A rant on online games

This is going to be a very “Max can’t sleep so he’s writing down his thoughts for no good reason” kind of post, so if you’re not interested in the subject feel free to skip it. This one won’t be on the quiz. With that out the way I’m going a’ranting.

Online games. Let me say first and foremost that the key aspect of the game is something that will always be out of the game makers’ control, the people. The people you game with can make or break any game you play. This is particularly true because of group play. While there can be all kinds of fun playing solo in one of these games group play is almost always better. I love being a being of unstoppable arcane power, but it’s nice to know that there’s someone with armor and a shield that can stand in front of me while I work my magic. And everyone loves healers. They’re like crack.

Anyway. Certain games have, I feel, better realized what this means to the game and put in some systems to help with it. The best example of this is the City of Heroes friend finder. Friend finder shows everyone in the area who is looking for a group, their level, and their class (archetype in that game but you get the message). It’s a shame that CoH was the one that did it so well too, because CoH is the one where it’s least necessary to have a specific group setup. The beauty of that game was its simplicity, so a group of 9 of anything could bring major pain. I’m glad to say that D&D online will have a similar function, as I saw in the 3 day preview event. That’s going to be a critical part of the game, and save countless hours of standing yelling “LF Cleric, Level 5+ PST”

Once you get past the people aspect I’ve found that the next most defining thing about the game is the complexity. This can very immensely. The simpler games tend to have a wider appeal and a bigger initial entertainment while a more complex system makes for a richer long term experience. This is where I bring up my old addiction, World of Warcraft. The first thing to know is that WoW was made by blizzard, a company which has a “hand of Midas” like effect on everything they do. Everything they do is also delayed, but once the product has come out its quality tends to make everyone forget the wait. WoW is on the simpler side of MMORPGS, which was a breath of fresh air to everyone who’d ever gotten to level 50 in everquest, died, and had to run for three hours to collect their corpse only to have to repeat the process over and over in order to not lose all of their level 50 gear. It also made it more widely accessible to people who wouldn’t normally play that kind of thing. The key reason I brought up WoW though is because its complexity was dynamic. It started off fairly simple but as you progressed gradually became more and more complex. This gave a greater feel of the leveling because as your character got more advanced so did you play style. It wasn’t just sneak ambush sinister strike eviscerate. It was sneak cheap shot, gouge, backstab, kidney shot, backstab, backstab, riposte, eviscerate. Etc. There are all kinds of other things I could point out but it would take forever and I don’t really care.

Another key aspect of these games is the grind. The critics of EQ back in the day when that was the only one out there gave the key argument that basically you’re hitting things with a stick to get a bigger stick to hit bigger things with. In essence what you were doing was a complex form of running on treadmill. I understood this, but was still entertained by the game. I have some theories on how all of life is more or less the same thing, but I’ll pos those later. Nearly every game has this same problem. City of Heroes is once again the best example because while it was visually spectacular, and the one game that made you have a true sense of being super. For example: I’m going to fly into the middle of that pack of gangsters, punch their leader knocking him back 20 feet, spin kick the rest, radiate negative energy to destroy the minions and then use my heat vision on the boss. The problem was that while that was awesome, and new powers added new flavor to it, it wasn’t that amusing on the 100^th pack of said mobsters. Wow has the unique advantage of having an advanced quest system which doesn’t actually remove the treadmill, but disguises it. Quests give so much more XP then grinding, and are so abundant that you don’t have to grind at all until later levels. This is if you accept the “Go kill 10 of each type of gnoll and report back” quest as not grinding. The only game I’ve seen which has actually done away with it is D&D online. In DDO you don’t xp for killing monsters. You only get experience points for completing quests. I liked the game during my 3 days of it, and I didn’t have any problems with the system it used then, but I’m going to need further testing before I can give a real verdict.

Hmm. Yeah I’m done ranting for now. Probably more later.