There’s this dog.
Every day he runs out of the house when his person comes home, all ready to play. His person takes out a Frisbee and tosses it onto the lawn, and the the dog runs up and grabs it, and then he brings it back. Sometimes his person pats him on his head. Sometimes its even a different color Frisbee. The dog dreams someday of meeting up with some other dogs, and being driven far away, where they can all get out of the car and their person will throw them a Frisbee.
See, we MMO players, we’re the dogs. Our person is an MMO game company. We don’t get to do anything but chase Frisbees. And you know, we don’t even get to keep it afterward. We dream of being wolves, stalking the wilds, so we run away and wake up in someone else’s lawn, and they’re throwing us another Frisbee.
We’ve all become very good at chasing Frisbees.
There’s a reason MMOs think we love chasing Frisbees.
It’s because they well and truly believe that the vast majority of their players aren’t much brighter than dogs.
Each encounter is designed, ever mob you kill has been tested and balanced; you stand here and hit this button and then that one and maybe you get a treat; maybe not. The devs took days making sure you had a place to stand and you knew which buttons to press, so all you have to do is stand HERE, open your mouth just so wide and leap into the air and WHAM, that Frisbee is in your mouth.
Good dog.
I’m not a MMO dev, so maybe all anyone can do these days is remake WoW. Next game that comes out that remakes WoW, I’m going to ask, “Why did they remake WoW?”. If EQ2 came out for the first time tomorrow, I would turn it on, ask myself, “Why did they remake WoW?” and close it down (though I might have asked why they remade EQ…). I would go to the head of every MMO developer and whenever they tried to talk about their game, I would say, “And when did you decide to remake WoW?”
When they protested, I’d add, “Do you think we enjoy catching Frisbees?”
MMOs these days are very tame. They are over-developed. Amusement parks where things seem dangerous but DON’T WORRY, it’s been tested over and over and there’s tons of people who will tell you just where to stand, when to open your mouth, when to jump, and how to land when you’ve got your Frisbee.
So here’s my little Manifesto:
1) We don’t want your crappy WoW remake. It’s been done by EQ, AC, DAoC, AO, FFXI, EQ2, and also WoW. All those games are still running, so we don’t need your clone.
2) We want encounters and situations that you have no idea how anyone would defeat. Challenge the players. And once it’s been defeated, it can’t be defeated again that same way.
3) If I’m on a Quest, it better not be a Quest to cross the street or kill a zillion of some nearby mob which isn’t bothering ANYONE. I do Quests for Holy Grails, or to Destroy the One Ring, or to Avenge my Family. Killing puppies in the North Downs isn’t a quest. It’s just sad.
4) Mobs shouldn’t stand around looking stupid. They should see you before you see them, scatter for the trees, call their friends, instead of just standing there while you kill them. I’ve read lots of times that devs feel giving mobs some actual AI would be too challenging for the average player.
5) If I am going to be in a battle, it better MEAN something. If I just killed one hundred hapless orcs, there better not ever be an orc within a league of me. They better be running screaming saying, OH NO! NOT HER! RUN!!! I should be being stalked by some sort of ORC GOD for killing so many of them. Yeah, maybe that orc god wouldn’t be kind to me when he caught up with me and took out payment for killing a hundred of his followers, but dammit, there should be consequences for killing stuff.
6) Make each battle mean something. I log in, I decide to set out and kill Orc #101. I talk to some peddlers, hear stories about a small, pathetic family of orcs, far away from the cities where raving adventurers rarely travel, only to find when I arrive that the Orc God has laid me a trap, and those little suckers are ready for me. And they kill me, just like that, because I thought they were just going to stand around acting stupid. I revive, prepare, sneak in, and after a long battle that takes half an hour, I’ve killed the last one (the two I saw and the three that were hiding in the trees and the velociraptor the last one let loose as it died), nearly met death a dozen times but by skill and cunning I managed to pull it off.
