Hooray for MMORPGs… or should that be… where did my life go?
Well, the last year or so – I have tried a couple of different MMORPGs (Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games). And I have come to a realization… they suck.
It’s not that they aren’t beautifull… it is not that they are buggy (they are)… and it’s not that I couldn’t spend forever playing them… it’s that they suck. I have had trouble figuring out exactly why untill it dawned on me… one of my friends was actually right at one point – what is lacking isn’t content, number of players, quests, things to do…
It’s someone guiding the action ensuring everyone is having fun – the operative word being ‘fun’. (Those weren’t his exact words… there would have been a lot of ale-references in there had it been).
I’m an old-school roleplayer – I’ve played a number of different roleplaying games for the last 15 years or so. I didn’t know why it was fun untill recently it dawned on me what was and is fun about roleplaying. It’s the DM (and now I’ve cursed him for so many years… killing of my characters left and right…). Because the DM’s job isn’t just providing content, making up quests and all those things… it’s making sure that everyone is having fun.
And that is the only thing of the above things that you cannot do in a MMORPG – you cannot have enough guys dedicated to making sure everyone is having fun.
Back in the day, we had a small club for roleplayers – we could pretty much control ‘the bad elements’ – they were shown the door and told to come back when they were able to behave – and everyone went back to having fun. Whatever the big companies behind these blockbuster titles do, they can never act fast enough, never catch everyone ruining other peoples fun before someone is in tears.
Oh – and you cannot fudge dice-rolls – when our heroes plan everything right, do everything right… and the damn dragon through a series of unlikely good rolls defeat them still… there is no-one to go “And the dragon rolls … 1… aww, how unlucky… you hear the dragon roar as it accidently trips over it’s tail and falls solidly on your ram, impaling itself solidly. Good job guys – the realm is once again safe from harm.”
MMORPGs is all about balance, control, fairness and equality… everyone gets the same shot at being a hero – no matter what they want to go about it. Now, it’s a matter of how well you plan your character, how good your group is… it’s a sport… which in my oppinion sucks.
A good DM can adjust his campaign to fit any kind of group. We had a group once where everyone made their character as what they thought would be fun… and it was all wrong for an optimum group in a MMORPG – our tank was 4′ tall and was also the only part-time healer in the party, the bard was the strongest in the party, our mage was a druid… the list just went on and on… but our DM just tweaked the campaign that little bit, so that we were challenged (most certainly), but never met impossible odds. You don’t have that in a MMORPG – everything is fixed from the get-go (there are guides that will tell you exactly what you should do to ‘win’).
Oh… and don’t get me started on the 1337/AOL generation… you know you have done something wrong in a game when you invent the ‘ignore’ button to avoid players in a fantasy world going “U zux0rs, c u l8″ and you are left wondering… “What in the name of the abyss just happened?”… I miss our living-room battles with the denizens of the underworld, where we chose who we wanted to play with.
Did I mention, that I feel old sometimes?