Let's face it, the days of table top gaming maybe facing their doom with the rise of the Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG. It's like the D&D your cousin played in your Aunt's basement, but on a computer with shiny graphics. On-line gaming offers a lot; you can finally play in real time with your buddies, you can play in real time against your buddies, shiny graphics where you don't have to imagine anything, and it offers quick pick up and put down possibilities.
Well, at the low levels anyway.
When you start a game, it's great. You check the community forums to read up on the race/class/character types looking for the one that suits your play style. You spend time crafting the perfect character: just the right hair, eyes, skin tone, and the coolest look available. One sure to be the envy of all the other n00bs. Then you hit the starter zone.
You're a god amongst mortals! The enemies fall to your starter powers like wheat before a scythe. You practically get xp for just showing up. The level counter may as well be on a spinning dial, you're leveling up so fast. And you don't have to buy any equipment because the stuff you find is fantastic! This game is awesome!
But after about 15 or so levels, just long enough to suck you into the game, the quests start to get further away and require more steps. It goes from simple FedEX quests, you know where a NPC (non-player character) asks you to deliver this or that to some other NPC in another zone, and Sweep and Clears (it's all gotta die!), to retrieving an item in one dungeon then fedex'ing it to another NPC to be sent to clear yet another dungeon to fetch another artifact and deliver to the original NPC that started the whole problem.
And now it's not a 10 or 15 minute thing to run a quest, now it's an hour or two. Then three to four, and the next thing you know you're in a raid and it takes the better part of a day just to get a team together. And let's not talk about how long it actually takes to run the raid.
Don't even get me started on crafting. For those of you not playing the home game; crafting is the jargon term for creating items for use by your character or by other players. It's like when your dad decided to build bookshelves for everyone in the house. And the first ones he built were slapped together with too many nails and the wrong kind of white paint. But then by the time he got to build the one for your mom, he'd bought a router, a table saw, and most importantly a level, and actually made something decent. Except you don't get anything except another graphic thingie, and you still have no place to put all your books. Crafting just annoys the heck outta me. I mean, wow, I get to gather all these supplies from where ever and I get to spend more game money on special items I need to complete the item. Super fun! yeah, no-thank-you.
Hey, if crafting is your thing, well, more power to you. I mean, I don't want to plunk $15 American a month to click the same button over and over again to see the same graphic over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. I can do that in my own garage. Except I'll have a place to put all my extra books.
Now, I know what you're thinking; I'm painting MMO's as a big bag of suck. Let me clear something up; I play a lot of them. My wife does too. We have been since the internet stone age of the late 90's. I mean, we beta tested the first Everquest! If it's a MMORPG, I've played it.
Except Asheron's Call. Completely missed that one. No, I don't know why. Okay? Let's move on.
So, I know how the games work. And they're a lot of fun. And I'm always looking forward to the one that's about to be released. Except Conan. That looks like zero fun to me.
But what all of them truly lack is deep content. If you've done one FedEx quest in City of Heroes, then you've done them all in Lord of the Rings Online. If you've made a Blood Elf Paladin, then you've made a Human Ranger in Guild Wars. Put together an attack string in Everquest? Then you've done it for every other game out there.
This is the ultimate limitation of MMORPGs; they are all clones of one another. Oh, sure one will come up with a nice innovation for a small aspect, like rest xp bonus, but the others will soon follow suit. And there's only so much space you can devote to story lines, because players demand updated graphics on a regular basis. So the companies employ battalions of folks to churn out a slick new animation, emote, effect, or zone.
And can you blame them? It's easy to package up some screenshots of the new power/ability/effect, leak them to a few sites to generate interest. It's not easy to package up a story line that spans levels and has different results based off the actions of the players. And how would you translate that to the other players who already went through that quest and got a different ending? And how would a tragic story of Love Lost appeal to a pack of 13 year-olds? Would a Destroyer of Worlds story appeal to 30+ year old women?
Like I said, it's easier to produce new flashy graphics and animations than produce a compelling story.