7. Heck, make your GAME mean something. Remember that I’m there, waiting to ask you why you remade WoW, but with spaceships. Make a game that you could honestly say will NOT appeal to everyone, but fifty thousand or so people will find exactly what they need, like back when Vanguard was supposed to be the game for hardcore players who loved the old OLD EQ. Adjust your business model accordingly. Remember that Neopets laughs at your puny subscriber numbers, and that’s nothing more than a web site with a bad UI and remakes of old arcade games.
8. Don’t lead us by the hand. Give us a world and the tools to make it our own, and we will. Give us YOUR tools, and what we make will astound you. Ever heard of Counterstrike? Played those amazing WC3 mods? Yeah, that was us, the dogs.
9. And by the way, we’re not dogs. Don’t you dare to speak to us as if we were. We’re as smart as you, and as dedicated as you.
10. It’s our world now. If you don’t let us make it our own in some meaningful manner, we’ll just go back to WoW.
11. Make our time in OUR world meaningful.
—
I’ve never developed an MMO, but I sure have played one long enough to know what I want. And that, simply, is to be surprised, scared, and challenged. There is nothing remotely challenging in any of the MMOs I have tried. Especially the newer ones… overdesigned; there’s a winning strategy and if you follow it you will win. How fun is that?
18 thoughts on “Dogs and Frisbees: Why your MMO sucks.”
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At a cerebral level, I agree with your every statement. A game should be fun, not a rat maze where we seek the cheese that is a level over and over. Why can’t there be a game where our Saturday night adventure group can face and work out a real challenge rather than another dungeon or quest that some of us have done already and if we haven’t, there is a detail write up on it only a bookmark away?
On the other hand, I look out at MMOs, and I pick the one that treats us most like dogs, ever ready to fetch the frisbee over and over again, and I see WoW, the most popular MMO ever.
We might have to go back to rolling 20 sided dice.
I would love to be chased by orcs. Maybe it’s time for MMOs to follow the long-time trend in gaming and let users pick a difficulty level when they create their character? Then again, I have trouble figuring out whether people would actually play a game where every encounter is a total challege, knowing that they have thousands more challenging battles before they reach cap (or even the next level). Personally, I like the occasional tough battle intermixed with a slew of really easy fights (grinding on blue cons to minimize downtime), and it’s not really hard to find that kind of situation in most games nowadays. I suppose that starting a “hard mode” server would put everyone on similar grounds, but still… comparing your hard mode character who is level 10 with 5 days played to someone’s easy mode character who is level 400 with 5 days played would be a bit depressing.
As far as mob intelligence, one thing I always hated about EQ2 — how can you have a 200 ft tall giant that can’t see past his nose? Their agro radii are seriously small. Maybe it’s time for SoE to equip them with some “Contact Lenses of Intelligence”, but I guess that would make traveling across TS and Sol Eye fairly difficult for the lowbie player.
I dunno, I thought traveling through Nektulos Forest used to be fun when there was a real question whether you’d survive. Freeport felt remote, isolated, definitely a place of danger and plots. If you were good, you did not go to Nektulos Forest or Lucan’s city. If you were evil, you were fiercely protective of your home.
Devs make fights easy because they require thousands of trivial battles in order to progress. If you could level with just one fight — but that fight might take you days of carefully scoping out an area, its monsters and challenges, getting the right gear, potions and so on — maybe even making common cause with the right friends — would it be worthwhile then?
I think it would.
This isn’t 1999, we all have serious hardware on our desks now, we should move beyond 1999 game play.
Here’s an example. You and I both need to kill orcs. I have to kill Thugar Yellowtusk, who stole my horse when I was routing out a nest of goblins. Patches was more than a horse — she was my friend — and the thought of Thugar riding her — or ROASTING her — is too much for me to bear. You need to kill One-eye Hawkbiter, a half-ogre said to be staying, along with Thugar, in the orc settlement of Greenblood Grotto in the foothills of the northern mountains.
