MMORPG??

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Someone explain to me why any game company has the audacity to call their massive online crap an rpg....

Since when is a game like WoW a roleplaying game?

Can you affect the environment in any meaningful way? No.

Is there more than one way to complete a quest, hence allowing you to play out the complexities of your character? No.

Are there dialogue options? No.

Are there racial bonuses/deficiencies? Not really.

Can you roleplay your character vis a vis the game community? Sure you can make a character and go into a tavern in any part of that world and act like your character, and in a certain sense yes this could be seen as roleplaying...but the game itself does not allow any real roleplaying if you think about it.

Here's a few questions I have begun to ask myself when looking at the flood of current games:

Since when did the gaming community get to be so dumb and silly that they play games that are only rewarding if you take away your social life entirely?

Since when did gaming companies conclude that no storyline whatsoever was necessary and that players would just be enticed by big swords and big monsters, and bigger swords to kill bigger monters. Certainly elements like these are welcome in a game with a certain balance to it, but you got to have a storyline don't you?

****, while I'm looking at this topic, we might as well ask the most pertinent question...Why do people play these games?

For example, why do people play diablo, or guild wars?

Lets take Diablo as an example. These days, when you log onto diablo, most of the community does the following: rush characters through the right XP areas, reach a desired level, mf unendingly to get the items they want for that character, so they can make another character and do the exact same thing...so they can make a kickass pvp character only to recognize the pvp scene is ruled by cheaters, potters, town huggers, teamers, botters, lamers etc etc etc.

Do they actually play the game? No, they go to tremendous lengths to NOT play the game, thats whats so weird and funny about it.

So I ask again, why do people play circular games like this? (a circular game means a game which has no end, and the point of the game is just to keep playing..which means there is no point to playing at all other than a difficulty on the part of the player to admit time wasted..)

Lets put ourselves into the mind of the hardcore diablo gamer...he plays to get godly items, so he can feel bigger than others. So he wants to be the richest person online, so he does runs to find items, to do more runs to find items, to do...you get the point. Eventually he comes to realize that there is no point to what he is doing and six months at 8 hours a day have gone by. Then he gets the perfect set up character...only to find that he doesn't even want to play the game, doesn't want to quest, doesn't want to go through the endlessly long areas with constant wave after wave of monsters coming at him again and again. The quests are real simple, there is no real complexity or intrigue to them, so he sets himself other superficial goals, like crafting the perfect caster amulet or some other useless crap.

Games like Wow, diablo, etc, all they do, is make people go nuts over rare items. And once they have all those rare items, they get bored, because the only point of these games is to get the items, the gold.....fools gold.

Sadly there will always be a stupid majority of people, but the current wave of games has shown that the true RP intellectual gamer is less and less important to the gaming industry.

When was the last great role playing game? Kotor 1 was decent, kotor 2 was embarassing. TOEE..crap....NWN..decent.....I could go on but its been a while since a great epic came to our door.

That's not to say that I want another epic...I gladly accept the decent RPG, I found much joy playing Kotor 1 for example, its a very good game, but the extent to which we should be insulted by the release of the sequel is exhasperating. Basically the big heads at lucas arts said: "well the first one was successful, so we can basically sell people half a game that uses 75% of the areas of the original with no actual plot resolution of its own and they'll still buy it.." ...and we did...

Is it over? Is there any hope? One can only sit and wonder, as millions of people waste away their days logging onto a massive multiplayer online ..something something, its not a role playing game, i don't even know what it is anymore, maybe we could call it an item obtaining game? Perhaps that is a suitable title, hmm, I wonder.

anyways, just a long rant i guess, but there's no game out there thats really worth buying right now, maybe the golden era is over..sigh.

 

it's "RP" merely because it takes place in a fantasy setting. Hence the corporations are then targetting a fan base who perfers RPGs to other games (us fantasy gamers). It's called an MMORPG because the RPG in the genre is more likely to make people interested in RPGs stop and take a look that these games, or at the very least pay attention to the genera, increased trafficing therefore creates increased sales.

