the success TellTale games is interesting.
‘Meh, I dunno. Monkey island was a moneymaker and as Hollywood constantly shows us, companies would rather go with tried and true.’
Moneymaker? Perhaps. Monkey Island represents graphic adventures and good story telling in games. Lucasarts stopped making graphic adventures (and games with elaborate stories) altogether because they stopped making money (as a Developer. As a Publisher/Licensor of other titles like KOTOR, this is obviously not the case).
TellTale became a huge success. And they are solely making episodic graphic adventure games with good stories.
Lucasarts pumps out a bunch of Star Wars games.
Lucasarts wonders ‘maybe making only Star Wars games isn’t the best course of action?’
Lucasarts joins TellTale by remaking Monkey Island: Special Edition and licensing the Monkey Island series for them to make an Episodic set of sequels.
Gamers rejoiced.
‘One last point, as I think more on it… I think people want to be special. And how are you special? By being the best in an online game!’
My mom said I was special. That’s all I need
In all seriousness, online gaming is the future, there is no way around it. But online MMORPGs have a two very major design flaw fixes before they become as satisfying and truly entertaining (to folks like me) as an offline RPG. That is:
Having a modular world which is affected by everybody’s all of the players’ actions and an over-arching storyline in which the game and story can in essence be completed.
Both of these problems seem extremely huge in scope. Without resorting to a full-time story writing team which would constantly be expanding the story in near real-time (which is a cool idea), it would be difficult even to come up with fresh and new ideas in a world filled with other Hero’s constantly running into one another. The closest automated story-telling (or interactive story-telling) by far is the Storytron (formerly Erasmatazz) by Chris Crawford, found here: http://www.storytron.com/
Chris Crawford may be a nut, and may not have released a game since the Atari days, but dismissing the ideas he put forth in his game design books would be silly. He knew that interactive story-telling would be really important someday, and he is already leaps and bounds beyond anyone else.
The second design flaw…. well… Implementing the interactive story into an online world, and then handing out tasks/quests, and then having those tasks affect the world in which the players are playing is, well… difficult. I have no idea what to do about that, yet
*Using the archaic definition of the word affection:
The act or process of affecting or being affected.
• a condition of disease : an affection of the skin.
• a mental state; an emotion.
– we’re nerds like that
MMORPGs Suck, And Are The Future of Gaming, Part 1
Jaybot’s essential Top 10 best Videogames of all time.
Monkey Islands…
{ 1 trackback }
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
This B-Dawg guy sounds like a complete tool who probably sits around in his underwear playing MMO’s while his wife supports him. MMO’s will never be able to compete with the story (by far most important aspect of a game IMO) of console RPG’s. I think the allure of online play really shows itself depending on the platform. FP shooters are dramatically more challenging and engaging when facing a living breathing opponent on the other end of the gun pointed at you.
The large draw to MMO’s is for those that need immediate sense of gratification and that sense of accomplishment that keeps them repeating the same tired story and questline daily.
Thanks for the comments Def!
You know, that is an excellent freaking point. Immediate sense of gratification and sense of accomplishment is a huge part of what makes MMO’s successful at the expense of actual contextual story.
I had my ass handed to me in First Person Shooter as soon as Quake came out and people figured out how to use Rocket Launchers. No argument on human skills trumping AI in FPS games. But there isn’t a lot of story to be told (even in the 1 player game, with exception of maybe Half Life)
That’s funny, Def makes a definitive comment about how stories on MMORPG’s will never compare to consoles (which I completely agree with) but then goes on to say first person shooters are “dramatically more” engaging — strange transition considering most FPS have weak stories. Oh, and thanks for the low-brow insult, it says volumes about your character.
J, thanks for including me in this discussion. I’d ask that actually you quote yourself more accurately in the future though, you were quite a bit more hostile in your replies that night. Maybe because my phone sucks with texts and you were getting frustrated, but our exchange didn’t go quite as you say it did. You were being bitchy. Love ya though bro, you rock!
Well, I decided to leave out a lot of my swear words as I try to keep my site *relatively* clean
I was pretty hostile that (early morning in Japan) as I think I still had jet lag and I was recently informed about the job loss (lame excuses, I know) and I get pretty emotional when talking about game stuff, especially RPGs, you know me 
I had a hard time using quotes in the article for both of what we were discussing without getting lost while reading so I tried to keep my end of it outside of quotes (which of course led to more structured thought, making me sound cooler than I actually am). I really wasn’t trying to show you in a bad light and I hope it doesn’t come off that way (otherwise I wouldn’t have even bothered to use your nickname).
Next time, I’ll be sure to let you proof-read any discourse we have before it gets published.
BDawg my good friend, if I was trying to be low-brow and truly insult your character I would not have suggested you were married. Would I not have rather implied you were in your mum’s basement while she makes you hot-pockets and grape soda?
