Frankenstein's MMO: Building a better MMO through parts

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the MMO market has stagnated in the past few years. In fact, the strategy of developers seems to be to create a WoW clone with enough market appeal to leach off a few subscribers. And when you consider that World of Warcraft was an Everquest clone, it's not hard to see how the market has been rehashing the same basic ideas for the last decade.

But while the genre seems to be creating games out of the same mold, there's little doubt that many of the various systems have improved greatly since the days of Ultima Online and Everquest. In fact, the best game might just be a mixed bag of different parts taken from some of the better MMOs we've seen in the last ten years.

So in building Frankenstein's MMO, the question becomes what part to take from what game?

MMO PvE Character Advancement: Ultima

The only thing developers do worst than creating a good, solid character advancement system in MMOs is creating a good, solid end game. There are many different games whose system could have been named here, each of them equally not-so-great. From Everquest to World of Warcraft, MMOs tend to fail in what should be the two most important tenants of creating a strong character advancement system: evolution and variety.

Evolution is important because these are games people play for months and years rather than days and weeks. A game like Dark Ages of Camelot, which dumped most of the skills on the character by level 15, tends to become quite repetitive when you've done the exact same thing over and over again for 30 or 40 levels.

But if there's one thing MMOs fail at more than providing evolution within class advancement, its providing variety. How many times do we just mash the same button sequence over and over again? Classes should be designed to have a variety of skills and strategies, each one effective in certain situations, which would not only make for some variety in combat, but also allow more talented players to shine.

In the end, Ultima's system is chosen simply because it puts many of the choices into the hands of the player. Champions Online also does this through a points-based system, which might be the best advancement system for MMOs, but is also the hardest to balance.

MMO PvE Combat System: Dark Ages of Camelot

Most MMOs employ a very offensive-based combat system where players and mobs score hits most of the time and the main strategy is whittling down the opponent's red bar faster than they whittle down your red bar. In other words, they are severely lacking in the strategy department, which tends to come out through defense rather than offense.

While Dark Ages of Camelot's system was far from perfect, it did focus more on defense than most MMO's, and the reactive combat abilities allowed characters to create strategies around their defensive skills. Not perfect, but better than just picking out the skills that do the most damage per second and blindly mashing them over and over again.

MMO PvE Environment: Everquest 2

If there is one area that Everquest and Everquest 2 both shined in it was creating a truly epic environment in which to adventure. While the graphical quality of Everquest has suffered through the years, very few MMOs have been able to replicate the breathtaking awe of running past towering ice giants on the way into Permefrost. And if a game did beat it, that game was Everquest 2's re-invention of Permefrost, which was equally breathtaking.

Beyond just providing a great feel, Everquest 2 did a surprisingly good job in the use of instances. Rather than have every dungeon instanced -- which whittles away at the massively in massively multiplayer -- Everquest 2 provided group-based instances only for those dungeons that would react to the player's presence (i.e. the environment changed based on what the characters were doing.) The other dungeons were only instanced when they would become overcrowded, thus allowing you to run up against other players when delving through dungeons.

MMO PvE Quests: World of Warcraft

While World of Warcraft certainly wins the popularity contest, there are few areas where it really shines. In fact, it can be best described as a game that does everything well, but few things great. A great example of popularity through popularity, one area that World of Warcraft nailed was the variety and humor of the quests.

Not that WoW doesn't have its fair share of 'go kill 10 of this' quests which seem to be a large part of that mold developers use in creating MMOs. But more than most, it has humorous side quests that have the player doing different things above and beyond the normal stuff, like taking control of a cannon and blasting away at an army or riding a war machine into battle.

MMO PvE Adventure: Dark Ages of Camelot

Beyond the environment, there is a sense of adventure, and moreso, a freedom of adventure that some MMOs tend to lack. In truth, the genre has gone more and more towards quest grinding and less and less towards letting us do what the hell we want. And lets face it, sometimes just grinding through some mobs can fit the mood better than running back an forth while juggling different quest objectives.

This is one are that Dark Ages of Camelot did well and, sadly, too few MMOs took notice. While it could have stood to have more quests, the quests available tended to have a purpose, whether it was a nice chunk of experience or a really good item. But Dark Ages of Camelot didn't force the player into questing. In fact, it rewarded players who went out of the way to visit far off spots and kept on the move while adventuring by giving out a spawn bonus when a mob was killed that hadn't been killed in a while. This sizable bonus was a nice reward for those who traveled off the beaten paths.

MMO PvE Story: Lord of the Rings

After Turbine's dismal failure in delivering on the Dungeons and Dragons license, I must admit, I didn't have high hopes for Lord of the Rings Online. But they turned out a surprisingly good game that captured much of the essence of the books with some innovative classes that steered away from the stereotypical classes found in other fantasy MMOs.

But where the game really shined was in telling the story. Characters embarked on their own adventure parallel with the story of the One Ring, investigating the growing darkness for Aragorn and beating back the evil at the behest of Gandalf. This epic series of story-based quests happened both overland and inside of instances and should be a shining example of how MMOs can include a strong story-line with interactive and interlocking quests without getting in the way of the 'massively multiplayer' part of the game.

