MMO(RPG) Should Not Be Seen As A Genre

[Electric-Knight]

MMORPGs should not really been seen as a genre. It is just a technological advancement in the way that people can play and partake in a wide variety of video game experiences.

I've honestly begun to think that this has been one of the largest problems within the mmo gaming industry - the hair-brained notion that an mmorpg needs to be a specific type of game that fits the mold of previous massive multiplayer online role-playing games.
It's possibly the reason why we see clone after clone... why people love talking about how the genre is dying out...
Most of the previous incarnations of what has been called mmorpgs or mmos have followed specific molds that cater to certain types of gamers and, more importantly, ignore (and/or turn off) large expanses of other types of gamers with different interests.

 While this is absolutely nothing new within the field of entertainment (producers want guarantees, especially as costs within the industry rise, and most producers believe that guarantees and efficient businesses come in the form of previously proven formulas that have a history of success, which also comes with a nice, already established, marketing plan), it's all about efficiency - and following known paths is more efficient than blazing a new trail (never mind the wise sayings about the path of least resistance and all that... as we're - shamefully - talking cents not sense)... The difference here is that this somewhat new method of video game entertainment has been stunted nearly from its birth. And it has been stunted and limited as such, rather needlessly.

 Perhaps there were two paths that were originally acceptable for the MMORPG: 1) A more rigid form, akin to the theme park ride, generally based around achievement and time spent earning things and 2) more of a sandbox system more balanced towards social community building.
While Ultima Online may have reigned in the early, early days, Ever Quest set the path for the WoW factory... While Asherons Call was the less popular option - yet, much more enjoyed by those that preferred its approach over EQ.
Star Wars Galaxies was originally designed and launched more around the principals of the Ultima Online approach - options, options and more options and let's see what community is built from the inherent interdependency and the encouraged individuality of the game's systems.

City Of Heroes was somewhat uniquely in-between these styles (in my opinion). I'd say more about CoH, but we all know it.

World Of Warcraft was heavily built around the other approach... and exploded (for a large number of factors - from things being timed right that were entirely outside of their control - to things being done right that were entirely of their doing and to their credit - that is all best left mentioned as a "perfect storm").

Ever since that explosion of success, we've seen a great number of games either fail or become converted into a game more closely fitting into the WoW mold (usually both).
CoH was one of the few that remained its own. EVE Online as well, to their credit, has been a unique fixture (loved and despised by different players... as differing options should be!).

Several large titles have been released over recent years, but they've all tried to fit into particular molds (oh, they've had their slight differences, but that's usually been more in line with accessories or merely different Barbi outfits, as opposed to something truly different).

I don't mean to start this thread sounding as though I have all the answers or that I am all knowing about this subject... because that is very far from the case. I'm more interested in sparking discussion, as a great variety of people here have many individual ideas, opinions and viewpoints of their own.

It just seems to me that this whole "MMORPG" or "MMO" thing has become some sort of far-too-limited genre as opposed to what it truly is...
A means in which large amounts of interested players can take part in, and share, an ongoing massive experience within a game that they all truly enjoy. The MMO experience could be as varied as the video game experience has been (which, admittedly, has had the tendency to fall into similar pitfalls... but still).

It almost seems like people have treated the MMO aspect as though, years ago, it would have been good and right to classify any and every game that used a joystick into one single genre.
MMOS are just PC games that are open ended and shared between players in an ongoing virtual world.

I do recognize that there are inherent issues with an ongoing, massive multiplayer, online video game... and that each and every one of them need to tackle those shared aspects, concerns, issues and potential problems... But... HELLO... there are so many different ways to accomplish things.
This industry is really missing the boat.
I expect that most of this is because the expenses have become so high for producing such endeavors, that the sure thing is the only way people are willing to put their money down on it. However, clearly that sure thing is nota sure thing, so, perhaps, different approaches would be recognized and embraced, rather than the whole advancement of massive multiplayer online experiences being lumped into some tiny single genre and shelved because the industry didn't know how to handle the true variety of customers they could potentially have.

*stomps on, crushes and splinters his soapbox*

[FatherXmas]

RPG is a genre, MMO is a modifier.

You never just have an MMO.  It's an MMOFPS, a Strategy MMO, an Action MMO.

Blame the media.

[Victoria Victrix]

I'm thinking that City is Second Life with quests.

[Ceremonius]

I'm thinking that City is Second Life with quests.

I think City is like IRC: A chat with alot of options and a graphical overlay.
I always called it a huge 3d chat with the option to do something else and have fun with your friends.
You also could stay quite and just enjoy the show.

If you wanted to roleplay, you could.
If you wanted to mess around with icon, you could.
If you wanted to bash something, you could.
If you wanted to have party, you could.
If you wanted to script, you could.
If you wanted to write up a story, you could.
If you wanted to enjoy the surrounding, you just could.

