How Guildhalls SHOULD have been done

Okay, guildhalls. As mentioned in the previous post, the EQ2 ones look lovely (though perhaps impractically large). They are, though, probably a little too functional for my liking.

Now, that sounds like a ridiculous statement when you first hear it. The thing is, though, you don't want guildhalls that have too much functionality in terms of game mechanics simply because its divisive in the community. Firstly, because it means that guilds will lock themselves away from the rest of the server. Secondly, because it alienates and disadvantages the players who don't want to be or who just aren't in a guild.

In my mind, guild halls should be a social thing, a manifestation of the guild's successes and achievements in the gameworld. A lot of a MMORPG is about social status, so I don't think this is actually entirely unreasonable. The trick is to do it properly, so the guilds see it as something to work toward. To do this, you'd have to make the guild hall something that was progressively unlocked through the guild's progress into the game. Perhaps each major raid boss downed would unlock a new room, or new furniture or a new NPC or something. Maybe each raid boss killed would appear as a head mounted on the wall in the main hall of the guildhall. There's plenty that could be done to show the status of the guild, and working together to unlock the various parts of the guildhall would probably bring the guild together a great deal.

Trashing some other guild's stuff is always fun.

The thing, then, is how to make it useful. Instanced guildhalls with no functionality could easily become as useful as the EQ2 player housing - not very, useful only for personal enjoyment. This is not a good thing, really. There's no point having a status symbol that nobody sees. Thus, you need to make them quite visible in-game, else they will only be used for guild meetings and rallying before a raid etc (these are quite important functions). You don't want to force people into them by making them more convenient to use than normal transport, so you'd only put transport to all the major continents there, which would mean it wouldn't be an inconvenience to use the guildhalls but it also there wouldn't be much of a advantage to doing so.

To make them visible in-game, you'd put them in the cities. If each guild hall was instanced, you'd have some kind of ranking for the guilds (perhaps in terms of who has been the most successful PvP guild, the most successful raid guild etc), and then you'd have a series of buildings in the cities. The most successful guilds in each category every week would occupy one of these buildings for that week (the more successful, the more prominent the location), with their heraldry being displayed on the walls and the front entrance being a direct entrance to their instanced guildhall. To see your banners flying across the capital cities shared by everyone would be quite something, and it'd encourage more inter-guild competition and provide the ultimate fix for those seeking social status.

Whether or not you think the high-end game needs more powergaming and competition between the ulta-hardcore players, the only practical use I can see for guildhalls (beyond roleplaying, which you could still do with my system) is to give guilds another prize to fight over. Anything else would involve the guildhalls being too useful in game mechanics terms, the knock-on effects of which would likely lead to the cities being abandoned.

Guild Halls and Player Housing - do we really need them?

The next EQ2 Game Update has been somewhat eclipsed by all the fanfare surrounding the largely successful launch of WAR, but one thing it does include (besides much needed improvements in crafted armour models) is the eagerly-awaited guild halls. Though when I say 'eagerly-awaited', I mean by the community as a whole, rather than by me personally.This is largely due to the fact that I see little to no point to in-game housing in MMORPGs, whether they be personal houses or guild halls.

Now, I must admit that the EQ2 guild halls look amazing. The tier 3 ones are bigger than most in-game dungeons, and look like palaces. There's some poor-quality videos of them on Youtube that give you an idea of quite how stunning they look (if you don't mind the blue of the projector), which can be found here for the good guys and here for the bad guys. Despite their mighty impressive appearence (particularly of the Good side's hall), though, they all suffer from the same problem as the in-game housing - an ultimate lack of purpose.

That's a fairly liberal (but awesome)  interpretaton of the word 'hall'.

The first MMO I played was UO, which had implemented in-game housing in the most logical and disastrous way possible. Basically, players could buy houses, and then place them anywhere in the game world where there was a flat, open space. Predictably, every square inch of the world was covered in player housing, which resulted in it being extremely ugly and laggy and impossible to hunt in. Thankfully when I began playing the game had been split into two facets, the green and pleasant Trammel and then Felucca, which was the same world but a lot darker and grimmer. PvP was enabled in Felucca, but I never really spent much time there because I just found the place so depressing.

Thankfully, housing was only allowed on Felucca, giving people some respite from the urban sprawl if they wanted it. Until, of course, the day that they made Trammel eligible for housing too, and the open space in UO became an endangered species. There were of course plus points to owning houses in UO, the main one being that you could place NPC vendors there to sell stuff. This was before the days of a centralised Auction House, remember, so a well-positioned house meant lots of customers for your wares. You could also only start a guild if you owned a house, and it provided immense amounts of storage space for your characters - which could often be important.

So in UO, there was some justification for owning property. It in no way excused the fact that allowing it turned the game world into a huge eyesore, but at least it was functional in some way. EQ2 added player housing when it was released, and many in WoW clamoured for the same thing, but the solution that they offered was personal instanced housing. As this has no phyiscal presence in the gameworld, other people won't find it unless they are specifically looking for it (and why would they?), which sort of defeats the entire point of owning real estate.

What it does do is serve the needs of the roleplaying population or the hardcore gamers who really just want a space of their own to show off. EQ2 has more of those than other games, and there's actually a lot of people who really enjoy decorating their houses and then posting on forums so other people who also like decorating houses can congratulate them on it. It doesn't really interest me (partly because I think the finished houses really don't look that good), but it's clear some part of the community does enjoy it even though few people will ever see their hard work.

The problem is giving housing an in-game reason to exist. Instanced housing isn't ever really going to have too much of a reason to exist, even if devs take the most obvious route and make the guild halls/houses transport hubs. EQ2 has done that with its guild halls, allowing people to pay to install Mariner's Bells and portals to the various areas in Norrath. I can see them being a good mustering point before raids/dungeon runs, which I suppose is an end in itself. The second thing that EQ2 has done is make the guildhalls a crafting resource, where you can add tradeskilling vendors and machines - but they've also added harvester NPCs who will go and harvest a hundred resource nodules every two hours. I suppose this makes it easier for everyone, but it does somewhat undercut the rest of the economy so I'm not sure if it's exactly appropriate. Time will tell, no doubt.

A view from the top of the Qeynos (good) guildhall. Inside, there's 30 or 40 rooms - check out the videos.

