Ekim's Gamer View: Single-player MMORPG
Ekim, 2003-11-14

Looking at only a few of the overwhelming number of upcoming mmorpgs, there is one feature that seems to be more and more popular among developers. If it's any indication, it seems that private encounters (as some developers call it) will save the genre from the griefers according to some. As if they were really the ones to be threatening mmorpgs from stagnation…

Privacy has a fee

The idea behind these private encounters is a pretty good one. Having a quest spawn an area (dungeon or region of land) that can only be accessed by the player that got the quest, along with any other group member that was with him at the time. The precursor of that system really has to be Anarchy Online, which basically offered a mission system that spawned a new underground dungeon for each player or group. Some of the newer games will go a little further by offering whole regions to explore that will be free of any undesired intruders. Now, real griefers do exist. They are a pain to deal with when you encounter one. But they are few, very few. Most of those that are tagged as such by other players are not even close to being true griefers. But still, I guess that we should be thankful that developers listen to their customers, as wrong as they sometimes are. And so we have griefers, or those that are believed to be, to thank for the private encounters.

But I have some issues with it all though. The advent of privately spawned areas seem to be bridging some of the gap between single player games and mmorpgs. And although that is certainly a good direction to take mmorpgs in, I'm afraid that it might work against the genre in the long run. Mmorpgs' greatest defining feature is the fact that you play within a community of other players. Alongside, or against them, but together for better or for worse. A great number of these players like to play on their own most of the time, for many various reasons. It's always been hard to find good groups anyway. Now if you have quests that will spawn new areas for each player to be able to enjoy on their own without anyone interfering, you might be left with a game that offers a single-player game with a monthly fee and lots of people to chat with. And that isn't good at all…

Privacy in overpopulated worlds

Of course you could argue that you can also enjoy private areas with a group, thus making the experience a collective one, something that you just can't find in any single-player game. While that is true, it's also true that you lose a little bit of what makes an mmorpg such a great community experience in my opinion. No more groups suddenly coming to the aid of an unsuspecting fellowship of players that are suddenly assaulted by enemies they could not beat. Unforeseen encounters and events like this are what makes an mmo such a great and different experience every time you play. If you cut off groups and individuals from each other by sending them to privately spawned areas, then what is there left of this dynamic?

In the attempt to find "the problem" with mmorpgs, I believe we will soon see that private encounters, or areas, are not a solution because they just don't address the real problem. I'm not altogether against the feature itself as I think it can work great in some circumstances. I just think that people will soon come to see that griefers were not really what was killing their experience to begin with. I think that private encounters will actually start to underline the true problem with mmorpgs: the lack of purpose and involvement within the world you are thrust into.

And to fix that, well… Make death more meaningful, make quests engaging and unique, make content speak on behalf of the game world, make NPCs less static and generic. Make the player feel as if he's really in a world that breathes and lives even when there are no other human players around. Make it dynamic and believable. Ground it with a background that has a history and a lived-in feel to it. The world itself is everything, and the players should complement it. Instead, developers rely on the players to be the ones to provide everything that I just mentioned with their own experiences. We think that players need total freedom. But you need tools to enjoy freedom, otherwise it just becomes boring. Players are lazy in general, and need to be spoon-fed, myself included!

So what does this mean about private encounters? Well, I guess it's good, but not so good. It's a nice feature, but certainly not a solution as some developers seem to want us to believe. And to me it will just make the real problem become more obvious. I guess that's a good thing too, because then maybe someone will finally sit up and see it, and maybe even fix it for once! But until then, enjoy your single-player mmorpg once it comes out.