Grandiose vs Individual Goals

How many people have logged on to Everquest for the first time looking for a grandiose story of ultimate peril, but finding only a thinly-laden excuse to kill indigenous slimes? One of the major problems with modern MMPORPGs is they know they can't fit a traditional Japanese RPG Savior of the World goal structure into the game, so they hardly try with any goals. This needs to change, as goal-based gaming is far more rewarding than the treadmilling the genre is known for.

For example, a player's NPC family might be sick, and the medicine is only available in a certain higher-level area that is significantly higher than the player's current level, and which is only available as an item to those who have sick families. Or perhaps a certain number of people start in a city that has been raided, and their purpose in the game is to rescue their Husband / Wife. Perhaps, as in SWG, there could be some form of Nirvana that individuals can reach by attaining X powers.

But all of this ignores the secret of good storytelling: it doesn't have to be consistent across all listeners, it just has to all make sense to each one. Phantasy Star Online did this admirably, with small groups venturing down to the planet's surface and miraculously not encountering the other groups on the surface. Many caves or dungeons in MMPORPGs would be significantly more emotionally gripping if they weren't full of hundreds of "William teh Great"s and "Yo m0t4a fuXor"s running around complaining about how easy the dungeon was. Why not have certain, if not most dungeons be party-based?

For that matter, why have goals be consistent? Maybe every now and then a few people in the world get singled out to form an impromptu party because they came across Midgard while it was being set ablaze by a Balrog, and it is their duty to defeat it. Maybe this happens to most people at a rough skill level in the game. Maybe not. Anyone else who happens across Midgard during that time gets the regular version.

You could take it one step further and have this as a function of the gameworld, ALA Silent Hill. The universe is being swallowed up by Hell (or The Nothing, for the Atreyu fans out there). It is your job to claw your way out. Or reach your goal, and stay to become one of the architects of hell. Maybe to some characters you speak a baffling language, to others you speak plain english. Maybe some characters watch as the world crumbles into a drug-induced fantasy realm, where others have no idea where the first group of people went. With people exiting and returning to MMPORPGs on their own schedules, this could mesh acceptably with the people's groupings.

With more and more people looking to use their broadband connections for online gaming we need to create more and more content tailored to the medium. Clan warfare was a good first step towards creating a unique language for MMP games, but there are many left to take. How far can we stretch consistency before players balk? How much of a "Tardis" effect can we rely upon, or do players need rigid spaces?

We won't know the answer until someone demonstratably steps over the line. Sadly, far more games fail these days because they are afraid of breaking conventions, rather than because they broke them too much.


- Chris Canfield