We set off together, eventually entering seamlessly into an instanced Grotto. A scout soon sees us and alerts the settlement, and the orcs pick up weapons to defend themselves, as patrols start to run up into the hills to find us. Thugar is leading one of the patrols — on PATCHES! — but Hawkbiter, deciding this was not his fight, watches from within the settlement’s pub, the Slime Bog.
What do we do? Too many orcs to attack frontally, we wouldn’t have a chance. Do we go guerilla on them? Try to negotiate? Bring sacks of gold? Put on orc costumes and act smelly? I have no idea!
Compare with EQ2’s Clefts of Rujark, a thriving Orc community. Powerful enough to wipe out any adventuring party. But you can just walk right up to them and kill them, no problem. You can solo in a lot of it. Go ahead! They just exist to die.
Devs focus on making pretty pictures, but they are awful pretty already. Now maybe is the time to focus on making games fun to play and not just a brainless exercise in button mashing that makes you stupider the longer you play.
I think the sad reality is people choose the path of least resistance or stop playing. I think we say we want to be challenged, but I wonder..do we really want the challenge you are asking for? I recall trying Vanguard and feeling rather frustrated because I was exploring this vast world, but I had no feeling of progress being made. In some sense, I want every day to log in and feel like I’m making some progress. If I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and not progressing, I’d rather do something else. Maybe we are more like hamsters who need the pellet. They redesigned the Nek Forest of EQ2 because they probably saw people were leveling up in TS on giants and didn’t need to face the greater challenge of the Forest. I have to agree though.
However, I have to agree with you wholeheartedly about the realism of these games. I can kill an orc in front of a group of his buddies and they don’t even intervene. Now come on…
As I read the original post and all of the above replies I sat at my desk nodding, but after a little reflection I started to doubt that any of us really want anything more intelligent or challenging than we already have. Why? Well, if we truly wanted a quest to be thought provoking or challenging why have we all got allakhazam, eq2i.com or thottbot at the top of our bookmarks? Many of the raid encouters in EQ2 take a great deal of planning and specific raid setups and tactics to defeat them, but instead of working these out for ourselves we immediatly hop onto one of the online resources do see how it was defeated in beta.
similarly, I agree that almost all of the mobs in all MMO’s are ridiculously stupid, the giants quoted above being a great example. My particular bug-bear has always been the regular pathing of mobs, that means you can easily find a ‘safe spot’ in any zone where you wont get attacked. But consider the alternative; you enter Thundering steppes at level 20 and as soon as you get past the first tower you have Gnolls attacking from the right and undead from the left. Because these mobs are now more intelligent, they send back word to the rest of their nearby friends that you are there, and you are dead in an instant.
The one thing we need to consider at the end of the day is ‘are we having fun?’ and I think most of us are or we wouldnt be here.
I think there is one thing the dev’s of these games could do to improve the experience, and that is to focus more on storytelling. Some of the quests in EQ2 are wonderful simply because the story leads you from one point to the next, disguising the fact that you are simply kill ‘orc * X’. This is not true of the vast majority of quest tho.
Anyway, just my thoughts =)
Thundering Steps is a great example. You have the human lands from the Antonica zone to the docks and Thundermist Village. Undead to the north and south-east, gnolls to the northwest, giants to the southeast and centaurs to the south and west.
Now, none of the intelligent races (we’ll leave aside the undead) is going to do anything to truly inspire the wrath of the other side. So if you keep to yourself, the other intelligent races will likely leave you alone.
So if you can’t just go around randomly killing stuff (something it is hard to justify; why do we automatically kill anything we see in an MMO?), where’s the game?
Let’s flip this around. What if YOU were the gnoll, you lived in Splitpaw, and it was your job to see the murderous humans stayed in their place, and if anyone of a race who did not worship Brell set foot in the Underrealms, that would be an act of war? What if status was the currency of the realm, and you gained status by promoting the culture of your race? Maybe you could even set aside your mistrust of humans to ally with them for awhile to push back the giants, whose giant city of Jotunheim (remember EQ1’s Kael?) is expanding alarmingly?
