In case you missed it,a somewhat big news for MMOs was a group of players in Final Fantasy 11 spent over 18 hours fighting a boss to only be defeated by exhaustion. There are other examples of quests taking a long period of time to accomplish in FF11. Even though I could personally never do anything of that scale in a MMO, a small part of me thinks that is cool.
Time and reward, two important factors for any quest or mission in games. Probably more so in MMOs, the phrase “punishment fits the crime” works here… in a good way. Getting a pair of shoes for a 2 minute quest is ok, but for a 10+ hour one I better get something useful. I think this feeling of being rewarded for time spent is in our psychology. No doubt a sense of satisfaction at achieving a huge quest would be lessen by a less then adequate reward. Unfortunately I think MMOs at this generation are not the best places for these epic sized quests.
First off,I’m not a hard core MMO player, I never got a character to the level cap in WoW or even tried one of the many raid quests in it. My experience with a huge quest was getting my Warlock mount, and I can say that if I didn’t receive help from someone in my guild at that time I would have never gotten it. I have two big issues with these types of quests, keeping the accomplishment and that there is a third factor when dealing with them, real money.
One of the many hooks of MMOs is the ability to play different character types and see and play things from a different angle. My problem with epic sized quests is that they are at odds with this principle. I don’t know about you, but if I have to do the same 5+ hour quest for every character I make, I’ll probably crack up. I really want to have my major accomplishments saved on my account (such as achievements on Xbox live). If I received my epic mount for one guy, I should never have to go on that quest or have to spend in game currency again on that time sink. I know what the supporters are going to say about that “it’s part of the game play, you need to grind for the reward”. I agree with that, except once I’ve paid my debt to society I don’t ever want to do that again. Another sneaky trick designers use is create gear that can only be equipped by the specific character who picked it up, which of course will be the rewards for those huge quests. I can rationalized not giving that super item to your friend’s level one character, but can I please share the wealth between my other guys? Personality , moving from a character system to accounts is what I want to see (I’ll be describing how I want future MMOS to be in a bit).
Next is money, yes I know I buy a lot of video games that of course cost a lot of money and complaining about a MMO doesn’t make sense, I’m cheap in a very hypocritical way. A lot of the quests in MMOs come down to jobs that I’m paying money to do. Going back to that mount quest I remember some of the time sinks associated with that quest. Having to kill X amount of enemies, getting rare materials or items, and of course having to kill more X amount of enemies. All this while my $15 for the month is counting down, I can see why a lot of mmos for the casual player takes months to reach the cap. Let me say this about WoW, if the game was free to play I would have it installed on my computer right now (at this very moment, a Blizzard employee has just started laughing uncontrollably for no apparent reason). Recently with MMOs I see a “lifetime subscriber” option. Where players spend a huge amount of money to basically never have to worry about a fee to play the game ever again. I just wonder with all the features Blizzard has put into WoW with a 2nd expansion coming out, if that option could work with WoW? I will admit I would be tempted with a game the size of WoW to pick that option. With that said it’s time to talk about my dream MMO.
Ok first off no set classes, this game will feature a classless system. Players will only have one character but all options can be unlocked for them. Players can specialize up different skill types and pick and choose which ones to have available for use (think traits and such featured in other MMOs). Unlocking new classes will require challenging quests (or epic sized quests) to give a real sense of accomplishment. Major quests (the raid level quests in MMOS) will have huge effects on the world such as giving the group that finishes them access to unique content for a set period of time. Due to the classless design, there shouldn’t be “character levels” in the traditional sense. How far you have developed up the skill trees will determine your overall effectiveness, but there isn’t a set cap for development. Maxing out every tree would not be worthwhile as the player can only use a set amount of skills and traits at one time, and over loading yourself won’t do a thing to help your character.
For the hardcore MMO players out there don’t worry, I don’t think creating MMOS is going to be in my future. Maybe someday I’ll resubscribe to WoW and get a guy to the cap and do all that uber content and raid with the best of them and see how great it is… ok probably not. Right now I’m keeping my eye on the WarHammer MMO and who knows maybe there will be a MMO for me someday.
Josh
