The second big bang: a call for new worlds.

Prelude to a Dream

Building a video game is about immersing a player in a world so convincing, that they forget all about their worldly worries. Building a video game is, in reality, no different than writing a good book, or directing a good film. In this respect, video games have come a long way from their roots that began merely decades ago, bringing us worlds so alluring, that virtual items have been sold for real money, and actual deeds, ill and otherwise repute, have been exchanged for intangible assets in worlds that are inconsequential to the world that matters most – the one we live and die in only once.

The pinnacle of this immersion, where we can transform ourselves into someone wholly different, and interact with people foreign than (or sometimes eerily similar to) those we know in our daily lives, is undoubtedly the growing genre of massively multiplayer roleplaying games (MMORPGs). It is this genre that has tried so steadfastly to produce worlds filled with more than just scripted characters, with more than just linear gameplay, trying to break free from the mold that static, single-player games have perpetuated. MMORPGs, now more than ever, are trying desperately to break free from the chains that its predecessor genres have laid out, where flexibility and community are more important than simply winning.

Yet even with innovation and change on the horizon, there are many key elements that are still missing in the latest breed of MMORPGs; there are elements missing that could refine and perfect the virtual worlds of tomorrow. It is the attempt of this missive to discuss exactly these factors; what changes could be implemented into MMORPGs to make them more immersive, more realistic, more open-ended, and in short, better? Perhaps this piece will not stir new thought into the MMORPG development community after all, or perhaps it will summon forth a storm of innovation on the heels of previously unrefined releases. Or perhaps, WyldKard is being paid by the word, and needs a new pair of shoes.

The First Failures

Online roleplaying is a complicated affair. There are so many sub-genres, so many settings, and so many levels of development, that pleasing everyone is next to impossible. Never mind the inadequacies of bandwidth, the costs of production, the staff required to keep a game running, and the fact that precedent has placed only huge companies in a position capable of bringing gamers successful titles. Clearly, what exists is a predicament that lends itself to failure, but that isn’t stopping companies from trying. After all, roleplaying games are still a craze, and combined with the ability to play with other, real people, don’t expect development houses to stop trying anytime soon.

Early attempts at bringing gamers online roleplaying games met with only limited success. Sierra began The Realm in an attempt to capitalize on the success of it’s Quest for Glory roleplaying games, which were, really, more adventure games than anything else. Nevertheless, Sierra realized early on, when the masses were flooding towards this thing we now call “The Internet”, that charging to play a consistently-active roleplaying game would be a great formula for success. With some experience in the area of online roleplaying games (previously through their ImagiNation network with Shadow of Yserbius and its expansion, Fates of Twain), Sierra believed that using the Internet instead of its own, proprietary network, would bring in users from all over the world. This was, of course, back when Sierra was still a quality company. Unfortunately, Sierra came to be run by more simple-minded folk who later restructured the company in full, leaving The Realm with only one programmer on staff. The Realm quickly became stagnant, and was eventually sold to Codemasters, where it now resides to this day.

Meridian 59, one of the first graphical MMORPGs to work in lovely 3D, hit store shelves with a bang. The sprite-based MMORPG set new standards for what games of its ilk should be like, and to this day remains what many argue to be a great balance of combat and roleplaying. Unfortunately, the game was published by 3DO, which sold all the intellectual property pertaining to the game in late 2001. Though Meridian 59 ran for quite a while, it lost a lot of support and, like The Realm, fell to stagnancy.

Perhaps the best two examples of MMORPGs came along somewhat later. Ultima Online, fueled by the Ultima setting established by Origin Systems, became a quick favorite, despite extreme problems with lag. The ridiculous budget Origin had, however, allowed them to continue developing the game for an audience who flocked towards anything with “Ultima” in its name. With a similarly high budget, Everquest didn’t struggle for very long, as Verant was quite certain that the MMORPG genre was a road to the proverbial “BLING-BLING”. This explains, of course, why Sony bought Verant without hesitation.

No discussion of online RPGs would be complete without first mentioning non-MMORPGs that have played a significant role in how we see roleplaying games today, and what we come to expect from them. For example, though mindlessly repetitive at times, few can dispute that Blizzard’s Diablo series played a huge role in defining online roleplaying games, despite the fact that Diablo wasn’t much of a roleplaying game at all. Almost singlehandedly, the first two games in the Diablo series reduced roleplaying games to item hunts, which set a precedent that even Gas Powered Games and Bioware followed with Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights, respectively. What did these titles teach the gaming community? Firstly, Blizzard provided ample confirmation that roleplaying games don’t need to have graphical wizardry (or socialization, unfortunately), to be popular. Bioware’s response, working with a modular editing system, proved that gamers love customization, even if their delivery of this customization was rather sub-par. Nonetheless, both these lessons are important, and ones that will be explained in more depth as this missive continues.

With no end in sight with respect to online RPGs in development, it would be painful, albeit true, to say that success will continue to be limited at best, especially as the battlefield of titles seeking monthly subscriptions continues to grow with new competitors entering the scene. As with United States politics, however, the parties competing are all eerily similar, and don’t address the issues people want with any real fervor; currently, every online RPG on the market follows a simple formula: kill or acquire. Until that formula is expanded, no amount of ingenuity or eye candy will take online RPGs out of the niche market, which is precisely why the MMORPG industry finds itself rather cluttered. This problem, however, is one that could be overcome if developers took heed of their game’s critical shortcomings.

History Repeats Itself

As online roleplaying games become more sophisticated both in terms of graphics and user customization, gamers find themselves with games of unparalleled entertainment. Unfortunately, these are the same gamers who enjoyed playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in their parent’s basement, thus creating a rather small niche of the potential market share. In other words, if the vicious cycle that RPGs are in does not end soon, the same types of people who like Diablo and Everquest will be playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, or whatever other title is headed our way; in order for MMORPGs to grow, the pool of players needs to expand beyond those traditionally attracted to RPGs.