Maybe the gnoll elders say the balloon has gone up, the humans have gone too far, now’s the time to make TS human-free, and it is your job to push the humans all the way back to Antonica, and the centaurs are going to help.
It’s no game if there is no way to have fun. I am just looking for fun of a more challenging sort. I don’t expect the devs to be able to provide this challenge — and I don’t think that is their job. The job of an MMO dev (as I see it) is to make a world, then give the players the tools to turn it into something uniquely theirs.
The very essence of an MMO is interacting with other players. Not necessarily to kill them, or to group with them and get going with some mindless killing, but to work together to build something new.
And this IS happening, here and there. Sony’s Littlebig World looks to be a possible example. Second Life has some of the elements (though it needs some game). Star Wars Galaxy had tons of player-created content. EVE Online, the players run the show!
So here and there, like the flowers of spring, we see it happening already. MMO devs who aren’t watching this and are still pushing out games that play like those of ten years ago… well, we have WoW already, and a dozen games that play in exactly the same way.
Imagine what Vanguard would have been like if the game had been built around Diplomacy? You might duel or fight off an attack, but maybe you would have to wheedle an appointment to the Imperial Guard before you were allowed weapons. Or maybe you’d have to apprentice to a blacksmith who was demanding good coin from your parents for the privilege before you could make the weapons for the imperial guard?
We’re so close. Someone is going to wake up and give the players the tools to make a game world a living place instead of a stupid place, and then, step back. Nobody can make content faster than a thousand dedicated fans. The devs will be more like editors, making sure the content fits into the game world, or like collaborators, being inspired by the players as they themselves inspire.
I would so play that game. The hurdles are huge (you’re talking about increasing the average content of an MMO by magnitudes) and it would take the kind of dedication you don’t see in the normal MMO fan base, but I would not only play it but I’d preo-order and whine for a beta key. 🙂
I’m not optimistic that it or anything like it will be made anytime soon though. For starters, producers see 8 million WoW subscribers and they want to duplicate that success. Nobody wants to take risks, which is why we’re seeing titles such as LotRO and Warhammer, 2 established properties with a built in fan base. And while I’m looking forward to Warhammer Online, I have no expectations that it will revolutionize MMO play in even the smallest of ways.
We the players share a lot of the blame. We share it for the same reason that we share the blame for movies like Rise of the Silver Surfer, every Wayans brothers movie ever made, and the tons of other drivel that Hollywood shovels out to our eager movie-going faces. We as consumers don’t demand good storytelling and interesting plot lines. We only expect mindless entertainment, instant gratification and cool special effects. And in that respect you can’t really blame the producers.
Players have to demand this game. Right now we are demanding games where gnolls stand around waiting to be slaughtered. Producers are happy to oblige.
I don’t think the developers believe their players are stupid. Quite the contrary, most developers are frustrated by how quickly players will find a way past the hardest content they put up.
The problem with having meaningful quests in an MMO is that it simply doesn’t work in that context. You can’t have a meaningful quest to kill the Dark Lord since EVERYONE is a subscriber and only letting one person do it is a good way to shut down your revenue stream. Therefore, even the biggest and baddest of the bad guys have to constantly reset so someone else can have a go. Which means nothing you do as a player matters since everything constantly resets and nothing truly changes.
That means there can never truly be a story in current (developer-scripted) PvE MMORPGs, only backdrop. (I distinguish the two because a backdrop doesn’t change, you simply walk around in front of it.) And because nothing changes, the motivation for players to continue playing is simply increasing some form of statistic (a level, skill, attribute, wealth, or better equipment.)
PvP MMORPGs can avoid some of that item-centricity (though many of them don’t) because it can provide an alternate McGuffin, such as conquering virtual real estate (such as castles in Lineage 2, etc.)