Player cities in Age of Conan were put in-game in special areas, to make them a hub of player interaction, but apparently they're hard to get to and not particularly useful, so they aren't used either. Perhaps the best bet would be to do a modified version of what WAR does at the moment, with the keeps that can be attacked and captured by both sides.  If a guild captured one, they'd then be able to decorate it as they wanted and have it display their heraldry on the side. Maybe there could be a portal inside the keep to that guild's instanced guild hall?

The problem with that, of course, is that it restricts ownership of property to the end-game hardcore players, which is a shame as it'd just further widen the gulf between casual and hardcore players. Personally, too, I really can't see any use for instanced in-game housing at all. Sure, some people like decorating it, but that's not overly functional as a game mechanic and I don't think it's worth spending the dev time to amuse people whose primary objective in the game is nothing that you couldn't do better in Second Life. Guild halls I see more use for, mostly as rallying points before going on a big raid, or just for guild meetings and social events.

The problem there, though, is the fact that the entire guild is locking itself away where other people can't find them, away from the rest of the playerbase. To me, that just seems a bit wrong. It's an MMORPG, and I'm not sure I like the idea of all the guilds having a little haven from which they occasionally appear to go and kill something, and then return to. It'd serve to further divide the community into cliques, which is never good. Forcing players to do everything in the non-instanced world would retain a lot more interaction between the community. The last thing you want, after all, are for the main cities in a game to become underpopulated because all the endgame players have guild halls that do everything they need more quickly and conveniently than a city could.

You have to balance this off against a guild having a space to call their own, and to foster a sense of community within the group. While I don't see much point for player housing because it's inherently non-social, guild halls certainly ARE social - just within one particular clique. I think I am actually slightly pro-guildhalls on balance, I just don't think a guild hall should be too functional, rather that it should be a record of that guild's achievements and a show of status to other players. Quite how you can get other players to see a guild's guild hall without putting them in-game and then ruining the playworld (a la UO) is another puzzle in itself, though. I'm going to go off and give some more thought as to how I'd like to see them implemented.

Player housing, though, really isn't something I see any room for in the current MMO genre (besides possibly in EVE-style economic simulation games).

The art of crafting (making tradeskilling useful)

Tradeskilling is very much secondary in most MMOs, something that people do either to make a bit of money or to enhance their character's stats a little to make them more effective at adventuring (which is obviously the primary role of the character). In almost all cases, the entire procedure is a huge grind that requires little or no skill and generates even less excitement. Much of it actually seems fairly superfluous, sometimes included just because developers feel they should.

It's a waste, really. Tradeskilling could add a whole extra dimension to the game world, moving it away from the realms of Diablo-style adventure games once and for all. One of the things most obviously missing from the WoW-esque games on the market at the moment is some kind of realistic economic simulation, something only offered by EVE in the current crop. I'm of the opinion that there needs to be a huge paradigm shift in the way we think about tradeskilling, and that we need to make it at least as important to the game as adventuring if we want the genre to continue to expand and improve.

Removing some of the more artificially restrictive aspects of MMO design and giving the function to players would be a good way to do this. There's a lot of them, actually - ideas that don't really make sense but are just so common in the genre that we've got used to them now. The first, and probably largest, is the idea that monsters should drop usable loot. It sort of makes sense if you're fighting a humanoid of the same size and gender as you, but other than that it's a bit ridiculous. It'd make more sense to have the mobs drop loot that then have to be taken to a craftsman to be modified into something useful. I think this is a great idea for several reasons.

Firstly, it makes crafters vital to the economy. If you add some kind of skill-based system where the more competent crafters can produce a better item, it might be quite interesting. Perhaps if they could customise the stats to an extent, or the appearance of the item?

Secondly, it means that you don't need to have loads of different drops in a dungeon for the various classes. If a boss drops a raw material that could then be turned into a class-specific item by the crafter, it means everyone in a group would be fully entitled to roll on drops and bad runs where no class-specific items drop for you would be done away with. Thirdly, it means you could have items that require several boss drops to make. Admittedly, these already exist, but they could be made far more common than they are now. It'd give people something to work for, and overall I think it'd be a good first step to making crafting useful.

The next thing that needs to be implemented is a system where component items can be mastercrafted, and crafted items have stats that are customisable to a degree. Appearance could also be customisable, allowing the more talented players to sell armour designs a little like as occurs in Second Life. But anyway, if a weapon or piece of armour needs half a dozen components (as it should), these should be able to be mastercrafted if the crafter is skillful enough, and the bonus stats carry over into the finished item. Thus, if you really pay out top buck and buy only the finest materials, a player could have an item mastercrafted at every stage of the development to get a truly superb piece of gear.

Additionally, group crafting should be implemented, where several crafters work on the same item at the same time, probably with different skills, and hopefully with some part of the minigame requiring co-operation to triumph in. The finished item would receive bonuses linked to how well the members of the group performed. Of course, the group-crafting items would be more powerful than those crafted by single players, and maybe it'd represent the final stages of assembling an epic weapon or something.

This would require a fairly robust system of accounting for what would happen when the item is sold, so all players would have to agree on how the profits would be shared and accept an appropriate contract before they started work.

Still, though, while all of this makes crafting a much more integral part of the MMO experience, it doesn't exactly make it fun, does it? Sure, some people just enjoy passing the time through crafting and the process of creation, but for the vast majority of us it's hardly going to become the focal part of the game. Therefore, you need to go beyond giving the crafters more control over the economy, you need to give them some action.

But what's the point of having someone in a group who doesn't fight? Under the current combat systems, not an awful lot. But I've been thinking about alternative forms of combat recently, and it occurred to me that if you burst into a castle, the battle almost certainly wouldn't unfold as it does in a current MMO. As is, the mobs stand around in small groups and the players beat them in small groups, systematically working through the dungeon/castle while the surviving mobs completely ignore the sounds of their comrades being murdered.

You are these guys. You are Chuck Norris with a bazooka.

Instead, the mobs should not be few in number and strong (too strong to solo), but they should be many in number and weak. After all, the players are meant to be great heroes, the Delta Force or SAS of the gameworld. It makes sense that they're tougher than the average guard, but it also makes sense that they'll be massively outnumbered. Therefore, I think weaker enemies on continuous spawn makes more sense, to represent the level of reinforcements that would be coming all the time.

