Stuck in the MUD

by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle

Perhaps a study of how graphics have affected computerized RPGs, and MMORPGs in particular ought to start with the pen and paper RPGs of yore. I played a fair amount of BattleTech in college, and while it's nothing like the venerable Dungeons & Dragons, we might compare the rote recordkeeping aspects of either game with success. The bottom line: it's extremely time consuming; the tracking element probably takes something like 80% of the total game time. Character creation for new players and explaining just enough of the rules to get started could easily take a few hours. Every roll of the die sets in motion a tangled web of tasks, assuming you rolled the right die, some of which have more sides than the Epcot Center. Not only is it criminally easy to misque or forget an important part of your turn (a BattleTech example: facing your mech towards a potential assailant, the cause of many a swift kick in the newbie rear...in a friendly game, someone might inform you of your negligence), the rules are subject to the interpretation of (usually) the most veteran player. Incidentally, this is the person that will win a given match. I suppose DnD has this figured out by conjuring up the Game Master (whose duty is to create and maintain the 46 hours of fun and frustration before you), but like ol' Lord Acton said, absolute power corrupts Game Masters absolutely. You might just get a Diamond Dragon of Forget'About-It sprung on you by "stepping on the wrong tile" a stone's throw away from parading triumphantly out of the dungeon; sort of a diabolos ex machina.

Enter the Multi-User Dungeon or "MUD" in the early 1980s where the computer takes care of the die and most of the rules in a text-only interface. This is not to say that all the features of pen and paper RPGs made it into MUDs; in fact, the transition of was rough and the ported features fairly spartan. Now, any sort of computer gaming that refers to text-wrapping as a "fancy feature"... well, you shouldn't expect much in the way of graphics. Also, by way of introducing you whippersnappers to MUDs, they offer the full gamut of playstyling, from primarily role-playing, combat-based "LP" MUDs to the glorified chat-room approach of "Tiny" MUDs. We'll be discussing the roleplaying style MUDs here, so those of you who use TinyMUDs as your... "intimate" outlet will need to keep both hands on the keyboard for the duration of this article!

You might know MUDs from idiotic exhortations like "Hail, yon traveler!," "Whither wilt thou go? 1.North, 2.West..." or "Gird up your loins, warrior. A fey enemy approaches!" Painful pseudo-Hochsenglisch aside, the decisions you make come to you in the form of a menu. You might think that sort of limits the immersion-factor, and you'd be right: the severe scripting simply isn't robust enough to trick you into feeling like your character isn't just playing plinko down the branches of a decision tree. Still, this approach can add a measure of suspense to the game. If I pick "3. South" and the MUD logs something like this: "You take a 100 paces South....Something rustles the ground to your right...(1 second pause)...A Grimwolf attacks you!!!", you suddenly feel like you're at the mercy of forces you can't entirely predict. The same goes for BBS games like Lord of the Red Dragon, which conferred upon lucky users like myself an ANSI based "map" that you can sort of picture yourself in (you inhabit a green or brown "+" sign- depending on whether you're in grassland or desert- in a 10x10 field of plus signs). That perfect cluelessness about what enemy lurks around the next corner is, sad to say, largely lost in today's graphical MMOs.

In the early to mid-nineties, I think its fair to say that most gaming geeks like myself, who were really RPG'ers at heart, flirted with the revolutionary three-dimensional first-person shooter (FPS) titles released during that timeframe. In the beginning, there was "Wolfenstein 3D," then "Doom," "Quake" and so on. While being twitch games, that baleful cadre of games in whom success is more dependent on muscle memory than the careful, lengthy accumulation of stats so critical to RPGs, we were seeing through a character's eyes for the first time ever. If FPS gamers could live in a world that was only important to them for its ability to produce and conceal enemies, why couldn't RPG'ers, for whom the world was of infinite significance for storyline immersion and roleplay value?

The stage was set for EverQuest in March of 1999. Unlike its top-down fantasy MMO contemporaries Lineage and Ultima Online, EverQuest gave you a first-person perspective on the gaming world. Without knowing it, a college friend sold me on EQ by telling me how he climbed a mountain just to watch the sunrise. Silly and sentimental, perhaps, but it wasn't something I could find elsewhere. After studying, work, friends, and family (and as a propitious escape from any of these) I could literally climb into another skin in another world. EverQuest was high fantasy and adventure, and just about as convincing as it gets for its time.

When the more photo-realistic Dark Age of Camelot MMO came along, I stuck with EQ for a time; telling friends I preferred a slightly more "cartoony" experience to put a degree of separation between me and the game. It wasn't as if I could be fooled into thinking I was in post-Arthurian Britain, moreso that I wanted fantastic characters for my high fantasy experience. On authenticity to real life, MMOs cannot compete; the illusion is shattered with the first time your character engages in melee combat, i.e. your character fans at the air three feet in front of your target, never connects, and somehow does damage. Nor do MMOs have the gore and dismemberment of FPS games, another desensitizing aspect of videogaming realism. Of course, a senate hearing has never convened to discuss explicit imagery vis a vis "Hot Coffee" in this side of the video game industry either (we call our hidden content "broken quests").

In the last year or so, I've again seen a line drawn between photo-realistic realism and cartoony fantasy, only this time EverQuest- or, more specifically, EverQuest 2- was the realistic MMO, and in the other corner, ladies and gentleman, the 4-million subscriber winner and all-time champion, World of Warcraft (or "WoW"). Both games have a graphical heritage, and the incredible efforts of the EverQuest 2 artists aside (it's got to be hard to destroy Norrath with a comet, age it 500 years, and maintain continuity), WoW takes the cake on continuing the franchise art heritage. We'll see what happens when the more Asia-friendly SOGA character models go into EQ2 in November.

So back to our original question: how have graphics affected MMOs? At its core, every modern MMO uses the same game theory found in "pen and paper" gaming and MUDs. While Lineage and Ultima Online gave us a landscape with which to live in, it was EverQuest that first put us into our character's skin. Drawing from the FPS genre, the first-person perspective has become the standard for all mainstream MMOs, and its hard to imagine the industry ever looking back graphicswise. Yet, at the heart of the matter, we're still playing the same wonderful old RPGs every time we enter combat in today's MMOs. If you listen closely, you might even hear the clatter of the die.