Let me take you back...back...back... Its June 2001. Lady Marmalade by All Saints is topping the UK charts, there's just been a total eclipse of the sun in South America, and Shrek is probably still on at the cinema. I, being the stay-at-home type, probably missed all of those, and at the time was enduring the last stages of a crippling cycle of Rallos Zek related psychological self-harm in Everquest, which would eventually turn me into the online sociopath I am today.
Still, in those days the MMO market, if you could even call it that, consisted of three titles really; Everquest, Ultima Online and Asheron's Call, so I didn't really have many other places to go. Then along came Funcom with Anarchy Online, an ambitious project which even today holds the title of 'Worst. Launch. Evar', in the minds of most gamers who were about at the time.
I wasn't nearly the obsessive chin-stroker I am today, but as I look back now, Anarchy Online seemed to have two main ideals directing its design and implementation. The first was fairly simple; there wasn't a sci-fi MMO at all, at the time, and there really ought to be one! Nowadays, we know that pretty much every gamer wants orcs to fire magic missiles at, and that even deciding on a Sci-Fi game makes for an uphill struggle from the start. Only a few games of that stunted genre exist in any kind of 'successful' state, even in today's diverse MMO market.
At its heart though, Anarchy Online was very much Everquest with guns. Its understandable. In those pre-Warcraft days, EQ was The Daddy, and we used to look at its third of a million subs and gasp in the hushed tones folks today reserve for WoW's ten million. It was the Era of "The Vision"; SOE stood unopposed, and knew it, and so did everyone else, with the kind of crushing certainty that the kids today use to dismiss possible future contenders to the Blizzard throne. We never thought EQ's sun would set...
Naturally, EQ became the model, and the base from where future games would attempt to improve, innovate and emulate, and for all AO's admittedly unique and fascinating backstory and world, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, it borrowed a great deal from EQ; Nanotechnology looked and acted like EQ's magic, it's class list and interface borrowed heavily from EQ, and the basic substance of combat felt very familiar to refugees like me.
But Funcom also took a long hard look at what people didn't like about EQ, and learned and adapted much. Downtime was a big gripe about 2001-era EQ, and I quite literally had time to iron shirts between one pull and the next, as my L29 Druid. AO added Treatment Kits and Nano Rechargers, eliminating the countless hours of sitting about 'Meditating' that I'd done. AO went for a more customisable point spending system for skill use, rather than EQ's 5 points per level of One Handed Swords, that you'd get within ten fights of dinging the level, automatically just by fighting, and thus being a bit pointless. Travel times were harsh in old EQ, so AO added a large teleporter network (Wompas and The Grid), useable by all, not just Wizards and Druids, along with a large set of vehicles which were more about utility, and less about prestige.
One of the major gripes with old-style EQ, however, was a curious one; camping, killstealing and farming; the presence of other players negatively impacting your game, and the solution Funcom came up with for that, was nothing short of revolutionary:
Nifty! #5: Anarchy Online's Mission Terminals
In addition to the more standard random wilderness monster scouring, Anarchy Online offered an entirely new and alternative way to play; missions. Available via special terminals, found in most cities and outposts, these terminals, when used, would offer the player a choice of five different missions, for the low low fee one 1cr per level (negligible).
When accepted, the map would then waypoint a doorway or cave mouth some distance away across the world, and the player would then have to travel to that location. There were thousands of these doorways, but unless you had the key provided by the terminal, they ordinarily didn't let you in.
Once inside, the player was presented with a random, and dynamically, generated set of rooms, which made up a themed indoor location; cave network, office block, sewer, and so on. These rooms would be populated with a variety of suitably levelled monsters, loot boxes, and the mission objective itself, usually near the back of it all. This was revolutionary enough, but the whole mission was yours alone and the only other players who could go in there, were ones you invited, via the grouping tools, and by making copies of the key to hand out. Being yours alone, it could be just right for you, without inconveniencing any one else, every time. In short, I believe Anarchy Online invented The Instance, as we know it today.
Modern day instances are a lot more elaborate, more group-based and typically have a set and repeatable map, usually with elaborate scripted events and much stronger stories behind them, but at the time, just the idea that a part of an MMO could ever be private to you and your friends only, was a hard thing to get your head around. In those times, soloing was an aberration, a guilty secret, and really not what you were supposed to be doing in an MMO. It certainly wasn't the done thing in EQ, that's for sure. Why play an MMO if you don't want to play with others? A recurring question in my online life, and perhaps AO was the first MMO I ever played that didn't just answer it with a hearty 'LFG or GTFO!' It offered new choices, and left it to me to decide.
