Level 15 Hunter LF3M 4 Spooky Wood
When Akela tweeted “***GOLIATH ONLINE!***”, and nothing else, all I could think of was, Davey and Goliath is online? There’s a Davey and Goliath MMO?
You remember Davey and Goliath? It always came on really early Sunday mornings, presumably so us kids could have something to watch while getting ready for church or something. I loved them. Even when I was a kid, they were kinda goofy. Not goofy in a talking dog way, but the dog did talk.
So maybe they were.
Anyway. The thought of an MMO with adventure and talking pets, but no killing and lots of moral choices is pretty wild. Kinda like a Claymation Ultima game, I guess, except for the killing part.
When you get right down to it, the original D&D was a moral game. You had your alignment, but if you wanted the very best alignment, Lawful Good, you had to continually examine your moral choices and ethical challenges. That’s something entirely missing from today’s games, where there are no moral choices aside from enlightened self-interest.
What if morality — which was such a large part of D&D — was brought to MMOs? Paladins and lawful good-aligned clerics were paupers — everything they owned, they carried with them. Amassing too much wealth would switch you to Lawful Neutral faster than you could spit. Imagine a modern MMO character who HAD to be poor. The closest example I can think of is EverQuest’s monk, who are severely penalized for carrying too much weight (although, this has been eased several times since launch).
So at character creation, you could choose your character’s morals — never attack weak monsters, say, or never refuse a quest to kill the undead, or to never wear better than green armor. If you stuck to these, you could get some benefit in game. If you were under a lot of moral restrictions, you could summon help from a god at crucial times, level faster, use less food and drink, and so on… by choosing your own morals (and they could be evil ones — always roll “NEED!”, never heal anyone who hasn’t paid in advance, never let the NPC in an escort quest live, etc) you could make the game different every time you played through.
But heck, I’d play a Davey and Goliath just to hear Goliath go, “Okay, Daaavey”…
Star Wars: The Old Republic will have an alignment system much like KoTOR and Mass Effect do. Not quite the same as the D&D alignments, but it’ll still inject morality and moral choices into the MMO genre.
I remember that show. I didn’t get to see Saturday morning cartoons on the account of being orthodox Jewish. I just watched it and ignored the religious messages.
It could certainly be done, after all, Fable 2 has a really neat morality system.
OTOH, you could take it too far. I mean, imagine coming back from an afternoons raiding where you’ve let yourself get a bit enthusiastic with the killing of innocent passers by for spare coin only to find half your ‘congregation’ camped out on your lawn and ready to do an intervention??
It’d certainly make the simplistic good / evil split a lot more believable. OK, so I roll an orc, why should he necessarily be bad? Maybe he’s just a bit stupid and easily led into ‘bad’ things but really wants to be kind to bunnies and just grow mushrooms in a cave. Would he end up becoming more good aligned (chaotic good maybe?) or is it predestination all the way down?
hmmm
As for orcs, if you go by Tolkein, they are corrupt. There can’t BE good orcs in Tolkein. They are all evil, In D&D terms, they could be lawful, neutral or chaotic evil, but there could never BE a non-evil orc. If a player tried to play a non-evil orc, they would lose their orc abilities, being evil-derived, but gain no new, compensatory abilities. Doing good would just make you weak.
But that doesn’t mean that such behavior shouldn’t be allowed. If someone wants to be a pathetic excuse for an orc, being spat on by human children but nonetheless trying to do good, so be it. But you’d expect them to backslide and choose evil once again.
What morality brings to MMOs is ROLEPLAY. And not the thee and thou roleplay, but the one where what you do has consequences to your character. EQ had factions, but they really didn’t mean much until Velious, where what you chose to do severely impacted the choices available to you at high levels.
In a decent game with morality, your choices would influence your character just as much as your class or level.
A) I have fond memories of Davey & Goliath. What an incredibly corny, but sincere show. In the New York/New Jersey area where I grew up, the show ran at some incredibly bizarre time like 6:30 a.m. Sunday mornings, yet I’d get up to watch it pretty religiously (no pun intended).
B) Morality from an RP standpoint in MMOs is sorely lacking and would really do wonders for role-playing once a dev team decides to get off their arses and do something different for a change. I don’t think they realize what solid RP does for player retention. I know people who still play UO and MUDs, simply because of the great RP environments they’ve discovered.
It’d be a lot more creatively fruitful for the developers and do absolute wonders for immersion rather than thinking of new ways to reinvent the wheel (oops…I mean the grind).
As MMOs exist now, it really makes no difference if you pick a traditionally “good” faction or an evil one. You grind the same mobs and acquire the same shinies because that’s how you “progress” or “advance” in these linear-focused games. Your experience bar is not going to fill up from NOT killing wolves if you’re a druid (who would not be running around a forest butchering animals).
The cynics would point out (and have) that RP stuff, like morals, or interior decorating and such, do not produce games with 11 million players. And so companies tend to think this stuff is pointless, and that the players who do enjoy these things will play their games even without it, so why bother?
But not every game HAS to be WoW, does it? There is a place for games that go in new directions.
That’s the funny thing. All the games that *try* to be WoW-like don’t garner WoW-like subs anyway–so you’d think someone would finally muster up the cajones to try something new.
It’s originality that always wins big and ultimately leaves its mark. But the MMO industry is so damn conservative, it doesn’t look like those sorts of risks are gonna come anytime soon. Not when you can put out a polished WoW-like game and garnish a healthy population of 150-400k subs.
Sometimes I wonder if the next big leap MMORPGs take will come from the console side rather than the PC side. It seems like the powers that be in our world have a way too rigid concept of what an MMO is (and I leave RPG out of that intentionally). Do you think they might have the resources, and lack of preconceptions of what an MMORPG is *supposed* to be that they might eventually break the mold?
No, I don’t think we will see innovation from market leaders. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Innovation will come from the indies. And it will then be copied in the AAA games.
Innovation in consoles? I dunno. When I play a console game, I am sitting on the couch, six or seven feet from the TV, and as such I feel really disconnected from the game. When I am playing a PC game, I’m right in there, and it’s easy to get immersed. I am not positive that I will ever feel the same way about console MMOs that I do about PC MMOs. I’m willing to be convinced.
Console MMOs have an emphasis on quick action and little communication that is really anathema to community and roleplaying…