As for why some play these games, well just look at the direction culture and society are going (and I don't mean morally or any of that other holier then thou stuff). The capitalist market places a premium on time and inherently always has more need for it. Since our time is primarily (along with our labor) marketable good, we tend to market it to (obviously) afford things of societal value. It becomes only natural that with more limited free time then in the past, we desire things more fast paced in order to experience more in the same amount of time (sorry Tal if this infringes on the Alley of Dangerous Angles, it isn't suppose to make any judgements or such placed on soceity, western culture or our economic system).

 

I'm afraid you may miss the point.

While someone may think they are experiencing more with a simple game like D2, GW, WOW etc, they are actually experiencing less.

In 2 hours of a good RPG, you get lots of story, talk to NPC's, maybe engage in a bit of combat, in short a variety of activity.

These crappy games often take up hundreds upon hundreds of hours of people's time, and in a 2 hour session you often just farm an area for items.

What I'm trying to say is that people's tastes have degenerated (perhaps they have always been this bad, I don't know..). A game like Torment takes maybe 20-30 hours to complete, try getting the same out of wow in 20 hours gameplay...

The gamer who plays the WOW type game keeps telling himself that all those hours spent doing trivial, repetitive grinding tasks will pay off in the end when his character is UBER...this as opposed to a game that doesn't tease, but delivers.

It's like someone taking 20 bucks and buying nothing but lottery tickets, and another person spending those 20 bucks on dinner and a movie rental..its about how you spend your money, right?

 

You most definitely haven't hanged around the RP servers very much. The definition of role playing is not Dungeons and Dragons, but the simple act of pretending to be someone else. No the lack of RPing in wow (regular) has nothing to do with the game itself, rather its community.

As a former WoW player I can tell you that it doesn't take away your social life unless you allow it to. The whole idea with rested expreince support that you can play a couple of hours a day, and still feel like you're advancing.

Or turn it around and ask you why you waste your time bitching about it here?

Diablo II died long before patch 1.10 came out. I have had many good hours with that game. Sometimes its good to do something absolutely pointless to take your mind of off RL things .

Dude... you sreiously need to lighten up! I mean come on! What? You've had like some tragic childhood experience involving a MMORPG? Is that why you loathe (not the game but people who play these games sop much? What do you even care? Should you even care?

People aren't experiencing less by playing these games. If the were, then they wouldn't be playing (seriously, they wouldn't). No, they are experiencing something diferent.

 

the experience, to barrow from Camus, isn't about the actual quality of the experience, but the quantity for the experiences. If we remove the intricacies of the plot line, if we streamline the point line, we can hyper-accelerate the game progression, you can have an character who in pnp would take a ridiculous amount of time to progress (like a lvl 40 epic character) in a matter of 10 hours unless you're playing the likes of L2 (*shudder*). I remember about five or so years ago (I think, maybe six) during the time I was playing DAoC, people would in less then 24 of straight gaming would have a lvl 50 character (I believe you can do that feat alot quicker now days), try doing the equvalent of that in PnP.

Quantity is what is desired, with so little time on our hands, we don't care so much about quality, we have to condense things to experience what we desire.

 

I agree MMORPGs are crappy wastes of time which are only interesting for the first few hours while you adjust to the gameworld and explore a bit - once that bit of mystery is gone, there's absolutely nothing left.

RPing on these things is a pointless exercise because your options are limited and the game isn't actually designed for it. The best you can generally get is 'Ho! Hello good sir! Would you like to go slay some almighty orcs with me?' - the world doesn't react to you, and therefor whatever choices you make as your character are meaningless. Basically - if you want online RPing - find an IRC group and play with them, don't even bother with MMORPGS, MUDs, or whatever - because they're just not suited for it.

 

Well, if we really want to be honest about it, there is not much point in playing ANY computer games, MMORPGS or CRPGS or Pacman or Minesweeper or Frogger. They're pretty muich all a waste of time really, but that doesn't stop most of us from playing them.

I guess we're all just irrational human beings.