Positioning and use of scenery would thus be highly important. A tank blocking a doorway would mean that the reinforcements from that area wouldn't overwhelm the group, while someone sealing up a door would temporarily hold off the enemies while the group did their work. And its here, in interacting with the environment, that the crafters could become non-combatant support classes that had a role in a group but didn't directly fight their enemies. For example, a trained smith would probably be the best person to bring with you if you're trying to loot a castle, because he'll know what's worth stealing and how to best remove it without damaging it. He could be grabbing the loot from the environment (using minigames) while everyone else buys him the time to do it.

The second use could be setting and disarming traps, or barring doors, or otherwise using the environment to help the fighters do their job. In effect, they'd be similar to a crowd control class. But the idea of the combat classes trying desperately to hold back the tides of incoming enemy NPCs while the support class(es) do their stuff and grab the loot is a cool one. It could play into the instance design, too, with them having to lay a bomb or sabotage something, so not only could it improve gameplay but also enhance the variety in dungeon crawls.

Overall, then, the 'support' professions need to be made more important. The MMORPG combat model is functional right now, but it could be much more realistic and exciting (I mean, it's not exactly white knuckle stuff when you're single-pulling mobs) if you added more non-combat roles. And that would add more variety to the game, and mean that there actually WAS an alternative to simply killing things. And that needs to be done if the genre wants to progress.

Expansions - are they a good idea?

MMORPGs always seem to have expansions, almost without exception. The lure is perfectly understandable for developers - after all, it's not like you're already paying for the entire damn game every three months, is it? So the idea that you should splash out another thirty quid to continue playing the game is perfectly justifiable, isn't it? 

Releasing an expansion has some plus points, aside from cynically milking even more money from the players. One of them is the opportunity to generate a load of publicity for free, which is probably why the devs release expansions as a whole rather than through regular game updates. For some of the more marginal MMOs, it's the only time they ever make the front (or second page) of any of the big games sites. It also allows the devs to make larger changes to the game mechanics that they wouldn't normally be able to do, and also to beta test the whole shebang so it works properly, so there are some plus points to go with the obvious negative points.

For the good of your sanity, don't work out how much it's cost you to play MMOs during your life. For me, the answer looks a bit like this.

Overall, though, they seem to encourage the wrong kind of thinking. There seems to be plenty of wrong thinking in the genre anyway, like the fact that development companies seem to think an MMO is finished on release day and reassign the vast majority of the dev team. Given that most companies will work on an offline game for a year or two and then sell it for £35, I don't see why a game that makes £35 out of its players every three months doesn't deserve a full-strength dev team (I can't see why it wouldn't be economically justifiable too).

More specifically, though, expansions always seem to entail a new continent appearing in the game world, with far more powerful creatures and amazing loot than the old world had to offer. The problem with this, in game terms, is that it leads to things being seriously disjointed. This is most obviously visible in EQ2, which is an utter train wreck in that particular respect, but WoW is starting to look much the same. These two examples will serve quite well, actually, because they've both fallen afoul of the same trap but done so in different ways.

EQ2 (unlike WoW) was a horrible game when it came out. The zone and quest design was atrocious, and while the standard has improved over time, the devs haven't gone back to improve the old zones - they've just released new ones. This leaves the game feeling very disjointed, with adjoining zones of similar level ranges often providing completely different levels of loot quality, quest experience and the toughness of mobs. In the older zones, my Shadowknight could easily solo a mob ten levels higher than him, whereas in the newest ones it's a genuine struggle to kill one a single level above. Similarly, the most recent starting zones have quest gear for levels 10-20 that's better than anything you'll find in the old world until after level 30.

To make matters even worse, to please the existing players, the expansions concentrate on the higher levels and the very earliest players, which means there's some excellent starting zones and some good high-end content, but then the middle-game is truly shocking. Geographically, too, it means that vast swathes of the game are completely abandoned. And leaving them in is stupid, really - it just makes the game overly bloated and, as well as being confusing for newbies, is a constant reminder about how crap the game used to be. I don't know about you, but that's not something I really want to be continually reminded of.

In World of Warcraft, the opposite has happened. World of Warcraft was an extremely polished game when it was released, with a great deal of truly superb zones in it. The second expansion is

 coming out shortly (EQ2 will have pumped out five in the same period), and they probably provide better value than most MMO expansions do, so I really can't criticise Blizzard too much on that count. The problem with the way WoW's developed, though, is the fact that the new content is almost exclusively aimed at endgame. Raiders are generally the most vocal part of any community, so it's easy to be blinded by their views when devs try to talk to the community, but it's a mistake to concentrate soley on the raiders.

From what I hear, the zones that made up the original release WoW are essentially ghost towns now. With the Burning Crusade, the pre-60 levelling was dramatically sped up to rush people to max level more quickly. In WotLK, the Death Knight will be introduced, which can start at level 70, and that entirely cuts out any need to play any part of the game released before that expansion. This is a HUGE waste of the developer time spent on the pre-70 zones, and basically represents the fact that Blizzard has accepted that WoW has now reached critical mass and it is more important to keep hold of existing endgame players than to attract new players, since all the new content is so endgame-centric.

If you weren't playing WoW 3 years ago, you won't have seen this guy the way he was meant to be seen. And, sadly, you'l never have the chance.

It's a shame to think that all of the zones I played through when I was a WoW subscriber are now unused, even the big raid zones like Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, which can now be 5-10 manned. It does make me wonder whether raising the level cap is worth it, at the end of the day. Instead of this continual drive toward more loot and higher levels, I'd like to paint a picture of a different type of expansion. Admittedly, it's not ideally suited to WoW as that's a game where people are rushing to the endgame with more intensity than in any other MMO I've seen, so the 'journey' there is less than in other MMOs.

I'm a big fan of cohesiveness in MMOs. I don't think changing the world too much is a great idea. I think adding lots of new zones is a great idea, but I don't like the idea of separate new continents appearing in expansions. At least, not on their own. I think a lot of the new zones need to be mixed into the old world continents, to keep those areas busy. That means that new players will be able to enjoy them because there'll be other players there too. Devs need to get out of the mindset that because experienced players have played through all the lowbie zones, that part of the game is dead. New players coming into the game for the first time will find them just as engaging as older players did when they first played through them, so there's no point getting rid of a useful resource.

Instead, the expansion needs to add a new zone for every level range, thereby improving the experience for new players but also encouraging existing players to level another character up to endgame to experience all the new content. This also helps to keep the newbie zones busy. The second thing to keep the game fresh for newbies is to AVOID SCREWING UP THE ITEM PROGRESSION. Don't just create a new starting zone with uber quest rewards, because there's no point to that except unbalancing the game. By all means add new items, but they should be of similar quality to those of equal level already existing in the game world. You don't need to lure people into new zones with great items, they'll go there anyway just to experience the content. All in all, equal attention needs to be paid to the early to mid-game as to the endgame itself if the game wants to continue to attract new players and not become ridiculously top-heavy like WoW.