The juncture we find ourselves at is not a new one. To be more specific, the juncture we are at is one the gaming industry has been to before, only instead of meeting it with a computer in hand, it was met with paper and pencils. Traditional tabletop RPGs, in their infancy, were little more than kill-fests. This makes more sense than one might think, given the gaming evolution that brought us RPGs to begin with. Modelled on tabletop wargames, roleplaying games were born out of a desire to classify the fictitious, rather than work purely with real-life war machines like panzers, riflemen, and airplanes.

When the 70s drew to a close and the 80s struck us with pop music and the DeLorean, roleplaying games remained hack’n slash efforts. Practically every game’s foundation was combat, whether you were armed with swords, blasters, or psychic powers. By the time roleplaying games were making money and had established an industry in its own right, things were growing somewhat stale. Gamers wanted more, and with steady profits from previous game lines, the big RPG publishers decided they could take some risks. Enter Call of Cthulhu, the legendary RPG built on investigating what you couldn’t kill. This was followed by games with the intent of full immersion in a setting, such as Pendragon and Ars Magica. Ten years after Call of Cthulhu was released, White Wolf released Vampire: the Masquerade, which shot its developers right into the history books as the people who combined non-combat with immersive roleplaying, all with a highly-developed backdrop and simple, relatively fast dice mechanics.

The emergence of Vampire led to two things, both of which are incredibly important. The first, and perhaps most noteworthy, is that a company earned success by showing us that roleplaying games were not just a niche market, and did not cater purely to those craving raw combat and character statistics. Not only did Vampire push character background and interaction to high levels, but unlike games before it, Vampire succeeded in transforming the landscape by making roleplaying (not rollplaying) primary to the experience, and drew in crowds that might otherwise never have given RPGs a look. Granted, it was Vampire’s gothic-punk setting that got people interested, but it was its easy-to-learn system, its in-depth background, and its focus on acting out a character’s role that kept people from straying. White Wolf proved this yet again not just by successfully releasing later games with different atmospheres, but by streamlining rules further for a non-tabletop, “stage” setting. When Live Action Roleplaying games (LARPs) became popular, it certainly wasn’t just geeks that wanted in on the action.

The release of Vampire also had an unfortunate side-effect, however, which, one might argue, worked against future White Wolf products. Because White Wolf put great effort into presentation of their products, some of their content began to pay a price. In computer gaming terms, one might call this an overindulgence of eye candy rather than focusing on gameplay. No doubt, a balance between the two needs to take place, as pretty games are not always good games, but on the other hand, good games often get ignored because they’re not quite pretty enough.

The intended analogy suggests this: For online roleplaying games to truly prosper, and to bring in gamers from other circles, the genre needs to have a financial foothold to work from. Fortunately, given the success of Ultima Online and Everquest, not to mention other MMORPGs making a profit, however slight, a financial foothold already exists. Market penetration has already shown that MMORPGs can make money with a good development plan, so a company large enough, or a team of developers good enough, should not have a problem obtaining the sponsorship for bringing MMORPGs to the next stage of evolution, namely the stage in which these games can begin offering players non-combat roles, and making these roles primary to the player’s gaming experience. Remember: Vampire was successful not because it focused on building powerful characters, but because it focused on building weak characters whose players brought them to life, teaching players that a character’s personality was more important than a character’s innate powers.

The other half of the analogy, the other lesson White Wolf’s experience showed gamers, is more of a supporting role for this argument: eye candy should not detract from content. Unfortunately, this will be a more difficult idea to push on an audience, since nowadays, any game not making use of the latest graphical features will be frowned upon by gaming magazines and critical audiences. For instance, when World War II Online (WW2O) premiered, it was immediately criticized for having shoddy graphics. Unfortunately, by “shoddy”, what reviewers actually meant was “not as good as other games released at the same time”. Never mind the fact that WW2O had a very impressive concept (perpetual, large-scale battleground), and that bringing gamers a landscape the size of Europe was not easy given modern bandwidth and processing limitations; WW2O wasn’t pretty enough to make the final cut. To be fair, it was a number of bugs that killed much of the hype behind WW2O, but even still, a game that may one day be seen as revolutionary enough to sit in the history books as the first large-scale first-person shooter, shouldn’t have been criticized primarily because of its graphics content. Games with pretty graphics and gameplay are the things gamers have wet dreams about, but games that deliver on fun and gameplay, with graphics slightly outdated, should not be ignored, and are generally much better than the converse. Again, this very concept was proven by Blizzard’s Diablo series more than once.

To reiterate, the argument is not that graphics are unimportant, but rather that immersion in a setting is absolutely important. Tabletop roleplaying games catch the eye based on presentation, and when it comes to computer games, presentation means graphics and sound, be it the box art, or more importantly, screenshots. When presentation becomes more important than gameplay, however, things have gone too far, and just as some gamers perceived White Wolf to be arrogant because of product presentation and self-fulfilling prophecies, MMORPG publishers need to take a step back and make sure they’re not making the same mistakes. Needless to say, it’s time someone stepped up to the plate and did for online RPGs what White Wolf did for tabletop RPGs – show the industry that RPGs don’t need to be based on combat alone.

Roleplaying, not Rollplaying.

It’s not that publishers don’t know what makes a good game, it’s that they don’t know how to merge genres. Just look at how long it’s taken to get a steady audience to support the real-time-strategy (RTS) and first-person-shooter (FPS) genres coming together. Games like Battlezone, Dungeon Keeper, and Giants: Citizen Kabuto were the Cthulhu games of the digital age, and were largely overlooked. It won’t be too long, however, before these types of games become a mainstay. As with the RTS/FPS hybrids, MMORPGs have “convergence” written all over them. The whole premise of a world filled with people, on any realistic level, intuitively cries out for a melange of character types. Playing D&D, on the other hand, makes one think everyone is a hero in the Tolkien-ish world Gary Gygax first set out to create. After all, who would be caught dead playing the tavern bartender? In smaller player groups, this unrealistic premise doesn’t really come into play, since the non-player characters (NPCs) are controlled by the Gamemaster (GM). However, when these games are made to be massively-multiplayer, one quickly has hundreds of fighter-class characters running around a single town, with underdeveloped NPCs selling gear and spam-bots running around the city in an excuse to add atmosphere to the game. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t enough GMs around to roleplay every NPC, so the NPCs need to be scripted. When this happens, any semblance to a realistic world background is burnt to the ground. Though there aren’t enough GMs around to fix this flaw, there are, however, enough players.