 

If you want to get down to the nitty gritty - then sure, all computer games/entertainment is pointless - if you want to look at it from a further away view - then you can see that, for example, that the point of playing PS:T is to experience the brilliant story, the point of Fallout is to see the game world change to your actions, the point of Baldur's Gate is to have an epic romp over the world+story ... and the point of MMORPGs is to walk on the level-treadmill into infinity - which pretty much equates to pointlessness.

 

It's just taste difference. i can't find any point in American rugby but then most of the Americans like it. Thus, the question is why play a pc game? Everyone has their own reasons. Leveling a character can be interesting as well. i am sure there are lots of people out there who think it is pointless to try to put a black and white ball through and in between two poles, but hey it is still the biggest sport in the world.

Frankly, i don't think story is the defining element for an RPG. Half-life has a pretty good story but we never view it as a RPG. No one lives forever 2 has a good story with a little leveling system and it is never an RPG.

Even if the word RPG initially comes from PnP DnD, with advancement in technologies, with enchancement by computers, it changed, and it should. How do you categorize Final Fantasy series? It has a good story. Its characters level up accordingly. It has some NPCs to interact with. It has its own unqiue .... mechanics of playing the game (advancing the plot, leveling up, collecting stuff etc). A shooter? A strategy game? It is an RPG. You play a character, you follow the his/her story, and you level up.

Diablo 2, as i see it, it's one of the most successful game out there. Good or bad aside, it is successful. Do a diablo 2 search on ebay and you can see people still selling (and perhaps buying) in-game items after all these years, all these years! You know, if battle.net put a little ad. to click before entering the game, it might just be the wealthiest gaming company out there. Baldur's Gate is a great game, but is it successful-ness on par with Diablo 2?

You can disagree with MMORPG non-storyness and people still flood the scence to level their character. People like that. As if .... you are training something. Remember tamagochi? People really like that. The "point" of WoW may be pointless, but the experience, the process of doing it, is great fun. You see your character grows step by step. You get to interact/taunt/cuss/humuliate/debate with other players. Great fun. i saw my roommate playing WoW and cussing at every turn and he enjoyed it. Talks with his buddies about the quest, the leveling, the skills, the group, the guild and such. Seems to me, he is happy fun. And when he is having fun like that, and not doing possibly harmful things, why not?

 

My new favourite quote from RPG Codex is 'You are the reason game companies can get away with continuing to make **** games.'

Popularity means nothing on my personal scale of how good something is - and when a game that I consider to be crap is successful - it means that we can look forward to a lot more clones of the same crap where companies try to imitate the successful formula and great suckiness happens, and no one tries anything different because of the risk involved - they'd rather ride off the success of game X than actually be interesting.

Story is not the defining element of a good CRPG - but it certainly helps.

Yes, CRPGs (I'm not talking about console RPGs here, like Final Fantasy - because I really don't care about them - they're not taking up any time of a developer who makes the kind of games which I might have an interest in) do need to evolve to suit the format best ... and haven't. They've evolved mostly into action RPGs with a few average-pretty good true RPGs on the side - but there are far too few even average ones being released recently.

IMO the best evolution from PnP->CRPG can be found in Planescape: Torment - it takes advantage of the video game format with the sheer amount of text which would be ridiculous in a PnP game, as well as visual style and such. However, it's still quite close to its PnP roots (as are most good CRPGs, I notice).

So basically: this is a 'me me me!' rant - I don't really care whether other people enjoy them or whether they have merit in their own way - I find them to be crap and feel that the industry focussing on making crap is destroying most of my interest in gaming. Now, I'm not saying that every game developer should start focussing on hardcore CPRGs - but I do wish that they'd stop making (bad) action RPGs and MMORPGs - there are enough of them on the market as it is. Having such a (percieved, anyway) demand just means that more and more are going to be made - and thus, I see nothing good coming out of mainstream PC gaming.

 

I think we can designate what kind of game it is based on WHY we play.

Here is a quote from a hardcore WOW player:

"The fun is not playing the game, but the satisfaction you get when you look at your level 60 character and realise all the $hit you have to go though to reach this monumentous accomplishment"

http://guides.worldofwar.net/strategy.php?&id=55

Now, who said getting a lvl 60 character is monumentous? When the game came out it had its initial growth problems, and then people logged on in huge numbers, to achieve this very same goal.

