Single Player
Go Forth, Young Pilot, in #EvochronMercenary
1I occasionally check out what Steam has going on, which usually results in waking up several hours later surrounded by receipts for games I have no memory of buying. I suspect at some point there will be no more games to buy, and I’ll finally be out of the woods…which is like saying that some day Charlie Sheen will kick his drug habit because there’ll be no more cocaine left, but that’s not the point of this post (sorry if you came here looking for “Charlie Sheen Coke Habit”).
The last item on Steam’s banner rotation was Evochron Mercenary, a space flight/combat/trading/mining/kitchen sink sim. I took it as a portent, since just the other day one of my friends had mentioned the need for another Freelancer. After looking over the feature set to EM, I downloaded the demo and took it for a spin.
The first thing that was set spinning was my head. As I may have mentioned here or in other places, I’m drawn to complex, in-depth strategy and simulation games, but I rarely have the time or patience to sit down and learn or to play them. EM was an exception. I stuck around through 75% of the continuous tutorial (it can be had in pieces as well) before I shut it down and figured the best learning experience is in dying on my own.
EM is a free-form sandbox space sim. You can pick up missions from the station to earn money, or you can trade goods from port to port, or mine, or tackle pirates, or customize your ship, or build space stations, or land on planets, or find hidden areas of the universe, or just drive yourself insane trying to keep all of this straight in the face of a control scheme that would make the space shuttle interface look like an iPhone. Really, to start, you just need to know how to move, how to jump, and how not to crash into things like stations…or planets. Everything else can be had in time, as time allows.
The thing that might really sell me is the multiplayer aspect. We played a heck of a lot of Freelancer back in the day, running a local server 24/7 just for our local group, getting together to run missions and goof around. There was no driving impetus pushing us forward, except to blow up pirates and make a lot of cash. But we had fun, and a certain kind of fun that we haven’t been able to find in this “advanced” age of massive multiplayer servers or tea-bagging spawn campers. EM may allow us to have that kind of fun once more, but with the feature-horsepower that a lag of several years can provide. While EM offers much of the same types of gameplay that Freelancer offered, it seems to move things along by providing Newtonian physics-based movement, ship customization, and even the ability to reap benefits from controlling a star system or building a space station.
I’m not convinced that this is the kind of game that can be enjoyed for an extended period of time alone, since it doesn’t seem to have much of a central narrative outside of “go out and do stuff”. The server is limited to 35 players (the server is downloadable and you can run a personal edition for you and your community) which is gated by the horsepower of the machine it runs on, so we’re not talking MMO-scale here, or even a greater community. You won’t be playing with strangers, unless you plan on operating a server farm on some 24/7 high end hardware. That means that the potential long term enjoyment of this game may lie in the throwback intimacy of the early days when we had to run our own servers that were limited in access and were only fun when everyone (all handful of them) were online at the same time.
That’s not a slam on EM, because this kind of private universe is just what we’ve been asking for. The real shocker is that the developer is a one man shop. This dude must be some kind of world-crushing super genius in order to keep pumping out games in this series, alone, and each with increasing depth. I think that fact alone means that EM is one indie game I can get behind, because I enjoy it, it’s my cup of tea, the price is comfortable ($25), and an update on the EM site hints at upcoming improvements that sound even better than what we have now: better visuals, the ability to move around on the planet surface, and more.
There’s a demo available on the EM site, although not through Steam, so if you have any interest in sandbox space sims, give it a shot. The demo allows you access to everything the universe has to offer for 90 minutes, which was long enough to let me blow myself up a few times, tackle several missions, upgrade my ship, and learn some of the finer points of interstellar navigation.
I Do Not Wish For An Elder Scrolls MMO
14This isn’t super-predicated by anything in particular, except that Skyrim continues to be relevant at this time, even with the impending bull-rush that will be the more-or-less open beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic this weekend. Of course, since I write a lot about MMOs and their people, it seems almost a given that this topic should come up here. I’d like to register the fact that I am totally against the idea of an Elder Scrolls MMO, and would suggest anyone who enjoys Skyrim to do the same.
