Bringing the single-player experience to MMOs

Ack. Been a while since I posted anything, hasn’t it? Yeah. Life has a funny way of monopolizing any free time you think you have, and then you realize two weeks have gone by since your last post… ugh. Well, I’m here now, aren’t I? That’s what counts. *cough*

I used to be an avid single-player RPGer as a kid and later as a teenager. I played most of the big PC releases in the late ’80s and ’90s, from Betrayal at Krondor to Daggerfall, Baldur’s Gate to Planescape: Torment, with a particular focus on high fantasy, which I’ve always enjoyed reading. That interest fell away once I started playing MMORPGs, starting with Ultima Online and then through Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and now WAR. I’ve picked up the odd single-player RPG in the last few years, but most often I’d buy the game, install it, play it for a few hours, and then leave it on a shelf while I returned to my MMO “hobby”, forgetting about it entirely. The last games I did this with were Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (both on X360), which I still regret not playing through. Thankfully, I still have both games, so I may give ’em a go again down the road.

Interestingly, I picked up Bethesda’s newest release a couple of weeks back, Fallout 3, and sat on it for a few days before having time to actually sit down and play for a straight stretch. I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic settings for my sci-fi, but I hadn’t played either of the previous Fallout games and I really wasn’t familiar with the game’s history at all. I sat down last weekend and went through the character creation process, played through the tutorial, and worked my way out of the starting area and into the blasted, mutant-filled landscape of Earth, circa 2277. And damn, I was impressed.

Is this what I’ve been missing over the course of this last decade? Is this what I’ve traded off when switching completely to the MMORPG genre as my bread-and-butter?

The trade-offs

Now, obviously, single player RPGs have their drawbacks when directly compared to MMOs; the primary differences being games’ lifespans and their aspects of social interaction. While I can muck around in my favourite MMO for years, interacting over that timeframe with thousands of other players on a single server (or more, if you include cross-server battlegrounds and the like), most single player RPGs will provide you with 30-60 hours of content. If you’re lucky, a more sandbox-style game like The Elder Scrolls series or Fallout 3 will give you enough freedom and side quests to get a couple of hundred hours of play in. That’s already pretty good, pushing 8-9 days /played, if you really get your money’s worth and play every possible angle through. Maybe you’ll even eke out a few more hours by returning to old save games and pursuing different dialog/action paths to discover multiple endings. At that point, however, you’re replaying old content and just fending off the inevitable conclusion of the game.

From a social perspective, they are called single-player RPGs for a reason — sometimes you’ll find a game that allows for some co-op local network play, or a multi-player variant that can be played on an online service like Xbox LIVE or Steam, but you’re still dealing with a game designed for the single player, with some extensions to it. Interestingly, this differs from old-school pen-and-paper and table-top RPGs, which were usually played with a group of friends.

What gets me is the amount of polish in a game like Fallout 3 have (and I bought the Xbox 360 version, which I was pleasantly surprised with) when compared to your standard MMO fare. 

Immersion? That’s un-possible!

Every WoW fanboy you run across will tell you that its success is due to its polish and simplicity, the way it brings in non-gamers and gamers alike, easy of gameplay and the usability of the interface. Yeah, that’s all baloney. While the introductory play of WoW (and even WAR, to a point) is certainly nice and polished, and the interface is pretty straightforward, it’s nothing revolutionary. It’s definitely an upgrade over previous games in the genre, but MMOs started on the low rung of the ladder while your typical single-player RPG has had years to get its game up to snuff. The current set of triple-A MMORPGs are put to shame by the level of immersion you’ll find in the latest couple of games from Bethesda, or any number of other single player RPGs released over the last several years.

Most will then argue that it’s nigh impossible to compare the two, due to the nature of persistent online worlds and the lack of true interaction the invidual gamer can have in a world populated by several thousand other people. That you can’t tailor an MMO to the single-player experience because then you have to either neglect the social aspects of the game, or figure out some way to get around the pandemic MMO issue of “if Jimmy does task X, then Jane can’t do her version of task X because it’s already been completed.” This lack of concurrency support is what leads to the current stopgap measure of instancing — creating individual bubbles within the universe where everyone can basically step into single-player mode (or co-op, in raid groups or dungeon instances) and pretend there’s no one else around.

