It's All About Gameplay
MMORPG.com Correspondent Matt Plourde uses this article to take a look at a simpler form of MMO gaming and asks readers to decide if TomeNEt, a simpler ASCII-based MMO is really so much worse than the multi-million dollar AAA MMOs.
Editorial By Matt Plourde on June 15, 2009
advertisement Sometimes... when you have nothing left - it's all about the gameplay.
What am I talking about? MMORPG gameplay, of course. I've been playing "online" games since the days of BBS Door games. After that, it was Neverwinter Nights on AOL for me. Ultima Online (UO) replaced Neverwinter. Then came Everquest (EQ) and its fancy 3D graphics. The beta-tests and subscriptions roll through my memories like thick nostalgic bytes - Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Asheron's Call, Earth & Beyond, Guild Wars, Shadowbane, World of Warcraft, Starwars Galaxies, Hellgate London, Tabula Rasa, Warhammer Online... and many more. Why do these games come and go for me? Why do I continue to play "the next greatest MMORPG," only to dump it a few months later? Is there any constant in my vagabond list of retired games?
Well - sure there is! You see, I've constantly returned to one online game: TomeNET. Why? The core gameplay is better - period.
For the uninitiated, let me explain. You see, back in the early 1980s these two guys (Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman) created Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom on UNIX. Indeed, your character delved into deep and dangerous dungeons in search of loot and experience (what else?), but graphics were achieved through ASCII characters. Monsters were represented by letters ('o' for orc, for example) and loot on the ground could be a slash ("/") for an axe or a bracket ("]") for a piece of armor. Since there were no mice on these UNIX systems, commands were done through keystrokes ("f" to fire a bow, "m" to cast a spell, etc), and this control scheme remains true to this day (with the addition of helpful macro systems in some cases). Unfortunately for Rogue, graphical games (Ultima) began to hit the shelves around the same time. Add to this the fact that many free derivations of Rogue were also available at that time, and you have commercial disaster.
Wait a minute - keyboard commands, no graphics... of course it failed! What's the draw? Well - part of the the genius is in the level design - it is always random! Though copied in spirit (Diablo, Disgaea), no game has been able to match the depth and variety of the random dungeon-mapping power of a Rogue-like game (there exist hundreds of Rogue variants in the world today). The second piece of the equation is gameplay. Some games just "got it right," and Rogue was one of the first.
Fast-forward several decades and we have TomeNET - a persistent, multi-player derivation of Rogue (or, more specifically - a derivation of Angband). TomeNET (Troubles of Middle Earth) boasts the core elements we love as MMORPG players: character development (via race, class, and skill point systems), loot, combat, cooperation, and online chat. Battles play out in real time, with swarms of enemies lurking in dark dungeons. Sure, the "graphics" are depicted with multi-colored ACSII characters - but, that is a small concern when you consider the gameplay. Keep in mind, for many of us "old-timers," gameplay is not at all related to graphics, sound or interface.
Though overly-simplified, the gameplay in TomeNET can be described in one line as: "hack & slash" through random, multi-levelled dungeons. To dive deeper in describing what makes an online Rogue-like game so special, I will draw upon comparisons to modern graphical MMORPGs.
;)
Maybe Next-Gen MMOs should go retro.
Besides the graphics, what makes today's MMORPGs so popular? Why not curl up with a good single-player CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) to burn away the nighttime hours? In my opinion, it's the permanence of an MMORPG that keeps people coming back for more - the permanence of their friends, guildmates, character, in-game items, game world, achievements, etc, etc. Once the permanence is established, the gameplay keeps us logging-in. Perhaps we want to tackle that dungeon for the first or fortieth time. Maybe we need a new piece of loot. Of course, some of us are addicted to Player vs Player combat. Maybe the game has a deep crafting/market system. Whatever the case, the game presents some systems which we find enjoyable. Add these systems together, and you have another source for the word "massive" in the acronym - massive amounts of features, choices, and variety.
How do today's MMORPGs entice us to buy and keep our subscriptions? In my opinion, this is accomplished with grinds, community, and realized expectations. Grinds keep us on a "treadmill" for a certain period of time for a specific reward. Some games cloak the grind in clever ways, but make no mistake - without time-sinking grinds, most MMORPGs would fail. The worst grinds are the ones that make you a slave to the game - daily quests and continued maintenance fall into this category. Daily or timed quests/bosses can only be accomplished once every 24 hours or other structured time frame. These types of grinds expand your time-to-complete over the course of weeks and months (sometimes: years). Maintenance is best described with an example - Star Wars Galaxies. To be successful in the "harvesting" part of that game, you were required to periodically deploy, check, maintain, and empty your harvesters spread across a planet's surface. Some people enjoy the maintenance/timed aspects of these games, and some of us do not. In my opinion, I don't like when my games start to own me.
