What MMO would I unmake?

Reader Elench dislikes EQ2 so much that he wishes it would die a swift death. Heartless Gamer wants to wipe EverQuest from the pages of history. Keen wants to zap Star Wars Galaxies.

Seems everyone has some certain game that holds a dark corner of their heart captive.

It took me a lot of thought before I finally realized that there was, in fact, one game that should have never been made, that constrained the MMO industry in untenable ways against which nearly every modern MMO still struggles.

A game that, if it had never been made, would have made today’s games different and far more enjoyable.

You’ll have to click through to find out what game that is.

There are some MMOs I just didn’t enjoy. Star Wars Galaxies I found slow and uninspiring; the mechanic of running long distances so I could strafe tree stumps for awhile for money was about as far from a Star Wars experience as I could imagine, so I tried dancing in a cantina, but that was largely people who had macro’d their characters to dance, play instruments and do specials while they were off doing other things. I know people found things to like in that game, but playing SW:G just left gaping holes in my life where time disappeared to no good end.

FFXI Online had the most punishing grouping requirements of any game I have ever tried, with their three-level group limit beyond which experience would tank; the need to find areas with large numbers of similar mobs and little competition in order to get good experience; and the absolute requirement to only user CERTAIN abilities at CERTAIN times in order to do the best damage to keep the flow of experience smooth. When it worked, it was amazing, but it didn’t work often. Plus, like many Asian games, it was saturated with farmers and gold (er, gil) spammers.

I don’t think either of those games should be expunged from the pages of history.

I certainly don’t think Everquest or World of Warcraft should be retconned out of existence. Both were extremely important games in the genre, and both will serve as an inspiration – and a warning – for games to come, regardless of how much they are loved or hated today.

I’d go back even further.

I’d wipe out Dungeons & Dragons. Not the MMO – the pen and paper game itself.

I’m sorry, Mr. Gygax, but the MMO world would have been better off if you had never had the inspiration to turn storytelling into numbers, tables and rolls of the dice.

By quantifying heroism, D&D cheapened it. No longer could mighty heroes beat unguessable odds in their quests for wealth and adventure. Now those odds were entirely guessable. You could no longer be stronger than a horse, unless you subtracted the horse’s strength score from your own and rolled a d6 to check. Mighty wizards could no longer blast back a swarm of goblins; instead, they could sear 2d4 of them for 2d8 hit points of damage each, maximum four, in a two meter radius from the center of their attack.

Now that legendary deeds could be reduced to a small number of figures scratched out on a character sheet, storytelling itself could be reduced to a decision tree ruled by chance, and even a computer could easily do the job.

Computer programmers took that one concept, basic to D&D – that everything could be reduced to math and chance – and made from it an industry that is now so entirely riddled with numbers that they themselves have become the driving force in MMOs. Raise your strength from 539 to 540! Have an intelligence score of 871 but fervently wish for a new hat that would bring that to 873, because then your spells would hit for five more points of damage against mobs with ten million points of health.

We’ve missed our chance to be heroes and legends and turned instead into accountants, balancing risk and reward and running analysis on opportunity cost.

Without the inevitable attraction that a neatly quantified Weltanschauung would have to the socially awkward, role playing, divorced from math, might have spread to the world in a different way, one more focused on plot, story and adventure than numbers and dice and the thought of doing something so intensely social as adventuring would have been thought an odd thing to try and do on a computer.

In fact, here in the 21st century, when computers are now finally powerful enough to, perhaps, bring this level of storytelling to players, the legacy of D&D has left us instead in a world of cookie-cutter games more or less exactly the same as each other, when your character is nothing but a set of numbers and all your actions ruled by chance.

We would all have been better off had Dungeons and Dragons never been written.