MMO Developers Re-invent the Wheel?

The MMO world is strange. It took years – decades – to get a game that at all resembles the traditional console game we all know and love. Think about that for a moment, that when the MMO world was obsessing over Ultima Online, the console world was playing Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX. Games like Skies of Arcadia were in development, and Shenmue. As World of Warcraft began to dominate, the console world was exploring San Andreas, hunting down The Boss for betraying her country and web swinging across Manhattan to take down Doc Ock. Even today MMO gamers are yet to see experiences akin to Fallout/Elder Scrolls, despite those series being the perfect springboard for a massively multiplayer game. With mod that turn Just Cause 2 into a 2000 person blood bath and DayZ hooking subscribers by the thousands, just what are MMO-specific developers doing wrong?

It’s not like they’re reinventing the wheel or anything.

Playing Catch-up

My traditional defense here – and it’s perfectly valid for much of MMO history – is that getting something to work offline and getting it to work online is a completely different thing. Sure, Dynasty Warriors 2 allowed you to run around and kill endless enemies on massive battlegrounds in 2000, but how on earth are you going to work that into an online game when the majority of people are still on dial-up? Final Fantasy X may have been absolutely stunning to look at, with a deep story as well, but how do you have an experience like that uninterrupted by other players? MMO developers not only had to find a way to make games within the limits of technology – both in the majority of computers and within the whole system that makes up the internet – but they also had to find ways of delivering plot and exposition that could be played through without interruption by dungeon running and strangers.

Most didn’t bother to even try.

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft was massive. It did a lot that hadn’t been done before and really did improve on the basics of MMO gaming. We take an awful lot of it for granted today, and it’s actually quite difficult to remember what was pre-WoW and what came post-WoW. At the time, it brought a huge amount of people into the MMO genre and inspired a new wave of MMO's that have helped our hobby grow in a way that was unimaginable fifteen, even ten years ago.

This really isn’t an article about the ups and downs of World of Warcraft’s effect on the market, rather that it has become the benchmark for the MMO genre in more ways than one. The Old Republic was a WoW-killer, Guild Wars 2 will be a WoW-kill. It is for MMORPGs what Call of Duty is for shooters, and I can’t help but think that Activision are pretty happy about the whole affair. If you have less than 10 million subscribers, in some people’s eyes, your MMO is a failure. If you don’t update with new graphics, new dungeons, new monsters and a higher level cap every few years, you’ve abandoned your MMO. Developers can’t outdo World of Warcraft, they can’t improve on the genre in which World of Warcraft is king, they can’t even keep up with what Blizzard are doing.

Weekly Guild Wars 2 coverage at DevilsMMO: Guild Wars 2 Diary

Most developers can’t reinvent the wheel, they can’t even copy the wheel that’s been turning for eight years.

Here’s the Problem...

The question you have to ask yourself – and it’s the same question Developers have had to ask themselves for an entire generation of MMO games – is how do you deliver a next-gen experience while keeping with the same specs present in World of Warcraft? That’s your potential buyer, somebody who has a computer that can play all present MMO's at a decent level. The question that has to be asked is how many of those people playing World of Warcraft (And its ilk) will be able to play TERA, or Guild Wars 2? How many of those people who can see Azeroth in all of its glory will be met with what they feel are sub-PS2 graphics if they upgrade to something like TERA?

Enjoy weekly TERA reviews: TERA Diary: Exploring Exiled Realm

Developers have to appeal to a mass market while effectively borrowing players from other, more established MMOs.

…And the Solution?

It’s taken ten years for developers, specifically ArenaNet, to realize that the MMO genre is stagnating. As World of Warcraft gets closer and closer to its ten year anniversary, how many games will have stretched beyond its considerably long reaching influence? How many will have pushed for a more user driven, linear story involving thousands of players simultaneously (but not experiencing the story individually)? How many will have made real time combat? The answer to all of those questions is probably “not many,” and of the ones that do push for a better game experience, few of them will be successful.

The solution isn’t simple. You not only have to push to change the entire way that MMORPG's work, but you have to entice the general public to change the way they play their games as well. The average person who plays something like World of Warcraft and who has done for the best part of a decade might not be hugely open to the idea of being told to play in a different way, being forced to interact with others.

Like Henry Ford supposedly said: “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

The Faster Horse

My major worry is that only a company on the scale of Blizzard can change the MMO landscape. World of Warcraft 2 (or an equivalent) is inevitable and the developers will no doubt do what they managed with the original game. They’ll add the real time quest system from Guild Wars 2, they’ll add the real time combat from TERA and mix in other elements from games yet on the market.

At the minute there are games chipping away the rocks, slowly reshaping everything we’ve come to take for granted. They’re the faster horses, they’re games that fix problems we’ve had with the genre for years but that fail to blow away our expectations, blowing away everything we currently love. There will be a game that’ll do that though, it’ll just take the general MMO populace to support it.

Conclusion

Most new MMOs are not quite at the level you’d expect from the average PS2 game just yet, in terms of graphics, sound design, story and gameplay. A lot of developers are struggling to get it to that level of involvement, perhaps because of funding or experience, perhaps because they know they don’t really need to. You get a shining star, a game that can live amongst even the greatest new AAA titles, but they’re not the norm. Of the thousands of new MMO games released this year, only Guild Wars 2 and maybe TERA will be remembered for years to come. What the developers at ArenaNet have managed to do is create a game that brings the things we’ve taken for granted in single player games for decades and turn it massively multiplayer. And that’s what all developers should be looking to do and, as we move into the next generation of MMO gaming, that’s what it’ll take to truly push the genre to new levels.

M. Growcott
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