Several Mistakes Which Mmo Designers Make Over and Over

The MMO market, if you can call it that, has seen its spectacular rises (with of course World of Warcraft in the forefront) and spectacular falls (Probably hard to find a good example here, but a few of the Sony Online Entertainment or EA Online games would probably be a good choice) is, no matter how some would like it or not, a constant and firmly standing part of the gaming industry. So popular, that some single player games tend to emulate their own play style.

This is both good and bad, as some of those schemes are probably not the best of decisions design wise. Decisions such as:

Modular world design.

By this I mean a design of “areas” which are meant for certain, pre-defined levels. A character starting in one area goes in a more or less straight line through the games content, cashing in quests and other fun on the way. Arcing choices as far as destination goes are practically completely gone by now, the few exceptions that remain are instead dragged down by “scaled” content. Exploration of areas that are too hard for the player, making a note of them and returning later used to be a very nice part of a lot of games. Currently practically only EVE Online and Ultima Online (and, as I’ve heard Fallen Earth, however I did not have the time to check that one out) try and carve something different out – a world in which every path you take will end up with the player advancing and discovering something new.

Piles of useless loot

The plague of most MMOs and quite recently, a lot of “normal” games in general, the mounds of ultimately useless loot that you can carry around and sell. Collecting that does not affect your weight and other restrictions, it’s just another way of getting cash. Which tends to make me ask the question why don’t we just get the cash and can collect other, potentially more useful loot. By example, making every bit of loot you find useful for all sort of crafting skills would be a nice way to go (Again, EVE Online shines in this). This one does tend to shape up a bit better as time goes along, but mounds of useless loot still plague most mainstream MMOs. Why is that exactly?

Mounds of RP-assisting tools… Which tend to be useless.

I won’t even go into WHO not having a walk option. Most MMOs offer pubs, yet in most of those it’s impossible to even sit down next to a table. Most MMOs offer emotes, but they tend not to look like something that your character would do. And let’s not forget the mounds of emotes which sole purpose seems to be annoying people. Even on servers which in theory are supposed to be RP enclaves, as indicated by the creators themselves, compared to places done by fans for fans (like fan-made Neverwinter Nights server for one), they tend to lose miserably. But even NWN suffers from abundance of silly emotes.

Copycat work instead of creativity.

Which may sound like a fault in the very players of the games, which probably is true to a certain degree. The problem is, the market seems to support doing mounds of the same instead of attempted creativity. This ends in comparing everything to World of Warcraft, since it’s the most popular monster out there, which in turn leads to the weird conclusion that doing things differently design-wise is a mistake. Of course, doing things differently may mean failing in that regard. But the constant bashing of certain titles just because they aren’t like WoW I’ve seen at places isn’t even funny anymore.

There are probably a few points to add to this short list, but I could probably write a separate posting on each and one of them, like the tendency for hand-holding. For now, lets just leave it at that.

As a final word, this is not meant to mean that MMOs in general are bad games, on the contrary a few of them are actually quite nice. The point of this short rant is to point out some of the imperfections that seem to plague games, yet the designers aren’t really held responsible for them.