A next generation PvE MMORPG (in my humble opinion) is one that will provide a new McGuffin other than increasing character statistics. Everquest, EQ2, Vanguard, WoW, and FFXI are all very stat/item-centric games. We’ve seen enough of those, thank you very much. We need a new motivation. That can be through one of two ways:
1) Tell a real story. A real story has a beginning, middle, and an END. Have a game over screen. Motivate the players towards a goal. Not every player can be a hero sure, but they can all play a role in some combined PvE effort. Since we know that our quests won’t be trivialized by a level cap increase, we can focus on making it epic; the world should change over the course of the story. Towns can be saved or destroyed based on how successful the players are. The point is, we know the developers can’t create content faster than the players consume it. We read books faster than the authors write them. We understand that. SO don’t string us along forever.
There’s a reason why X-Files hemmoraghed fans towards its final seasons. People want resolution. Design a story with an ending in mind (or multiple, since players should affect it.) How do they continue to make money? Simple. The same way TV shows and Hollywood movies make money. Tell another story with the same props later (game world, monsters, maps, backstory.) But the world should change over the course of each episode.
and/or
2) Learn from PvP MMOs: have the players generate content — motivate them to compete in some fashion (even indirectly). Have unique magical artifacts that they need to acquire. Perhaps those artifacts need to housed somewhere and defended, so maybe the player-run guilds that acquire them have to create player-made dungeons to do so.
We can have PvP without combat, without turning things into a gankfest that attracts immature players. And by giving the players the proper toolsets, they can create content as fast as they themselves consume it.
Great post Tipa. I think the balance between whats fun and whats challenge is a tough one, although one very interesting point you make is to have a game designed not for the masses, but a target audience. Not sure how well that would pitch to the suits in accounting, but an interesting idea.
I would be curious to get your feedback on some of my design ramblings over at my blog. I have a feeling we have similar roots (UO for me, early EQ for you) and see similar issues with the MMOs of today.
I agree that games need to be more intuitive wth more participation from the players (player-based content) and challenging. You might want to check out some of my recent posts on my blog which talk about the lack of creative quest writing, player run events, player created content, and town-building, all things that I believe go hand-in-hand with making the players feel part of a vast world that they feel more involved in and truly believe in. You might find them interesting.
I’ll definitely check out your blogs. I think it is important for we PLAYERS to continually challenge MMO devs. If they think we enjoy pablum, they are happy enough to provide pablum.
I know of at least two companies that will be making a platform and a base game that can be infinitely extended by the players. I do wonder if these efforts — you can’t really call them games, they are more like platforms — will actually be fun. Because they are games, after all.
@Wombat — you can’t look at WoW, EQ2 and their copycats with their big bright glowing symbols that scream “Come here and I will tell you what to do!” and tell me the devs have high opinions of their players. And obviously there is a market for this sort of game, and I played WoW in beta and after release, and still play EQ2, so I don’t deny that it’s nice having a brainless game to relax in.
Where do you go, though, for a challenge? Where do you go when you want to make a difference? You’re absolutely right, you can’t have quests to “Kill the Dark Lord” for everyone to complete. It’s pointless. There’s three different ways to kill Mayong Mistmoore in EQ2 — Contested in Mistmoore, Instanced in Mistmoore Inner Sanctum, and Instanced in New Tunaria Throneroom. Or you could go back to EQ1 and kill him in the Demiplane of Blood.
Your option 1 — tell a story. I dunno. People consume content at different rates and it’s hard to tell a real story. A book in MMO format would be a big challenge… LotRO tries this, I think, but since you are always working on side stories, while the main story takes place off camera, it seems somewhat less exciting.
Option 2 — where the players create the content — is precisely what I’m talking about.
@Syncaine — there’s a bunch of tools to roll your own MMO at the moment; a talented group of friends could just use the Unreal 2 engine and put together a very minimal MMO very quickly. There are a lot of art assets (most of which you do have to pay for, but they are available) for people who can’t model, easy build landscapes, so it’s very possible for people to just do a proof-of-concept MMO on the cheap that could be extended by anyone with the same freely available tools. There’s actually someone who took the EQ engine, and made an original game on top of it… I’ve been meaning to give that a look for awhile.
