Do we need the Massively Multiplayer?

We’ve discussed before the “single-player MMO,” the idea that you’re following a certain quest path but you’re doing so without any help from anybody else. Sure, you’ll see others running around, you might even have the occasional discussion or trade with them, but for the most part you find yourself going solo. It’s a problem that I can’t imagine it’s easy to circumnavigate, how do you create a game knowing that it’s going to be populated by a constant flow of fair, cooperative, friendly people and build the game around that? The answer is simple: you can’t.

The average MMO gamer is playing with friends they know outside of the game (be it online or in real life) and, if they’re not playing with friends, they’re playing it as a single player title with as little interaction with those around them as possible. The two would be impossible to bring together, nobody wants to be forced to play with strangers.

So How Do You Fix It?

The most obvious thing to do is to offer two separate paths; one which people who’re inclined to do so can meet new people and journey together, the other for people who want to play alone. In a perfect world that would solve every problem and those who want proper co-op multiplayer missions can do so without any effort, anyone else can continue without being bothered. If somebody leaves the co-op section without good reason or acts selfishly or aggressively, they’re banned from the co-op and are left with only the “alone” quests to participate in. In a perfect world developing two different stories wouldn’t cost any money, network testing would be easy and problem-free so that people could interact without lag or general annoyance and moderators would be easily able to detect “assholes” (technical MMO term) and enforce the rules without issue.

It’s not a Perfect World.

And actually, I think that this is the major problem in the MMO genre. We have millions of quests over thousands of games and very few of them actually encourage you to play together. It’s annoying that in a multiplayer genre, I often feel more part of a community, more part of a team in an online FPS than in a living, breathing digital world. There are usually specific servers or areas within a game in which to play together, which defeats the point of a multiplayer game entirely. Seeing others, interacting with them isn’t always enough, sometimes you need to be forced together and forced to co-operate in order to break down the barriers between people. Communities are friendly enough, but it never ceases to surprise me how often the text box in a game is populated by the same four or five people – people that have played the game endlessly.

Warmage Battlegrounds review is coming soon

Single Player Mode

But that’s not what I want to talk about this week; it’s an article for a different time. This week, I want to talk about how there aren’t ENOUGH single player experiences in the MMO world. This might seem counter to everything I’ve just written, but in actual fact it’s not. I do believe developers aren’t doing enough (in regards to what they CAN do) to get us all working together – think things like Left4Dead, only with a community that doesn’t boot you obnoxiously every time you make a mistake – but I also don’t think they’re doing enough to give us a game to play when we just want to be alone. Quests are one thing, it’s generally boring and it’s something that we’re all just totally used to. More could be done though, couldn’t it?

Blame it on the Monotony

When was the last time you played an MMO that wasn’t built around some sort of quest system? Perform this action, get a reward; fight 20 enemies, get a reward. It’s been done so many times, I wonder if there are actually developers out their questioning it as the status quo. Then again, I suppose we have to stop and ask ourselves: how could they improve it. With the limitations of needing to be online, the limitations of being visible to other players, how can the genre perform above what we’ve come to expect? Both The Secret World and The Old Republic offer extended single player instances. I can only talk for The Old Republic, but despite having a “single player” portion of the game; it doesn’t really shake things up any. It’s pushing boundaries within what we already have: a quest system.

Looks like single player? Not much of a life sign around...

Single player

I played Warmage Battlegrounds this weekend; I played quite a lot of Warmage Battlegrounds. While the game is very good on its own merits, the main reason I was playing it for review and had it not been for that fact I’d have probably turned it off almost instantly. Throughout the weekend there were less than ten players on the server. Thankfully this didn’t prohibit my review too much because the developers had had the foresight to place a set of player vs. computer challenges in so that you didn’t have to play with other people. There was no pressure, just a really good game available at all times no matter who else was on the server. So while I’d like to see developers moving towards a more multiplayer focused game overall, I think it would be silly for them to forget that some people just want to play alone.

Finding the Balance

So, mainly for the sake of critics - hardworking people like me with bad beards and caffeine addictions – it’s important that developers start to try to find the balance. I have no doubt that as technology evolves; we’re going to find ourselves in a more comfortable position with other players. We’ve seen it happening in shooters and in console games, and I like to think that MMOs – the true multiplayer experience – can start to top those other experiences. But I think what this article has ended up being about is that balance, finding that point where we are our own characters, but relying on other people is an occasional necessity, just like real life. With that, the developer will have to remember that sometimes it’s nice to just go off and be alone as well.