Starting out in MMO Games

 

 

 

I came close to getting involved a few times. I remember buying a disk of RPG games from The Works or some similar retailer of mostly-crap PC games. On the disk there was a collection of freeware rubbish that tended to break if you did something as unimportant in the genre as, say, attack a monster or speak with a NPC.

 

 

On this disk was an MMORPG, the name of which completely escapes me. I got the disk at a time when we didn’t have the internet (this was THAT long ago, when dial-up could be expensive) and when we had our service switched back on, it was the first thing I put onto my computer. I’d read through information on each of the races, I’d read about the backstory, the lore of the land, I’d convinced several friends to join with me so we could become a mysterious band of freedom fighters with sharp swords and quick wits.

 

Like everything else on that disk, the MMORPG didn’t work, but learning about the world that the developers had created was incredibly exciting. For a group of people to create an interactive world with thousands of years of history was something that blew my mind, it just would have been nice if they’d created a working code to base it upon.

 

 

I think this is probably a fairly common experience among MMOers, the initial attraction to the genre probably holds little to do with raiding or looting, it gives players the chance to experience a world other than their own. Soon the technical parts of the game may become more and more interesting, but that initial interest comes from learning the backstory and becoming part of that world’s future.

 

This has been especially taken to heart in some MMOs like Dust 514, the PS3 MMOFPS, players of whom will be able to affect the goings on in EVE Online. That alone means I’ll probably play Dust 514 when it releases next year, and a good amount of people will probably be waiting in line with me for the same reason.

 

 

In my case, I moved on from the idea of playing with other people. With a lack of decent internet and far too many single player games to play, I managed to entertain myself. It wasn’t until the quality of internet rose substantially that I got my need to MMO back, and that came at around the same time I played my first online game – Call of Duty 3 on the PS3. Call me a late bloomer.

 

But playing Call of Duty 3 showed me that playing with others was something that could be fun. It wasn’t an MMO, but it was an introduction to a mind-set, an introduction to learning that relying on others and being relied upon was an interesting mechanic for a video game.

 

It’s interesting, considering the comment that made me write last week’s article, to see how the MMO genre has grown, actually. In the year 2000 there were probably less than three or four million people playing MMOs, based on subscriptions at the time. Around five years later, World of Warcraft would hold that figure alone. As we’ve seen an increase in the amount of households that could support always-on broadband internet, we’ve seen a rise in the amount of people logging onto MMO servers.

 

And my experience isn’t unique. When I started playing Call of Duty 3 in late 2007, the servers were already fairly quiet after the recent release of Modern Warfare. Released shortly after Halo 3, for the first time ever the mass market was finding its online feet. As the more dedicated became bored of running around and killing for hours at a time, they found an alternate.

 

Perhaps the biggest example of this for console gamers came in the package of Final Fantasy XI, but for those with capable PCs an entire new genre was rapidly opening up – and the population was growing to accommodate the wide range of MMOs available. From a set of questions sent to Blizzard by Penny Arcade in early 2005, it’s obvious that the amount of people who wanted to play their brand new MMO was a little hard on their servers:

 

“We had not anticipated this amount of growth in such a short time; however, we did have a backup plan that was deployed rapidly. In the first week of launch, we more than doubled our number of game servers and server infrastructure to accommodate the demand. The fact that we had planned to grow the service over the first 12 months of operation was evident, as we had server hardware waiting to be deployed. We just anticipated that this server rollout would be gradual.”

 

 

And it’s into this market that many MMOers will have initially stepped into the genre, likely through using World of Warcraft for the first time. Those who had been playing MMOs before – games like Lineage and Ultima Online - found that many of their favourite games were losing subscribers to WoW and very few of them, with the exception of Everquest and EVE Online, managed to top their previous best after 2005.

 

As internet connection speeds increase, the number of MMOs on the market is going to increase and increase. With the free to play model becoming more popular, more users are going to be attracted to a wider range of games, both on consoles and on PC. And as we move into the future, the PS4 and Xbox 3 specifically, the networks are going to be written with massively multiplayer in mind – certainly more so than in the last generation.

 

Some people will dislike that change, no doubt. They still remember logging into Ultima Online in 1998 and feeling they were doing something incredible and unique. Now it’s as easy to get into an MMO as it is to get into any other game and the increase in players shows support for that change.

 

Personally I’ll never forget my first attempt at getting into an MMO, reading for hours through the manual. If I’d have managed to get in, I’d have probably found it incredibly boring, but it’s difficult to complain when you consider how things have changed.

 

If you’re feeling like sharing, I’d be interested in hearing about other people’s first experiences (even if they weren’t quite as successful as mine), so feel free to comment.