So playing the game, this wow guru admits, is not fun, the whole point is prestige and showing off....

Not all video games are useless, good games have a clear point and an end.

Bad games prey on people´s low self esteem and their need to feel big and mighty, this is why so many people in wow games, diablo games, whatever, like to 'gank' people, insult them, call them noobs unendingly, etc. There are nice people who play these games, but one might almost say that they play to distinguish themselves from the ******* community, to say that indeed 'a nice and normal person can play this kind of game as well'

As to the guy above who said his friend likes to log on and be mean with everyone, all i can say is he needs to get a ****ing life.

We should play games for fun, we should NOT play games to grind out a 'godly leet' character that people must bow down to. This is trying to live your life through the game, which can never work.

Its the difference between someone who buys a fancy sports car to drive the **** out of it versus someone who buys it to show it off to the ladies and his neighbors.

If you want to be the second jerk (sadly most people are) thats YOUR business. If you like to play a game for the wrong reasons, thats your business, just dont call it a ROLE PLAYING GAME, call it what it is: powergaming, god gaming, ego enhancing.

RP belongs to another community you stupid ****s, don't use it in vain.

 

Never could understand the fun of "ganking" someone, having your fun at another's expense always seems so petty and lame (I can see being a marauder and killing others for the sake of loot, but thrill killing is predominately a modern day phenomena that has more place in the likes of URT 2004 then a medieval setting).

The only way I survived on MMORPGs was when I had a buddy who was playing with me or an active guild, the solo grind was boring beyond belief, though the high lvl RvR stuff in DAoC was often quite fun (before that dreaded Left Axe patch which watered down my berserker I want to say... 4 years ago...).

Lineage 2 was an absolute nightmare, the only thing that broke the monotony was mass training monsters into the Chinese Adena Farmer Bots until their "enforcers" drove you off. I loved the anime feel of the game though (although the constant panty flashing of the elven girls and the constant... bouncing... of the dark elf women got annoying after a while). That the Dark Elves had higher STR then Orcs, Dwarves and Humans kinda left me confused as well.

Also the lack of realism and therefore the inablility of class function in MMOs leaves a bit to be desired. Honest to god, not many fighters are just going to blow by another fighter who's swinging at them to go deal with a mage. DAoC's positional styles helped take care of this, if anyone left their backside exposed to my berserker, I'd be dealing more damage to them then a mage could.

Unlike in PnP, where realism enforces class role, MMOs have so many issues with class balance, everyone always thinks someone else's class is better then theirs, the patching seems to do more damage then help... I suppose that's the part I dislike the most about MMOs even when I was playing on friendly servers like in DAoC (where you can't even read what the otherside is saying to prevent insults), is this need to make every class have an equally important role. God knows that in PnP there are certain classes you just don't need (Bard anyone?), but in all seriousness you can't allow that in an MMO, every class has to have a non RP reason for being played, leading to what seems some classes being scrapped and redone just about every month.

 

I happen to be a fan of MMORPG's such as Runescape. If you want to actually RP, buy NWN and go to a Persistent World RP server (mine is the best!!) And Diablo II, I was a fanatic for that game for an entire summer, I mean, who doesn't love the occasional mindless hack and slash? Why all the hate for MMORPG's?

Although I will agree with you on one thing, I think its absolutely ridiculous watching my friend MINE COAL for 12 hours straight on runescape just to get half a mining level, or watch my friend wait 4 HOURS for a party invite... Ridiculous!

 

For me the lure is exploring the fantasy landscape. I recently succumbed to WoW and having grinded to level 17 I must say its charm is wearing thin.
Without doubt the best crpg is baldurs gate 1.
Seems it took the pc a while to get to the level where programmers
A. had suffiecient technology to do rpgs, and
B. the experience to really make a good story/system etc.

With MMORPG's I think we've just achived A and B can't be too long behind.

My 2c