Imagine, if you may, an MMORPG where there are no quests. Players are free to roam the lands, gradually building their skills and abilities via actions such as swordplay or logging, rather than through levels and creature grinding. There’s persistent, non-instanced player housing with multiple designs, customisation, ability to create furnishings and rules about ownership and entry. A deep, accessible and interesting crafting system that compliments a fully player run and driven economy. PVP is worldwide and unrelenting.
It’s not some new Kickstarter pipe dream, nor is it anything slated for release within the next few years. It’s the base feature set of the original Ultima Online that hit retail shelves back in 1997, almost 2 decades ago, and well before the genre busting hit that was Everquest redefined the status quo for years to come.
Everquest’s linear questing structure, rigid class system and user friendly UI attracted a plethora of gamers who found UO too difficult or confusing, and helped to create the foundations for hundreds of future games. World of Warcraft, in particular, took much of its initial influence from EQ and owes much of its incredible success to a complex and gradual refinement of the original concepts that made Everquest so rewarding.
It’s for that very reason, coupled with a significantly long lifespan extended bit by bit via expansion packs and content patches, that has WoW spawning a multitude of competitors attempting to simply clone many of the same mechanics, systems and static elements in a desperate attempt to replicate the same monetary extravaganza. In most cases, they have failed.
World of Warcraft appeared on the scene at the right time and created what was arguably one of the best UIs in modern gaming history. It was clean, fast, polished and clear. The game ran beautifully on almost any machine and almost any connection. It’s linear questing structure was thoroughly addictive and tapped a special part in our monkey brains that kept us playing for hours on end. On top of this, Blizzard kept pace with customer service and offered a level of stability and technical brilliance that they are still renowned for today.
Many of the titles that followed were full of promise but ultimately failed to provide an experience that not only matched Blizzard’s efforts but excelled past them. Buggy launches, missing features, lackluster customer service and poor design meant many games barely lasted a year before folding or going Free To Play. The primary reason behind these deficiencies was the design brief — that the market was World of Warcraft and that we need to take their players.
As a result, many titles were full of the same gameplay systems with slight modifications in order to feel different. But the core was the same — linear questing, battleground PVP, numbered levels, skill points, and numkey combat. As each new title rose on hype and fell on delivery, the same thing occurred, with each focused on one or two points of differentiation — like siege warfare, real time combat, the ability to fly or limited political influence.
As time went on, MMO players became more and more cynical, expressing hope and praise for early demonstrations of games before they hit Open Beta and ended up being more of the same. People started to get use to the paradigm — that playing an MMO was about hitting numbered levels, running through the same dungeons over and over, or collecting the same old garbage for lifeless NPCs with little to no personality. Players in each game world fought over the same resources, fought each other for trinkets and better equipment, or simply spent hours fighting pointlessly in general chat.
There was no consequence to any actions, other players were not allies or opponents but simply tools in order to reach the next level or that new shiny bit of shoulder bling. It’s in this vein that we end up in 2014, over 17 years since UO redefined how virtual worlds and avatars could interact and build a community together, and we're still doing things the same way. Sure, there’s EVE Online, a diamond in the coal fields, backed by a team desperate to cede as much control to the players as possible, but even then, still restricted by a legacy game engine and confusing interface.
The Elder Scrolls Online is less of a pariah and more of a catalyst for change. It is an almost perfect definition of how little the genre has elevated since it was originally conceived. It ticks almost every trope box — from linear questing to battlefield PVP — while actually going back to the future by removing welcome improvements like Auction Houses which centralize commerce. Zenimax Online had the ability to use TES’s freedom as a base for creating a wider world of player control, consequence and choice, but instead chose to take the exact same route as a decade of other contenders before it.
The problem is that people just aren't satisfied with the status quo anymore. Blizzard is hemorrhaging players every month as it works desperately on Project Titan, its successor to WoW. Almost every single major MMO of the past 10 years is now free-to-play, with the exception of EVE which continues to bank on its sandbox hook to keep players paying.
I find it almost offensive when players feel that these failures are due to developers not getting “the systems” right. But the “systems” are broken — linear questing relies on an almost unlimited amount of curated content to be developed on a monthly basis to ensure endgame players have something to do each day. It also relies on the fact that players will never get bored with the lack of control they have over their environment.
I have no doubt people enjoy the current status quo, but the fact of the matter is that these people generally like to stick to a single game. In 90% of cases, it’s probably WoW, because it’s still the most refined theme park. Players may flutter across to games like GW2, TESO or Wildstar, but their continued devotion to “the core” means that people will eventually go back to where they feel comfortable.
The fact is, the genre cannot grow or expand without allowing each player to have a lasting impact on the world. Some of the best stories in gaming are not about taking down a boss, but outsmarting another player or building your own adventures. Many players still play WoW primarily because they now have such deep social connections with other players — thus they find meaning less in the content but more in the games’ legacy.
Games that do this find success — Eve has grown its player base consistently, month on month, since its inception to now sit on over 600,000 active subscriptions. Star Wars Galaxies was one of SOE’s most popular titles until it was modified to remove much of the sandbox elements, as was XL Games’s relatively recent ArcheAge in Korea. Thankfully, the Trion Games published North American version reverses much of these changes, so it will be interesting to gauge its number when it becomes open.
Interestingly, the next implementation of Everquest, “Next”, is shaping up to feature many deep Sandbox elements, including a very impressive crafting and mining system that allows enormously detailed structures to be built in persistent areas. John Smedley, who was a big part of the original’s development, has made it clear that he wants players to be able to make their mark on the world.
Everquest set the standard for MMOs 15 years ago. Let’s hope it can once more.
