Opposite Day

Un-Designing the Anti-MMOG

by Shayalyn

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It’s Opposite Day here on the Ten Ton Hammer network, and we community managers are charged with the task of describing the anti-MMOG; a game that would make for a nightmare experience in a persistent online world. I have to admit this topic leaves me feeling a little uninspired. One visit to the official Vanguard: Saga of Heroes forums and you’ll find plenty of folks ranting about what they do and don’t want to see in Vanguard, or any other game for that matter. Even so, I’m going to dive into the topic (I’ve been told that I will be replaced with a typing chimpanzee if I don’t) and try to uncover elements of the worst possible MMOG experience.

Imagine a game where you enter and find a person standing around with a big cheesy exclamation point over his head. You proceed to talk to this person, and find that he offers you a quest. Once you accept his quest, his exclamation point changes to a question mark and you’re on your way to kill 10 sphincter beetles to help rid the world of its boundless sphincter beetle population. Of course, you kill 10 only to find that the little buggers respawn faster than you can bludgeon them to death with your crude club.

Uh, wait...that comes perilously close to the World of Warcraft (WoW) newbie experience, doesn’t it? Let’s take a different tack.

There are 4 things that truly ruin MMOGs for me, and they are:

• Excessive hand-holding (too-easy, too-soft gameplay mechanics)
• No soloing possibilities (particularly at early levels)
• Dull, repetitive, quests; or poorly designed quests that don’t engage the player
• Linear progression

Fortunately, I’ve never found all of those nasties rolled into one game. Not yet, at least. WoW has excessive hand-holding and too-soft gameplay, but you can certainly solo. Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) launched without any significant solo play options, but its quests are definitely intriguing. (And DDO wised up and added some limited solo options a few months after launch.) I remember feeling as though I was on rails in EverQuest 2 because the progression was so linear, but I could solo, and there were enough compelling time-sinks (who could resist harvesting?) to keep me addicted...for about 6 months.

Now, indulge me while I talk about my MMOG no-nos in a little more depth.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Maybe it’s just me--or a lingering fondness for my first MMOG, EverQuest--but I prefer a challenge. I grew up in Norrath, where men were men, and women were women, and men were women...and gnomes were nervous about it. There were no big exclamation points leading me to quests; I had to find quest NPCs on my own. I had to find my way around the world without the aid of maps, or even a working compass (at least not until I got my Sense Heading skill up). When I died, I had to trek out into hostile territory, dressed in my newbie pajamas, to retrieve my corpse.

You want to hear about my newbie experiences in EverQuest? I fell off a ramp in the tree city of Kelethin, while trying in vain to find my guild master, and plunged to my death. I wandered around for nearly an hour trying to locate my broken body on the forest floor so I could retrieve what little gear and coin I had, but I simply couldn’t find it. I eventually called upon a bard (which adds insult to injury, if ya know what I mean) to help me track down my corpse. Not 15 minutes after retrieving my stuff I went to talk to an NPC (to see if he had a quest to offer me), forgot to hit the ENTER key so that I could start typing in chat text, and the moment I hit the A key I was summarily introduced to the cold hard turf of the Greater Faydark forest by the angry NPC I'd just inadvertently attacked. This was my first lesson in key binding.

Despite all the hardships and the difficulty, I’ve never found a game more compelling than I found EverQuest. You can chalk that up to EQ being my first MMOG, but I’ve known people who’ve joined the genre using other MMOGs as a vehicle, and none of them have as much nostalgia for their first game as I do for mine. EQ was hard, and we liked it that way. No Carebears allowed!

I Just Want to be Alone

I’m all for community in MMOGs. I like the idea of interdependence between the classes. Some of the best times I’ve ever had in-game have been while grouped up with friends, and I wouldn’t change anything about that...but don’t force me to group.

I was lucky enough when I played DDO to have some great guildmates (here’s a shout out to the Ten Ton Hammer DDO guild on the Sarlona server). Together, we made up some fun groups, and I’d wake up my kids laughing at my teammates’ antics, particularly in DDO’s integrated voice chat. (Brockton pulls a whole bunch of giants down on top of the group, and then attempts to train them away. Sylesstra cries, “Ruuuuun, Forrest, ruuuun!” Brockton replies, in slow Forrest Gump-ese, “Ah am not a smart man, Jen-nee.” Stuff like that.) But when my guildmates weren’t online, or were otherwise occupied, DDO was painful. Pick-up groups were usually horrid, and there wasn’t a single time-sink to be found to whittle away the minutes while waiting for a group to happen.

I have to be able to solo, particularly in the early levels of a game when I’m not yet fully integrated into the server community, and I’m still familiarizing myself with the game mechanics. But I like to be able to do some meaningful soloing later in the game, too. It helps kill the time when there are no groups to be found, or when I only have a limited time to play. A game that completely cuts out soloing is never going to make my A List.

Kill 10 Sphincter Beetles and Bring Me Their...Antennae

In the name of all that is good and pixilated, please don’t make me do bazillions of collection quests. I don’t mind a few at early levels while I’m learning the game, but if I’m at level 20 and I’m still collecting bone chips or bug antennae I’m not going to be progressing to level 25. Instead, I’m going to be taking a permanent vacation from whatever MMOG is making me play endless rounds of fetch.

I want quests to be engaging. So often I find myself clicking through the quest text the NPC is spewing and thinking, Okay, c’mon already, tell me what you’re going to give me and what I have to do to get it. I hate that. Sure, a simple mindless quest every now and then is fine, but I’m going to be looking for a good balance of quests that have a real purpose, and an arcing storyline. If I don’t find those in my game, I’m going to find another game...simple as that.

Start Out Here, and then Go There, and then Go...

One of the things I liked about EverQuest was that, at any given level, there wasn’t just one place to go play. If you were into traveling around the vast world of Norrath, you had plenty of interesting options, particularly as expansion packs were introduced. Looking for action at level 30? The Frontier Mountains, Great Divide, Split Paw Lair, Castle Mistmoore, or Dawnshroud Peaks were all valid options...and there were plenty more where that came from. There may have been one place that was notorious for giving the best experience or loot, but your choices were never limited if you wanted a change of scenery.

I don’t like the idea of running around the same zone for 15-20 levels before I get to experience something new. While other aspects of a MMOG may hold me for a while, if I get too much of the same old same, I’m going to be heading out to find excitement in another game, and it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.

Fortunately for me, the game I’m anticipating most, Vanguard, doesn’t seem to have any of the features I dread. The game won’t hold our hands, but gameplay won’t be tedious, either. Although the jury’s still out on how well we’ll be able to solo, at least Vanguard offers other diversions like Crafting and Diplomacy. We’re told quests will be engaging (and I can only hope there are no sphincter beetles). The game progression shouldn’t feel too linear because we’ve been promised that the world of Telon is enormous, with many places to go and see.

So, there you have it, my article about the anti-MMOG. All it really proves is that no one game can be all things to all players, which you, gentle reader, already know. Some of us love a challenge, while others like to take it easy. Some of us enjoy being able to solo, while other social butterflies can’t function without companions. There are those who could care less about engaging quests as long as they get to beat up monsters. It’s a big MMOG world out there, and as you travel it...your mileage may vary.

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