As far as endgame goes, raising the level cap is a poor idea. Why? Because it makes zones obsolete in a way that renders them even less useful than dated early/mid-game zones. Why? Dated newbie zones, for example, still provide some experience and entertainment. Obsolete dungeons and raid zones don't even do that, as they are designed to provide good loot and a challenge to keep endgame players occupied. As soon as the level range goes up, all the loot becomes completely worthless as there's now a whole tier of items above it, and the challenge becomes obsolete as the increased level cap makes the challenge laughable. So formerly great zones and loot become completely worthless and forgotten, which is not only sad but a tremendous waste of existing resources (so very, very bad management).

Instead, add more horizontal progression. After Molten Core came Blackwing Lair, for example. The level cap didn't go up, but the gear from MC allowed guilds to sink their teeth into BWL. Now, the argument against this is simply that raiding guilds who started later than other guilds can never really catch those ahead of them without a level cap increase (which equalises everyone again), and that only the elite players ever see the newest content. But again, that's a silly argument. If you're not one of the elite you won't be seeing the NEWEST content, but as you progress up the hierarchy of raid zones you'll still be seeing new content you've not played through before.

At the end of the day, though, giving the raiders endlessly more zones to grind through is somewhat missing the point. An MMO won't last forever, and eventually you have to realise you've done the vast majority of what's available and simply move on from it. New players coming in to experience all the content for the first time will replace them, and so it's far healthier for a game to devote equal attention to all level ranges in the game (albeit with a slight emphasis on the endgame). That way, it'll ensure a newbie friendly, well-balanced game where it actually will be worth creating a second character and levelling them, because you wouldn't be able to see all the content with one character.

And it'd create a memorable, large and above all unified world that would stick in your mind. Everquest 1 did it with its first three expansions, but that too fell foul of endlessly innovating and catering for its existing fanbase rather than trying to attract new ones. Just once, I'd like to see a MMO try and stick to its principles rather than its players.

Using NPCs to create a more believable gameworld

One of the problems with MMORPGs is that, unlike their offline counterparts, you can’t actually have any lasting effect on the world. It’s rather ironic when you think about it – it’s almost the entire point of an RPG to play a hero who changes the world. You don’t play it for the combat, though of course that’s an important part – mostly you play it for the story. So, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the RPG model isn’t exactly the ideal model for modern MMOs.

However, things could still be done to make players feel like they are achieving something in the gameworld without changing the fundamental game mechanics that prevent this from actually happening (a dragon like Onyxia can’t reasonably be expected to stay dead after one person on the server has killed her, for example). They key to this is probably in the social world, and the most obvious way of accomplishing this would be through use of NPCs.

Currently, NPCs just stand in one place and either give players quests or sell things to them. They’re just manifestations of the services available to players – the game needs a repair system, so they add in an NPC that repairs items. Even at the most basic level, players need something to kill to level up, so NPCs are drafted in to die for our levelling pleasure. The main thing that surprises me about how the current crop of MMOs handle NPCs is that they are all part of the persistent world.

Slay me ten cheeseburgers!

This means that it can be difficult to suspend disbelief. In terms of game mechanics, it makes sense, as (as mentioned above) most of the NPCs provide services to the game world in one way or another. The games are sufficiently advanced that the NPCs will interact with different players in different ways, generally their ‘faction’ or alignment, though the reactions tend to fall into one of three camps – normal behaviour, attacking the player, or standing around sulkily refusing to talk or provide any services.

The king of NPC interaction was, of course, the original Everquest. There were at least eight or nine starting cities, and you would be treated differently in all of them depending on what race you belonged to. It actually made your choice of race fairly important, as much of the world was policed by wandering guards and choosing an unpopular race (like the Iksar) was a definite disadvantage right through the game. Happily though, every NPC had both positive and negative factions, so killing them would increase your popularity with some groups while losing it with others.

This meant that you could actually be a dark elf who was welcome in the home city of the wood elves, provided you killed enough of the nearby Crushbone orcs (though you might not be welcome in certain areas of your own home city afterwards). I personally loved this feature, as it was a bit of a badge of honour to be able to stroll through the gates of an enemy city unmolested (though due to the game’s numerous factions, you might be acceptable to a city’s guards but still find that a few NPCs will still attack you on sight due to being on a completely different faction from the rest). WoW came along with a far more binary system, the Horde/Alliance divide, which wasn’t particularly advanced but fitted the game well, particularly on the PvP servers that I played on.

Anyway, tangent over and getting back on subject. While Everquest’s system was pretty cool (and probably the most advanced I know about), when you think about it, it’s not really much of a patch on most offline RPGs. Let’s take Fable as an example. It has a lot of features that MMOs would do well to copy. For example, the characters start as weedy children and as they progress through the game and level up, they first become strong and powerful young men and then eventually wizened and greying older men. I’d love to see an MMO where you start at level 1 with a scrawny teenager and become a huge bull of a man as you hit max level. It’d give you a sense of achievement. But I’ll probably cover that in another entry.

Three's a crowd. Technically.

Fable used NPCs that changed their reaction to you as you became more famous and achieved great things. Once you were a great and good hero, gleeful children would chase you around and crowds of men and women would cheer when you entered town. In MMOs (and even in some recent offline RPGs like Oblivion), NPCs treat you exactly the same whether you’re a level 5 hunter covered in rags or a hardened level 60 adventurer clad in flame-spewing armour and carrying the head of a dragon. I don’t know how difficult it would be to make the persistent NPCs appear with different animations on different player’s screen in a technical sense, but it would make a huge difference if they started off surly and uncaring and would wave or salute or something after you’d hit a certain level of faction or completed one of the epic quest chains that resulted in you saving the city.

Better yet, though, would be the use of non-persistent NPCs – ie, ones that didn’t appear on anyone else’s screens or interact with the actual game mechanics in any way. You’d have to make them graphical options, so people could turn them off if their PC wasn’t up to it performance-wise. It would certainly help to sort out the problems of having cities that are mostly empty and lifeless, without choking up the players with lower-end systems. The best bit, though, would be that you’d be able to give the NPCs appropriate behaviour depending on what reputation you have in that particular zone.

