gamedesign.dev: MMOs

Everything's better with friends, be it a good cake, a fun game, or mourning a lost family member. So it should stand to reason that playing an RPG with friends is only going to make it even better. I don't think the current model of multiplayer RPG, the MMORPG, works very well for that, though. Not to say it can't work, but the current trends just don't seem fun, from a game design standpoint. Not to imply you can't have fun with it, though, but then, people had fun playing with a hoop and stick back in the day.

First off: what is the goal of an MMO? The first and most apparent goal is "level up". Which isn't that bad, provided the system is fun enough to withstand a bit of leveling, but it's not really solid enough to be a standalone goal. After all, what happens when you hit the level cap? Most MMOs have figured out this problem, and offer plenty of content aside from that for when you've finished leveling. Which is all well and good, but there's an issue here anyway: unless you and your friends all work at the same time (or all max out your characters) it's nearly impossible to balance out your party without either getting the lower level players killed or making the higher leveled ones waste their time.

But that's not a big enough issue for most people, since people who are dedicated enough can easily get their level up to the maximum. This lets them play all the postgame content alongside their friends, which begs the question: why make people slog through a good twenty (or more) levels to get to the actual meat of the game? Of course, the obvious counter-argument is that there's no merit to leveling up in the first place if you do that, and balancing for people who do choose to level up is difficult, leading to leveling either being unrewarding or implicitly required anyway because everyone else does it.

As for the actual postgame content itself, in most MMOs, it seems to revolve around specific bosses meant to be tackled by anywhere from a party of four to an entire clan/guild/whatever. I don't really have a problem with that, except for two points. The first is, of course, that the bosses all have a strategy to them which, depending on the MMO in question, ranges from careful planning to outright gimmickry that leads to instant death if any of your twenty teammates forgets the rules for a second. These strategies aren't usually hinted at anywhere in-game that I'm aware of, which is a problem because that means all your party members have to be informed of the strategy through outside communication, which isn't a surefire thing.

Additionally, there's the equipment to be considered. A lot of the fun in these games comes from obtaining rare equipment to show off, but the problem is that you're competing against a crowd of other people your level or lower for that same prize. If an enemy only drops one Shiny Doohickey every ten minutes, then the other players will exploit every trick in the book to get their hands on it, especially if it's above and beyond what you can get by easier means, such as NPC shops. And for those players lucky/cunning/cheating enough to get that Shiny Doohickey, they're at a marked advantage compared to other players of their level. Which is what getting rare stuff is about, sure, but as with bosses, it's not ever really hinted at except through other players, who probably won't be willing to give away where they got the Shiny Doohickey.

Which leads right into my next point: player versus player. After all, what better way to show off your hard-earned levels and rare loot from postgame boss battles than by beating your opponent over the head with it? Well, let me put it this way: ever tried ascending a healer in NetHack? Now take that, but spawn a leocrotta five tiles away from you. Most MMOs simply aren't balanced enough for player versus player content, since each class has a role to fulfill in multiplayer parties (tank, DPS, heal, et cetera), and not all of these roles can feasibly do battle one-on-one against an equally-leveled character.

Now, since I don't play MMOs anymore (too bored of level-grinding a fresh character in each one) I can't really comment on the state of them as a whole. If you want an example of one I don't hate, I offer you Realm of the Mad God. It's more of a shooter than a traditional RPG, and it's still new and rough around the edges, but it manages to preserve the elements of an MMO without being completely unbearable. The first thing it does is grant full XP for monster kills to anyone in a good-sized radius around the player that delivered the killing blow. Further, other players are highlighted on the minimap, and you can teleport to any player in the server at any time (although be careful around those level 20 players). This encourages players to stick together, even if you've never met, since your tactics can usually work in good concert together. Additionally, there's no currency. Monsters have a chance to drop items on their defeat, and each class has a weapon slot, an armor slot, a ring slot, and an ability item slot. Of these, rings are class-universal, but all the others have class-restrictions, which means that if you have a rogue in your party, they can use the rare cloak you win, and if you don't, you can loot it to trade in the main lobby for something you can use, or hand it off to your newbie pal. Finally, since your character has the same basic moveset across classes, a decent player can even teleport right next to their high-level buddy and survive against tough enemies long enough to quickly match up to their level. All of this encourages cooperation, which any MMO player can tell you is the core of the genre.