And I guess many other terms apply here too.
So City is basicly an IRC .


For those who don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

Had great MUDs in IRC .

[Captain Electric]

Going to ramble a little to help me go back to sleep. Sorry.

I've never believed that massively multiplayer games are a genre. And I've always been conscious of that. I think massively multiplayer games constitute an industry. One that sprang up so quickly--largely fueled by fantasy titles--that people barely had time to consider what it is exactly.

But I do acknowledge that there's a reason why these games subjectively constitute a genre for many MMO denizens. More on that in a moment.

I'm half-proud, half-ashamed to admit that I've been playing MMORPGs since November, 1997, when I opened the first of several Ultima Online accounts (I still have that first account). I signed up for an interactive story with many unexpected adventures--maybe I'd even become a hero, become famous for some deed. Whether the game would tell me that I was famous, or a real person would, I don't remember fully thinking out. But I'd grown up with the Ultima games and I was excited for another Ultima; an Ultima that would feel more real and more alive--just like every previous Ultima had. In reality, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. No one knew what they were getting into. A few days in, and I joined my first guild. I could write novels about what followed next. Unexpected adventures, indeed.

Ultima Online finally popularized the massively multiplayer concept (which had been building up for a really long time), and the Ultima universe's creator, Richard "Lord British" Garriott, coined the term behind the acronym MMORPG. But not even Lord British knew what he had gotten himself into. I knew about CompuServe, AOL, the Sierra Network. Those services had made their way through my household; I even had a U.S. VideoTell terminal. And even still, UO seemed fully anomalous to me. Meridian59--? Please. UO didn't represent just a whole new ballpark--it was a whole new sport. But it wasn't anomalous for long.

It went from anomaly to niche industry pretty quickly. Even while it was a niche, everyone back then knew it was already exploding. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers in all of the first three MMORPGs (all of which are still running). Hundreds of websites, real-life fan gatherings, in-game guilds dedicated to everything from policing the roads from player-killers, to fishing and in-game theatre; or legislating within their player-made cities so seriously that guilds devoted days and weeks to council sessions and constitution-writing. What might constitute a very small event in our present era was often anything but in that era. Who remembers saving some innocent victim from highwaymen, and afterward getting the impression that their tears of gratitude weren't entirely fictional? It wasn't too long before the fiction leapt off the page, and people connected across the ether and became friends, forging what would become years of real human histories. They started marrying (and divorcing) each other in real life because these other worlds were impacting on the real world. This new thing shook people up, sometimes tragically and sometimes wonderfully; sometimes both. Lines were blurred along a mainstream social spectrum of folks who never expected their 56K modems to affect their lives that deeply.

These days, MMORPGs hint at potential social experiences on the backs of boxes, using as advertising an element that every designer and business executive underestimated the power of before 1997: the unexpected turns that result from human connections. We're over the novelty of it now, and modern-day MMO players insulate themselves just as thoroughly within virtual worlds, often preferring structured and predictable experiences to truly unexpected adventures (excluding places like Eve Online's non-empire space). I think the idea of the unexpected adventure--"IN A WORLD UNLIKE ANY YOU'VE EVER EXPLORED"--is still romanticized, but really, this has less to do with just exploring worlds, and more to do with exploring worlds full of people. Even many solo players want the world full of people to be noticeably there, even if it's essentially a backdrop to their play experience. For the socialites, whether it's PVP for the lulz, just chatting, or the thrill of immersive RP adventure: Forget descriptive terms like fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, horror, super heroes. This "massively multiplayer" social aspect has itself become a genre for those players who are specifically seeking it above all other qualifiers. This isn't fully how I operate--I have a sometimes mercilessly discriminating imagination to contend with, so games that break the Fourth Wall in too many places are problematic, for instance--but I think it's normal for many people.

Here I'm thinking of friends who moved after COH's closure to Guild Wars 2, Champions Online, World of Warcraft, or the Secret World based not-so-much on genre preferences, but the preference of keeping their friends. Just the other day, a friend confided in me over Valve/Steam Chat that he wouldn't touch his new MMORPG home if his closest friends weren't also playing there (which led me to half-wonder if any of his friends felt the same way). In any case, not one aspect of the conversation hinged on the actual theme-genre of the game itself, and to be honest, I still have no idea what theme-genre my friend would actually prefer--he always poked fun at my classic comic book heroes in COH.

This sounds like it justifies MMOs as a genre, right? 

But it's also a little like saying, "I like reading books; I guess that means I like the 'book genre'." 

