Rose-colored glasses

August 24, 2006 on 9:15 pm | In MMO (Live), Playstyles, Industry

It's funny how people can romanticize game systems they either never played, or remember many years later with a perspective skewed by time.

But it's also fun to see how the community in which they don their rose-colored glasses rises up to, err, remind them of what was.

My week has been pretty rough, with meetings and traveling and all that. I finally had a chance to catch up on some ongoing conversations. One of my current favorites is the Raids and the Games Before them thread over at F13. One tangent that popped up, apparently today, was this notion that back in the old days of Everquest, trains (a group of mobs chasing the unfortunate to the zone line, the only safe exit for the player(s) ) built community.

Heh. Not. 

It wasn't just the trains. Rather, it was the result of the crash course between RPG-style gaming and a persistent world that was all public-space

EQ wasn't about socializing any more than WoW. Socializing is what happened as emergent behavior after the fact, or because just enough interaction is required to get people together. A lot of people were expected to play these games with a core group of folks they already knew (ala D&D).

They needed ways to talk, but it literally took years for things like LFG tools to come along. And those came along when development community realized just how many people were falling into these games by buying a random box-o-MMO at retail instead of Diablo.

Diku-inspired games are about acquisition (XP, gear, whatever). EQ was all public space though. So now a bunch of people broken down into sub-social-groups were in the way of other people vying for the same content. That doesn't build community. It builds Lord of the Flies.

Instantiating content, loot-rolling systems, scheduled events and raidIDs and all that stuff was built because RPG-based item acquisition by itself is not great fun for thousands of people when there's only a few dozen things to get and a few thousand other people that also want it. It sets up competition in a system not designed for it, one of the basic problems people (rightly) had with Trammel as well: there was little one could do against a jerk who worked against them except to ostracize the jerk. And that only worked for as long as the local community card, or even remembered.

If you want a PvE-centric item-based game, you need these tools. You can't expect people to wake up one day and be all happy-go-lucky about their progress upward being thwarted by the mistakes of people they don't even know. This genre just keeps growing, more people keep coming in, by the millions, and this awakening hasn't happened. There's reasons for this.

And the funny thing is, I can't even recommend oh thee of the roja-glasses go back and play EQ1. Why? Because even EQ1 has changed so much, to fix these problems.

There may be a game or three someone can point to as an exception. I invite them to do so, because I think we'll find that each game has a specific element to it that makes it very different from trains to zone.

If you have a thought, please feel free to post it here or in that thread. It's always a good conversation!