MMOs : Fun not required

A couple of weeks ago, Kristoffer Touberg said that MMO players like the mundane: “Something as mundane as having shared credit cards, in EVE, becomes a feature,” he explained. “It doesn’t have to be like the biggest dragon you could ever find. Just take something from real life that might be slightly boring and put it in a different environment, and just watch what happens.”

“Everybody complains about mining, but I think it’s the finest hangover feature you could ever do. I’d just switch the miner on, I’d watch sports on Sunday and be hung-over and eat pizza. I think that’s great. Not everything has to be super wild.”

It’s true, mundane is big

It's true you know, although I really wish it wasn't. In recent months I've played any number of MMOs for review and the majority of them have been pretty good (some of them have been anything but). The most popular, or at least the ones in which I see the most people playing, tend to be rather generic, a little bit slow and, honestly, not deserving of their vast numbers of players. Why then do these games get such a following? There isn’t any charm, no action, no real fun to be had, so why on earth are people working all day, coming home and jumping into what I would describe as a  bad MMO?

I've been pondering this one all week and there's no easy answer. It's too simple to dismiss MMO gamers as masochistic, as enjoying doing the same thing over and over again in the hopes that they can, well, do more of the same thing over and over again. It's easy to dismiss them as anxious of anything new, too comfortable with what they already have to let developers try something a little bit different. These are the sort of presumptions the wider gaming world might make and, for the most part, these presumptions are completely wrong.

We love variety

It's easy for more general gamers to forget that we're the people who put Star Wars: The Old Republic into the Guinness World Record books by playing it in our hundreds of thousands during betas last year, despite the fact that the voice work made the download more than a little hefty.  We're the group waiting patiently for action MMO Tera and Guild Wars 2 at the exact same time. We love to try new things and, occasionally, we won’t always go back to World of Warcraft once we’re done. We love variety, we love new things and this is what confuses me that much more.

Where do all these MMO Gamers come from?

If all we were interested in doing was playing rehashes of the same old thing - and I admit that sometimes it certainly seems that way - then I would completely understand the reasoning behind, say, World of Warcraft rehashes being so popular. But that's not the case, rarely are these WoW clones well-advertised and it’s even rarer that the majority of them are covered in the mainstream media. It seems, then, that the people who play these games quite literally come out of nowhere. I can't believe for a second that all these users I keep coming across while trying to find something entertaining in a game I've played a million times before (under a different name and in a slightly different world, of course) are all avid readers of the many MMO sites on the net, the only places that have any chance of covering every MMO out there.

Mundane but popular: Eudemons

Take Eudemons, for instance, one of the first games I’ve played this year in which I really couldn’t find much of anything to enjoy. One of the first missions, if you haven't read our review, is to grind until you reach level six. The hook, the early quests that are meant to keep you interested, is to fight a bunch of monsters, heal, and fight some more monsters. And despite that, despite the uninteresting graphical style and the unpolished gameplay, there were quite literally hundreds of people in the starting area alone.

Was it the low system requirements? Perhaps it was the fact that there ARE so many people playing, perhaps people just like to play games with others, no matter the quality (it would certainly explain the popularity of so many Facebook games). Perhaps it’s because Eudemons is a throwback, a game made to simulate MMOs of the past. It’s a wonder that the genre ever took off the way it did if that’s the case, but nostalgia is a powerful thing.

Cabal

Cabal, similarly, is pretty much the same as every other MMORPG out there, but without any shred of originality. And yet there would be times when my computer came to a standstill because of the sheer amount of people on screen. This is on my new top-of-the-range computer as well (obvious brag, I know), so I can throw quite a lot at it before being too badly affected (this is down to the optimization within the programming, so I'm by no means saying that Cabal is difficult to run - it isn't, it just isn’t made very well I presume). This one I can’t explain because, while Cabal isn’t a bad game, there are things I’d much rather be playing.

MMOs those are not massive at all

I've played games, decent games, where I've completed quest after quest without coming across a single person, let along bands of adventurers looking for a good time and fresh-faced noobs to explore dungeons with. I've played titles for review and have had to question whether or not they really are MMOs because, despite being online, there's certainly nothing massively multi-player about them. And this isn't just a case of "why don't people like what I like?" I'm just fascinated by how hit and miss success can truly be.  Am I going on the wrong servers? Am I that bad an MMO player that people avoid me well in advance (potentially true)?

Conclusion

Whatever it is, I hope we can shake it up a little bit over the coming years. Things are changing, as broadband usage grows people want ways to socialize and the most off-putting thing for somebody interested in the genre is the mundane, the boring and the viciously dull.  If we’re going to keep growing as a genre, as a community, and have the developers grow with us, we need more players and to get more players we need to start proving that we know what’s good, we know what’s fun and we have more respect for our time than filling it with, say, Eudemons. Only then will we prove Mr Touberg wrong and show that, actually, MMO features need to go beyond shared credit cards to be a true hit.