[Samuel Tow]

Many, many times in the past, I've had people ask me "If you don't want to team, why play an MMO?" Um... Because I like the game? I'm fond of saying that we're so focused on the M, the M and the O that we tend to forget about the G, and it's the GAME which sets each MMORPG apart. To treat the Massively Multiplayer Online portion of a GAME as being the sole defining characteristic to which all other game aspects as subject is, to me, a capital mistake. It simply applies the same mould to vastly disparate games and makes them all play the same. Just imagine what it would be like if every game played from a first-person perspective were expected to have all the elements of Modern Warfare. We'd lose games like Portal and Half-Life, we'd lose games like the Legend of Grimrock, we'd lose Dishonoured, we'd lose Deus Ex. Now, granted, some of those games may or may not be from before Modern Warfare, but you get my idea.

To me, putting the MMO aspect of a game before the game itself is a bit like putting the cinema before what you're actually watching. Maybe I don't want IMAX 3D and tilting seats and image enhancement and popcorn and super-high definition and localised dubs by overpaid actors. Maybe, just maybe, I want to sit my ass down and just enjoy Avatar AS A MOVIE, rather than marvelling at the CGI or the many doodads it comes with. Because, popular opinion aside, I genuinely do enjoy the movie, but I enjoyed it far more watching it in my 1280x1024 monitor at home with my local Doulby Surround than I did in the city's most expensive cinema, walking out with a splitting headache because 3D can kiss my ass. There comes a point after which the mechanic of delivering an experience begins to overtake the experience itself, rendering it inert, simplistic and uninspiring, done so specifically so it can be shoehorned into whatever the delivery method is believed to work best with. MMOs are a lot like that.

To me, the brightest example of this core problem was actually CrimeCraft's ad campaign, and indeed "CrimeCraft" itself. The name alone should be a warning, but the actual ad videos are what kills me. The game proudly announces that it "has loot, has PvP, has crafting, has an auction house, has instances, has raiding, the end." What is the game about, though? Space men? Orks? Secret agents? MLP? We don't know, because the ad never mentions, because the people who made the game (or at least those paid to advertise it) didn't think it was important to mention. Because who gives a rat's ass about what the game actually is, right? It's an MMO, and it has all the "standard MMO features." What more do you want? You could be playing pac-man in space, and you're not expected to care so long as you have loot, crafting and PvP. I know, right?

CrimeCraft is a modern-day world game to do with gang violence, I think. I've never played it - why would I? I've heard it's crap, but I wouldn't know. The point is, I don't CARE, and I don't care because I can already tell that nobody involved in making it cared about the actual game. They cared about making an MMO and it feels like they threw in any old setting just so there's SOMETHING for the graphic artists to work with. What is the game about though? It doesn't matter, because "the game" is not what CrimeCraft is about. It's about the MMO. Every single one made for years on end has been, and it's why people have been predicting a severe MMO market collapse. And it's already happening. Star Wars bombed, DC didn't do so well, a whole bunch of subscription games are going F2P and NOW, "action MMOs" are making rounds as people realise that ZOMG! You actually need to make a good game for your MMO to have a place on the market. You can't just slap together a Skinner box and hoover people's money with it, because gamers are no longer as easy. We've seen better, so there's no chance in hell we'll fall for another 9Dragons or Divine Souls. Or, it turns out, for Aion, aka "another Lineage II."

Here's the real shocker, though, at least to me - MMOs don't need to be defined by their multiplayer component. In fact, they're far less reliant on it than more traditional multiplayer games like Unreal Tournament or Battlefield 2. Those games offer only systems but no content, and rely on players to make each other's content in PvP matches. An MMO doesn't need to do this. If anything, the whole term of "MMO" is a misnomer in itself, at least when it comes to the larger ones. These are less "massively multiplayer online" games and more "persistent shared word" games, though I can imagine the SPWRPG acronym might sound like something you say to summon Great Cthulu. My point, though, is that MMORPGs are more than just an MMO with whatever odd skin was lying around the studio thrown over it, because the "point" of an MMO isn't the loot and the raids and the forced teaming. OK, it is, but it shouldn't be and it doesn't need to be. There's nothing wrong with a good game that facilitates cooperative and competitive multiplayer in a persistent world without it having to be a slave to "standard MMO features."

MMOs are not a genre, and the only reason they come off like such is because the game gets pushed aside in order for uninspired developers to repeat the actions of those who have come before. Simple as that.

[Samuel Tow]

These days, MMORPGs hint at potential social experiences on the backs of boxes, using as advertising an element that every designer and business executive underestimated the power of before 1997: the unexpected turns that result from human connections.

Except that's not what they put in their actual games, nor what the majority of players I run into one seem to be after. This is the problem I have when "teaming" is equated with "socialising." The other day I was playing FireFall, and a friend of mine insisted I invite some random yahoo who ran past our Thumper. I asked him, he responded with "y." I explained and he responded with "inv." For the next half hour or so, this person said not a single word to either of us that I didn't directly extract out of him with an insistent question, he ran off on his own, did his own thing and we basically ran around gathering lots of resources because... That's what an MMO is about, right? The drops?