Also you mistake the direction of my comment on FPSs and “dramatically engaging” (terrible paraphrasing to suggest I was implying something else, are you Republican?) I was highlighting a point at which online gaming shines in FPSs. In no way was I suggesting FPS story is anywhere near RPG stories. However, on that note I believe Mass Effect to be on of the best RPGs both gameplay and story-wise in the last 5 years if not the best and it was FPS/RPG (forgive me if there is a specific genre name).
Anxiously awaiting your rebuttal.
Jaybot, I whole-heartedly agree that the absence of contextual story is permitted and overlooked by the MMO masses while they are distracted by shineys and trying to look like ninjas. The real kicker for me is these players spend months on end giving countless hours of their lives to build up artificial ego and accomplishments. Week after week they raid the latest dungeon to slay the latest overgrown bad guy in order to complete the epic “n1nj4 arm0r of l337ness” as you suggested, only to complete it and then wait for the next expansion to DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!!
However, I don’t know if you follow Star Wars The Old Republic MMO that is in the works and being helmed by the geniuses at Bioware but I know the main focus of the game is going to be story which obviously Bioware is well known for reaching back to Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter Nights and mega-hits KoTOR and Mass Effect but I will be curious if they can translate their great story telling history into the MMO world.
Now, now guys…
When I first read Dramatically more challenging I didn’t even catch the unintended pun B-Dawg stumbled upon, but damn that’s an awesome turn of phrase (I read it as the um adverbial adjective or whatever it’s normally used as, I didn’t even notice it could be read the other way until he mentioned it). I’ll give Def the benefit of the doubt on just grabbing a random adverb which means ‘really’ or ‘very’ challenging and I’ll give B-Dawg the benefit of the doubt because even if Def said wasn’t intended as a personal attack at an anonymous MMO player, it did have the effect of calling him the type of person who solely plays MMORPGs all day, which is really not the case. I highly respect his opinion as a gamer, which is why I included his thoughts in the article in the first place
I am a big fan of Bioware, and a big fan of KOTOR (and NWN), so it will be interesting to see how they handle the Old Republic storyline. Although I’ve seen so many other big houses (including Square-Enix) mess up MMO’s that my hopes aren’t high at this point.
While I agree with everything stated here about MMORPG’s, I still stand by what I said about being connected. Even though the masses are asses and humanity lets me down time and time again, I like being able to instantly message a friend or person I play with when the mood strikes me. I was thinking about it and if I recall, I was actually playing on my 360 the night we were texting and I was thinking about how I prefer to be logged in to XBOX Live whenever I’m playing. Even though I don’t talk to people 99.9% of the time (because it distracts me from the game of the moment), I like feeling like I’m playing with a bunch of other people. It’s a poor comparison but it reminds me of when I living in the dorm when I was in college — sure I could have always gone to stay at my parents clean house and eat awesome food, but then I always felt like I was missing out on something in the dorm. Either which way, I believe as games, computers, and memory continue to advance, MMORPG’s WILL have ever changing worlds that are directly impacted by players (sadly, it won’t be for a while IMO).
Def, say what you will but an insult is an insult — perhaps you should change your name to “Destroyer of Innocence” as you’ve said nothing here to indicate you’re a defender of it. Hmm, you say you’re one thing but your actions contradict what you say you are… are you, sir, a Christian? =)
J, I love a good story and all good stories come to an end which leaves MMORPG’s in a conundrum. With that said, I think most people want to be a hero in some great story but what good is being the hero if nobody (read other living players) know about it.
Aw fine, we’re going without the hyphen for now: BDawg
Thanks for the comments. Appreciated, as always. I definitely understand the feeling of being connected and ‘plugged-in’ as it were with a sense of community (which is why I spend so much time on facebook and twitter
) and I’m really waiting for the opportunity for that to be integrated seamlessly into a game design without detracting from the game, as you say. The dorm room metaphor is actually pretty good, I know exactly what you mean.
The whole point of behind …. damn, I left for 15 minutes and forgot what I was saying. I’ll be back when my train of thought comes back.
A potential solution to the MMORPG conundrum came to mind while running errands. How about a game where all of the beginning character classes you choose from are menial jobs (like garbage man and street sweeper) and the game world has an evolving story where, if the players don’t come together and save it from the sinister evil force, it comes to a grisly end and every player starts at level 1 again. The true heroes would, of coarse, eventually transcend their starting class and become something more, like Olympic Gold Medalist (or something more traditional like a Holy Paladin). Assuming the players could actually save the world, the game developers would really need to step up to the plate to keep the content coming if/when the bad guy is defeated. Another idea the masochist in me has always been fond of is when you die, you’re dead. No “respawning” or “rezzing.” Many people don’t like that idea and I don’t think it sells very well but it really says something about the high level people that make it through the pitfalls of leveling/questing.
