Ekim's Gamer View: Fatal Attraction
Ekim, 2003-07-18

Keeping a role

The fact of the matter is that we have problems sustaining any kind of role in an MMORPG because most of the people we meet don't role-play. Sometimes we role-players are weak and eventually succumb to the masses and drop our role-play entirely. Others that are more hardcore will keep up with their acting even if the people around them stubbornly talk about how lag is killing their character. It's hard to remain in a role in an environment such as this, but I guess it never really is a reason for disliking a game either. All MMORPGs I have ever played have the same problem, even if you log on to the Role-Playing dedicated servers.

A lot of people I meet in my travels across multiplayer worlds are more into action games when they aren't playing their favorite MMORPG. Why would an action game enthusiast even care so much about MMORPGs? The answer is simple, even if we don't want to acknowledge it: MMORPGs probably cater more to action fans than RPG fans. Combat certainly isn't very active as far as most MMORPGs go, at least not when compared to the action games out there. But the character development is a feature that is probably sought by action game fans out there, something that they don't necessarily have in traditional action games.

MMOAPG?

When you take an MMORPG apart to analyze what it is, you discover pretty quickly that it's mostly a huge graphical chat room first and foremost. Character development is probably the next most important feature of MMORPGs, since they will have to sustain the interest of many players over a significant amount of time. Beyond that, there is not much left. There's usually no story, not an important one at any rate. When there is a story, it's completely negligible and easily ignored (developers haven't quite figured out how to really make the players part of a story in this genre yet). What's left is the interaction with other players and the environment. Basically, you kill stuff again and again to make your character better and better.

It's the part where you can make your character become stronger and better that probably attracts action fans the most, something that they cannot achieve in most action games. They also gain the freedom of going where they please when they choose, and buying cool weapons of their choice. The role-playing aspect of an MMORPG is nowhere in the list, which leaves the few poor souls who are willing to do so in the dust, grinding their teeth at the l337 speech they are subjected to. It's a little frustrating sometimes, but it's also become part of what an MMORPG community is, unfortunately. It becomes even more frustrating though when that behavior is found on role-playing dedicated servers, where the developers were kind enough to set aside a small oasis of hope to those who want to role-play.

Bugs killed the Role-Playing star

But the l337 players are not entirely at fault actually… Even though we point fingers at them, and although they don't help much, I think that they are not the huge nuisance that some would make them out to be. Even though they don't role-play, I have yet to come across one that would call me names because I do. No, the real role-playing killer is the infamous Bug. It's hard to role-play when your game is being torn apart by technical problems. It can be worked into some clever acting (being swallowed by the ever present Void was a favorite quote of mine after coming back from being Link dead in DAoC), but it still kills many people's willingness to play an actual character other than their own person. It's hard to sustain a willingness to role-play when the mindless android in front of you swallows your shuttle ticket without so much as an apology. It's hard to act some eccentric personality when lag makes you run straight for a group of Pookas that con purple to you, and die because of it.

Still, I guess that the attraction that fans of action games might have towards MMORPGs is a sign that MMOs are not so much RPGs… But we always knew that, deep down. What really turns an MMO into an RPG is the interaction with other players, and if that isn't happening then the role-playing dies. Perhaps developers could do a little more to cater to true RPG fans, but then again maybe we are just too small a market to really hope for that. Some less mainstream online RPGs prove this (I doubt the population of A Tale in the Desert ever really soars). I guess that what's really fatal about this attraction then is the role-playing, and in the end it might just become another helpless victim of the masses.