I’m not a competitive player in MMOs. I’m more interested in the shared-world aspect than I am in the struggle for supremacy between player characters. I don’t begrudge anyone that if it’s their preference, of course — I just don’t want to participate in it too frequently. I’d rather explore the nooks and crannies of the world than fight stuff.
That’s not how most MMOs work, though. Most MMOs have an implicit competition against other PCs, in addition to any explicit competitions they have. The implicit competition is a nebulous competition, too, which is a disenfranchising aspect. There’s not really a plainly stated finish line. Sure, things like level caps, endgame content, and elite equipment exist, but attaining those is an illusory achievement, or at least a subjective one.
Which means, then, that obtaining that piece of equipment or playing through that story arc can really be taken on its own terms only. Someone else is going to kill the dragon, too. Someone else is going to earn that potent weapon.
My play style — more of a participation style than a play style, actually — is undone by that paradox, too. Someone else has seen the nifty area I’m exploring. Tons of other players have been there before me. A level designer has built the thing in the first place. I’m not discovering, I’m treading where someone else has already been. And because I’m guided through the experience by the game’s content, those paths are pretty well-worn.
Now, these aren’t inherently flaws of the game in question. They’re that negative space between what the game is designed to do, and what I actually want. Levels exist, therefore I want them. More accurately, I know I’m supposed to want them, even though most times I don’t actually give a shit, so I pursue them even though I don’t care about them. The result is that I feel like I have to race through the world, gobbling the content as quickly as it’s presented to me. I don’t have the time to read mission text, let alone luxuriate in it. There’s more to find, more for me to get. I don’t have time to explore like I want to because I know that’s not really what the game’s about. I know it’s about leveling and acquisition, so that’s what I do, even though I don’t want to.
Few of the shared worlds that currently exist allow player activities to shape those worlds. Even the ones that do don’t allow complete control over the state of the world. In most cases, you’re interacting with a partial diorama, a pretty box that’s going to reset for the next passerby, so he can have the same experience you do.
That’s where the game experiences converge, and that’s where the stories offered by the environment are told. When I explore a place I think is fascinating, that’s cool to me. When a hardcore PVPer smashes another player, that’s cool to him. When a crafter finally obtains the skill and raw materials to make a rare item, that’s cool to her.
It’s different around a tabletop. The gamemaster crafts an environment that only the other players around the table get to experience. The players’ characters can undertake any action and change the world as they will, because no one else is going to come by and require that an NPC respawn to offer them the quest, too.
That’s not to say the tabletop is better, however. At the tabletop, you’re not meeting a potential infinitude of other characters drawn from beyond the boundaries of geography. The gamemaster has the responsibility of filling in those blanks. And building the world. And coming up with at least a sketch of a plot, in order to keep events moving forward. That’s a lot of work. It’s not always rewarding for the gamemaster.
Meeting other people in the world is enjoyable as well, but I find it less so if those meetings are overtly and exclusively competitive. For other people — lots of other designers with whom I work, for example — the competition is the experience.
The answer, then, is that there’s no sweet spot, no secret ingredient that puts all the answers in place for every play style. You can set a place for everyone, but not everyone’s going to enjoy the dinner, as it were. Not every game needs to cater to everyone. It’s okay to leave a portion of the audience unserved if your design goals mean that those people aren’t really your audience. To paraphrase Sid Meier, one solid game is better than two experiences (of whatever quality) under one roof that conflict with each other. That’s why the Civilization games never bother to incorporate military-sim tactics and why Street Fighter (er, not a Sid Meier game, I know) doesn’t have puzzle-solving.
To bring that back under the auspices of, um, what I was talking about in the first place, look at World of Warcraft. It’s a game that pretty much wants you to fight monsters in PVE. You can explore, sure, but look at how the game rewards you: with a few paltry experience points whenever you find something new. You get twice as many experience points for killing a monster in the location as you do for discovering the location itself. Exploring the world isn’t the thrust of tha game, fighting things in it is. That’s not a condemnation, that’s a game rewarding you for behaving how it wants you to. If you don’t want to fight monsters, WoW isn’t the game for you.
If a game’s not for you, no amount of wanting to like that game is going to throw the switch for you. You’re supposed to be having fun. You don’t want to have to try to like something.