As I write this it’s come to mind that MMORPG stories suck not because of software/hardware limitations but because of the HUGE amount of manpower it would require to keep a story ever evolving. I have no ideas about how to solve that.
Incidentally, to the garbage men (or women) and street sweepers out there, your jobs are tough and I appreciate what you do. No slights intended.
Interesting idea
I always like trying to take the RPG concept and apply it to worlds which aren’t standard D&D fantasy (which is why I love KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Pokemon).
As for never respawning, I think a recent game online tried to do that and I don’t think it worked out to well. In all honesty, I don’t think it’s a good idea as it doesn’t allow the player to learn from his mistakes without severe punishment. That sort of punishment is equivalent to going to jail for forgetting to tie your shoes. It would be far too devastating to a level 40 Paladin to die because he forgot to buff up first (as a result of the player missing his morning coffee or whatever). Sure he learns his lesson, but at the cost of destroying the fun. That also reinforces that making mistakes is bad and permanent (which is quite the opposite of life). You went to public schooling for far too long, my friend
You’re thinking in the wrong direction with Huge amounts of Manpower involved. Creating fresh new content for stories interactively has already been done to a pretty good degree. If you check out any of Chris Crawford’s books on game design or his Storytron thing and test some of the workign protypes out, you see that it wouldn’t be too hard to implement.
The harder part is having a server physically change it’s characteristics and rulesets based on how the players interact with it. Anarchy Online actually does this to some degree, where each server actually does have a completely different world based on what wars were won and similar (and it really cool) and is headed in the right direction, but the changes happen far too slowly (I think it’s weekly or monthly) to keep up with any sort of fluid story structure.
……….. Frack….. I just “submitted” a 30 minute reply only to get a server error. Remind me to copy & paste my text before I hit “Submit”
So now I am going to paraphrase.
Bdawg, I offer you an olive branch in my last post and instead of choosing to accept it you would rather stick it up your arse with the other one presently there. How did our discussion which started on a difference of opinion and escalated over semantics turn to religion? Yes, I am a God fearing man. However it is irrelevant to my post or your comment. For you to suggest I am a hypocrite for not defending the innocent would have you implying you are in fact the innocent. I apologize my good man but I find that difficult to believe. Your word usage and underlying tones of your messages would suggest that you are far from innocent, you may lament your innocence, but it has been gone for some time. You probably feel you have seen too much or been made to carry too much as you chose to move onto religion. I think it shows in your posts about online gaming and the desire to feel connected, must be difficult feeling alone while surrounded with others. Or do you long for the days which have passed, did you miss something? Enough psychobabble from me.
Let us focus on gaming, as we are all clearly gamers.
I like your thoughts on resetting or wiping characters and the server if a central storyline goal is not met, I think it would definitely promote grouping and community interaction, however as Jaybot points out it comes at the cost of fun which will lead to a short lifespan for your MMO. I think it would be awesome to play a MMO where once you die you are perma-dead. Would make you think twice about playing solo wouldn’t it? Or even if perma-death is too extreme harken back to the glory days of EQ and give death significant meaning. Make getting a resurrection extremely difficult. Create only one class which can ressurect a player and put it on a long cooldown, say 2-3 days. Have the only safe haven for these “clerics” be cities, and when they step foot outside of cities the environment responds sending hordes to try and defeat them. That would cause you to have to “enlist” a small army to defend this cleric and deliver him safely to your corpse. Then take into account the fact that anyone who dies while in service to you faces the same circumstances that you are in.
Jaybot, I think SOE’s Planetside accomplished the real-time world environment updates rather well. Granted it was much easier to accomplish as there was only one story arc.
Hahaha, I offered you bait and you took it. I know who you are Mr. Defender of Innocence.
Oh, and J, I see your point and agree somewhat about the punishment thing. These types of games try to maintain some degree of realism so it only makes sense to me that if you die, you’re dead. Also, it would raise the adrenalin factor when in a life-or-death situation. Maybe the solution would be to make it hard to die — that is NOT to say making the game easy. They could have Coma (in which case having to wait a few days like Def said before you can play again), Knock Out, or both. Call it what you will, but if you reach the state of death you are truly dead. Or like Def also said, have clerics and make it risky. I think I really am going off on a tangent now so I’ll leave this blog in peace. =)
BDawg could I make it any more obvious for you?!
I think there needs to be more deep thinking discussions and topics on games in the near future. This was fun.
Okay boys, now that the hatchet has been buried
Seriously, I appreciate the comments, it is always good to discuss games.
