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The Stealing of Ideas

M'colleague Van Hemlock is running a feature where he details features and ideas from MMOs that he thinks are nifty, so I thought I'd steal the idea as punishment for him making us sound like a couple on Shut Up We're Talking this week. Now I can't do MMOs of course as he's doing such a good job at that so I'm going to come at it from the console angle. Very few of these ideas will be obviously MMO based, but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that MMO as a term is what's wrong with this end of the industry at the moment.

Why? MMOs have baggage. We throw the term PvP around while the PC FPS and console gamers just consider it "Online". They have a special term for non-PvP and that's Co-op. From the start they're at an advantage as PvP is the default and the games are only just twigging that it's fun to play with your mates through an ongoing plot. What's more MMOs seem to be turning more towards the raid every year, which is just what online on the console is but I'll get onto that later in the series.

I'm going to start with a game on the PS3 that teaches a very important lesson that MMOs really could learn from. Fl0w is a hard game to describe, and it existed before the PS3 as a flash game but it was only with the motion sensing controller that is the sixaxis that made it reach a new level of amazingness.  The game is basically this: You are plankton. You eat other things and get bigger. Eventually you notice you're on the end credits. Yeah, it's short and before you know it you're done and he repetition is just being able to be different creatures for each play through.

So what's so great about it? The controls. You tilt the controller to move and press any button to lunge forwards. And that's it. So how can that help MMOs? Take LOTRO, which I'm currently playing. I have x number of skills that need to be interleaved at different intervals. Most other games are the same and the whole idea is to make combat more involved. Of course it's a totally false button mashing experience designed to make you feel involved but maybe there's a better way? Fable 2 has an "attack" button that will apparently do different thing based on context, which may give you a more timing based experience but as it stands MMOs are more complex than they need to be just so that they can make you feel like you're doing more.

So that's the lesson. Stop hiding behind complex button mashing and make the gameplay capable of standing on it's own. Some MMOs manage, Eve springs to mind, so why can't others make that step?

posted @ Monday, April 28, 2008 11:28 PM

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# re: The Stealing of Ideas

Left by Melmoth at 4/30/2008 4:54 PM
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It does seem that tactics in many MMOs at the moment involve not a great deal more than using whichever of the one or two (three if you're lucky) skills that essentially dictate your class role, and then mashing whichever one of those isn't on cool-down.

My first reaction is that I want more involved game-play, but at the same time I used to play Sonic the Hedgehog until I was as proverbially blue in the face as the game's spiky hero namesake, and all that game entailed was a left, right and jump button.

I guess the thing that frustrates, then, is that the game-play in many MMOs is not a lot more complex than the arcade games of yore, and yet they pretend that they are something more, by adding skills upon skills which are often very situational and barely ever used throughout the life of a character. However, Hellgate's skill based system meant that you could only really invest in two or three skills if you wanted them to be powerful enough to be useful, and I got frustrated with that because I was only a few levels in to the game and I already had most of the skills I was ever going to gain. Maybe if the game-play had been less repetitive I wouldn't have minded, but coming back to Sonic and co, how much more repetitive can one get, and yet they were still compelling and eminently re-playable games.

In conclusion, I'm a fussy ol' bugger, and I'll never be satisfied.

I liked your post, though.
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