Naive gamers may be fine with the lack of realism in these types of games, and many will undoubtedly proclaim that people don’t want to play the “goddamned barkeep”. Au contraire, mon ami. The social atmosphere of roleplaying settings are a consistent draw for people. Adventuring (i.e. “killing stuff”) is not the only thing people want to do, especially now, when they can’t really do anything but. A discussion with Game.Ars coauthor Calvin some time ago illustrated this exact point, in which he voiced his desire to play a blacksmith in a fantasy setting. All he wanted to do was make weapons and armor for people, and every once in a while, go out and collect things. Considering that the man doesn’t do hard drugs, and that he’s shown incredible proficiency in games where he does kill stuff, it’s almost hard to believe he was being serious. This stance may not be one shared by every hardcore gamer out there, but one can’t ignore that the idea of playing a character in a non-combat role appeals to other people as well, especially people who are not drawn to hack’n slash games in the first place. Fortunately, some companies have begun to see the light, and “complimentary” roles like smithing are popping up in fantasy-based MMORPGs. Unfortunately, these are not primary character roles, and adventuring (read: killing stuff) remains the main focus for even blacksmiths. While having the option to give a combat-oriented character a smithing skillset is nice, why not allow players to build a blacksmith who doesn’t excel at killing things, who merely forges equipment and plays the game to socialize with other characters? After all, if that’s all a character wants to do, isn’t it wasting skill points to give them fighting proficiencies in the first place?

It doesn’t take The Sims to show us that people will play, and buy, games without violence. There’s a reason that non-violent games have repeatedly reached the top of the charts, be it The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon. While these chart-toppers obviously differ in genre, the point is that there’s an untapped market MMORPGs are ignoring; the potential market for games offering both social and combat roles is simply huge. People who look forward to games like The Sims Online are looking for games that are not purely simulations, but games where they can develop a character and interact with other player-created characters. For those who don’t see where this is going, it’s the development aspect of running a character that exemplifies the fundamental idea behind roleplaying games. For many roleplayers, the idea of thinking up a character background doesn’t even come up, and they’re content to jump right into a game after allotting skill points. Many “pure” roleplayers would cringe at this, as most answer questions like “What did my character do before coming here?”, and “How do I want to play out my character’s personality?”. These and similar questions are vital in fleshing out a character, and are often more important than skills alone, assuming one wants to participate in a game that’s not just about hacking and slashing.

Consider this scenario: A female “gamer” considers herself a roleplayer. Moments in the bedroom aside, the roleplaying of note that she’s participated in includes some dabbling in LARPs, as fully acting out a role appeals to her sense of drama. LARPing allows her to more easily escape the world she lives in, without her having to look at her role through the eyes of a character sheet or a set of dice. Hack’n slash games do nothing for her, and she even finds tabletop RPGs with irregular scenes of combat rather unappealing. Her idea of quality roleplaying when not LARPing is not sitting around a table rolling dice, or even defining character statistics rigidly, but rather (much to the dismay of geeks everywhere) logging on to AOL, loading up her favorite chat rooms and IM clients, and engaging in what could be considered to be rough, prose-based roleplaying. “Rough” is appropriate, because the roleplaying is freeform, like collaborative storytelling, without paying much heed to what a character is realistically capable of. It’s not that character attributes would necessarily get in the way, as her focus is on an exchange of prose, but she’s not the least bit interested in solving an ancient puzzle, acquiring magical items to brag about, or killing off a tribe of werewolves. The level of immersion her roleplaying moments foster is pretty significant, despite being only text-based. For her, it’s like living a character in a book, but having some say in what happens. Again, this is a fundamental aspect of any good roleplaying game. This said, would she ever load up Everquest and make a character? Heck no. Everquest and its ilk don’t offer anything she’s interested in, even though she does want to play a character, and would be happy to take part in a fantasy setting.

Perhaps to the surprise of gamers everywhere, people like the aforementioned female are out there in spades. They play LARPs on college campuses across the nation without ever once installing a computer game. Some think The Sims is a swell idea, and others spend their nights browsing chat rooms for other roleplayers just to get a scene or two in before they have to go to bed. Many connect to their social hangouts via modified telnet clients to play in text-based worlds on antiquated software technology like Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). The point is, there are plenty of other people out there who like to roleplay, but don’t consider buying titles branded as “roleplaying” games because they simply don’t offer anything other than a hack’n slash environment, even if that environment is prettied up with nice graphics and complimentary skills.

Some of the best online roleplaying experiences out there are very basic; the author recalls a fantastic time playing a WoD-based MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination, similar to a MUD) playing a human rather than a supernatural race. Exploring the city, watching characters interact, and inadvertently stumbling upon the existence of supernatural characters was more interesting than jumping into the know and playing a character capable of bullying others. Much of the time, the character spent in the local tavern socializing with people, getting to know the town’s inhabitants, and catching up on the rumours running through the countryside (which were generated by the actions of players). Likewise, though plots would come and go, the characters, for the most part, lead normal lives, despite the little-known fact that the tavern owner was a vampire who kept bar every night. The author played a locksmith and part-time thief, making and selling locks to the local townsfolk (rather convenient for a thief). The tavern owner and the locksmith got to be good friends, as did the locksmith and a number of other townsfolk, and though each character had matters of their own to deal with, which were wholly different in nature given the respective character’s backgrounds, the characters still got together to spend a large amount of time just socializing. The community the game fostered grew to such a level that discussing gossip, character pasts, etc became almost as fluent as talking about the player’s real lives outside of the game. That is the pinnacle of immersion – being so engrossed in the world one’s character is part of that one can sit around and talk about anything, without thinking about how many experience points (XP) are needed to get some new skill, or wear some new, fancy armor.