Final Fantasy XXI, in my case. It just misses me. Final Fantasy is one of my favorite video game franchises, but FFXI leaves me cold. It takes too long to do anything, I don’t like the character race designs, and I don’t like that so much of the gameplay practically requires grouping. That’s not to say I don’t like any of it — quite the contrary. I like a lot of the character and critter design, I like the feel of the world and its environments, and I like the music. If there were some way I could play it by myself, like a traditional Final Fantasy title, that might change a significant amount. But that’s not what they’ve done, so I have to acknowledge that it’s not a game I want to play…
…as much as I want to want to play. I want a game that appeals to me, I don’t want to change my definition of what appeals to me. And that’s fine.
Pity Myst Online: Uru Live had to shut down; it sounds right up your alley. Well, to some extent.Characters had no stats, had no levels. There was an overarching story, and the only metric for your completion of that story was how many worlds ("Ages") or puzzles you’d completed. While there were public areas, they could largely be ignored. By default you’d be exploring Ages on your own, unless you specifically invited someone to join you.So plenty of opportunity to explore, to sit back and enjoy the scenery, whatever you like.There are plans to push it out as Open Source, and a push from some of the users for procedurally-generated Ages, so when you step in for the first time, you’ll truly be the first person ever to see that particular Age.
Ah, but the instancing in Uru sounds like it’d undermine the "massively multiplayer" for me. Was that the case? Is it a massively multiplayer solo game? I didn’t have a chance to play it after it was announced they’d be taking it down.
Not trying to be snide, here, but with regard to your issues of exploration and discovery I’m motivated to ask: In what other areas do you find yourself unwilling or unable to suspend your disbelief? I’ve never known an [X]RPG player so focused on being the first to reach someplace new that it stopped him from imagining it when it wasn’t so. I’m intrigued.
I don’t think it breaks suspension of disbelief, I think my problem is that there’s no motivation for me to hang out and appreciate. "Okay, great. Fungus Cave. Check. Gotta move on to Wyvern Aerie or all the other level-tens are going to have the Polymorph Hat before me." I don’t even care about the Polymorph Hat, man, but since that’s the currency of the game, I’m forced to.
You touch on one of my major areas of suspension of disbelief in MMOs, and one of the primary reasons they’re glorified single-player games in my opinion, and not capable of being roleplaying games. I get my group together, we go kill Bruticus the Destroyer of Worlds. Huzzah! Except, we didn’t actually kill him. Other groups are out there killing him on a daily basis.I like how World of Warcraft took one step toward addressing this in the latest expansion, wherein when certain events happen, it actually changes the world for you. A given area is decimated or on fire, for example. For players who haven’t experienced that quest line, it looks a different way (they are in a different instance of that area).Ideally, I’d like to see a system that provides truly individual challenges in a persistent world. I guess a fully PvP world is one way to accomplish that. But I feel that there must be some better solutions out there. For example, you defeat the enemy, but at the end of the encounter, they escape in typical villain fashion. After looting their stronghold, you leave, but they return to amass power again. Or maybe you just thought you killed them, and they later come back (though I suppose that would be more a thing for a story arc). Or… something.
Yeah, I think MySpace is a better MMORPG than most MMOs, because they "player" contributions are what are important. Then again, most MMORPGs play really lightly on the RPG aspect, even to the point where roleplayers are mocked for doing what’s a third of the acronym. But there’s always been that disparity between tabletop RP and computer RP.And yeah, that elusive something is the philosopher’s stone for the medium.
That feeling of being left behind is a level-based issue, not just an MMO issue. I’ve seen it in tabletop D&D games and other RPGs for sure. You know the situation where somebody misses a campaign for two or three weeks and then thinks about quitting because everyone else is far ahead of him? It’s that. Come along or be left behind, but without the regulatory device of a quorum or a GM to stop the hardest of the hard-core players from playing all the time. This is just one more place where MMOs suffer from losing the GM dynamic (though they gain a lot by dropping it, too).The best fix I know in tabletop is to have PCs gain XP along with the rest of the group even if they’re not in attendance. There’s no great analog for this in an MMO, but EVE’s offline skill training is close, and bonus XP in your WoWs and LOTROs is meant to be, I think. It would be interesting, though, if you could gain XP even when not adventuring by partnering with another PC or group and "inheriting" a cut of theirs’. So you can craft or wander or RP without falling behind the curve. (To the extent that falling behind matters — the rush up the level ladder is often artificial and inferred by players from, what, the basic architecture of a level-based system?) But we’re dangerously close to my first scheduled D&D 4E release, now.