There’s a gulf between the MMOs I WANT to be playing — such as EverQuest, where I currently have a max-level rogue — and the MMOs I ACTUALLY play — which, these days, are Dungeons & Dragons Online and Star Trek Online. (Wizard101 is on the back burner as we wait for the expansion).
EverQuest is famous for being a social, more ‘sandbox’ open world where reputation matters and the things you do have consequence. Well, not so much anymore; SOE has fully bought into the instanced adventure scheme and now, nothing anybody does has any effect on the world. But ONCE UPON A TIME, it did. The point being, though, was it WAS a virtual world, where you could just hang out in places and chat, role play, run events or do whatever you wanted — and even occasionally pull on the heavy boots and wade into dungeons and battle for treasure.
DDO and STO are, in contrast, just thin wrappers of virtual world around packaged adventures. You sit down at your computer, choose a snack or a more filling meal from a menu of choices, go to the entrance, follow the script, and then you’re done. You can return for another or move on to something else.
There’s no sense of changing either world at all. The Seal of Shan-Ti-Kor will still sit, waiting to be found, at the bottom of miles of corridors beneath the Steam Tunnels, after I’ve spent an evening retrieving it. The Crystalline Entity will still harass ships in the Alpha Centauri sector, after a fleet has shattered it to a million pieces.
But when I do sit down to play, I find more and more that a packaged adventure is often exactly what I DO want. Certainly when our Sunday night static DDO group meets, we know we only have two hours; we want a two hour adventure, please. We’re all real people with busy lives, and we don’t have the time to soak in a virtual world for days on end any more.
This is how the definition of an MMO has changed in the last ten years. From virtual worlds where adventure awaits your discovery — memorable places like Norrath, Brittania, Dereth and Albion — to packaged bits of self-contained adventure in Azeroth, Eberron and the Alpha Quadrant.
Even the poster child for virtual world MMOs, CCP’s EVE Online, builds its PvE experience around packaged (and repetitious) missions. I wonder if their forthcoming World of Darkness MMO will tend toward the virtual world or the packaged adventure. I’m hoping the former, but expecting the latter.
4 thoughts on “Dungeons & Dragons Online: Adventure by the Bite”
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I agree that it’s great to have packaged type adventures waiting to be played. Especially for static groups as you mentioned.Nothing worse than a group of people all meeting up and nobody knows what they will do that night,lol.
There will be time in my life when I have infinately more playtime to invest in virtual worlds again but right now I prefer my online adventures the packaged way too.
Nice post 🙂
Excellent post. You’ve hit nail on the head between what was and what is. I miss the old EQ days, but like you, I probably don’t have the time to invest in such a game as I once did. Pity.
You are quite right. Skirmishes in LOTRO and instant teleport to a Dungeon via Dungeon Finder also fit into this scheme.
Cryptic’s upcoming Neverwinter Night is trying to scratch the “group adventuring together in an instance” itch as well. Diablo 3 probably won’t be so much different, Cities and other staging areas will become lobbies to start adventures, just like in DDO.
I guess this is why I like Guild Wars so much. You can play it solo and multiplayer as well. It felt somehow like a connected world to me, despite the heavy instancing. Still, an open world like in Ultima Online or more open instances like in Aion would have been nice.
But well, I know you and many others never really got into GW, I am a bit surprised that STO worked for you better than GW. I am not here to analyze the gaming habits and preferences of people though, so let me get back to the point:
I see more and more MMOs delivering content in small, instanced chunks. A controlled gameplay experience. Blizzard’s Chilton/”Kalgan” especially likes this word/concept of “control”. He recently said in an interview with Petter Mårtensson that one of the “problems” with PvP is that they do not have as much “control” about the player as in PvE. Uuuuuuuuuuhhhh!!!
Guild Wars 2 seems to be super social, about cooperation and… everyone will be rewarded and have babies. Erm well. Something like that.
But not anyone seems to have a “virtual world” vision that empowers and trusts the player to create their own entertainment. They are simply not given the tools to do so, killing a monster and clearing a crafting material node are still the maximum of player-world-interaction.
Driving sheep that could be shorn with scissors into a gate, then butchering them and cooking their flesh… chopping wood and creating chairs and tables for the “Tower” or “Mini Tower” or whatever kind of building one had bought a deed for was GREAT. Later on one could even design very individual house designs.
That was on a private German Ultima Online shard/server, in 1998.
And where are we in 2010? We level SOLO, adventure in GROUPS (~5) in INSTANCES and RAID in larger groups (10-25) in larger INSTANCES with a timed lockdown and do our DAILY QUESTS.
I see the genre making progress, but it could use some games that revolutionize it. Not more epigones. Not likely to happen. GW2 makes a lot of concessions to the DIKU type of MMO that WoW and EQ almost made synonymous with MMORPG, SWTOR plays it even safer and goes WoW in Space.
And most MMO gamers are drooling over the upcoming Cataclysm. Including one of my best buddies – could not bring him to play either GW or STO, did not even try to convince him of LOTRO. Sigh.
I need a real Cataclysm, not a Reboot of more of the same!