Skyrim is a sandbox game, which is a term that many people use often to refer to MMOs that don’t force you to progress mainly through a railroad of quest chains. You’re allowed to go where you want, when you want, and if you come across something that’s more interesting to do at the time, then you’re welcome to do it without having it affect your potential to complete any other tasks (which is a tangent for another post). Sandboxes are about freedom, and Skyrim takes the further by allowing you to pick up anything that isn’t nailed down, to become a vampire or a werewolf, to own multiple houses, to command retainers, to slaughter villagers and their chickens, to construct, enchant, and do alchemy while shooting fire from your bare hands and unleashing powerful shouts in the ancient language of the dragons.
Seems like a perfect candidate for an MMO, right? Sorry, no.
Wanting more of something great doesn’t automatically mean that it’s appropriate to have that thing appear in another form, especially when transmuting said thing into said other form would require massive concessions that would severely neuter what made the source material so great. Skyrim works so well as an ultra-sandbox because it’s single player. There’s only one instance of that particular moving part – the player – which means that the design decisions are far different then they would be if there were hundreds of thousands of players that all have to be made happy enough to continue to play (and pay). The sandbox element would certainly be nerfed because not everyone could loot that barrel or slay that dragon without the game resorting to MMO tropes like instancing and re-spawning…two examples of things that the lack of which makes Skyrim pretty great. MMOs need to be designed to offer equal opportunity to all players, which necessitates throwing most of Skyrim out the window.
Of course, that’s not an assertion that’s set in stone. MMOs are the way they are today because “conventional wisdom”, accountants, and forum whiners have made them so. They are designed to appeal to a wide audience through egalitarianism, so that your choice of race, class, or even gender should neither grant a benefit or apply a detriment to your opportunity to experience content from start to finish. Classes are designed to compliment one another in a triangle of arrows that proves the effectiveness of the “Holy Trinity” in order to get people to play together, but each class also needs to stand out so that choosing one over another has meaning, but then there has to be balance between the classes in PvP, because those players need to kept as happy as those who don’t do PvP. So the next time you think about bitching about balance or opportunity in an MMO, consider this broad overview and realize that MMOs are about keeping as many people as happy as humanly possible while trying to keep all of these eggs and chainsaws in the air. It’s not an easy task, and is probably the second choice job for developers, because they couldn’t find a job as a police attack dog test subject. The unspoken bottom line, then, is that many thing could be done if developers could (or would) jettison the notion that everyone needs to have the same opportunities open to them. That’s a loaded idea, and in the interest of tl;dr, I have to leave it hanging out in space like that for now.
But there are other roadblocks to making an Elder Scrolls MMO. Part of what makes Skyrim kick so much ass is that you can intend to make a bee-line from point A to point B, only to wake up three hours later after having stumbled up seven mountain paths, clearing two forts, a dwemer mine, and served as an errand boy or girl for a few daedric princes, just because you were curious. If this were an MMO, there would be 200 online guides which play connect-the-dots, telling players where everything is, what you get from it, and which order to tackle them in order to maximize your stats, and other players would be on your ass if you didn’t use those guides. Basically, it would totally ruin the point of a sandbox game, which is that “Ooh! I wonder what’s on the other side of this mountain!” sense of exploration and reward that anyone who’s played Skyrim is probably familiar with.
So no, I don’t think the Elder Scrolls would be served by having an MMO set in it’s universe. Yes, it could exist “out of time” the same way earlier Elder Scrolls games do, but let’s face it: people would expect Skyrim: The MMO but would end up with something that’s associated in name only, leading to disappointment and a troll-feeding frenzy across the Internet. Instead, let’s keep our Elder Scrolls apart from our MMOs because we need to have games like Skyrim to keep us grounded, and to offer us a break from the grind of the “modern” MMO.
