Ultima Creator Calls Time On Traditional MMORPG

Lord British, AKA Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series of RPG’s which culminated in Ultima Online, has said that the time has come for MMORPG makers to find new ways for players to play their games.

“I think that if all you’re trying to do is do what we’ll call the traditional feature set, where you highlight and opponent and do the Whack-a-Mole combat and what I’ll call the ‘WoW’ feature set, I think yes, World of Warcraft is the end of that feature set arc”

Obviously Garriott took the opportunity of CVG’s visit to NCSoft’s European HQ in Brighton to big up his latest project, Tabula
Rasa, which he says has examples of innovation in its fast paced combat system, dynamic battlefield and storytelling. Whether the game does away with my major gripes with many MMORPGs, ‘the grind’ and collection missions is yet to be seen.

Get Rid Of The Grind.
I have a real problem with ‘the grind’, killing the same creature over and over again to get enough experience points to move to the next level. I find it tedious and more like working than playing a game. There is often no challenge in it as you’re obviously going to pick on creatures, known as MOB’s in MMO speak, which are not a significant risk to your character’s health. From what I’ve seen of the beta of Tabula Rasa, not enough has been done to engineer grinding out.

The gaining of experience should be something which is done as transparently as possible, merely going with the flow of the game and whichever of the many stories available in an MMOG should be enough to get you the experience necessary to progress. These are meant to be simulated worlds right? Where in reality can you say “Hang on I can’t do that job yet I have to go and do something really tedious for a couple of hours before I even attempt that.” I can see you shaking your heads now thinking “Well what’s school then?” I take your point but hope that those of you still at school see it as more than merely grinding till you’ve got enough XP to get out into the real world. Take it from me, school is necessary but it’s nowhere near enough.

Garriott missed an opportunity to decry grinding and innovate it out of the system, and I think it’s deliberate. The grind is what keeps people playing and paying their subscriptions. Its a way for players to measure themselves against each other and the game. What drives players in traditional MMO’s is not the story and their part in it as it should be, but the numbers, and as long as this is the case the grind will be there.

Not To Catch ‘em All
Collection missions are easy to get rid of, just don’t code them. Replace them with something that is actually interesting. To me these kind of mission (go and collect x of this item by killing this creature/harvesting this plant/mining this ore) are fair enough in the tutorial stages of a game, but seriously to expect high level characters to do this kind of drudge work is unfair. They’re filler pure and simple and They’re also lazy. Why create a mission with a compelling and involving story, with a variety of tasks to complete, when you can just grab the collection quest template and change the fine details? Frankly players deserve better.

A Clean Slate
I’ve been playing the beta of Tabula Rasa and ‘the grind’ looks to be the same as it ever was, and so are the collection missions. This is only the beta though and though ‘the grind’ remains, and its too late to engineer it out now, there is still time to do away with the collection missions. The combat is different though, there’s none of the ’select target, take turns hitting each other till one of you is dead’ here. Its alot more fluid with your crosshairs tied to your mouse and whether you hit or miss dependent almost entirely on your accuracy with the reticle. I’ve not played it for long enough for the story to really take hold and have yet to see the dynamic battlefiled in action.

Other areas that Garriott says require more innovation, with regard to MMORPG’s are AI and physics.

“Dark Messiah did a great job of doing real-time physics in a role-playing environment, both with objects and on the characters. I think physics has a big part to play… in the MMO space. Plus AIs, which even though I think we’re doing a better job than most any other MMO with Tabula Rasa, I think the stage is now set where that needs to play a bigger and bigger role.”

These present technical problems of a sort not yet explored by many MMO developers and getting them working properly in an MMO environment will be tricky to say the least. AI would seen to be superfluous in an MMO where you’re meant to be fighting and competing with other human beings but there are those who play MMO’s simply so that they have other people to talk to while they kill computer controlled enemies, I’m not ashamed to admit to being one of them. Until a game comes along where every entity you encounter is human controlled then there is going to be a need for AI, and good AI at that. Physics is a whole different kettle of fish, to get an environment where every item is moveable and destructible would take an awful lot of bandwidth. The position and shape of every item in that environment would have to be sent to every player in that environment. At present it can be done with a limited number of physics objects and a limited number of players, but to do it with a possibly infinite number of objects, with new ones being created on the fly through the destruction of existing ones, and a far larger number of players is at present damn near impossible.

Its all very well Garriott calling for innovation in MMORPG’s but ubtil a developer is really willing to break the mould that has been set by WoW and its predecessors, including Ultima Online, its not something we’re going to see except in minor areas. The MMO genre needs to be rethought from the ground up to do away with ‘the grind’ and other standard techniques. Until this happens it’s far from game over for the traditional way of doing things.(From CVG.)

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