Community can also be a powerful force. If your friends and/or guildmates are playing - that's almost incentive enough to keep logging-in. Newer MMORPGs have even developed complex guilding/corporation systems to facilitate the socialization process (ie - guild advancement, territory control, guild bases/keeps). Here is where the graphical MMORPG's shine brighter than TomeNET. Logging-in to a graphical MMORPG can be a purely social endeavor. Perhaps you want to catch-up with guildmates, rearrange some furniture in your house, or chill in the town square - these things, and more, are more satisfying in a graphical MMORPG. Some games (like Star Wars Galaxies) even go so far as to offer deep social systems such as playing music and redesigning another player's appearance. If you enjoy the massive communities in your MMORPGs, then the graphical games certainly have more to offer.
;)
The past is calling, maybe
it's time you answered.
Now comes the reason I believe a modern MMORPG cannot hold my interest: Realized Expectations. Since MMORPGs are mass-market games, they must appeal to a wide audience. Part of that trick is to make the game forgiving, predictable, and somewhat linear. Most MMORPGs don't have a death penalty anymore, and I'm not advocating for one. For how much time you must dedicate to gather loot and experience, the addition of a death penalty is usually a case of adding insult to injury. However, most successful games are quite forgiving if you make mistakes or happen to "die." This leads in to the predictability of today's MMORPGs - you usually know when you are going to die, fail or succeed.
Let's take a look at World of Warcraft: When you engage an enemy, you usually know how many of that enemy you will "pull", and you know what button combination of abilities you must press to be successful. Take it a step further, and all the dungeons are just as predictable - once you learn the "tricks," defeating the boss is a mere formula. Quests fall into the same formulaic pattern. Let's be honest - very few people play MMORPGs for the "story." Quests are merely Experience and Loot fuel - we don't even read the text anymore. Heck, if the interface doesn't light the path to our quest target on our maps, then we use a third party utility to do it for us. The quest will usually tell you how difficult it is, and you can expect to "win" every time out. How do you win? More predictability. This is all by design, as everyone likes to succeed - right?
Of course we like to succeed. However, how sweet are the rewards when they are either luck-based or predicted (or worse - grinded-for)? Sure, you "won," but did you really do anything special? Did you sweat through a tough encounter, or did you just listen to your raid leader tell you where to go and what to do? Was your raid leader sweating, or was he/she merely following the formula? What could you really lose if you failed - a few minutes of your time? Sure, dedicating fifty hours to gain something can be categorized as an "accomplishment," but was it fun? Were you playing the game or were you simply going through the motions?
Now, let me tell you about the type of gameplay that will put hair on your chest (this applies to both sexes). Take a trip down memory lane to games your ancestors played (okay, by "ancestors" I mean - "your older cousins"). In the end, if you are like me - you may realize that something has been missing from your MMORPG tours.
I like MUDs, but I play them for a different reason than MMOs. To me, they aren't better... they're different. I enjoy the 'interactive book' feel of a MUD. I also enjoy the nostalgic look of them as well. With MMOs, I'm usually looking for faster gameplay, more 'hero'-style combat, and all sorts of neat eye/ear candy. To clarify on that last one, for me that sensory reward doesn't necessarily mean cutting edge tech. I find the graphics of Lineage 2, Vanguard, EVE Online, LOTRO, and AoC all pretty equally appealing... although few things beat the satisfying crunch of a crit ona golem or skeleton in Asheron's Call. :)
For me, looking for a deeper MMO in a MUD is like looking for a deeper Doom 3 in ZORK.
There is a simple reason why the author's experience different that much from a 'standard' MMORPG: the random dungeon.
It's exactly the same feeling a MMORPG player experiences the first time he/she enters a new dungeon. You do not know the layout, where the mobs are and what special abilities the bosses have. You do not know the patrol routes or any of the traps.
You do a dungeon a few times and it gets predictable. Thing is that the ASCII games started the same way. Doing the logic for a good rundom dungeon system is not easy and it took time for it to evolve. Doing the same thing for a 3D MMORPG is even harder and creates its own problems like the maphacks from Diablo 2. Hellgate London tried to do this and fell flat since they could not commit the resources to really make it varied.
BEST article EVER. It helped my to change my view for looking for mmorpg.
