Cookie-cutter MMORPGs, you’re killing me

The following is a guest post from Mark Joslin – a friend of MMOMFG, a student of Computer Science at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and an unwavering Ultima Online fan. You can read more from Mark on his blog as well as on Twitter. A version of this post first appeared on Mark’s blog on April 7, 2010.

Cookie-cutter MMORPGS, you’re killing me

Call me crazy, but I find today’s MMORPGs to be painfully dull. Maybe they are all crafted for 12 year olds and simplicity is the key to profits, but come on! Something’s got to give! In today’s MMORPG, you can:

• Pick a race/class
• Level up that class
• Do mundane quests to get special items
• Join a group and run into a dungeon over and over again to get that super special item
• Bitch to each other about who gets to keep that special item
• PVP with one another in an enclosed environment where nothing is really at stake (except maybe you have to respawn or something)
• Repeat

Not only does today’s MMORPG hold your hand to ensure nothing bad happens to you, it’s nothing but a pursuit after a random drop that the game will continue to lure players in with. The PvP is laughable, and can we just do away with levels? What the hell is so great about levels?

I’m sick of it, and call for a return to an Ultima Online-like MMO experience. UO had skills that could be mastered by doing specific actions. So instead of just picking some cutout class like Blacksmith, you just went in and got to mining. And you totally sucked at it. It took forever to make a profit while you tightly pinched onto that precious 1000 gold you started out with. The only persons willing to buy from you were the NPC vendors. It was an uphill climb between begging the rich to lend you a hand, and avoiding getting killed while you mined. In fact, it was better to make some connections first to ensure your safety out there. That is, if you didn’t want to use 600 of that 1000 gold to buy a horse for a quick escape. Regardless, hopefully you had real life friends who could look out for you. Ultima Online could get a bit stressful, no doubt. But you know what? That was what made it such a great MMO experience for those that were lucky enough to play it in its prime (until EA bought it). I sat around hunting crappy monsters for crappy gold, talking to strangers, figuring out how the game even works, and loved every second of it.

This was a real MMORPG. This was an MMORPG that had players shouting in Britannia Bank that they were selling X item and/or giving portals to their shops to market their items. This was an MMORPG that allowed you to barter for the best price, shop around different players’ shops, and talk to your friends or guild members about what the best “mall” was. This was an MMORPG where land was a precious commodity, and you could own your own home (or castle) and sell that same home. In essence, UO had the perfect free market. We all worked for what we had, and we all started out with near nothing. Nothing was guaranteed unless it was in your bank, and the only protection was the city guards (which were only activated by yelling “guards!”). Talk about a libertarian’s fantasy.

Today, we have games that keep your characters as safe as possible. They start out and are led through the entire process. They go on quests and are awarded with items and money. They rise in ranks. Maybe they pick up a rare item or two as they grind away and sell it for some money. Maybe they buy that rare item with the money they earned. Soon they start getting into groups, and go after the big loot.

All I can say is “meh.” It was fun in the beginning, but now it’s become such the norm in the industry that it’s a total bore fest. There have been small changes to try to spice things up like Age of Conan’s mouse style combat wherein you move the mouse to slash, instead of just auto attacking, but it’s too little, too late. I hear the argument that players in Ultima Online turned out exactly as warriors or mages or whatever the preset classes are in new MMOs – but that’s not exactly true. There were craftsmen who doubled as mages so they could teleport around. There were those who could wield a sword while also doing a few spells. The system was very customizable and, to this day, I still see new innovations upon it (in the free private pre-EA UO servers).

Now, I’m not saying that everyone should pick Ultima Online up again. Rather, I think we need to reevaluate the merits of this system so we can break out of the jail cell of levels, experience, quests, and system awarded loot. Instead, let’s start looking at an alternative system that provides players with more power:

• A set of skills that enables customization on the player’s part. These skills can be leveled up slowly by doing the appropriate action.
• A system where the players run bartering and trading. Limit the number of crazy-special loot drops in order to keep the system simple & fair. PvP benefits greatly from this.
• A system that doesn’t guarantee safety — this non-guarantee of safety, after all, creates one of the best clashes a player can be actively involved in: good versus evil.
• A system where you can buy your own houses, set up vendors (shops), and sell these houses.

Until this happens, we just see more of the same old same old with games like Final Fantasy XIV by Square-Enix, who may just manage to create two major letdowns back to back in the span of two years. Star Wars: The Old Republic looks like a possible Planetside, but I’m not entirely sure as I don’ t see any indication of how a class system levels up.

All in all, I miss my old game – a game that EA brutally murdered. Even the private servers that started out well intentioned corrupted it with all sorts of paid item crap to cover their own costs. Ultima Online, alongside so many other classics, shows how great game-play ultimately trumps production values any day of the week. In general, I think the game industry needs to re-prioritize away from production values and into creativity. Until then, I’ll see you in one of the many free private servers of UO.

*YouTube clip courtesy of user Brodster85

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