During the locksmith’s life, for the entire half year or so that the game was played, there was not one single exchange of blows between he and a monster, or he and another player. While there was one confrontation with a fight about to break out, the locksmith somehow got out of actually throwing a punch by talking his way out of it. The locksmith didn’t solve any huge quests either, nor did he collect any treasure. Yet, the experience of playing a game that immersive is an experience yearned to be relived any day of the week, and well before shelling out 10+ dollars a month for any currently-existing MMORPG.

There’s a balance to be had, naturally. It’s clear that there’s a place for hack’n slash scenarios, but it’s complimenting fantasy settings with the ability to play a social character that will flesh out the one-sided titles currently seen on store shelves. More importantly, it’s allowing players the flexibility to take as much of either extreme as they want that will define what it means to be a roleplaying game in tomorrow’s world. Right now, however, even people who want to see combat and adventure but don’t want to play the typical hack’n slash character can’t do that effectively. Neverwinter Nights did a splendid job of allowing players to create characters that acted in “support” roles, such as the classic thief, who found and disarmed traps, all the while sneaking around and unlocking treasure chests. However, given that the emphasis was on experience gained by way of combat, there remained no good way to further the character by playing a thief totally in-character. Likewise, MMORPGs need to cater to support roles in addition to pure combat characters. Lionheart pushed the concept of thieving characters even more, and with a little ingenuity (monster confusion spells), thief characters could effectively get through a significant portion of the game while receiving adequate XP from sneaking past tough monsters, and occasionally casting confusion spells to clear out rooms where monsters were packed too densely to effectively sneak past. However, once again, the developers didn’t push support roles quite far enough (they were still support roles!), as the limits to this trickery made pure thieves horrible characters, since the character wasn’t rewarded enough to play through the whole game while remaining true to the thief concept. Why even allow the player to build a thief if that role can’t properly be played out?

Roleplaying games need to get away from dedicated support roles. Support characters certainly have their place, and are quite useful in building effective adventuring parties, but quests should not have one solution only, and most certainly, that solution should not always require the slaughtering of monsters throughout a dungeon, and a butchering of the local mini-boss. The Quest for Glory series, albeit simple compared to the games of today, did an excellent job of allowing different character classes to complete quest objectives in different, unique ways. So too should the support roles of today be character concepts that can be flexible enough to allow much more soloing that RPGs today allow, which fortunately is a consideration Blizzard made when designing World of Warcraft (WoW).

Beyond exposure to combat, plot is one of the most important elements in any game, and one central to a character’s place in the world. That said, the best plots are those made by the characters themselves. In real life, people aren’t handed quests by some omnipotent being, unless one’s smoked too much crack, fallen asleep, bumped their head on the furnace, and seen The Light. Minus those people, the most don’t have an unusual desire to participate in some world-threatening quest. Unless commissioned by the government, most don’t go overseas to kill a powerful warlord, or extract vital documents from a rival organization. Most people live fairly banal lives, perhaps engaging in certain pursuits they enjoy, but nonetheless not doing anything of extreme importance on a world-shattering scale.

While the idea of a roleplaying game is not to relive one’s relatively banal life, thousands upon thousands of people chat with each other online because they have nothing better to do. How many people would argue that doing the same thing in a fictional world, with non-stressful, fictional world events surrounding them, is not more fun? At minimum, it’s just as boring as what they’re doing already, but at most, it’s much more interesting, and has far more potential to turn into something more fun, especially if that chatter develops into world-altering decisions, tasks for characters to complete, and political exchanges that will have an actual impact around the character.

Unfortunately, pure socialization on existing MMORPGs is difficult and tedious. Characters can’t always emote by way of graphical representation, and following a chat with disappearing voice “bubbles” is an absolutely horrific experience. Games with embedded chat windows are not much easier, given that they’re usually quite small, not resizeable, and don’t have much filtering potential. User interfaces (UIs) need to be designed with these things in mind, such that a conversation can be followed despite having multiple people in the room. Text shouldn’t just appear above a character’s head, but organized in a window akin to most chat clients, where it can potentially be logged, and at least looked at beside previous exchanges before disappearing into the ether. Anything less reduces the continuity of conversations. If the chat window in-game is smaller than what a player generally expects from their Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client, then the game is already red-flagged. At a minimum, allow these windows to be resized or enlarged, such that a player can follow a conversation when the lack of on-screen physical action allows it. As for emoting, it’s a wonder this didn’t make it into MMORPGs earlier, since it’s an old concept in text-based games, and even though included in games like WoW, developers haven’t decided on an all-around standardized set of emotes that include smiles, winks, etc. With 3D graphics as complicated as they are these days, there’s no excuse for missing out on these minor, albeit very useful, additions.

To compliment UI evolution, character communication needs to be perfected. The radius of sound around each character should be reflected in what can be heard, given another character’s form of communication. For example, while a whole room may be able to hear a character when he’s in “shout” mode, only people a few feet from him should hear him when in “talk” mode. One more step might be for mostly-private discussions, in which only a character directly adjacent to another character may hear discussion in “whisper” mode. If technology were at an ideal level for online roleplaying, all communication would be voice-based anyway, with players talking through microphones and their voices being sent only to players whose characters are close enough to realistically hear them. Slowly but surely, “gamespeak” solutions are being perfected, and this needs to be considered a built-in feature for the MMORPGs of the future. In any case, while gamers are currently stuck with text-based solutions, there’s no reason a game’s UI can’t keep text-based communication clean and organized.

So what does it take to bring about a social, yet functional atmosphere, in addition to one that caters to combat-oriented characters? Bringing players in from multiple genres may be a great idea, but how can it be done seamlessly, without additional overhead? More importantly, how can one reduce the current overhead MMORPGs have to make a game both more enjoyable, and less costly to maintain?