Once A Dovahkiin, Always a Dovahkiin
2
Alduin dilon. Alduin is dead.
I guess I’m an oddity in the community of Skyrim: I played nothing but the main quest (well, mostly). I wanted to “complete” the game, as I saw it, by finishing up the main story before I deviated and started traveling off the beaten path. I did occasionally stop by a ruin or clear out a camp, but usually it was a spur of the moment thing, or because I jumped into the faction story for a bit in order to get some perks out of the deal. According to Raptr, I’ve played for 28 hours, and I’m only level 15.
As I have stated before, I play these story-based titles on the easiest mode, because I’m interested in getting through the content. I rarely do, even with this trick in effect, mainly because I get tired of the game or something else comes along and I lose interest. Thankfully, Skyrim is a “perfect storm” game: there’s no other games out right now that I care to start, I’ve lost interest in Rift (and currently my authenticator is offline anyway, which is another whine for another time), and the game itself is just so goddamn amazing.
So now I have to figure out what to do with myself. I signed on with the Imperials, and have to complete all of their tasks. I also have a whole quest log filled with minor tasks…and just realized that I have to go BACK into Blackreach and pick up my lexicon cube, which I accidentally left behind. I didn’t find every dragon word, although I wonder if I’ll actually be able to slay any more dragons at this point.
Era
13This is a difficult post, technically, for a few reasons. I had an epiphany this weekend, which came as both a surprise and which was also not surprising. It is, however, something I am concerned about discussing because I know that any way I frame it, it’ll become fodder for some partisan camp to seize upon, and I really don’t want it to become a rallying banner for some frothy-mouthed fan or anti-fan to carry into battle. It’s also difficult because it involves the presence of a certain NDA locked MMO, which means I can’t speak of specifics that illuminate my points. But I’ll give it a shot. So here’s a disclaimer!
This post is not in support of anything. It’s also not an attack on anything. If you want to badmouth the principals involved in this discussion, please take it elsewhere. I’m writing this because it’s my own epiphany, and I’ll not let it be used to support to deny any quality product intended for our entertainment.
And so, I would like to start by saying that I believe that I’ve come at least to within sight of the end of my affair with the massive multiplayer online game genre. I’ve been playing them since I beta tested Ultima Online over crappy dial-up connections, up until now, where I maintain a six-month-at-a-time subscription to Rift. I’ve played all the “big name” games, and have played or at least tried or tested legions of smaller titles in the genre. I’ve played alone, with friends, and with strangers. I’ve been ganked, and have ganked, have both enjoyed and have hated PvP, and I do not regret the time or money spent having played in this genre. Not one bit.
Part of the allure of the MMO was that, at first, it was new. Back in the late 90s, “social networking” meant leaving posts on BBS or chatting in IRC. Having real live moving avatars was fantastic and exciting. As the Internet took off, and people became more and more interconnected, it only made sense that gaming follow suit and offer a more group-oriented experience. The single player game was declared “dead”, at least in it’s traditional, offline form, slain by the multiplayer, always connected experience.
Looking back from our vantage point of today, maybe the MMO genre has grown too fast. Video games themselves are barely 30-some-odd years old, with at least 1/3rd of that knowing the “modern MMO”. Now we have hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Sadly, the best mirror I can hold up to the current state of the MMO genre is Twilight. If you want a more palatable example, then Harry Potter. In both cases, the extreme popularity of a singular product spawned hundreds of similar or outright rip-offs in a very short amount of time, all looking to get some of the original’s zeitgeist while the getting was good. If the existence of Twilight is bad, then surely the existence of a Twilight clone is even even bigger target for derision? That’s what we’ve got in the MMO genre: constant arguments over who’s the latest copy of World of Warcraft, or a general malaise over features that many see as having been stagnant since EverQuest. This is apparently fuel for some, but for those of us who aren’t as partisan, it’s tiring to have to hear the same chatter over and over again with each and every new game.