WOW. And I had just posted in another thread how today's MMO's are basically:
Icon indicator that initiates another icon indicator on where to go to complete shopping list to collect / return / deliver. Rinse - Rpeat until End Game.
I have to agree I enjoy a good MUD or even a nice RP driven forum, but I do play MMO's for something different. Nicely written article!
A Rougelike MMO sounds like it would actually be pretty fun. I do wish they did have SOME kind of Graphics though, even bad ones. Hell, 8-bit sprites for all I care. This is due to the only issue I have with Roguelikes.... Lack of actual graphics makes it incredibly difficult for me to tell what in the name of god is going on.
Neverwinter Nights on AOL sorry I missed out on that.
I played an old Apple II+ back in the early 90's. I had an early Ultima game. pretty fun tell the program crashed.
Since I'm not a programmer I don't know the difficulties in making randomly generated 3D quest instances, although I know they do it very well in City of Heroes, so I don't see why a company like Blizzard can't bring something similar to the table to help freshen up their game. It certainly can't be hard to randomly generate groups of mobs in an instance based on party strength so you are never facing the same thing twice, even if you don't want to take the time to do the random map generation. I have to say I agree with this article, I have always felt the only way to keep a game new and fresh for people is to have a random element involved in the enemies and dungeons. People might cry though if you randomly switched the bosses around and they spent time fighting only to come up on the boss they didn't want.
I think randomness = work, and a lot of people don't want to work in games any more. It's one of the reasons I quit playing WoW. People just want epics handed to them for nothing compared to work it took in pre-expansion pack WoW to get them. I understand some people want to play their games for fun, but some people like a challenge. I think that's another big hurdle for MMORPG makers. If a company manages to make a successful game that was initially challenging , they face the choice of dumbing it down to keep the more casual subscribers, or hold true to the game's nature. Sadly the almighty dollar usually wins out and kills off the challenging play.
There's a few problems with that. Currently, random means significantly less context and story than handcrafted. If you have both in a game, you will be able to easily tell which is which and that starts to kill the fun for a lot of people. Also, players like to 'get comfortable' with a dungeon. Part of dungeon running for many peoplel is mastering the dungeon. Another thing is the scaling of the content. Scaling content often reduced the feeling of progression since everything remains pretty much at your level. Another satisfying aspect of gameplay for many is to go back to that dungeon where you got trounced when they're a higher level and toss a beatdown on those mobs.
Oneof the best attempts at procedural dungeons and the content around them is Dungeon Runners. It's got a free to play mode to it, so download it and check it out. It has some really cool benefits to it, but that "new dungeon feel" starts to wear thin as you become more aware that there's really no rhyme or reason to each new iterationof the dungeon.
Thanx for the article, TomeNEt is a game i'll play.
For any who are fans of Rogue-alikes i HIGHLY recommend Dwarf Fortress - a free indy sandbox sim/game in development by Bay 12 Games www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Your mmo history is nearly identicle to mine, except i went from BBS doors to Realm, UnderLight and Meridian 59 before finding UO.
A lot of the exciting qualities you describe come from Pencil and Paper D&D. In my opinion that's really what modern mmogs are missing - Dungeon Master (DM) creativity and interaction.
The closest that mmogs have come to that level of interaction are the early months of UO when employees ran weekend Events (the Shrine Wars campaign was ASTOUNDING!) and also good old Asheron's Call, where again the storyline and world was advanced by DM Events.
For Depth of Immersion and Suspension of Disbelief, I still await the mmog that can even come =close= to a good DM-run "Village of Hommlet" D&D intro scenario.
That pretty much sums it up for me as well. :D
This is a great article and describes exactly how I feel about modern MMO's. I've been playing them since Ultima Online and to this day Asheron's Call 1 remains my favorite MMO because of how challenging it is and how it is a sandbox.
I keep trying out all the new MMO's and none of them can hold my attention for longer than a month. I continue to fall back on a MUD i've been playing for the past 9 years off and on, and even today keeps me entertained a lot longer than any MMO has in the past 5 or 6 years. I'm a big fan of old school games because they were actually challenging unlike all of the newer MMO's.
I will definitely give TomeNET a try, as I was a fan of the rogue games back in the day. I never knew an ASCII MMO existed until now. Sounds like great fun, and much more appealing to me than World of Warcraft any day.
Dude... thks for the amasing artice u have explained in detal(tho its a bit 3 para lengthy :P).
i am stating to play the game.. hope its as good as u have mentioned.. cos i too am not into MINDLESS grinding in MMORPGs
I liked your take on the "massive" part of the acronymn.