All Hope Lies in the Proles

Before the Golden Age of computer gaming, there was the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), which was little more than a text-based online roleplaying game. More accurately, MUDs were text-based online roleplaying game engines that required an administrator to describe rooms, alternate game mechanics, and so forth. From these mostly hack’n slash codebases grew Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSHs) as well as another dozen acronyms (all referred hereafter as MUs) all based around the same idea: allowing administrators to build a world for characters to roam around in and interact with. Some of these codebases fostered combat, and others fostered socialization. Either way, most were customizable, and were so influential that many MUs continue to exist today, despite prettier and larger games out there.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the MU*’s of the past and the MMORPGs of the present, is the level of player participation regarding the development of the world. Nowadays, all development is done in-house by paid staff, which is good in the sense that dedicated folks are spending time on a consistent basis to bring about a focused vision for the game, but bad in the sense that this not only increases the cost to play the game, but limits development and staff by the monetary limits of budget allotment. To borrow a previous example, in real life, there isn’t an omnipotent being, or even a single influential group, that determines the where, what, and how of building throughout the world. So, it should only make sense that dynamism of environment should be a precursor to MMORPG development; characters should be able to stake a claim in ungoverned territory, and, given proper wealth and manpower, actually build their vision for whatever it is they want to construct.

With development done offline and piecewise additions to worlds taking place, current in-game MMORPG development is slow and unfriendly. There is little to no personalization of world objects, and no way for players to exceed the design limitations of game rewards imposed upon them by a rigid object system. For instance, players may find ways to obtain unique items, or are given the ability to own or even build a house or castle, but there is no way for players to forge their own unique weapons, or to construct castles of their own design, complete with hidden doors, custom booby traps, and special, localized attributes. It is this lack of personalization that stifles modern immersive worlds.

This is a far cry from the flexible object-based designs of certain MU* codebases, which allow players to create objects while online, and immediately have these objects accessible to the inhabitants of the world. Using a built-in programming language to supplement the hard-coded foundation on which the world is built, there remains enough flexibility for users to create anything from a weapon, to a car, to a fortress getaway. Not only can these objects be created such that they manifest to other players, but these objects can be functional with a little scripting – weapon objects can do damage, cars can be entered or exited and traverse through the world, and fortress getaways can have rooms linked to one another and the world at large using doors.

Given this kind of system, Calvin could very well create his blacksmith. Given raw materials, a forge, and the proper skills, he should be able to spend time X to create object Y. Increasing X will yield objects of greater scope and/or quality than Y, though this would mean he’d have to get ahold of more raw materials. Enter the economic system for a game. Characters are paid to scout out mines and explore them. This may or may not involve combat of some sort. Either way, once a mine is cleared, construction may begin. The construction may be done by NPCs given another character’s purchasing of the mine and hiring of NPC labor. Once constructed, the mine may yield iron ore given additional payment to NPC labor. If the mine is in a wilderness area, player character protection may be hired to defend the mine from brigands, or they may be hired to transport the ore back to town. Raw ore can be sold to Calvin for refinement and profit. Though seemingly complex, this chain of events is actually ideal – not only does it involve players who want to explore, but it involves characters who don’t want necessarily active roles in adventuring. Suddenly, character’s are motivated to do something that serves a purpose in-game. The mine owner can log off and collect ore when sleeping, and yet an automated system he sets up can still pay his workers while he’s not around. Similarly, while Calvin’s making dinner or paying his bills, he could have the game up in the background while his smithy is busy working on a customer’s weapon. When Calvin has more time to pay attention to the game, he may move his character out of the locked back room of the forge, and sell his wares or talk to customers elsewhere. This gives him a chance to earn money for himself and exchange that money for additional ore.

The level of complexity here can get even more severe, especially if we’re not talking about a mine, but of a small house. Not only does an owner need laborers, but he may need to purchase things from other characters, be it lumber for the walls, stone for the foundation, locks for his doors, or furniture crafted by player carpenters. The possibilities are pretty impressive here, especially when you consider that this directly fosters an economic system, if not one built on bartering for goods alone.

To use MU* codebases as an example of how object creation has previously been handled, players are typically given quota, or “creation points” with which to create objects. While often restricted, quota allow players to work with city-builders and other staff in the design process of the world, and intelligent city-planners will assign quota for well-proposed buildings. This means that players serve an integral role in the expansion of the world, and because of this, are much more likely to become attached to the world, since it’s not only one they play in, but one that they help create.

While the script-based system found in MU*s is overly complicated to players to learn, it’s easily simplified by in-game objects and invisible scripts that run beneath graphical representations of objects. A lumber stack can be targeted by a character with a carpeting skill, and that lumber can be used as a resource to fuel a building project, with the player’s building interface composed of room shapes. This would be little more than an RTS-like interface, with a list of available building options based on the character’s skill, and some flexibility in the designation for doors and windows. From an engine standpoint, door objects work with lock objects, which may work with trap objects. Each of these can be installed by characters with the appropriate skills, who exchange their services for monetary gain. Very much akin to an item-trade menu in typical multi-player RPGs, characters can contract to receive a certain amount of money for performing a certain service, and the game would recognize when a particular service has been performed on a home or shop belonging to a particular character. This type of “hidden-script” system in which various objects can interface with one another is not a new idea. In fact, the idea dates back to Trespasser, where developers expected players to find ways that objects could work together that even they did not think of.

Allowing players to direct the existence of certain world objects is a very important idea: players directly responsible for certain changes in the world will make decisions more carefully, and seriously. If everyone wants to play a fighter, and Calvin is the only blacksmith in a town, there will be a huge shortage of weapons and raw materials. The simulation aspects of the game come in here, but rather than one person overseeing a balance, it’s the community that needs to keep everything in check. To make sure players want a balance, pitting them against an enemy is a good way to do just that. For instance, if everyone wants to be a fighter, chances are they will get overrun if the enemy is better equipped and they themselves have no weapons to speak of. No one wants their character to die, after all, especially is death is a severe punishment one can’t simply respawn from.