This isn’t to say that it’s not warranted; some of us just don’t let it color our opinions of the product as a whole, standing on it’s own merits and not using it as a whipping-boy for our issues with other games. Still, there’s really only so many times we can look the other way as marketing departments work their hardest to convince us that this time it’s going to be different, but when it’s really only incremental if we’re lucky. It’s easy and even lazy to just dismiss and complain. It’s difficult – and far more rewarding – to look beyond the path of least resistance and the delusions that we have “higher standards” that demand to be met. But there may come a time when that attitude just can’t be maintained in the face of something that just brings one back around to what made gaming so enjoyable in the first place, and makes one realize that “settling” isn’t always the best strategy.
This weekend, I had time split between Skyrim and the oft-mentioned NDA MMO (herein known simple as NDAMMO). Both are hot properties. One is widely available, and invitation to the other is widely sought after. It would be criminal to have obtained access to NDAMMO and not participate when one is able, so I was constantly switching between the two. To say that it was like apples and oranges doesn’t quite cover it. One is online, the other is single player. One is tightly scripted, the other is sandboxed. The art styles differ. The genres differ. Both are extremely well done, but neither is without technical issues, but that’s neither here nor there. But on Saturday night, I think it hit me that Skyrim was fulfilling a need that no MMO had ever been able to fill, no matter how hard it tried or how noble it’s aspirations.
Skyrim isn’t the Second Coming by any stretch. It’s not going to be for everyone because it’s the Sandbox of all Sandboxes which means that you’re free to go anywhere, at any time for no other reason then it looked interesting. The northern land of Skyrim is a cold and empty place, punctuated by occasional bursts of interaction with far flung villages, secretive bandits or mysterious ruins – and the occasional dragon. It’s all of this combined with amazing visuals that gives you that sense of immersion that I think we so desperately want from cutting edge games. Trudging through the mountain pass in near-white-out conditions while stalking a target is both nerve wracking and exhilarating. In all my years of gaming, I don’t think I’ve encountered anything quite like spotting a dragon wheeling around the sky in the distance, heading closer, and scorching the ground as it passes overhead.
And then I transitioned to the NDAMMO. Sadly, I can’t say much because of the NDA, but to move back into the MMO space after spending time in Skyrim was…jarring. It was comfortable and familiar, even though I hadn’t played that game specifically. There were people all around me, doing MMO things like jumping, dancing, fighting. I’m sure the chat channel was abuzz with talk of World of Warcraft, but I ignored it. It was…an MMO, which should be enough to convey a set of parameters about the game without getting into specifics. I enjoyed my time there, after a while, but it’s that after a while that made me realize that I just wasn’t all that excited to MMO-it-up much anymore. I’ve barely touched Rift in the past few weeks, and the MMO-flavored highlight of recent memory has been DC Universe Online going free to play.
I don’t credit Skyrim specifically with my malaise regarding MMOs. I think that after 10+ years of walking a familiar road that I finally admit that I might be in need of a change of scenery. Skyrim is a once in a blue moon phenomenon. Others have tried to take on the open world fantasy (Two Worlds being a high profile miss), including “sandbox” MMOs (Fallen Earth, EVE Online, etc.) I can’t say I’d be interested in leaving MMOs entirely for games like Skyrim because there are no games like Skyrim, at least not on such a schedule so as to fill my gaming dance card. What I think happened is that there was finally another style of game that just blew me away, that showed me that although MMOs are fun, they’re not pushing any envelopes anymore. The notion that the future of gaming is online is incorrect; online gaming has shown us that their “future” is a hamster wheel of intra-genre cannibalism which is limited by having to please everyone while keeping up with the competition in a genre stuffed to the gills with contenders.
To sew it up, I’m still on-board for the release of this NDAMMO. After an initial sputtering start, I really got into it, and have some positive things to say about it at an undetermined point in the future. However, I expect that this may be my last and terminal MMO. Having gone back to many MMOs over the years, I am not sure that I can look at them the way I did when I was discovering them for the first time, or even delighting in what I find in any new MMO. I recognized early on that I Have a shut-down point in pretty much all of them that drives me away with boredom, and I’m bored with being bored in that fashion. It’s time to look at some of the non-mainstream, non-mass-market titles out there that may suit me. I’d have a lot of time to fill, if I did actually give up MMOing, and I suppose there’s a lot of titles out there to fill the space.