People are too stubborn these days and insist the first "M" is for massively only applying the number of players.
When in fact, everything about MMORPGs is "massive" derived from its permanence element.
I agree on the purpose people are using quests and raids,nothing more than loot gathering.I think gaming has become even worse than that.People forget why you actually play a game,they start to talk like there has to be a hardcore and casual formula.There is no such thing as hardcore or casual because the game has to move only as fast as you can handle it.
The fact that so many are talking casual/hardcore is proof enough that people are not joining to enjoy a game,they are joining to join the masses[WOW] or joining to see how fast they can hit max level and feed their ego[i guess].For others it is more like a hangout where they can meet some friends.
All of it adds up to anything but game play,however for myself it is ALL about game play.That is why i looked to FFXI,it has an aged engine,low end graphics,but the whole game showed me tons of effort was put into it.Many of the games ideas are unique not copies of other games.Look again at WOW,the entire game is pretty much a copy of EQ,so why would so many join a game they could have already had in EQ2 or EQ?not because of game play i assure you.
To further prove that most do not care about game play,look at how many posts where players the [fanbois] especially talk about how great a game looks when they first logged in.Then they start up guild recruits the first day before they have even learned anything about the game play.Look even further to games that garner a HUGE following before they even hit beta phase,so again nothing to do with game play.
It is funny to this day to still see so many post topics that always talk about their experience in games dated way back,yet so many have never tried FFXI.This shows how much marketing rules the gaming genre as there is still a ton who have never even tried FFXI.FFXI was a game truly built around team work and gaming.Most quests in FFXI are not about loot,but more so about fame and gaining abilities or spells.The whole game has a purpose that interlocks with everything else,it is amazing to see how well thought out the game design was.Sure it fails in many areas and also has the loot raids but at least it misses the usual stereotypes we see from all other games.
For me, yes, gameplay is the biggest concern I have with most of modern games.
I remember playing games 25 years back in time, when the C64 was state of the art, and you played them for hours and hours, again and again.
Since the introduction of the first FPS-games, when 3d-graphics got introduced (of whatever genre they maybe) nothing has ever changed really, when it comes to gameplay. Whatever graphical updates there are since then, doesn't make them any more enjoyable tbh. It's repetitive.
The only thing, as of today, that makes games more interesting over others is content, content, content. If there's not enough content, or better said, not enough different contents to play with, you play a game until you've played it through and that's it. in my case atleast.
So, the only game I've bothered playing for more then a few month during the last 5 years is EvE Online, as it provides the players with alot of different stuff to do, and where players create their own content in 0.0.
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The Wii steps out of this, as it features a new method of controlling the game, instead of playing with a mouse + keyboard or a game-pad. This is really fun :)
Excellent post. I too loved and occasionally play Rogue. I also am an old schooler and played BBS games.. Heck I was a cosysop of a BBS board. And the most challenging games in terms of bosses was old Drakkar.. Drakkar and LoK were the forefathers of all MMO games :) Drakkar required more strategy and discussion and plotting than ANY game I have every played.. you logged into the game in an INN with tables.. join a table and devise strategies to defeat bosses like the Vampires that you lost hit points when you died by them.. and it was not cheap repurchasing them back. Or bosses that have cloaks of limited invulnerability. Barbarians pumped up berserk and came running past you on screen and into the bosses lair because they would kill anyone in sight. Than everyone would plunge in after them.. healers casting healing, mentalist casting spells of protection, and other sticks attacking.. many a times was I one shot killed by a berserk barbarian.. they tended to stay on the target they were fighting but sometimes they would attack one of the members since the boss would be attacking mostly the barb but he would occasionally attack others as well. And it took all the classes helping each other.. paladins were weak until level 16 which took a long time to get too.. they needed their Red Armor best armor for them.. but the weakest boss Red Dragon was too strong for them until they got their armor.. so all the other classes had to help Paladins get their armor.. than off to the next boss for the next class.. each boss had something that another class needed but without help of other classes you would never achieve it.. so all the other classes had to support each other.. I still remember this game with many fond memories. It is hear that the new mainstream graphic games are not able to reach this type of gameplay.. where all classes have to help each other.. and support each other.
absolutely a lovely article, being a roguelike lover myself since i was just a kid toying around with his father's appleII :)
as for tomeNET, i played it a lot the last year (usually as Turbovandal, or Vandal delle 3V) and sometimes i still play it. that's a good attempt to bring online play to roguelikes
ps: lynx, your avatar brings me lots of good memories XD