@Kanthalos — I don’t doubt that players will generate a lot of the same ‘kill ten rats’ quests that fill MMOs today. But occasionally there will be some great ones that will make the whole thing amazing — I’m thinking of some of the incredible NWN and WC3 mods I’ve seen.
What I would do:
The game world is a setting. There isn’t a story. It’s up to players to create the stories and the quests.
Essentially the game is toolset wrapped up in a game that gives players the power to create their own dungeons full of quests and monsters. There is a game outside of this – essentially open lands where players can go out hunting – the world is full of a great variety of creatures and items that players can find to use in their own dungeons.
The whole game would revolve around players creating their own games.
The players can create stories for their dungeons, fill it full of monsters and traps and quests.
Dungeons are rated by the players that play them, and each month the highest rated dungeons get prizes and the lower ones are destroyed… This prevents the game world being full of all rubbish.
Prizes would be unique things that can be put into Dungeons… for example – if you’re dungeon is the top rated in one month you could win a massive one-of-a-kind demon to use as a boss.
@Indraunt: That’s it. That’s it exactly.
I do think devs should give some skeletal structure to the game, because not everyone is a content creator. And in the end, there still needs to be a game there — SWG’s failing, IMO. All sandbox, no game.
It’s not easy. It’s a hell of a lot harder than coming up with pretty screenshots. But that’s why they get the big bucks.
Well the game wouldn’t only be about making dungeons. There would be a game there too 😛 There would be pre-made dungeons and outdoor areas to explore… Essentially I think the game would end up breeding two kinds of gamers – Dungeon Makers and Dungeon Runners. With this you could expect to see mixed guilds working together to create really top dungeons – essentially their own little worlds, pooling the resources of Runners and Makers to make the best experience possible.
I dunno… I’m a believer of ‘Keep it simple, stupid’… So although I love the *idea* of having huge open-ended games like SWG, I just don’t really see it working. I think for a game to really work, you need to really focus on only a handful of things… WoW with its simple, accessable PVE experience, WAR with its focus of PVP. I don’t think Conan will do too greatly simply because it has such a grand scope.
Maybe if we all continue to rant and rant and rant, someone will finally listen to us.
The current state of design is just a single player RPG gone multiplayer in a persistent world. We are all playing the same single player RPG, just together. Sure we can group, but its just an amusement park. Let’s all get in line and ride the Vomitron again.
Sure, there are times when I’m in a mindless hack and slash mood. I don’t see why there can’t be some content that would be “accessible” for this lower input type of play, but I also don’t see why it can’t “matter” and “fit” in a better world context where the playerbase shapes and changes the world.
There is so much more horsepower available now, why must it all be directed at making things shiny? Not that shiny is bad, but come on. Help us out a bit.
Good post.
If any of you are wanting to have a game built that really satisifes, you might consider doing what I have done: find a game in development that you think is a good one to support, and get on board, share your ideas and help build something truly new and engaging and rich. If you haven’t got the skills you need, go learn them.
I am helping to build PlaneShift, and it’s all built by volunteer effort. It will be a long, long road for us to get to something we’ll call version 1.0, but I believe the project is well worth building. What we have now is the first 30 pages of a 1000-page book, but we will keep building it one word at a time.
I don’t believe commercial efforts will be able to truly create something satisfying for the niche market that the is the intelligent adult, not when there are millions of more-straightforward players with disposable income who are quite happy catching the simple frisbees out there. The easier road towards a profit is to make something prettier and (and sexier) and more satisfying on the reptile-brain level. Those of us who want to get more involved on more levels will need to build our own playgrounds.
That’s a really great suggestion, Venae. I’ll definitely look into PlaneShift. Complaining about the state of MMOs is one thing. Changing the state of MMOs is truly work worth doing.
I’ve designed an MMO and also a “proof of concept” minigame which is small enough to actually implement; I’ve been waiting for the tech to get to a state where I can implement the game without worrying about implementing the engine as well. It’s looking like that’s happening right now…
 Oh, cool — PlaneShift can run under Linux! I like games that run under Linux.
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