Skylanders! The Game(s)!
7
Skylanders is available though two possible avenues: the console (or PC-specific version), and the online multiplayer Flash version. When you buy the starter kit, you have to choose a platform (Xbox, Wii, PS3, 3DS, or PC) and you get the three characters, the portal, and the game. However, you can visit the Universe and play the online version even if you don’t have the physical goods, at least for a while (I suspect they expire the trial characters they lend you).
Consoles
The console version is where the meat and potatoes live. You can play single player, two players, or a battle mode. The gameplay itself is like Gauntlet, where you (and your friends) run around and destroy boxes, vases, foliage, enemies, or anything not nailed down, and pick up the loot that the ruins vomit up. When you start off, you have to endure a lot of exposition, which is good because the manual sucks. However, younger kids off their Ritalin might just want to make with the bloodbath, so give them some crayons or something to amuse them while you forge ahead. In the name of expedition, of course.
As has been written elsewhere, Activision has brought their “A” game. And by “A” game, I mean the game of “punch you in the gut and steal your wallet”. The game world is broken up into elemental zones, and the elemental type of the Skylander you’re using is enhanced in a zone of like type. Also, there are locked side trials (a la Little Big Planet multiplayer challenges) that require a specific elemental type to unlock. Expensive? Hell yes! Pain in the ass? Not really, because the figures are hot-swappable. You can pick up a figure from the base and plunk down another to unlock something or to get the benefits in a specific zone. The transition is pretty quick, so you won’t end up rolling your eyes when presented with the opportunity to dot every eye or cross every tee.
As with any game of modern temperament, there’s levels-up to be had, collectables to be found, and cheevos to be unlocked. There seems to be a fair share of voiceovers, as there’s running exposition accompanying your saving of the world, including pipes provided by that ubiquitous vocal thespian Patrick Warbuton as Flynn, the balloon captain who ferries your privileged ass around from place to place.
One really cool aspect of the system is that you can purchase expansion packs which are more then just new characters. One is a pirate ship, and the other a crypt, and each comes with a character, an expansion, and a buff item. Placing the expansion on the portal opens up a new area in the map for you to play, and the buff will…well…give you a buff. I wonder if this data is on the disk with the original game, or if it’s somehow embedded in the object. Nah…must be on the disk…otherwise, that would be quite a coup for Activision’s Wizards. Right?
The console game is leveled at people in the younger age range playing with someone older, or just someone slightly older alone. Adults may find the gameplay a bit too simplistic, a la Free Realms, unless you like collecting virtual hats (which grant buffs and look appropriately silly on Spyro and friends), or just enjoy blowing stuff up and seeing the crazy puzzles the game throws at you.
Web Game
The web game is a tad bit simplistic right now, but they have a “beta” sticker on the logo, so I guess that means they expect us to give ‘em a pass for it. This is where stuff gets real, though: you can hook the portal up to your PC and place your figures upon it’s milky surface to have your characters – with all their stats and loot in-tact – appear in the web game. Don’t want to clutter your pristine PC with the portal drivers they ask you to download? Supposedly you can copy a hand-written code from the console version and enter it into the web to translate the bits, a la Metroid (for those who remember Metroid). I have yet to try this, and I wonder if you lost your figure (or had it eaten by a dog) if you could transfer the data from the figure to the web, and then from the web to a new figure. Might need to ask the Skylander brain-trust about that.
The web game is basically socializing and mini-games including – you guessed it – a Skylanders version of Angry Birds (I can’t get away from those douchebags). There’s a common hub where you can rub elbows (and wings, tails and assorted beast-parts) with other players, although keeping in mind that this is technically targeted at kids, might not be worth the electrons it’s printed upon. For the privacy freaks, there was an option to make your entire online experience solitary, which is great for parents who want their child to have the full range of Skylander experiences (since we paid for em!), but without the added discomfort of having to deal with other people.