If you were unpopular in the city (or just starting out and a nobody), you could have people barging past you and making rude gestures. When you got a bit more respectable and powerful, the crowds might get out of your way as you walk through the town. When you become well known, you might get the occasional nods or waves or stares from the crowds. When you become really famous, you could have the whole hog, with cheering crowds and saluting guards and perhaps even a changed appearance of the city. As long as the zones are non-PvP I really can’t see this interfering with the gameplay at all. The collision detection for them would probably be turned off, so they wouldn’t impede your own character or any of the other player characters on your screen. Assuming they weren’t exploitable in any way, I think it’d add a huge amount of immersion to the game.

Overall, I think the MMO genre still has a lot to learn from the standard RPG genre (though it seems many MMO developers think they are a cut above offline games). One trick would be more advanced clients that display the same persistent world in different ways for different players. This would help hide the underlying fact that MMORPGs by definition can’t have a story or players who change the world in any great way. In itself, that’s not necessarily a huge problem, as long as you look at the genre the right way – MMOs aren’t games that will last forever, just a long time.

No updates?

Just a quick note to explain that the lack of updates over the last week is because I've just moved house, started a new job and haven't got the net at home yet. Expect to see normal service resume in the next couple of weeks.

Warhammer Online - the next big thing?

In a previous post on this blog, made over a year ago, I dismissed Warhammer Online as a serious contender to World of Warcraft, instead putting my money on Age of Conan being the closest challenger. Despite the comparatively smaller coverage of Warhammer Online, though, I’ve changed my mind. Age of Conan was the perfect example of style over substance, a game that looked stunning but was strangely uncompelling for it. Warhammer looks like a game that might actually take the genre a step forwards (though you can see my previous post on 'why MMORPGs are dying as a game model' for a discussion on whether it truly is forwards or not) by producing a more compelling endgame based more on PvP than the nearest crop do.

Now, the NDA on WAR has just been lifted, so I’ve been able to find some stuff out about it. Bear in mind that I’ve never played the game, so this is just what I’ve picked up from forum lurking and so on. You’ll also have to pardon the lack of pictures in this post, because I’m on a 56k dialup modem tonight and I’m tired and in the middle of moving house – I’ll probably add some next week.

Anyway, why do I think PvP will make for a more compelling endgame? Because PvP always is more exciting than PvE, when it gets down to it. I happily played CS for many hours when I was younger on a selection of my favourite five or six maps (aztec, dust, militia, siege and assault), and remaining equally interested the whole time despite the identical surroundings and mission. Why was it fun? Because the other people playing made the experience slightly different each time. Thus, I think the PvE raiding endgame offered by WoW is probably the wrong avenue to go down these days, though of course it was logical enough at the time. Instead, we’ll see PvP raiding, likely guild-based at the real high end of play. And this is important, because guilds competing to be the first to down a boss is one thing, but actually fighting against each other is another.

So, the basics then. Warhammer Online is based on the popular Warhammer universe, the big daddy of tabletop gaming. It’s a world I’m pretty familiar with, though not to the point of fanboyism – I was an avid Warhammer 40,000 player when I was in my early teens, but I never played its fantasy equivalent. The game features six of the wargame’s most popular armies, around half of them, paired into antagonistic Good and Evil sides. The goodies include the Dwarves, the High Elves and the Empire, the latter being the main human presence in the game, very heavily influenced (read: lifted entirely) from the Germanic early-modern Holy Roman Empire. Their less altruistic adversaries are the Greenskins (combined race of orcs and goblins), the Dark Elves and the forces of Chaos.

The gameworld itself is quite large. Each level range will feature multiple zones in the lands of each antagonistic pair, of which there are obviously three. Some of these zones will be PvE and some will be PvP, allowing players to mix between the two as please. Of course, if you’re playing on a PvP server then all the zones will be PvP-able, so I know which type of server I’ll be playing on.

Ganking, thankfully, seems to have been addressed in some of its forms. If you’re too high a level for the particular PvP area you are entering, you will be warned of this and presented with a countdown. If you fail to leave the area before this countdown expires, you’ll be turned into a chicken and consequently become easy pickings for any of the correctly-levelled players in that zone. This doesn’t eliminate ganking in all of its forms (hunting in large groups, attacking players busy fighting mobs etc), but it eliminates the most annoying strain of it and this can only be good.

Speaking of which, the game’s Battlegrounds-equivalent comes in the form of PvP scenarios, and they’ve introduced a measure I’ve been telling people should have been introduced ages ago – low-level players are temporarily boosted up to near the top end of the level range to allow them to compete on a relatively even footing. I think they’re boosted to the 8th level in that level range, so level 18 or 28 etc – meaning you can still have a slight advantage if you’re at the very top of the level range, but it’s generally pretty fair. These instanced scenarios seem like a pretty good idea, as I always liked the Battlegrounds in WoW, and I think they offer a fairly large number of variants to keep you amused.

The main non-instanced PvP-areas, however, are part of a larger war. The Good and Evil sides perpetually fight over the zones between them, and players are able to capture various outposts and strategic locations along the way via sieges (high level guilds can ‘own’ these forts after capture, but they can be seized from them by other guilds via similar methods). Once sufficient zones have been captured, a faction’s racial city in that area becomes capturable, and turns into a massive battle as both factions fight in the streets to relieve the siege or torch the city and its inhabitants. If the city falls and wasn’t that faction’s capital city (the racial cities of the Empire and Chaos forces), then the capital city becomes siegeable at that point. Sounds like quite an interesting mechanism with a lot of potential, and I’ll be interested to see how effective it in practice.

The other major innovation of the game is the public quests, which are mostly on the PvE front. These are like casual raids that anyone in the zone can participate in and leave at any time, and serve to replace much of the strict entrance requirements of endgame raiding in games like WoW. These public quests have three stages. Firstly, someone kicks them off with a task that’s easily completable with one player, like collecting ten puppy ears. He can complete this on his own, or anyone else in the area of the public quest can help him. Once it has been completed, the harder second stage of the quest begins, which requires the efforts of more players to complete, such as getting a hundred puppy ears. At this point, the final raid stage of the quest commences, such as when the epic mommy dog returns and finds out that all her puppies no longer have any ears. People can join the quest at any stage, and leave at any stage too.

