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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Make our time in OUR world meaningful.
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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?