I never played SOE’s Planetside, but I did watch a friend play it for a few hours. The world seemed pretty small and from what I remember, it was basically red color dudes against blue colored guys dudes, right? did it run on tons of separate servers like EQ/Wow, or was it only a few massive servers like Anarchy Online?
As far as killing off the player or severely hampering their play time, that won’t work as it removes the instant gratification and honestly, joy or playing the game. There are other ways to penalize the player (taking away a level, removing gold, etc)… Or, one of my favorite hold-overs form console games like Ultima&FF, removing any experience or gold obtained since the last ’safe/save’ point. In this way, the player will still take risks (which is good!) and try to do dumb stuff which they can’t possibly accomplish at their level, lose their life, but then pay the penalty of no advancement. I wonder why safe-houses or something aren’t used more often in online RPGs.
Overall the playable world planetside is limited to several zones on each world but if I recall it is not any smaller than EQ or WoW is in terms of explorable terrain if not actually larger. There were 5 massive servers at launch and as the numbers have dwindled over the years it is down to 3 now I believe. However SOE did recently announce plans for Planetside 2 last month which I find rather peculiar as the estimated peak subscriptions back in 2003 was 100,000-150,000. Seems like a lot of development work for a very limited market segment.
In regards to your “favorite hold-overs” the Japanese game “Demon’s Souls” was recently ported over to the U.S. and it reminds me of the glory days of old when video games didnt coddle the players. This game is more than willing to kick you in the teeth and make no apologies for it. You run the risk of dying on every encounter and when you do you lose any and all souls you have collected (think of it like currency/xp). Then on top of that you also have to run around in a spirit form which is much weaker than your physichal form in order to try and get your body back. I have really enjoyed the limited time I have played it as it the difficulty really tests your mettle as a gamer. I have always tried to play my games on the hardest difficulty settings and at times I found myself wishing this game had an option of making it easier. You have to love dying to the first “trash mob” encounter 5 times. O.o
Jason, the major draw for many MMORPG gamers is the player versus player (PvP) battling. You’re taking a character that, unless you’re a loser who bought it, you built up and extensively customized to pit against other people. You mentioned preferring the AI in Street Fighter, but that’s a very simple game that requires only simple AI. For a more involved game, like any shooter, real-time strategy, or rpg, programmed AI is a dull and repetitive match compared to what a human mind can come up with.
I agree about most people using MMORPGs as a graphical chat room though. Also the note about it being a stale world that players can’t change at all needs to be addressed in future games. I’d imagine that among the next big developments will be game worlds that players can impact meaningfully on some scale.
Also, for the record I player FPS as well. The Battlefield series is unbeatable -real ones not the stupid watered down one that also were on console. It’s just a different kind of beating others.
Thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts GameMaster!
Good point on the AI, and I figure many MMORPG players do play just for the challenge of going up against another human opponent. On the flip side, there are many players that only play on Non-PVP RP Only servers as well, which seems to take the graphical chat room degree to new levels (if you read the classic WoW encounter about the sex role playing thing, you know exactly what I’m talking about)
I simply suck at FPS, that’s the main reason I can’t play them. I wasted my youth learning how to do hadoukens and shoryoukens and missed out on my time to hone my rocket arena skills
it feels like you said what ive been thinking the last few years…Final fantasy 7 emotions run deep in me its feelings i will never forget and i played it with a friend…wow is a sorry excuse of an rpg..the most disturbing thing about it is that the majority want action and disregard feelings and emotions and the artistic bit and the storytelling and feeling of the game…i think were outnumbered and thats just sad..somethings wrong when people dont care about deeper emotions in games anymore
Thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts Steve. FF7 did have some very, excuse the word, romantic moments and today still has lots of merit in story telling. Every time I play through the game (I end up doing it once a year, the last time was in Japanese) I *still* get confused about what really happened to Cloud and Zack in Nibelheim, even though the explanation is given very clearly each time. The story telling is so thought provoking and the characters are quite believable. You almost feel sorry for Sephiroth and his dilemma when he realizes who he is.
That being said, it seems that story telling in games is not completely dead and there appears to be a lot of story-driven games popping up in the casual games market (and any existing adventure games that get published usually are published through casual distributors), and the success of Tell Tale and Hot Head is pretty encouraging.
As Al Lowe said here: http://bit.ly/9KzI68 ‘You know, the whole thing is selling stories. Basically, all we’re doing – at least, what I thought we were doing- was sitting around the campfire outside the cave, telling stories.’ I think that will always hold true in the end. It happens in all forms of entertainment.
You’ll always have your Summer Blockbuster Action movie with no story but awesome special effects; and your middle of winter Low-Budget Artsy movie with a great story… and in 20 years, no one will remember the Action movie, but everyone will still be fond of the story from the artsy movie that still holds up.