This means you don’t have to worry about being committed to a raid until it ends, but it also has the problems that pick-up raids have in World of Warcraft – the majority of players are idiots with either no playing ability or no spelling ability, and thus you’re unlikely to get anywhere. Hopefully the public quests will be suitably casual-friendly and thus minimise the requirement for actual teamwork, because otherwise they may be very difficult. I think the ease of getting involved for casual players probably outweighs the disadvantages of not being able to weed the retards out of your team as in the more formalised raids of World of Warcraft, but as always it’s a bit of a trade-off. I imagine the elite guilds will find it slightly irritating to have other players hanging on, to say the least.

The loot system won’t pacify them either, as when the loot is dropped every player involved in the public quest is eligible to win it. The game records your contribution to the quest, you see, and it gives you a bonus to your roll accordingly. If you contributed the most to the quest, you might get a +400 bonus to your roll out of 1000, while someone who joined in at the end of the last bossfight might only get +10. This means that people can still join in the late stages of the quest and have a chance to win something, but the people who have contributed the most are more likely to come out of it with a shiny new epic item. The system is somewhat exploitable, perhaps, but its an innovative new idea that certainly deserves a chance.

Finally, onto the combat itself. From what I’ve read, the game’s combat is somewhat slower than in other MMOs, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d have to play it myself become I commented more on it, but don’t expect to be see casters being killed in two seconds flat like they can be in other MMOs I might mention.

The other main innovation in combat is the fact that there is collision detection, so you can’t just walk through other players (friend or foe). This is very interesting, particularly in siege warfare, as placement thus becomes far more important – particularly for tanks.

Speaking of classes, from what I’ve heard there are about twenty in the game. Each race has all or most of the four class archetypes in the game, Tanks, Melee DPS, Range DPS and Healers. However, unlike in other games, the classes play slightly differently depending on what race you are. A dwarf Ironbreaker and an Empire Swordsmaster are both tank classes, but they won’t play exactly the same. It remains to be seen how large the differences are, but the potential is certainly there for a bit of a breath of fresh air and some much-needed differentiation between the races.

Onto my one concern about the game, though – the graphics. Frankly, it looks quite seriously sub-par. Most of the existing promotional shots were from before the beta NDA was lifted, and thus don’t show the game’s new lighting engine or the improved draw distance, and even the most recent shots presently don’t show the highest texture quality (nor shadows), but they still don’t look great. Nor is there grass or bushes, or anything to liven up the flat open space between the buildings/scenery items in the zone. Currently, they’re worse then World of Warcraft, and that’s really not acceptable for a game that’s being released in 2008. I’m not expecting Age of Conan (I don’t actually want Age of Conan right now, because my graphics card can’t handle it), but I expect something of at least Everquest 2 standard. And really, it should be MUCH better than that, given how much things have advanced in the last five years.

I’ll be watching the game’s progress with interest, at least, and I’ll consider buying it at launch too. It just depends how much free time I have with this new job I’m starting…

EQ2 Diary updated - 8 months late

Just a quick note to say I found my EQ2 diary from level 60-65 sitting in my drafts folder, even though it looks pretty much complete. I've posted it up, though sadly it's without screenshots.

Should MMO players be able to freely choose the appearence of their characters, or should they have to earn it?

Warhammer Online has piqued my interest, and I'll post a longer commentary on it tomorrow probably. But first, one particular minor feature caught me eye and brought back some memories of a discussion I had online with a friend recently.

It came about when EQ2 implemented 'appearence slots' in its inventory, which allowed a player to equip one set of armour for stats and another set of armour for appearence. I'm told that LOTRO has the same system, though I've not played it so I can't personally vouch for that. Essentially, it means I can equip the Badass Platemail of Face Shattering for its amazing stats, and then equip the Flowing Robes of Beauty in the 'appearence' slot and my character loks like he's wearing the robes, with no sign at all of the platemail. I had rather mixed feelings about this for several reasons, and I'm still not sure I've decided on whether I think it's a good idea to allow this. I'm going to examine some of the arguments on either side here.

First, there's the gameplay element. You obviously can't let players wear ANY armour in the 'appearence' slots, because you can't have a Warrior who looks like a mage. Not only does it makes no sense that someone's able to hide plate armour under cloth robes, but it's game unbalancing in PvP. When I was playing my WoW rogue, I would deal with a Warrior and a Mage differently in the battlegrounds (namely by leaving the former well alone and sticking a dagger in the back of the latter). The visual recognition of classes by their appearence is a vital part of PvP, and to muddy the waters unfairly weights the game towards the classes that don't have external markers to their identity - ie, no pets, no stealth, no obvious buffs etc.

WoW's epic gear is famed for the subtlety of its appearence.

Thankfully, EQ2 limited gear in the appearence slots to gear that your class can use, which is fair enough. It also used to have a limitation that you couldn't put armour of a lighter type than you had in your normal armour slots in your appearence slot, intended to solve the problem mentioned above. This meant that you couldn't wear robes over chainmail, for example, though I'm not entirely sure if that restriction is still in place or not. Presumably LOTRO also has similar restrictions, because I doubt the players would be too happy otherwise.

Lets set aside the game balance for now, as it's not really what I'm interested in discussing. What was more of a concern to me is that it somewhat devalued the achievements of the more hardcore players. When I was playing in WoW as my rogue, when I hit level 60 I quickly got my grubby mitts on my full Shadowcraft set, and it made me proud. I could stroll around Ironforge, and people knew that I was a level 60 with a respectable level of gear, because everyone knew what Shadowcraft looked like. When I started raiding and got my Nightslayer stuff, most players knew what that looked like too, so they could take one look at me and know that I was a high-level raider and I got correspondingly more respect. As your avatar's appearence is essentially the only representation of your achievements in-game, it struck me as a bit off to suddenly let everyone customise their appearence. I thought that players should have to EARN a good appearence.

I wasn't, of course, saying that all rogues irrespective of ability would automatically be able to look like they were wearing Nightslayer. I knew that if I wore the stuff, people would still identify me as a high-end player. But once everyone started customising their appearences to their likings, even the low-end players could look really cool, which diluted the prestige of my appearence somewhat. Snobbery, I suppose, not wanting to lose the status I felt I'd earned. But then status is what a lot of players play for, to be the best and to impress other people.

Yeah, there are people who have worked long and hard to earn this.

