Ekim's Gamer View: Going Offline
Ekim, 2003-11-21

I'll stop criticizing everyone and everything for a minute (just a short while though) and try to explore some of my darkest desires… Don't worry I'll stay in the realm of the tasteful. I've once talked about the possibility of being able to pause an mmorpg, and how such a feature could greatly help those of us with interfering real lives. This week I found myself wondering if we couldn't push it a little further by providing offline capabilities to online games.

Time and time again

Ok, I'll admit that even thinking about this is kind of contradicting myself since I've often argued that the defining aspect of an mmorpg is the interaction with other players. Now here I am saying that it would be nice if we could play an mmorpg offline. Maybe I'm cracked. But a few upcoming games will already be introducing private areas, or instancing, in their new mmorpgs. In essence, these will be areas that will be spawned for, and only available to a specific player, or group, to play in without any interference. If I take this idea one step further, I would make these instances downloadable and playable offline, on the player's pc. Now, why would we want to be able to play an mmorpg offline? Well, I'm thinking of casual players here, those who only have a very limited amount of time on their hands, so please bare with me if you're not one of those.

The biggest reason someone would not want to play an mmorpg is the time investment it requires, and that's usually because they don't have enough time available for long sessions of play. And since you generally can't just pick the game up, play for an hour, and leave while still hoping to complete missions or quests, these players bail very early to concentrate on single-player games instead. If a player could take on a quest, which would send him to an area that spawned just for him somewhere, and if he could download the content of the area to his hard drive complete with monsters and items to be found within, he could enter it, and log off, and be able to complete it at his own leisure by using the age-old save/load system.

You would effectively turn an mmorpg into a dynamic single-player rpg, and allow players to have an evolving game that they could enjoy at their own pace, without fearing to be constantly outpaced by other, stronger players. Once the said quest would be done, the player logs back in the game and travels the world, says hi to his friends, and gets another quest that he can enjoy whenever he wants to, offline where he can go in and out of the game at his own leisure. Think of it as of Knights of old that left their kingdom to quest alone.

Taking my game home

With broadband technologies evolving so rapidly, communication could be handled with a game-specific messaging system if the player wants to stay in touch with his guild and friends. It's not because the player is offline that he should be completely cut off from everyone else, all we're asking here is to be able to advance at our own pace, with offline-capabilities that just can't be a reality in online worlds, such as the ability to pause the game when the real world calls for our attention. Now, I can hear everyone crying from miles away that such a system would be a gold mine for cheaters. Maybe it is, I'm not claiming it's perfect, or that it's the ultimate answer. I'm just putting an idea on the table for others to take and expand upon, and refine. Since the trend of the time seems to be to protect players' experience, and to welcome casual players into this evolving genre, I'm thinking that melding it a little further with its older brother, the crpg, would actually be a good thing.

Of course, the real problem that I see is that such a feature could potentially dilute the true attraction of an mmorpg, and just turn it into a single-player game with constant updates. But then maybe there's a real market for that? I mean, I would certainly consider buying and subscribing to a game that I could plug on a server every once in a while to get loads of new content and thus gain a dynamic world. Think of Morrowind and how it would have been so much better if you could have had an evolving story, and a design team that would have constantly added to the game on a regular basis. Yeah, I know we have that already since the game is modular, but I'm thinking on a grander scale than that, really.

Or maybe I'm just as delusional as ever, and this is just another of my bad ideas. I just think there is a place for offline content in multiplayer games. Not necessarily for everyone, but rather for a very specific part of the player community to enjoy. As more and more players want to play solo in mmorpgs, I wonder if allowing them to play them as single-player rpgs, while still maintaining the possibility of joining greater hunts with other people once in a while, wouldn't be a good idea. Think of it as a reverse of NWN's feature that enables a player to take a character that he uses in an offline module and bring it over to a multiplayer session, with gear and levels and all. We'd just be bringing our multiplayer character over to our offline game, and then back to the online world. I think that could be interesting.