It offered choice on a more practical level too. The terminal came with a number of sliders on, including one marked 'Difficulty', which was novel. By manipulation of these sliders, not only could you set up a small place in an MMO to have a bit of 'me time', but the very nature of the challenge could be altered to suit your own mood, class, playstyle and so on. After living under "The Vision", I was stunned to be allowed that much say in how I could play, frankly. You're a Fixer? No problem... slide that and we'll throw in lots of locked doors for you to fiddle with. Enforcer? No problem, throw it the other way and it becomes a full-on open-house rampage. Prefer Nano-using opponents? Want robots? Want to assassinate someone, or just repair something? Want something lightweight to relax to? Want something that'll really test you? The sliders would provide.
Over time of course, clever as it was, the mission system did start to become a bit samey. The random construction of the mission helped, but it still had only so many modular building blocks, rooms, to pick from, and it wouldn't take that many missions in a row to start recognising them. To be fair, Funcom often added new rooms to the pool over the years, but they couldn't possibly do so at a rate fast enough to keep up with players seeing them all.
For some, (myself included) the missions eventually became a bit routine, and a bit of chore, and the sport of 'Blitzing' became quite popular, where a player would just pump their Run Speed stat up to about 300+, pick a mission that didn't actually involve killing something, and then just went sprinting through the place, tagged the objective and then dying to the train. When done on Full Difficulty, this would net the player a much higher level item than they could use and sizable chunk of cash, and this became the way to grind out cash for the Yalmaha jets (Flying mounts; also invented June 2001!), etc.
When it launched, the game had nothing that modern players would recognise as a Quest, and even EQ beforehand at least had the NPCs with quests, in the form of [spoken hints] that they would [give out] when [hail]ed, leading in a circumspect fashion to the kill ten rats stuff. That stuff all got added to AO much later, so initially the Missions became the main game for a great many people. The overland world spawns of the game, while interesting in parts, were really nothing that special, and in this area, EQ still had the edge. For many, the wandering mobs became little more than obstacles in the path to the next mission door.
This all led to early prototypes of the kinds of large-scale debates that still rage today on blogs and forums; where is everybody? Answer; playing thousands of single-player missions, out of sight and out of mind. Many would argue that an overuse of instancing can destroy the fabric of an MMO's community, and this kind of thing is why many don't like Guild Wars, or wouldn't even class it as an MMO at all, a point clearly acknowledged by Arenanet when they talk of GW2 being more 'MMO-like', with more in the way of shared zones...in other words, less instancing.
City of Heroes is an example of a similar kind of content generation; instances created from stock tilesets, accessible via hundreds of black doorways about the city, although I'm not sure how random those are. In turn they too suffer the criticism that they all start to look the same after a while - I certainly found that when I was there. In any case, it lacks the accompanying mission terminal, and the customisable sliders which probably do need to go hand-in-hand for this kind of thing. I expect a Blaster does much better at some missions, than a Tanker. A randomly generated mission can't possibly be suitable for all the classes, if those classes are fundamentally different in any way, and I'm surprised I'd not seen the configurable Mission Terminal approach used since.
Almost every modern MMO, including the Mighty World of Warcraft, makes use of the Instance however, albeit in a more static and repeatable manner; dungeons, arenas, battlegrounds, even player housing. Hell, even EQ itself went and added something similar eventually, with it's Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion. All these variants on the same basic concept use tricks of the server, and a generous helping of suspension of disbelief, in an attempt to put the player back at the centre of things, and make their own experience somewhat unique, in a player base where upwards of 3000 other people are also all the Hero.
So, for trusting the player enough to let them have a say in how they want to play, Anarchy Online's Mission Terminals; Nifty!
Anarchy Online is still going today, players, content, expansions and all that. The basic game, which is essentially everything that was there in June 2001, and then some, is free to play, (with In-Game Adverts, so you can grumble along with this fortnight's podcast!), and can be found here:
Anarchy Online: Basic Client and Signup
Its old, certainly, but doesn't play too badly for a seven year old game, and is apparently due for one of those super-swankey graphical upgrades some month soon. The later expansions (which you will have to pay for separately) tended to move away from the Mission Terminal structure and back in to the fold with a quest journal, non-instanced dungeon zones and so on, but if you want to try out the Mission Terminals for yourself, the above link is all you'll need - just head on out to any of the big city zones, once outside your Backyard, and you'll bump into a terminal.
For further reading, theres Some more detail on the nuts and bolts of how the missions work, what the sliders mean, and so on, here: Anarchy Online Wikia: Missions