The other side of the coin is represented by a couple of arguments. Firstly (and especially relevent to EQ2), sometimes it's needed. EQ2's armour is frankly horrendous. Sets of armour, especially crafted ones, often don't match up properly in appearence terms. Individual looted armour is usually even worse. And very few pieces look any good at all, either, including the high-end raid gear. A fully-geared up raider doesn't look any cooler than the normal players, indeed often they look like complete muppets. Raid gear in WoW is distinctive in all of its kaleidoscopic, skull-covered, flame-spewing glory, while EQ2's stuff is just the same models as all the crafted stuff, tinted a vaguely different colour. So sometimes appearence slots are needed.

The more general argument is simply that, well, why shouldn't people be able to customise their appearence? Often a set you're wearing for stats looks a bit rubbish, like if you happened to be wearing your fire resistance set, and mine was horribly mismatched because it was taken from half a dozen different sets. Plonking my Nightslayer set in my appearence slot would allow me to keep my dignity while not simulatenously being burned to cinders. So, this gives players a measure of protection against a moment of madness on the part of the modellers. It also allows players to role-play without sacrificing too much of their character's power.

Can you blame the EQ2 devs for putting in the appearence slot when the class armour looks like this?

Also, why should looking cool be limited only to the endgame players? Shouldn't players just be able to look how they want to look, while only the stats are affected by the choice of gear? There's something in it, no? Surely even an incompetent soldier can dress up in a General's uniform, or a Duke's armour (provided he can get his hands on it somehow)?

Personally, I don't think that holds too much water for me. Part of the enjoyment of MMORPGs for me is finding new gear and seeing your character develop in appearence. Choosing an appearence right at the start of the game and sticking with it right the way though would take much of that away for me. Happily, though, there's a third way which Warhammer Online will be introducing.

It's actually been borrowed from both EQ1 and Ultima Online, so it predates the current crop of MMORPGs and thus I'm surprised that it's not more common - armour dyes. If I have it down correctly, each piece of armour has a foreground and a background colour that can freely be changed to one of something like a hundred colours. I like this a lot. You'll find guilds all wearing the same colours, which is always really cool. People will actually be able to look how they want, but at the same time you'll be able to look at their gear and recognise it from the armour's model. Good middle way, I think.

Personally, I've got a lot to say for letting people customise their appearence to a large degree. I think it adds a lot to the role-playing aspect of the game in that it makes you attatched to your character, gives you an identity, makes you a little bit special (I don't mean role-playing in the sense where you actually think you're an elf). But you also need to carefully control the armour models. There's nothing wrong with low-levels players not being able to wear adorned armour, for example. Maybe mid-level characters are allowed to have inlaid armour. High-level characters can have inlaid, enameled armour with adornments. That way you'll still be able to see what level a character is, and the high-end people can look more impressive than the low-end people and everyone can keep their individuality. I expect it to be a huge success in WAR, and I expect it to be much more common in the future.

RPGs just aren't Role-Playing Games any more...

As promised in my previous post, I'm posting an updated vision of what the future holds for MMO players (you can see my original thoughts in my 'thoughts on Blizzard's next-gen MMO' post from over a year back). Firstly, it's probably important to discuss what I think is wrong with the current MMORPG model and why it'll become increasingly defunct in the future.

The problem is an inherent lack of skill-based gameplay. If you think about it, current FPS games are all about twitch, using your reflexes to line your weapon up with the most vulnerable parts (usually the head) of your opponent and firing at it. Also, you can use the scenery to your advantage by hiding, so when you do open fire on your enemy they'll have less chance to fire back and kill you before you kill them. This is not an overly advanced mechanic, but it's equally simple for everyone and so a jumped-up test of reflexes can actually become very engrossing.

A RTS is another genre of game that is very skillful - much like chess, you maneuver your pieces into a position where they can defeat a similarly-armed opponent by skillful use of tactics and battlefield positioning. An RPG, on the other hand, is not exactly a game that lends itself to skillful online competition. It is perfectly understandable why they were the first genre to go Massively Multiplayer, but the same things that made them the logical choice as pioneers of the genre also make them a poor choice to continue it.

Q. What's the difference between Italians and toast? A. You can make soldiers out of toast. Aha ha.

The key's actually in the name, Role-Playing Game. Everquest was heavily influenced by MUDs and Dungeons and Dragons, and it played on the social role of people wanting to adventure together. This was a good move, because the persistent characters and large world were perfectly suited to attracting those accustomed to D&D. It's understandable why it did so well - the target audience wanted to meet up with other people, and explore a world and vanquish some monstrous foes together. The game fitted the niche perfectly.

Of course, the genre has evolved a considerable amount since EQ was released (I'll leave out the pioneering contribution of games like Ultima Online for brevity's sake), most notable with the release of the monolithic World of Warcraft that still dominates the genre today. What WoW did is bust the genre wide open, attracting a huge range of fans that would never have played EQ or UO or Asheron's Call. And that's the problem.

The older games were aimed at role-players and people who were primarily interested in the world of the game, generally in a non-competitive way. Remember, you can't powergame in D&D - there's just no point. Now, of course I'm not trying to claim that min/maxing and powergaming are new to WoW and never existed in the likes of EQ1, but they were certainly less prolific. As a predominantly PvE game with a difficulty curve so high you needed crampons to climb it, most of the enjoyment of EQ was fighting your way to the max level, because it was a genuine achievement.

The WoW-generation of MMOs has changed this. In appealing to an audience of more mainstream players, Blizzard sanitised the world and made it much less punishing and much more logical. It's no longer a place to explore, it's a place to level up in. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that it is a different thing. The game is no longer about the world, it is about the player. But as it becomes more and more about the player, the relevence of the world decreases and the role-playing element of the game goes with it. Few people have any real empathy with their race or class in WoW, for example, or find any of the quests particularly interesting beyond the rewards and experience they yield. And when things like that happen, the 'Role-Playing' element is gone. Leaving you only with a 'Game'.

If you think about it, WoW is more of an adventure game than it is an RPG. It's just a more persistent and customisable version of Diablo II, with a few added bells and whistles. And what's wrong with that? Well, Diablo II wasn't the most skillful game in the world. You levelled your character up and found better gear, and that was that. Enjoyable, briefly, but not a model to build a long-lasting game on. World of Warcraft is on a much larger scale and so sustains the interest for longer, but the weak combat mechanics at its heart still hold it back just as they hold back all of the other MMORPGs on the market.

