The Perfect MMO

Let’s put on our judgmental hat for a moment and complain about some MMOs. World of Warcraft? With the identical “bring me X of Y” quests and the nearly penalty-free deaths, WoW is grinding for pansies. EVE? No one has that much energy to dedicate to mothering one small frigate before anything can actually happen. Guild Wars? With the level cap at 20, it’s barely even a real MMO.

Now let’s move into the realm of the hypothetical, just because we can. What sort of world would avoid wearing out its players with repetitive leveling while steering clear of the anticlimactic endgame in which everyone’s maxed out? What sort of MMO would challenge without demanding too much? Blogger “Hanta Sinnombre” proposes, in detail, a game that combines elements from WoW, EVE, and Guild Wars. Here are a couple of the issues he addresses.

Death

The WoW death and the EVE death lie at opposite ends of the spectrum: in one, you merely lose some time running back to your corpse, and in the other, you lose everything you’ve gained since you started playing. In Guild Wars, you lose hit points and mana every time you die while attempting a quest, but once you complete or abandon the quest, the damage disappears. Nearly every MMO will commit one sin or the other: either hitting you so hard you shatter, or just completely letting you off the hook.

Sinnombre suggests a middle ground reminiscent of Diablo: dropping “the contents of all your bags as well as one random piece of equipment,” losing “a large amount of XP,” and re-spawning at the nearest shrine, where you should probably try to run back to your body before someone takes all your stuff. The damage is permanent, but usually moderate, and venturing into the wilderness becomes a greater risk the farther you go.

Leveling
MMO worlds are swarming with “gankers,” those guys that knock out lower level players when bored or craving noob blood. As wonderful an experience as ganking can be, any game with a healthy death penalty will have a leveling curve that allows noobs to walk past veterans without undergoing instant fireball death, as in EVE, where a couple of frigs can coordinate to jam a battleship’s weapons systems. In such a game, the lack of play time isn’t entirely crippling, while huge amounts of play time are worth the most when backed up with skill.

Still, not everyone should be equal. Otherwise, the players who put the most time and effort and monthly payments into a game go unrewarded. Sinnombre calls for “tiers of higher quality weapons and armor, each of which would have slightly better stats. ‘Slightly’ is the key word; even the rarest unique would not be OP, and facing a similar character wielding an uncommon, player skill would still be by far the greater factor.”

Okay, so different games appeal to different markets, and a game that targets everyone would probably appeal to no one, but come on. A gamer can dream. I, for one, refuse to believe that the perfect MMO lies completely out of reach.