Why MMO’s will never have “true” roleplaying…
January 30th, 2006I have these past years tested various MMORPG games, and come to the conclusion that we will never see any MMO with truly integrating roleplay as many of us have experienced from NeverWinterNights or PenAndPaper games. There are several reasons for this, but I think I can point to two of the major reasons.
1) Population
With a game consisting of 5 million subscribers (World of Warcraft) or even 1 million players (GuildWars) there will always be masses of “players” as opposed to “roleplayers”. Roleplaying was always a niche, and I think even more so in computer games. Though a “true” roleplayer will always wish for more people to immerse the world with a more realistic outlook and more options – I do believe that roleplaying works best where there’s a majority of roleplayers. This harkens back to the old “war” of PowerGamers vs. RolePlayers.
2) Automated quests
Automated/Game generated quests kills creativity, and leads to a powergaming mentality. Very quickly the casual roleplayer will find himself just running waypoints, killing X amount of mobs and returning for the reward. “What story?!” GuildWars has kind of tried to fix this problem in a few neat ways like instanced maps and cut-scene driven “main” plots. However it helps little when you reach a town to hear the cries of “SUP? LVL?! ASL?” or “WTS God-defying fullplate only 100K” over and over and over.
Heroes of Might and Magic V (the coming online variant) has tried to take the “small league” world of NeverWinterNights and turned it into an MMO world, where players match-up in a “chat-room” and launch an instanced map of the “mission”. So far, I’ve yet to get past this match-up section so I can’t say how well the game will work – but I have my doubts.
Most games have crafting of some kind – which we all know leads to farming. Even the first futile attempts at crafting back in Exaria (a NeverWinterNights “persistant-world”) led to a handfull of farmers. In the end, farmers ruin crafting, which ruin player economy, which leads everyone to farming, which… well…
Other games simply leave out the Massive part of the game, like AutoAssault, and works best when soloing. Unlike AutoAssault, at least GuildWars is designed for parties of players – though with the addition of AI Henchmen the game can be played solo aswell.
Unfortunately I have no real solution to this. We all want a game where we can play when WE want, and do what WE want. And for this we look to MMOs… when really I believe we should be looking to pen and paper or the instanced world of NWN/similar-game where there’s 4-8 players and 1-2 DMs following a tightly plotted scenario.
However, I’ve said this before, MMORPGs we won’t have, and why they call them that is kind of beyond me. Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games? Well, most are fantasy themed atleast – however I think there’s a reason why more and more people just stick with MMOs…
August 17th, 2006 at 20:58
I’ve always roleplayed on games like WoW without any of those problems. yeah, many people don’t roleplay, even in RP servers, but many others do. what i mean is that you simply have to find the right people to quest with, and it’s done. the pure roleplay is something very very hard to realize. but i had a lot of fun roleplaying in partyes with friends and killing mobs for quest without having any problem. WTS Armor only 100k? Well that’s OOC, and OOC is sometimes necessary.
pen and paper games are the only real role playing games? well then i’d say it’s not true, because it happens that you have to stand up and take a glass of water. what does that mean, that you’re ooc and you aint roleplaying? let’s be serious. i think you’re intending roleplay in a very very WRONG way… read any WoW RP forum and try to undestand
October 20th, 2006 at 6:59
Roleplay in MMO’s is in many ways far more immersive than in Pen and Paper tabletop games. I think you certainly correct about the roleplay aspect being more of a niche. I do not see that as a problem however. It becomes very difficult to deal with communities such as large the one World of Warcraft has massed. There are folks with seats at the U.N. with less than the 6.5 millions subscribers Blizzard as managed to attract!