EQ had the same weak combat mechanics (weaker, in fact), but then it also had the role-playing element to support it. WoW is much more centred around PvP rather than PvE and exploring, so combat is that much more important in its world - and this highlights its weakness in the area. Additionally, the focus on combat means that the game becomes a race to max-level, and once you've reached it there's really not much else to do except collect increasingly more powerful weapons and armour just because you feel you should. It also ironic how that the game relies so much on combat, when there's so little skill involved in it - it's largely down to stats and equipment unless there's a truly enormous gap in how experienced a player is with their chosen class.

And another part of the reason WoW has been so successful is the sheer novelty of it, as it's the first MMO many people have played. But in many ways WoW was the pinnacle of what an MMORPG can do, aside from the obvious (prettier graphics, bigger world, more classes etc), and you have to question whether people will want to play another very similar MMO after three years of WoW, even if it is prettier, bigger and has more classes. Warhammer Online looks like it's taking the only logical step forwards for MMORPGs by becoming far more PvP centred, but this is simply taking an even bigger step away from the Role Playing element of the old MMORPGs and heading towards the mainstream online games. In what way really is my avatar in WoW or in WAR going to be any different from the guy I control in Counterstrike or Battlefield 2, except for the fact he's a little more customisable? At the end of the day, he's not. I'm not role-playing any more, I'm just using him as a tool to fight other players.

Which makes me wonder why we're bothering using an RPG model at all. Think of your single-player RPGs, like Baldur's Gate or Fallout or Final Fantasy. You don't play those purely for the combat, do you? No. You play them for the story, for the world, for the experience. In them, the combat is a means to an end rather than a means in itself. It's the FPS and RTS game models that are based around combat in itself, and consequently the fighting in them is much more rewarding (and the story and world is generally much less enthralling). So, as MMORPGs become increasingly combat-based and less and less about role-playing, I think it's only a matter of time before the lightbulb switches on above someone's head and they think "You know, we're barking up the wrong tree here -let's make a truly persistent online FPS or RTS."

And once they do that, there won't be any going back.

And now for something completely different... (Company of Heroes)

What I'm going to talk about today is the game I've had more fun playing online than any other game I've played online, including the great Everquest 1. And it's called Company of Heroes, which you've probably heard of. It's a critically-aclaimed WW2 RTS by the fellers that brought us Dawn of War, and it is quite simply brilliant. It recieved unanimously good reviews from the major sites on release, so I went and picked it up and played through the single player campaign. It was pretty good, if somewhat easy (even on the hard settings) for an experienced gamer thanks to the inability of the AI to deal with armour, or to think outside the box when it comes to displacing you from defensive positions.

Online, though, it's brilliant. It's been diminished slightly due to the expansion pack adding two new armies (one for the Allies and one for the Axis), therefore meaning that each one has to be balanced against two potential opponents rather than just one, but its still excellent. The game has beautiful graphics even on a fairly average PC, and the destructable terrain is fantastic. You start off with a pristine battle map, and it quickly gets reduced to rubble when the tanks and artillery hit the field. And, speaking of artillery, this is the first game I've played where the awesome power of artillery is properly represented - not only is it visually spectacular, but it's an extremely important game mechanic that can kill pretty much any unit in the game if correctly utilised (and not properly countered).

The unit balance feels good too. Basic troops come in squads that can be reinforced and usually upgraded, and the early game is all about using them to outflank your opponent in conjuction with support weapons like machine-guns and mortars. There is a LOT of skill in this game, more so than in any other RTS I've played online. To make things even more interesting, the light vehicles in the game are pretty much invulnerable to all but the special abilities of the basic troops, so if a vehicle hits the field before the enemy has a hard counter to it, it's often got a game-turning effect. So you've got to balance early-game dominance against preparations for an armoured attack on your troops. And once the heavy armour hits the field, the light armour becomes largely obselete in a straight-up firefight.

But one of the great features of Company of Heroes is that it's definitely not a tankrush game. It's a game of combined arms - a couple of unsupported heavy tanks by themselves will be shredded in the late game. You have to think carefully, because it's a game very much about tactics. Tanks are weak from the side and rear armour and are generally fairly poor anti-infantry weapons, support weapons only have a limited angle of fire, troops can be supressed by special abilities or machinegun fire, grenades are superb against bunched troops - there's a lot of tactical decisions to make, and it's an extremely fluid game where the balance of power moves backwards and forwards extremely quickly. It's damn exciting stuff, particularly against the good players.

The fact that the online scenarios are 'take and hold' rather than annihilation makes it far better, too. It doesn't matter if you've shelled your enemy's base into oblivion if the victory points have been in their hands for too long, you still lose. It also means that there's rarely any times in the game where nothing is happening, there's usually a skirmish happening somewhere along the lines as one of the players tries to stop his VP counter ticking down - there's no massing troops in your base here. If you do that, you'll lose. Given the power of the game's artillery, you'd have to say the game certainly favours the attacker, which means it's relatively easier for a player who is losing to regain the initiative than in many other RTS games, and again this makes the game extremely exciting.

Needless to say, it's also not a game where you have to go harvesting resources. Basically, the amount of resources you get are linked to the amount of territory points on the map that you control, and how you spend your fuel and munition resources is a vital part of your strategy. It gives a huge element of strategy to the game, and needless to say you'll have to change your tactics on the fly to deal with what your opponent is throwing at you.

Overall, it's a truly superb online game. The game is extremely skillful, rewarding the player who can use his squads skillfully while manueving his vulnerable support weapons into positions where they can do the most damage to their opponent while simulatenously protecting them from harm. The game feels balanced, and the way you start with infantry skirmishes and end with heavy armour like Tiger tanks rolling across the battlefield is a brilliant progression that is generally timed to perfection, with the really powerful units only hitting the battlefield when the Victory counters are down to within a hair's breadth of zero. I've played countless brilliant games where I've managed to hold off a Tiger with a handful of half-dead infantry squads to snatch a victory, or had a certain victory snatched away from me by a masterstroke by my opponent (usually helped by the appearence of some particularly lethal unit I wasn't prepared for at just the wrong moment).

It certainly won't cost you much to pick up CoH nowadays, and it comes with the highest reccommendation from me. It also dovetails neatly into the subject for my next post, which was originally going to be part of this article, but I've since made it into an article of its own - where the MMO genre could be going next. MMORTS anyone? MMOFPS? I really don't think MMORPGs have a monopoly on the future of the genre, mostly due to the inherent lack of skill involved with them. Keep your eyes peeled for my next entry to see what I do think are possibilities.