SUPPOSITION TO: The Fear of the Online RPG
Disclaimer: This article is not meant to convince the reader not to buy or play online role playing games, or to insult anyone who enjoys them. It’s more of a personal list and ramble about some of my experiences with online RPGs and why I feel they do not hold up well in gameplay against single-player RPGs.
My first online RPG was Ultima Online. It was also my last, aside from giving Everquest a short trial run. Despite being a big fan of the Final Fantasy series and enjoying many other RPGs, I have no plans to purchase Final Fantasy XI (Online), or any other upcoming online RPG. Unlike single player RPGs, where one bad installment may have no bearing on how good or bad the next will be, online RPGs share a general set of traits that I find undesirable.
The first issue is money. This is, of course, a driving force behind both single player and online multiplayer RPGs. I start with this issue because I feel it has disproportionately influenced gameplay design in RPGs intended for online play. To my knowledge, all of the big-name state of the art RPGs designed for online play, both current and in all of the foreseeable future, require a monthly fee to play. This is, for a significant portion of the RPG community, a prohibitive factor by itself. Even if it isn’t a prohibitive factor, though, paying a monthly fee creates, fairly I think, the expectation that the game should be better supported, smoother running (lag and connection), and more regularly updated and patched for bugs than other online games which can be played for free. In my experiences, this has been true to some degree, but not to the extent that a $9.95 or more charge per month is warranted.
In my experiences in Ultima Online and Everquest, the rough amount of connection failures, disconnects, lag-ups, and general frustration-creating problems inherent to online games were just as bad as for any game, pay-to-play or not. In some cases it was worse. Whereas action-based non-RPG online games tend to have some limit on how many players can exist in one “area” at a time (whether that “area” is a game, a channel, a server, etc.), the convention in online RPGs is for one giant interactive world where all players can exist simultaneously. This creates intense lag, particularly in the more popular areas and cities. In my three years of playing Ultima, the staff and support insisted right up until the day I left that any serious or regular lag problems were the fault of individual customer ISP’s or connection speeds, despite the fact that huge numbers of players would experience lag at the same places, at the same times, regularly, despite a very diverse range of ISP’s and connection speeds. (If my character lagged at the Britain bank for 15 seconds, the guy right next to me on the screen on a T1 connection lagged for 15 seconds as well.)
Money affects gameplay design as well. Take everything you’re accustomed to in a single player RPG, and decelerate it by a factor of 10 or 20. Everything from gaining skills and abilities and stats, saving gold, or being able to work towards and complete any in-game goal happened at a snail’s pace. The explanation probably isn’t a big mystery. If you could “max out” a character in a relatively short period of time, you might only play the game for a few months. When, short of quitting your job and living in the game, you can’t make a high-end character in less than 3-6 months, however, you not only pay the monthly fee for that long, but also you’re less inclined to want to quit playing (and paying) after putting so much effort into a character. It’s never been a big concern for me to “max out” characters in an RPG in a minimal amount of time, but it is very frustrating when the game becomes tedious long before you’ve maxed out anything, simply because it takes so darn long to advance in any significant way.
One of the big status symbols in Ultima Online was owning your own house, which was permanent and within the playable game world, where you could log out safely, store belongings, or use to coordinate guild/clan activities or team ventures of any kind. (It was also a place where you could get away from player killers and thieves. Characters couldn’t be killed in town except under very special circumstances, but robbing in town was allowed and fairly common in the earlier days.) In the very beginning (shortly after the game was released) many characters were content to share the use of houses with friends or guild members. Before long, however, having a house became a virtual necessity. In order to compete with other players who were able to stockpile huge amounts of items and gold, or macro repeated skill-building or item-creating actions overnight (an “illegal” action, but commonly done, but unsafe to do anywhere but within your house, since a monster might kill you or another player might report you if you did it in the wild or in town), you had to have a house as well or risk being “so behind” that you couldn’t contribute to or participate in group actions. As house owning became more common, the prices of houses were repeatedly increased by the Ultima staff teams. The richer players became by being able to stockpile and macro within their homes, the more houses they would buy, and the higher housing prices went up. It got to the point that, aside from “cheating” in some way (which I include as receiving huge sums of money from a friend), it got to the point where, playing a few hours a day, you’d have to pay four or five months’ worth of game time to save up enough for a house. (I feel this, as much as the demand for in-game houses, was the motivation for the Ultima team to keep increasing the price of buying a house.) In other online RPGs, it doesn’t matter if the goal object in question is a house, a great weapon, a magic suit of armor, or a gold chocobo, the point is that it is in the interests of the company which made the game to make you pay for as long as possible in order to get it. When you acquire skills or items you want not necessarily after you’ve “earned” them, but simply plugged away at tedious tasks for a long period of time to make you keep on paying that monthly fee, the enjoyment of the game suffers.