Yeah, these are the twilight days of the pen and paper set, there is no doubt. But until the MMO's can produce dynamic content that is deeply satisfying in a storytelling kind of why, then tabletop gaming will never truly die. It just will never be what it was, especially with
tools available like Neverwinter Nights (it comes with a module builder so you and your buddies from college can still get together to slaughter goblins).
Well, at the low levels anyway.
When you start a game, it's great. You check the community forums to read up on the race/class/character types looking for the one that suits your play style. You spend time crafting the perfect character: just the right hair, eyes, skin tone, and the coolest look available. One sure to be the envy of all the other n00bs. Then you hit the starter zone.
You're a god amongst mortals! The enemies fall to your starter powers like wheat before a scythe. You practically get xp for just showing up. The level counter may as well be on a spinning dial, you're leveling up so fast. And you don't have to buy any equipment because the stuff you find is fantastic! This game is awesome!
But after about 15 or so levels, just long enough to suck you into the game, the quests start to get further away and require more steps. It goes from simple FedEX quests, you know where a NPC (non-player character) asks you to deliver this or that to some other NPC in another zone, and Sweep and Clears (it's all gotta die!), to retrieving an item in one dungeon then fedex'ing it to another NPC to be sent to clear yet another dungeon to fetch another artifact and deliver to the original NPC that started the whole problem.
And now it's not a 10 or 15 minute thing to run a quest, now it's an hour or two. Then three to four, and the next thing you know you're in a raid and it takes the better part of a day just to get a team together. And let's not talk about how long it actually takes to run the raid.
Don't even get me started on crafting. For those of you not playing the home game; crafting is the jargon term for creating items for use by your character or by other players. It's like when your dad decided to build bookshelves for everyone in the house. And the first ones he built were slapped together with too many nails and the wrong kind of white paint. But then by the time he got to build the one for your mom, he'd bought a router, a table saw, and most importantly a level, and actually made something decent. Except you don't get anything except another graphic thingie, and you still have no place to put all your books. Crafting just annoys the heck outta me. I mean, wow, I get to gather all these supplies from where ever and I get to spend more game money on special items I need to complete the item. Super fun! yeah, no-thank-you.
Hey, if crafting is your thing, well, more power to you. I mean, I don't want to plunk $15 American a month to click the same button over and over again to see the same graphic over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. I can do that in my own garage. Except I'll have a place to put all my extra books.
Now, I know what you're thinking; I'm painting MMO's as a big bag of suck. Let me clear something up; I play a lot of them. My wife does too. We have been since the internet stone age of the late 90's. I mean, we beta tested the first Everquest! If it's a MMORPG, I've played it.
Except Asheron's Call. Completely missed that one. No, I don't know why. Okay? Let's move on.
So, I know how the games work. And they're a lot of fun. And I'm always looking forward to the one that's about to be released. Except Conan. That looks like zero fun to me.
But what all of them truly lack is deep content. If you've done one FedEx quest in City of Heroes, then you've done them all in Lord of the Rings Online. If you've made a Blood Elf Paladin, then you've made a Human Ranger in Guild Wars. Put together an attack string in Everquest? Then you've done it for every other game out there.
This is the ultimate limitation of MMORPGs; they are all clones of one another. Oh, sure one will come up with a nice innovation for a small aspect, like rest xp bonus, but the others will soon follow suit. And there's only so much space you can devote to story lines, because players demand updated graphics on a regular basis. So the companies employ battalions of folks to churn out a slick new animation, emote, effect, or zone.
And can you blame them? It's easy to package up some screenshots of the new power/ability/effect, leak them to a few sites to generate interest. It's not easy to package up a story line that spans levels and has different results based off the actions of the players. And how would you translate that to the other players who already went through that quest and got a different ending? And how would a tragic story of Love Lost appeal to a pack of 13 year-olds? Would a Destroyer of Worlds story appeal to 30+ year old women?
Like I said, it's easier to produce new flashy graphics and animations than produce a compelling story.
Yeah, these are the twilight days of the pen and paper set, there is no doubt. But until the MMO's can produce dynamic content that is deeply satisfying in a storytelling kind of why, then tabletop gaming will never truly die. It just will never be what it was, especially with
tools available like Neverwinter Nights (it comes with a module builder so you and your buddies from college can still get together to slaughter goblins).
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