The beautiful thing with this kind of system is that one can easily introduce competition. Online games are ripe with competitive players, which is perhaps one reason that current MMORPGs contain a significant amount of player killing (PKing). If there is a direct negative effect of killing locals, however, a player will be less prone to killing another. That is to say, if killing the smithy to steal his wares sounds like a good idea at first, consider that a dead smithy means find oneself unable to put shoes on one’s horse when one needs to skip town, and the town’s ability to forge new weapons to defend itself is suddenly decreased.

With these negative effects of PKing, however, there could still be ample opportunity to kill one’s neighbor. While most MMORPGs involve killing beasties who may or may not serve a powerful NPC evil, introducing enemy player characters may very well be more rewarding. For instance, imagine a game in which there are three kingdoms, and each of these kingdoms are at war. A player is randomly assigned to one of the three kingdoms when she creates her character, and this influences her alliance. If she kills her own people, her kingdom may fall, but killing people in another kingdom may be beneficial. This not only creates a need for fighter characters, but also makes economic ties cross foreign borders. Characters may need to protect caravans, line up on the field of battle, etc. Games like Lineage II hint at exactly this concept, but the economic ties between player-nations and the social atmosphere around it still doesn’t appear to be a focus of the developers.

This type of community model is nothing like present instantiations, where paid staff are the sole designers, and where there is often little to no correspondence between the players and staff. While the existing model supports design consistency, it is expensive, and is one of the largest variables in why MMORPGs are pay-to-play. Full-time staff, after all, need a source of income, and unless they get paid, no more development gets done. Instead, let the players help shape the landscape. Give them the ability to create weapons, structures, and more complex objects. Even more importantly, let them draw new plots and political conspiracies. Let power plays be fought by characters, where players can amass wealth based on resource ownership and craftsmanship. Let the players create a self-sufficient community with paid staff giving direction, not defining every aspect of the world’s evolution.

This power-to-the-players philosophy is especially important when talking staff direction in particular. A number of games have supporting communities in which especially knowledgeable players serve as unpaid “guides” or “mentors”. Similarly, but with more responsibilities, are staff powers given to people on certain MU*s, which is usually done when a player has proven himself among existing staff. This is easy to do in a smaller community environment, and more difficult in MMORPGs, but nonetheless, respectable players could easily serve as lesser staff. For instance, players could be given certain city planning privileges, which allow them to approve structures built within city limits, or they could be given certain jurisdiction in-game, be it a military rank, the ability to enforce law within city walls, et al. Not only does this reward players in ways other than giving them the ability to wear a fancy new rig of armor, but it frees paid staff to work on more important things than building yet another stone hut, like fixing bugs, developing new quests, and keeping the servers up.

When it comes down to it, the most important developers are the characters, since they reside in the world being built. Give the players capitalism and privatization, not communism of world resources. Like the real world, it’s the people that make things happen, and this ought be reflected in online games. So long as some level of moderation can take place, empowering the people is the holy grail of MMORPG evolution.

Your Character, Your Life

As mentioned, modern MMORPGs are riddled with adventure-specific characters, where supporting professions, like Calvin’s aforementioned blacksmith character, are mostly overlooked. Adding non-adventurer characters will not only attract players uninterested in killing things, but will help establish in-game communities that will solidify the immersive aspects of the game world. That said, clarification should be made, for though “profession” has been used to identify the duties a character performs, the ideal MMORPG would be classless, and as such, “profession” is used rather loosely, and not tied to a class-based structure found in traditional RPGs. Ultima Online’s development included the concept of non-combat characters, but to make that happen, additional classes were introduced that solidified a character’s purpose. In many ways, this was a huge mistake, as it’s the level of ability a character has in a particular skill that should identify their profession, not an arbitrary term tacked below a character’s name. Some games, like Dungeon Siege, have tried getting away from the class system by allowing characters to choose whatever skills they want, and the nice thing about Dungeon Siege’s interpretation of the class system was that one’s proficiency in skills determined class, not the other way around.

There’s nothing wrong with class templates that group certain skills together at a predetermined proficiency level, such that a player can create a character already geared towards what they want the character to be. However, there shouldn’t be an artificial limitation on the types of skills a character can learn. After all, why shouldn’t a fighter be able to learn how to cast a spell, or a thief learn how to use a katana? So long as a character has the equipment to learn a new skill, it’d ridiculous to disallow it based on something as artificial as a class.

In the past, classes haven’t only defined the skills a character can possess, but it’s also defined what the character looks like. Fortunately, games are slowly getting away from having characters of similar skills look the same, thanks in part to the character customization process. In early MMORPGs, characters who were fighters looked the same, while thieves likewise looked alike. It was easy, in this way, to determine what kind of character was on screen at any given time. An even worse violation of this was when, in Ultima Online for instance, one could look at a character and determine his class based on an on-screen identifier. A fundamental concept behind roleplaying, be it known by this name or not, is the in-character masquerade (IC-masq), stating that in-character knowledge should not be shown out-of-character. That is to say, unless one’s character has divulged certain information, other characters should not know about it. Likewise the out-of-character masquerade (OOC-masq) represents information pertaining to the real world, not the in-game world. These masqs are breached when an in-game character uses information gained from outside the game world; in the case where player classes are displayed to other users, the IC/OOC-masqs are breached, which should never be the case.

