I pissed off a lot of people with my recent piece on the stagnation of massively multiplayer games.
Discounting even those who failed to read or understand the article, I think the comments proved that MMO fans are equal to, if not light years beyond, the most obstinate console fanboys for sheer, borderline-religious zealotry.
Luckily for MMO developers, that devotion is the key that's going to save the industry.
After I wrote that piece a few days back and the comments erupted into a tsunami of angry swears and poorly veiled death threats, I momentarily thought that maybe I had been a bit unfair.
These games have hundreds of people working on them, so someone there must have some clever ideas on how to expand the genre, right?
In my spare time this weekend I tried to prove to myself that the industry isn't doomed. Many people sent me links to upcoming MMOs or smaller indie titles, but for every game that had really wacky, inventive ideas, they were backed by finances that – assuming it could even fund an engine capable of making their ideas work – would lack the aesthetics necessary to attract the sort of audience an MMO needs to survive more than a few months.
By Saturday night things looked pretty bleak and I was more convinced than ever that the genre was going to continue its dull march forward.
That's when a bomb hit.
On Saturday an explosion tore through Jita, a gigantic trading hub in EVE Online's New Eden galaxy, destroying over 67,000 ships and leaving many EVE fans scratching their heads – and cheering with glee over how disruptive the whole thing was. In the midst of an otherwise typical weekend, a huge, unexplained catastrophe had taken place in the midst of one of the busiest areas of the EVE universe and it was genuinely new and different – the same things I called for in my earlier article.
No explanation for the explosion has yet been found and players seems equally torn between the idea that the event was caused by developer CCP to herald the arrival of EVE's Empyrean Age PvP-focused update, or if it was a particularly well planned, malicious attack by players.
After all, that wouldn't be a completely new thing for EVE. A few years ago the Guiding Hand Social Club, a now-notorious EVE corporation, was successfully able to plant a number of operatives within a rival corporation before simultaneously assassinating key members in its hierarchy and raiding the group's virtual coffers.
The heist was so well planned and executed that coverage expanded beyond the admiring words of EVE fansites. I recall first hearing about it in an article in PC Gamer and I've seen coverage of the coup on this site, in major newspapers and in Time magazine.
Why? Because events like these – events where the entire world is shocked and brought together under a common experience – are what we were originally promised when MMOs first came onto the scene.
Early MMOs always drew players in with vows that they would play out like gigantic, electronic simulacra of the same roleplaying fun people had been having with four pals and a couple Dungeon Master's guides in a basement for decades.
The only problem is that these games, in relying on computers to simulate the creativity of a Dungeon Master, lost the most important aspect of roleplaying: human interaction.
I'd love to think that the next big revolution in massively multiplayer titles is going to be a concerted effort to create important, entertaining large-scale events that actively affect entire populations, but sadly I just don't see it happening.
As much as developers would love to leverage these events to sell their titles and entertain players, the only way these sort of occurrences work well is if they're created by the players themselves.
Developer-controlled events, for instance: the events in Everquest where the developers would possess the bodies of monsters and assault play-controlled characters, always have a certain sterile feel to them. Rarely are developers willing to do lasting damage to a playerbase that funds their salaries, and having developers even momentarily alter the behavior of some creature, no matter how insignificant, ruins the immersion players feel within the game's logic.
Player-created events though, are not only forced to adhere to the game's logic, but they make for great drama simply because they are great drama: nothing provokes human emotion like being betrayed and attacked, and since the attacks can actually do heavy, logical damage within the game's world, these events hold even more interest for players who have devoted years of gameplay to these worlds.
I still maintain my idea that some MMO title is going to come along that will completely blow everything else away by showing us completely new, intuitive, successful ways to do things, but until then we may have to entertain ourselves.
It's obvious developers are unwilling or (financially unable) to craft wildly creative content, so why can't we just do it for ourselves? The EVE guys have obviously already got the right idea.
Image: greg_westfall/Flickr
See Also:
