Editorial: By any other name

By Jeffrey Philipp | November 5, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: champions online, cryptic studios, Editorial, Editorials, Everquest, Global Agenda, Hi-Rez Studios

So hello again mighty spacemen of the future.

I’ve been spending some time out in the wild internet savanna recently, and the sheer variety that I’ve come across has prompted me to ask myself a question.

Basically I’m just wondering what exactly it is that makes one game a Massively Multiplayer game while others are simply classified as regular online games. I’m not here to be a snob about it or anything, it’s simply something that I’ve noticed.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning here, that generally speaking almost every game that has come out in this particular genre for the last ten years has been in some fashion modeled on EverQuest. That’s not inherently a bad thing, EverQuest was a fantastic game, especially for it’s time. Heck it’s still kicking today, albeit with a much smaller crowd than it used to have. The one downside to that however, is that when you have everything trying to be the same game you end up with a very bland gaming landscape.

Zip ahead a few years and you have the same thing, except you can replace EverQuest with World of Warcraft. Once again, not a bad idea to see what the winners are doing, but it gets boring when they’re all the same.

And that’s the train of thought that brought me to my little “huh” moment. Basically, these days, I’ve heard a number of people, not many mind you, but some try to say that games which are indeed legitimately massive in many senses of the word, and certainly multi-player in at least some cases, that take place online, are somehow not Massively Multiplayer Online games. Somehow it seems we’ve created a situation for ourselves. Some people believe that you’re not playing an MMORPG unless you have an action bar and levels and gear, and if it doesn’t look like something that they’re familiar and comfortable with it should not be included in the list of games that you can find on a site such as this.

Now if that was as far as the problem went I would be happy to ignore the folks who say that and take care of making my own judgement about games individually. However, it happens that the people who make these games do end up hearing from the people who have a very narrow view of what this genre is, and since this is by no means an industry with fat margins (excluding Blizzard; but let’s not go into the outliers right now) they become just that little bit more risk averse. And when they get that little bit more risk averse they become a little less willing to try something that might be new and might work, and might just be the thing that makes all these games into solid gold ROCK HARD AWESOME!

If you’ve ever read any of my other articles, or any of my reviews you’ll know that one of the first things I’m going to bring up is story and plot and writing. And you’ll also know the second thing that I’m going to bring up is what a game or system does differently. I bring these things up in this order before all the other more mundane aspects because I honestly believe that these are the things that are most important in judging a game, not only from the aspect of how fun it’s going to turn out, but also how it contributes to the body of work that is the art (and yes, I do mean art cause I’m a nerd that way) of video game design.

Basically think about if nothing had ever been added to the first person shooter formula for twenty years, since Wolfenstein. There is absolutely NO WAY the genre as a whole would be as big as it is today if all we got was a prettier Wolfenstein every nine months. Even the sports franchises from EA, which are notorious for being re-releases and roster updates tend to add something every few iterations that makes the game deeper and just a little more involved. The same thing should be true for our beloved online games, but currently many of the developers are just a little bit afraid to try something radical, or even slightly off message.

More than a little of the problem is due to the production of games as a whole becoming more and more costly, with MMO projects being even more so; and the hit driven nature of the games themselves. It becomes difficult to predict just what’s going to take off, and I understand that I just also wish that more dev houses were willing to try new things like Cryptic, or Hi-Rez with Champions Online or Global Agenda (Of course it’s really easy to say that when it’s someone else’s money, but we’re talking about ideals here).

The one thing that I think we, as players, can do to help this process though, is to perhaps widen our vision and our nets, and allow a little more latitude in what we try. I know there has got to be a few people out there like me that are happy to have a game which features a tagline of “No Elves”, but even the people who like their Elves, I implore you to be a little more adventurous in your game choices.

One other thing that I think we can do, that I will likely expand upon on another day, is stop marrying ourselves to games. The forums are lousy with this; go into any community you like and you’re almost certain to find in the top two pages, if not the top page, some small group of individuals debating over which game is better and how the other game should never EVER be played under any circumstances, because it’s not the game they like. Seriously, this kind of display is infantile, if you try it and don’t like it, fine, stop playing it and shut up about it, but the key to that particular situation is to TRY IT!

There has never been, in any situation I have been able to find, a game that actually and actively prevented you from playing another game AS WELL AS the one you are so worked up about. Saying that you can only play one game, and this happens with online games more than most I find, is nothing more than ridiculous fan boy talk, no matter how level headed you sound.

So to nutshell for everyone, all MMO’s don’t need elves, try new stuff, and you can play more than one game at a time.

Looking forward to getting some discussion going on how Hub and spoke games and instance focused games aren’t “true” MMO’s now.