Speaking of MMOs that tries to pretend that they are single player games, there is a trend that I rather dislike.
Making any given player character out as the main hero of the story, rather than a small part of a big whole.
An MMO experience will, quite necessarily, involve a lot of people, and taking part in that is the point of playing an MMO, surely? So, trying to portray every player character at the same time as the main hero, on which everything depends, will clash quite fiercely. That illusion will break down right quick, particularly if it only relies on the player not thinking about it at all.
Surely, it is a safer bet to make the player character simply one of many, part of the crowd? Particularly noteworthy players will no doubt stand out nonetheless, for their actions and their standing in the community. I would rather be a freshly baked adventurer, taking part in a great, big fantasy/sci-fi Volksturm much greater than I, than have the game portray me as personally responsible for every good deed in the land, while I am supposed to ignore that I am merely hero number 327 who have done that this afternoon alone. Player co-operation ought to be the goal, joining with some friends and doing something greater together.
I suppose it is more difficult to write fulfilling content where your contribution is still somewhat anonymous to the effort as a whole, than it is to simply write a hero portrait, but it would be better to at least attempt it. Not to mention, there are opportunities now for a lot more dynamic content, or player-made content, as what Eve Online has lived on for nearly one and a half decade now.
The Elder Scrolls Online tried to do both, in a way. Having a story centered on one character, while also having the player hero being just one amongst many heroes present at the same time in a strange time bubble. Silver star for effort, but still. A Dragon Break is high-grade plot spackle, and must be applied carefully and wisely. This was not either.
This effect is kind of why I believe MMOs would make supreme examples of single-player RPGs. But not as they stand, they would require retooling in at least two ways:
In most cases, while solo content is soloable, it is still built around the concept of long-term group fights. So you have a full (or several) bars of abilities even if you only use one or two to kill one or two or a small group of enemies at a time when you're soloing. I'd rather see this retooled so that what constitutes raids today would require, in this mythical MMO-as-SP-RPG, a broad use of abilities and skillful play. Depending on the complexity of the fight in its MMO incarnation, may require assistance from notable NPCs (but hopefully you would be the deciding factor; too often NPCs tend to be the actual protagonist while you and your raid were merely the cannon fodder/help). Meanwhile, what constitutes solo play today would be you - champion and demigod- waltzing through absolutely hordes of enemies laying waste to everything your path. Think Dungeon Siege 2 with a mod to increase mob density: just hordes of armies of monsters throwing themselves into your meatgrinder.
The second point is to actually change the world when you're done with a region. I haven't played many MMOs these days but those I have don't seem to do this very much. Warcraft has a bit of it with its phasing but it still seems to keep the general layout of the map the same, and it is simply the enemies and objects that populate the area that change depending on your phase (your progress in a quest line). So far as I'm aware, GW2 didn't even have this. Not sure about other third-generation MMOs like Wildstar or BDO (both of which I've only played for maybe 5 hours each).
Of course, none of this would ever happen. MMOs have a far extensive (if shallow) breadth of content precisely because of the massive funding they have, and the requirement to continually pump out new content. The only way this myth could be satisfied would be to have an MMO retool all of its content - changing and adding bonus content based around a true single player experience - at the end of its life. But if it is at the end of its profitable life, no company is going to spend the resources it would be require to give this concept a proper attempt. Even and especially emulators try only to replicate the original experience, because they still want the game to based on those the social requirements (however successful one might argue those social aspects were), not rebuilding it as a single player game.
I think the players get annoyed quite a bit when someone implies that they don't actually matter. I remember there being constant whining about how the plot is revolving around "GM NPCs", even though the players always deal most of the damage and are the ones actually winning the fights. So, the "you're the hero" is supposed to alleviate at least a part of that. I dunno if it actually works.
Yeah, [raise hand]. It's a matter of gameplay and story segregation. What the players do in the raid is just gameplay, the actual story that played out is revolves entirely around the NPCs. There is a balance to struck here - in EQ, NPCs did not exist in any of the raid I did (to speak only of those raids that became something more complex than "a dungeon boss that did more damage and had more life that a normal dungeon boss enemy"). In early WoW, this was the same. I'd rather see a return to that - success purely by the work of the heroes, and acknowledgment (via flagging or other means) that your character played a
part even if they weren't the sole hero responsible. Comparatively, a lot of the raid bosses in WoW were defeated not by the players necessary, but just buying time for a NPC to do what it needed to. And the NPCs are, canonically, the only one who get credit. If players' efforts are acknowledged it is only through reward of shinies, not in the story.
I could try to debate more but I am out of time, it will depend on where this goes when I get back.
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Topic: Gaming Pet Peeves (Read 526436 times)