For some roleplayers, the IC/OOC-masqs (hereafter referred to simply as “masq”) are fundamentals for the games they play. Many MU*s feverishly sought out to prevent masq breaches by coding an IC and an OOC channel into the interface, such that players could isolate the text relevant to the game world so they could focus on purely on the game. This interface design decision is often overlooked, particularly with the ability to temporarily “block” OOC text from appearing on screen. As real-world discussion will eventually creep into the mix, especially as players want to relate real-life experiences to their virtual friends, the ability to separate IC and OOC discussion is invaluable in maintaining continuity in the game world. For this reason, enforcement of the masqs is very important. Unfortunately, it is rarely enforced in a lot of MMORPGs, and characters will discuss, in-game, stuff that’s happening in the real world. For a MMORPG to be truly immersive, this kind of behavior needs to be watched and moderated, which is yet another reason for responsible player-staff to exist, given that no paid staff member will have the time to conduct this type of moderation given other job duties.

Since proper roleplaying is a necessity for game atmosphere, the community can self-police itself even with minimum player-staff available. This can be done by preventing player advancement from happening only by earning experience from combat. This raises the inevitable question: How can character advancement happen if experience is no longer gained from killing? While it makes sense that certain skills should increase by use (and obviously, killing things uses certain combat skills), the brunt of character advancement should work by earning experience by being a good roleplayer. To borrow a popular advancement scheme from certain MU*s, players could gain experience points by way of a voting system, where other players vote for a character they enjoyed playing with, either because of good roleplaying, because they were in invaluable aid in a particular quest, etc.

A rough, prototypical algorithm will follow, noted here only to illustrate the feasibility of such a system. Hopefully, this will address some problems associated with a voting system, and likewise better define how it would work. Firstly, assume that every player is given one vote per week. Votes do not stack, so if not used by the end of the week, are simply discarded. At the end of the week, players who received the most votes are awarded experience based on a function on the number of votes they received and the number of hours they were active on the server. In this way, players who don’t log on that often are not penalized too harshly when it comes to receiving votes. Feasibly, a player who logs on for one hour a week and roleplays exceptionally well can earn experience as fast as, or quicker than, someone who logs on for days and doesn’t roleplay very well at all. Combined with limited skill-use experience accruement (a loner who just goes out and kills things, for example), players will have some leeway when looking to gain experience. This immediately addresses the concerns some MMORPG subscribers have regarding players who can afford not to attend full-time jobs and spend 15 hours a day playing online. Neither does this systems penalize those players, however.

To limit rigged voting, prevention can be accomplished by putting limits on how many times a particular player can vote for someone, especially in a row. For instance, allow one to vote on a specific character only once a month at maximum. Furthermore, if the system detects “circular” or “pack” voting by a group of individuals by way of IP or patterns, suspend future voting privileges or otherwise punish the players. This has two benefits: frequent players won’t keep voting for one another and put non-frequent players at a disadvantage, and schemes to quickly advance a group of characters will be difficult without interacting with other players. In turn, this simulates real-world interfacing with society, where the more people one interacts with, the more a person can potentially learn.

A hybrid XP-earning system like the above is more universally applicable to the various types of players a more social game would attract, and yet still works by rewarding characters who repeatedly use a given skill. However, with this secondary XP system in place, a character should not be rewarded for killing yet another imp if he’s done so a thousand times before. Much of the skill use should go into maintaining that skill, while neglected skills will deprecate to a very minimal degree after disuse. Another realistic approach to skill management in improvement is the way the skill is applied. For example, a character should earn more XP if the character successfully combats a monster he’s never come across, compared to combating the thousandth imp he’s come across.

The gist of these alternate XP-earning systems is that players should want to accomplish tasks not because those tasks reward the character with XP, but because the completion of the task is in itself satisfying. Expensive weapons, a better economic system where money and gear doesn’t drop from every monster killed, and worthwhile goals ought to give players a sense of accomplishment when a quest is conquered, and new gear is obtained. While the recent trend of companies limiting the number of characters an MMORPG subscriber is permitted to create can be seen as aggravating and nonsensical, the premise does prevent some degree of items-swapping between characters belonging to the same player, which is, in essence, a violation of the masq.

Just as players may become attached to a world if they had a personal say in how it develops, players become more attached to their characters when those characters are tougher to come by. One need only compare the emotions of normal players in Diablo 2 to those who play Hardcore characters in Diablo 2 when the respective character dies. In the former case, the character respawns with a gold and/or XP penalty. In the latter, however, the character is gone for good, and this really has an impact on the player if he’s developed the character over many days of playing. In an MMORPG scenario, this attachment could be vital to how a player decides his character’s course of action. Even if resurrection exists, so long as it is rare and difficult, players will not take extreme risks if it could mean the loss of their character’s previous form. Just as in real life, players will not go around picking fights, murdering townsfolk, etc. if such actions have dire consequences.

The trend to create more realistic games is one that will not go away anytime soon, and it’s only a matter of time before some of those more realistic traits find themselves in the MMORPG genre. In many ways, realism implies a leveling of the playing field, where characters don’t have a billion hitpoints just because they’ve been around longer. While it makes sense that fighter characters should be tougher to kill, this should be because of their combat skills and physical attributes, not a hit point number that greatly varies. A human is a human; a sword will do just as much damage to a fighter as it would a fisherman. The only difference is that the fighter will be more difficult to hit, especially when wearing armor. This ought be reflected in MMORPGs, which would practically kill the need to have a hundred different types of monsters, each monster more powerful than the last. And, when you do have more powerful opponents, with a more standard health system in place, players will think twice about joining that expedition to hunt down the dragon queen. Fear and intimidation suddenly becomes a factor simulated in the gaming world.

What it comes down to is consequences. A game where player actions actually mean something will foster community growth. Characters need to be varied, with non-rigid professions, and above all, need to have a sense of mortality. Once this is accomplished, in conjunction with a more varied in-game social atmosphere, true roleplaying will emerge where games begin to feel more real, and less like an arcade game.

Where Dragons Fear to Tread

Already established is that a player-driven atmosphere is necessary to bring about immersion. We can support this argument by using examples from numerous roleplaying games, wherein NPCs are stale, predictable creatures. Even if a game’s artificial intelligence (AI) were built to expand on NPC actions, wherein monsters work together in packs, and actually roam the countryside, the problems in AI still surround neutral or benign characters in the game. While AI could (and should!) continue to be worked on when it comes to building better monsters, design limitations will limit non-hostile NPCs for some time still, which is where player-driven contributions become important.