The web game is decent for those who are hopelessly addicted to Skylanders, but I can’t see it being a substitute for the console version, nor can I see it standing toe to toe with other web based games. I’d count it more on-par with Club Penguin, and somewhere below WebKinz. But the character stat transfer is pretty damn cool.
Forget College! Skylanders Is Where It’s At!
If you have younger kids (10 or below) who like video games, are good at them, and like collectable monsters, then Skylanders will certainly be right up their alley. It’ll be hard to go near a retail outlet between now and the end of the year without huge displays pushing the figurines. Considering how Target, Wal Mart and Toys ‘R Us love to do exclusives around the holidays, I’m sure we’ll see more figures rolling out that will have you hitting all of the nightmare sales after Thanksgiving to find.
If you’re and older kid (which includes adults) and you’re enamored by the novelty, then you might get more of a kick out of simply collecting the sturdy, well made characters and the technology behind it all then you will from the gameplay. But if you have small children or siblings, then I think you could do much worse then to pick up this season’s must-have toy-slash-video game.
Shots from the official site, showing the console/PC version
Screenshots from the web game
I Have Never Been So Pissed At A Video Game Character
4
[Potential minor spoilers ahead. But come on…I’m the LAST person on earth to play Portal 2, so how spoilerriffic can I get?]
Video games receive a lot of grief from the non-gaming public, and a lot of that grief stems from a misunderstanding of what games bring to the table, but it seems that most of it is predicated on the levels of violence in many titles. The reliance on violence as a motivator is not a dirty secret, or even something the industry shies away from, but sometimes I think that violence is the “easy answer” for a designer who wants to build a game around strife, danger or difficulty. Violence is visceral, and is therefor easy for everyone to understand. In the face of violence we’re asked to either fight or flee. In the hyper-testosterone world of video games, if you flee you’re a sissy. If you fight, you’re heroic.
So here’s my obligatory-as-a-gamer Portal 2 post, a game which is conspicuous in it’s practical absence of violence, yet still manages to be one hell of a fantastic title. With some careful mechanics, some thoughtful level design, and a better set of writers then any late-night variety show can claim, Portal 2 (and, of course, Original Flavor Portal) show that a stellar game doesn’t need to revolve around headshots to be successful.
The core of the Portal series success is not the portal gun, or the design of the levels, as fantastic as they are…it’s GLADoS. If you turn off the sound, these two games are just gimmicky physics-based puzzle-platformers. Although the Aperture Science AI employs agents of violence in her tests, it’s really her soothing, sing-song, self-esteem sniping that makes the game.
In the first game, it was assumed that GLADoS was crazy. She was kind to you in unkind ways, treating you the way a repressed 6 year old treats a kitten. It wasn’t until the middle of the story where you’re sent to the recycling fires, and then again at the end when the AI tries to douse you in neurotoxins, that her insanity was confirmed. But calling her “insane” was too easy a trope to recycle in the service of a great game. In Portal 2, GLADoS seems very stable, mentally – just really, really pissed off. But she’s still the calm, caring Mommy Dearest: she wants you to succeed, but can’t just let you off the hook for blowing her to pieces. It’s an eye for an eye, and if I remember correctly, there were three eyes you had to incinerate in Portal 1. GLADoS is happy to cram three eyes worth of revenge into her ongoing relationship with you.
As the game progresses, GLADoS’s dialog starts to become less “haha” and more of a “haha…huh?”. She insults your character’s weight, her jumpsuit, her bone-structure, calls her “smelly garbage”, insinuates that she’s “round” and bound to be “full of bullets”, and in the lowest blow so far (as far as I’ve gotten, anyway), taunts her with the possibility of seeing her parents. When this last straw was drawn, only to result in entering an empty room (the confetti filtering down the vacuum tube was a nice touch), I realized that I really, really fucking hated this AI. This morning, I realized that I have never actually hated a video game character based on character alone.