MMO PvE Trade Skills: Everquest 2 / World of Warcraft

While both have their benefits, the best trade skill system might just be a healthy combination of what is found in Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. The cool thing about WoW's system is how it interacts and can actually aid the character, such as herbalism giving the character a minor healing ability and skinning improving the character's ability to deliver critical blows.

But while World of Warcraft does a good job of interlinking the trade skill professions and letting players make useful items, the system itself is about as advanced as the original Everquest's trade skill system. And that's great for those who just want to waste a little time between beating down dungeons, but for those who really get into the trade skill aspect of MMOs, World of Warcraft's watered down approach and character level requirements just don't do the trick.

Everquest 2 might not have hit the nail on the head, but it did a good job of making trade skills something more than just staring at a single bar filling up on the screen.

MMO PvE Things To Do: Everquest 2 / Lord of the Rings Online

One thing that shouldn't be overlooked is having things to do other than just running mobs through with your sword, completing quests for farmers who somehow have a magic sword to give you and working on trade skills. Everquest 2 accomplishes this by having question marks littered throughout the land that provide collection quests and an alternative advancement system that rewards you beyond just the slaying of a creature.

Lord of the Rings Online also does a great job of linking different objectives to character advancement where simply discovering all of the secret ruins in an area can actually help your character. These little goals help add a bit of spice to a game that might otherwise grow a little stale.

MMO PvE Mentoring System: Everquest 2

Not only did Everquest 2 do a great job with their mentoring system, but it actually got better with the introduction of the alternative advancement system. Rather than having a low level rise up to the power of advanced characters, EQ2 beckons the player to truly mentor their lower-level friend by going down to their level and gaining only a sliver of experience. In turn, the lower level friend gets a nice boost to their experience gain as well as a powerful (and hopefully knowledgeable) ally. And with the alternative advancement system, the mentoring player can get credit completing lower level quests.

MMO PvE End Game: None of the Above

One of the most important areas of the game, this is where developers have really dropped the ball. Rather than provide an engaging end game that adapts to the multitude of playstyles of the many MMO players, most games tend to ram the same raid-till-you-drop playstyle down everyone's throat, with some mixing in a small bag of PvP as well.

Perhaps it is a symptom of the genre being dominated by EQ clones, but it would be refreshing to see an MMO that truly looked at how players are playing these games and adapted the end game to meet the multitude of styles. Until then, we'll be on the quest to add 10 more to our DPS and 100 more to our armor.

MMO PvP Environment: Warhammer Online

Warhammer Online didn't turn out to be quite what the PvP enthusiast hoped it would be, but it did provide a basic blueprint for providing a good PvP environment. While the battlegrounds are ripped straight out of World of Warcraft, the different fortresses available in the zones are like a littering of the frontier from Dark Ages of Camelot, but where Warhammer Online really shined was the world PvP quests where each side could duke it out while trying to reach their objectives.

It's just too bad that the game itself wasn't good enough to play, because for a casual PvP game, Warhammer Online did provide a great blueprint.

MMO PvP Benefits: Dark Ages of Camelot

Few MMOs have provided true benefits to PvPing like Dark Ages of Camelot. Forget looting your enemy and getting a handful of gold coins. PvP in Dark Ages of Camelot meant rising up through an alternative advancement system that could give you useful skills from the ability to purge a mez or root from your character to unique class abilities like an AoE Life Tap.

In a genre where PvP bonuses often tend to be a piece of gear you could easily get in a dungeon, it was refreshing to see a true advancement system for those who loved to go out and get themselves some elf ears.

MMO PvP Consequence: Everquest

The best consequence for PvP was found in a game that was never designed for PvP. Everquest's PvP system its fair share of flaws, but it is often overlooked when people talk about PvP in MMOs, mainly because so few people really tried it out. For those that stuck around, they found a system that had surprising depth.

But where it really shined was in the days before the first expansion when PvP actually meant something. It wasn't about getting a bit of coin or a nice item. It wasn't about an artificial advancement system.

It was about content.

The original Everquest had massive problems with content. There simply wasn't enough of it to go around, which led to people taking numbers on content on the 'blue' (i.e. non-PvP) servers. But for those on PvP servers -- especially those on the 'race war' servers that were divided into four different teams -- there was a way around taking a number and waiting in line: kill the people whose spot you wanted.

In a teams environment, this led to individual teams taking control of major dungeons. It also meant that PvP had a real purpose -- to gain access to content, to gain access to items, to gain access to key quest drops, etc.

Unfortunately, this system is mostly overlooked by PvP games, which tend to throw down some arenas and a few open world PvP servers and be done with it.

Frankenstein's MMO

What would we get if we took the humor of World of Warcraft's quests, added the awe of Everquest 2's environment, mixed in Dark Ages of Camelot's freedom to play the game how we want and wrapped it in Ultima's skill-based character advancement system? Would it be possible to both include Dark Age of Camelot's PvP alternative advancement and create a world where the point of PvP was to take over key dungeons?

And will we ever see an end game that goes beyond just PvP arenas and PvE raids? Or have we seen the last of the really good MMOs?

Maybe the next one up to bat will get it right.

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