Right now, non-hostile NPCs do many things: they sell items, they give characters quests to undertake, and they act as conversationalists (albeit poor ones). In essence, these NPCs serve one purpose only, however: atmosphere. Beacons of information in what would otherwise be rather stale worlds, most of the functions these NPCs serve could easily be replaced by player-driven characters. Take the store owner, for example. With Calvin’s blacksmith supplying another player weapons and armor, the player can sell his wares for a profit, and dedicate his time to showcasing his gear. Calvin doesn’t have time for this, for though he can sell his gear to players directly, he spends much of his time collecting resources and working in his own shop putting the gear together.

The advantage of player-driven stores are simple: characters have a place to congregate where discussion and haggling can take place. This adds a human element to the previously-simplified purchasing of gear, and compounded with the earlier decision to make gear rather expensive to come by, purchasing decisions will be more important for characters, and building good rapport with a shopkeeper is very pertinent. Furthermore, player-driven shops can choose to stock whatever gear they wish, and contract numerous blacksmiths to work on specific types of gear, such that Calvin, for example, has the luxury of perfecting his armor-creation skills rather than his sword-crafting. From this, a tiered skill-system is born, giving players the option to focus on very specific areas, so no longer is there just a blacksmith profession, but concentrations like armorers, goldsmiths, et al. This tiered system can easily carry over to other skillsets, including carpentry, herbalism, and leatherworking. The more complex the sub-skill tree becomes, the better the economic system is supported.

Caravans for transporting specialized gear from one town to another become capable professions, in which traveling merchants make money by buying and reselling gear. Armed escorts may be hired if the merchants don’t take the sword up themselves, but as one can see, each profession fleshed out by the developers leads to yet another profession. At each stage, there is a human counterpart to the actions specific to that profession, and the often-overlooked haggling skill becomes unnecessary, since a character’s proficiency with it is linked to that of the player, just as typical conversation is. Perhaps more importantly, with an economic system underlying the decisions of many players to work together, “mini-quests” such as acquiring certain items (in this case gear, mounts, etc) become important, since they have a direct affect on another player’s wealth. No longer do characters need to complete annoying “FedEx-quests” and wonder what they really accomplished, because now, their contribution is not only to their purse, but to the community as well.

While non-hostile NPCs will be a part of roleplaying games for some time yet, even much of the informational roles they serve can easily be replaced by player-driven characters. Most MMORPGs already have this in place, since characters can ask other characters what’s going on in the town, where the local shops are, etc. While NPCs will give the same directions in the same words, however, player-driven characters will give different advice depending on mood and the state of the game. Instead of directing a player to look at the closest shop, they might direct the player to give Calvin’s place a try, since they know he often sells his extra wares for cheap at the end of the month, since it means the shops have already done their buying. Should one shop owner offer better deals, player-driven characters can give that information out in a much better way than any NPC could.

Naturally, the biggest obstacle to overcome are the roles NPCs play in governmental or other special positions. Palace guards, local sheriffs, and the kings themselves are positions that most players don’t dream of holding, because most of the time they simply can’t. That doesn’t mean the MMORPGs of the future can’t be built to make this idea a reality, however. After all, it’s not as though the local king actually does anything – usually he serves to fill a role to add to the game’s atmosphere and background. What if governmental positions were run by players who established policy, however? What if field lieutenants, through specific UI considerations, could have battlefield views of soldiers, issuing commands that told other players what to do? This isn’t an impossibility, it’s simply a matter of building a game around the concepts of a player-driven world. Should a town be conquered by a player-driven army from another nation, a new ruler can be put in place, and as is the case in many MU*s, that new ruler would be a player, who commands the local militia or army, the local police force, and determines city planning, taxes, etc. It’s a world-building simulation that may not be for everyone, but who says everyone wants to be a ruler?

Still, be it supplying soldiers or fighting on the battlefield, there’s yet a difference between helping the community and helping oneself, and few players who enjoy adventuring would consider a title that lacks it. While a world driven by players requires numerous changes, that doesn’t mean that adventuring itself would be dismissed, and in fact, players again come into play to make these adventures a reality. From mini-quests generated by characters such that they can acquire goods for their gear-making or shop-keeping, to quests given by characters to hire assassins and mercenaries, there will always be a requirement to have world-changing events. While some of these events can be produced by decrees of war from one player-nation to another, with huge Lineage II-like battles taking place, as borderlands change hands of rulers, some people will want more, and for this, there will always be NPC threats backed by staff decisions. However, these types of quests can not only alter the state of the world as a whole, but more importantly, the state of player-nations, who might compete against one another to complete significant quests, like seeking legendary holy items that bolster a nation’s might, or sabotaging an impasse such that an NPC army is blocked from attacking, thus leading it into the territory of another player-nation.

In an MMORPG, a player can’t “win”, they can only overcome obstacles and do their best to survive and prosper in a dangerous world. This concept remains fundamental to any MMORPG no matter how dated or revolutionary. What sets one title away from the next isn’t how long the game runs before it’s beaten, but rather how immersive the game is, and how long it keeps a player interested. Interest isn’t kept by adding new places to kill new monsters, however, it’s building an immersive world in which the characters are innately human in conversation and tasking. Until computer science brings the industry a way for computers to act human, MMORPGs require a player-driven world in as many aspects as possible, such that the bare minimum number of NPCs remain present to keep the game going. More importantly, however, revamping roleplaying games with this consideration in mind brings a vital element back into the skillsets of geeks everywhere: being able to talk to people. While text on a screen or even headphones and a microphone aren’t real replacements for face-to-face communication, they’re capable alternatives in a virtual world limited by the technology the industry currently has available. At a minimum, gamers learn more from talking to people than they do pre-scripted robots, and those skills, even if small, are still better than gaining nothing from buying a new set of armor in Diablo 2.

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