GLADoS is a bully in the purest sense of the word. I really don’t view the character as “insane”, because I think that takes away from the point that her taunting is purposeful and done entirely out of spite. She tells you as much, about how she hates you for destroying her in the first game, and in that, you realize that these “tests” aren’t tests, but are her brand of mental torture. Each and every time she speaks (and it’s always a monologue, so no snappy comebacks that she can hear), it’s easy to hear in her voice the kid on the schoolyard who knows all the right buttons to push, or the snotty high-school girls who have an uncanny knack for homing in on the insecurities of others. She uses words to wound, but couches them in pleasant tones. You hate her for insulting you, but you despise her for the tone that insinuates that she’s doing you a favor by pointing our your shortcomings.
If this treatment happened to us in the real-world, it would certainly be downer, but because this is entertainment, it’s amazing to see. Some people might claim that Portal’s selling point is the way it makes you think about puzzles, but once your recognize the parts and the purpose in the room, the solution is due in a matter of time. Some would claim that GLADoS is just pure comedy – which she is – but she’s also the lynchpin in the whole endeavor. Her job as a game mechanic is to make you hate her to the point where, if you were given the opportunity to escape the facility or to double back to bloody her nose, you wouldn’t even consider freedom until you put that bitch down for a second time. It’s brilliant writing, and brilliant characterization, and proves that if you have talented people who can craft a character like GLADoS, you don’t need to rely on violence to make a spectacular game.
The Unsocial MMO
34This started a few days ago with a post at Massively about soloing in MMOs, and was further compounded today by a post at Bio Break which featured a single question:
If we are lazy and resistant to being social in MMOs (the path of least effort, etc.), is it the game’s/devs’ responsibility to encourage — or even force — us to do so?
This has always been a pet peeve of mine. As a long time soloist, I admit that I’m not generally a social person around people I don’t know, especially in situations where I’m expected to do something. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate grouping and socializing, but not as a replacement for my soloist ways. After all, I’m playing for my own enjoyment, not as employment, and not for the benefit of others.
So the opinion that the only reason why people should play an MMO is for the social aspect is one that’s never sat well with me. I have been able to enjoy MMOs for years, primarily as a soloist, which in my mind makes the argument moot. Still, people persist with this asanine idea that if you’re not chatting up a storm, jumping from PUG to PUG, or signing up with a guild on day one, you have no business in the MMO genre.
The usual avenue of attack usually comes in the form of “if you’re not going to [socialize], go play a single player game”. Unmitigated bullshit, and here’s why:
MMOs offer something DIFFERENT then single player games. The two are NOT mutually exclusive, nor are they divided be a social/not social partition.
Single player games control you. Look at Mass Effect. It gives the illusion of freedom because you can choose the order in which you take your missions, but you’re really dealing with a hub location (the Normandy) which serves as a gateway to very scripted missions. ME tells a good story, but doesn’t really give you a lot of authentic choice. You’re still bound to the Normandy, or the mission locations that you choose. When I want a story to immerse myself in where I have absolute control over myself and my party, I’ll go with a single player game.
MMOs — even the most theme-parked — are more lenient because you can choose to quest or not quest. You can craft or not craft. You can explore or not explore. You CAN socialize, or you can solo. You do give up some of the single player advantages like immersive storylines, but you do get options, and a certain degree of freedom that you don’t get from a single player RPG.
Add to this the patches and changes and expansions that add more areas, more content and more features and you’ve got a living product. Sure, a lot of single player RPGs get DLC and sequels, but at a certain point (usually within a year of release), the single player game is left in a specific state and will not change any further. Healthy MMOs change over the course of years, for better or worse, but the game you get at launch is never the game you’ll get when the servers finally shut down (except, you know, APB, Auto Assault, or Earth & Beyond).