People praise the "social" aspect of MMOs, but I've been playing them for eight years now, and not just City of Heroes. Aside from very rare, unique instances, I don't see it. The average person I run into in the overworld couldn't care less about me, he's just running for more phat loot. The average person I team with doesn't care about socialisation or companionship or conversation. All he needs is another warm body to kill stuff faster and do harder content. To me, your run-of-the-mill pick-up team in most any MMO is an inferior experience to playing with bots. I get just about as much socialisation out of random strangers as I could from a CPU-controller character and at least bots are more competent more often. They're also not as whiny.

The bottom line is that while I fully appreciate the social aspect that MMOs purport to have, I'm not seeing it in practice. You can't just jam people together in the same communal space and just sit back to watch them mingle. Maybe you could have back in the old days when the actual games were crap and people sought them out FOR the social aspect, but that's not longer true these days. These days, the actual game matters and a great many of its players come for the story, the gameplay, the graphics or the artwork. The only reason I even played Dragonica was it had a ganguro girl on the cover. The audiences for Ultimae Online and EverQuest and Asheron's Call and so forth don't consist of the same people who are buying into Tera and Vindictus and World of Tanks today. Of course not - the MMO market has ballooned so much that it's no longer niche and is attracting a wide crossection of society, a nice chunk of which consists of people like me who'd sooner play alone than with others, and who buy games, not social experiences.

I'm sure that there are people who care about the social interaction aspect of an MMO, but that doesn't mean they want raiding, crafting, loot, PvP, etc., etc. To my eyes, what they want is literally social interaction, and there are many, MANY other ways to accomplish that than the "standard MMO features."

[Starsman]

Except that's not what they put in their actual games, nor what the majority of players I run into one seem to be after. This is the problem I have when "teaming" is equated with "socialising."

The biggest problem, imo, is that teaming=socializing technically was true in games like EverQuest, where the action was slow, the key presses far in between and most the action handled by auto-attacks. A wizard should was able to unload his entire mana bar in a fight, but the group would spend way too long resting IF the poor wizard was able to survive the aggro in the first place.

So combat usually was full of idle time, enough idle time for everyone to crack jokes and communicate. After every single fight, there was downtime, where jokes and role-play took place.

With games getting more and more active, its harder and harder to talk. Some people are good at it, I was never able to find it viable in CoH. Despite being a touch-typist with darn high typing speed, I just was never able to talk without forcing huge activity holes and potentially result in some one dying (always was the tank.) The most social period I ever went through, I guess, was a short time I played with Global Heroics using Ventrillo. Voice chat does a huge difference, although can have it's own share of immersion issues.

I know it will be heavily resisted but I eagerly wait for the day we get an MMO that forbids typed chatting and forces voice chat.

[Samuel Tow]

I know it will be heavily resisted but I eagerly wait for the day we get an MMO that forbids typed chatting and forces voice chat.

Woe betide people who don't own microphones, or have small children sleeping in the house

Your larger point is valid, though - faster-paced games aren't as conducive to chatting. Then again, you've seen what constitutes "chatting" these days, right? "r u healor" "need 2 4 baf" "lvl 50 def lf itf" and so on. There's only so much blame you can put on games preventing chatting when a good half the people I ran into in City of Heroes and nearly everyone I run into everywhere else refuses to type more than 6 or so letters at a time and will never communicate to even answer basic questions, nor read chat for basic instructions.

Both based on people's actions and on their actual behaviour in-game, I get the sense that a great many couldn't stand my presence and would rather just "gogogogogogog" already, seeing me as a "noob" for slowing down their progress. City of Heroes had relatively little of this, but I've found it practically everywhere else. Even when given complete calm and plenty of time to chat, such as when sitting around forming a team for half an hour (oh, ITF, I love thee), they still refuse to chat almost at all. It makes me believe they don't want to. In fact, I've even had people I've tried to make small talk with tell me they're here for the xp, not the conversation.

I firmly believe that "social games" deserve to be their own genre, but that this genre should not be synonymous with the term MMO, and especially not MMORPG. Just earlier today, I tried out Second Life, and that turned out to be a game squarely about socialisation. I couldn't play it because the interface was made in hell on a hot plate, but that's a game I could not see anyone going to for anything beyond the social aspect. It's what it's about. But an RPG? A shooter? An adventure game? Just because it has other people in it doesn't excuse the game aspect of this game being neglected as it has been in so many recent WoW-clone MMOs.

These days, MMOs come in many different genres, and many newer games have put their gaming ahead of their socialisation. I consider this branching out from the MMO singularity to be a good thing.