WAR’s take on this is even more unrealistic. If you join an end-game city raid, you’re limited to separate instances within the city. There’s no open gates to run through, there’s no sense of belonging to a real defense because you’re split up amongst queues and separate instances of the exact same content. How frustrating is that? This totally destroys any sense of immersion the gamer has, and I’m really hoping that as technology advances in MMOs over the next few years, they’ll find a way to improve that type of bottleneck. MMOs are currently suffering from their own popularity, with inherent flaws in architecture in the current generation limiting what’s possible for them to accomplish.

Been there, done that.

Age of Conan. Guild Wars. Both are much maligned for other facets of their gameplay, but I think many of you will agree (if you’d played them, tsk, tsk) that one of the strongest areas in both games were the way they approached development of the individual character. In fact, it’s probably the area I enjoyed the most in both games. While the social aspect of MMOs was still there (moreso in AoC), both had a very enjoyable take on character development that harkened back to the way you built your characters in single-player RPGs. Both even compare favourably to my previous example, Fallout 3, which has a spectacular combination of scripted events, tutorials, and your own exploration of your starting area, Vault 101. Even at that early stage in the game, decisions you make affect how your character develops and is treated in the future.

In AoC, the single-player “night” mode in the starting City of Tortage alternated with the multiplayer “day” mode until level 20. There was voice acting and great quest scripting throughout. Of course, the minute you passed level 20, the game started to fall apart, quality-wise. I still think AoC would have been an amazing game if they’d kept up that early quality level throughout the game, right up to level 80 and beyond. The game’s artwork was admittedly amazing, and the character classes were all pretty neat and unique. The combat mechanics were a little gimmicky, but I didn’t mind the combo sequences all that much. Instead, I stopped playing at level 35, mainly because I’d lost that sense of immersion that I’d truly enjoyed for the first few levels. I’m sure I’m not the only one in that boat, either, and it’s really unfortunate for the genre. Rushing games out the door to meet or beat your competition’s release dates has become a common reason for the failure of new MMOs. Hopefully the next batch of releases will learn from these mistakes, but I’m not holding my breath — you can only screw up a multi-million dollar production so many times before you start running out of chances.

In Guild Wars, I treated it almost solely as a single-player game. While you could group up if you so desired, I only started playing GW when the Nightfall expansion was released, which allowed me to select a bunch of heroes to act as my henchmen, which was a lot easier than if you played with the dumb-as-a-stick henchmen in the first two releases. The heroes were much more customizable (both skills and gear) and less cannon-foddery for it. I played through the single-player missions quite extensively in Nightfall, then I went back with my new heroed-up character to the Factions area and played through the missions there, as well. While Guild Wars had some non-mission related stuff that really bugged me (why couldn’t I jump? seriously!), and the combat and movement response times were a little sluggish after coming from a couple of years of World of Warcraft, it was very tactically satisfying, and the campaign missions were fun, well-thought out, and immersive. I enjoyed the sense of accomplishment I had after completing each mission and unlocking new abilities and items, something you really don’t feel when questing in your typical MMO. At least, I don’t.

So, my question to developers is: why isn’t it possible to take what AoC and GW did a step further, and tie the single-player experience more tightly into MMOs? Why can’t my own character development path be more interesting and immersive, instead of the way everyone now just automatically clicks on quest givers, runs to the flag on the map, completes the “kill 10 foozles” quest and runs back on autopilot? Obviously, the scale of MMOs requires a lot more work on the technology and infrastructure to handle load and concurrency, but there are enough frameworks out there now that it must be possible to license a solid, proven MMO framework technology and then build a game that really focuses more on the gameplay.

Maybe the next batch of games will take this sentiment to heart. Now that’s something I’d gladly pay to play. :)