This leads me to the next problem plaguing online RPGs. Online auctions. Once immense wealth built up within a small portion of the game’s community, “stacked” accounts went up for sale on E-Bay and other online auction sites. They typically consisted of a full character roster of fully developed, stat-maxed characters spanning several different skillsets and job types, huge stockpiles of items and gold, and most importantly, houses. Once powergamers realized they could make a profit from playing the game, soon all of the game’s open space was crammed tight with player-placed houses and template-made characters dotted the game world. The introduction of “twinks” (players totally new to the game, but completely overpowered and ridiculously wealthy because of buying or being given a fully developed account with property in the game) did as much, or more, to ruin the gaming experience as anything else. I won’t go into that in great detail, however, as I can’t think of a real way gaming companies can prevent it, and consider the blame for it to fall largely on lazy or greedy players rather than the game itself. Nevertheless, it does damage the in-game world, the game community, and the player’s enjoyment of the game, unless he is someone who entered the game with one of these stacked accounts. It will probably continue to plague online RPGs for all of the foreseeable future, so I think it’s fair to mention as a count against online RPGs.
As pointed out in “The Fear of Online RPGs”, the lack of any serious storyline or end goal is a big problem in online RPGs. There may be quests, missions, and “final bosses”, but defeating them doesn’t distinguish you in any way, or end the game. That would “defeat” the purpose of an online game, some might argue. It certainly would not be desirable for the game companies to lose customers the moment they completed a “final objective.” If online RPGs actually removed a character from the game world once he or she completed an important goal, however, it would add more of a sense of purpose in my opinion. Of course, there would have to be a reward of some type, or else few would ever opt to finish the game. One idea I had would be for new game worlds to continuously open up as you “won” a game. Everyone who had completed the game once would be able to create new characters in a game world inhabited entirely by other people who’ve beaten the game once. The same for people who’ve done it four times, or ten times. (Rather like being able to play in “Nightmare” difficulty games in Diablo II only after you’ve beaten Diablo in Regular difficulty.) There would have to be unique aspects to each “level” of the game world in order to discourage people from just recklessly charging through the game, trying to beat it in record time in order to progress. Unique items, abilities, jobs, monsters, weapons, etc. would have to exist on each game world so that people would play in their favorite, rather than simply trying to move from one to the next as quickly as possible. Rather than being linear, perhaps characters who defeated the first game world (where all beginning characters start) could choose which world to go to next (out of a finite number of detailed and unique game worlds), but would then have to “win” that game world in order to create a new character on any other. To my knowledge no such system has been employed for any online RPG, and I’m not holding my breath that it will.
The next point is game support and bug fixing/patching. Paying to play, you expect this to be a superior service than what you get in play online free games. In my experiences, it hasn’t been. There was a greater volume of patches and fixes and updates, but many of these were dictated more by how to draw in a larger new pool of customers than to fix problems that people already in, and familiar with, the game repeatedly stated that they wanted fixed, no matter how serious. When new players would complain that something was too hard, a patch would eventually come around to make it easier. Another very annoying thing that was done frequently in Ultima Online was for a patch to completely reorganize how useful different skillsets were. On the surface, this sounds like a good thing, as no one set of skills would be “the most useful.” Taking into account how much time and effort it took to reach high levels in any skill, however, frequently changing around the utility of skills vastly hurt older players who’d been paying and playing a long time. This was an irrelevant concern, however, when the only priority was bringing in as many new players as possible. If older players got mad that their skills had been nerfed, but not mad enough to leave, they would simply have to start new characters from scratch in order to build up the new useful skill sets, ensuring that they would continue to pay the monthly fee. If they were mad enough to leave, it didn’t matter as long as 3 or 4 newbies took their place, totally unaware and unconcerned that in a few months they too would find their progress stunted by a new patch.
Single player RPGs have a “set” design. If killing an orc gives you 20-30 gold, then you will always get 20-30 gold for killing an orc. You won’t turn on the game the next day and find out that now they only give 15 gold while the price for a healing potion has been increased by 20 gold in order to make you play the game more for the same results. Likewise, if 10,000 experience points will always move you up from level 10 to level 11, you will never find out all of a sudden that the game mutated and let everyone who bought the game –after- you did to advance to level 11 after receiving 100 experience points. Imagine making Lulu into an incredibly powerful black magic user in Final Fantasy X, only to turn on your game tomorrow and find out that black magic has been universally decreased in effectiveness (even against beginning area monsters) by 50%. If you can imagine that happening, then you can imagine the frustration of playing an online RPG.
Goals in single player RPGs are always attainable with basically proportional levels of effort. If you make it to the moon in Final Fantasy IV in about 15 hours of gameplay, then unless you do something drastically different (spend a lot more time leveling up or something), on a second play-through it won’t suddenly require at least 50 hours. Aeris’s mother in Final Fantasy VII won’t suddenly start demanding a 20,000 Gil bribe in order to let you date her daughter and continue with the storyline if she didn’t before. Some may call this predictability, but when you are paying out of pocket to play a game by the month, predictability can be a very good thing.
I definitely second the conclusion of the original editorial writer. I’ll stick with single player RPGs from here on out.
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