I bought Age of Conan last week and have been playing it since, and you know what — it’s the same as Star Wars: Galaxies and World of Warcraft. Seriously, they’re all nearly identical games, and I don’t mean just the gameplay mechanics, I mean you could superimpose the GUI’s of each game over top of each other and they’d damn near overlap.
I was really expecting something new and exciting from Age of Conan, one of my friends from work had been playing it and is really enjoying it so after he espoused it’s merits, I was happy to jump into it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy playing the game, I’m just taken back by how MMO games have progressed in half a decade — barely at all. Sure the system requirements are higher, but don’t go in expecting Crysis style graphics (despite the similar system requirements). In fact, don’t even go in expecting the lush jungle environments seen in Farcry (as in the game from 2004 Farcry). What you can expect is poorly rendered grass (2D sprites!), trees, and shadows (that only cast on the ground, forget about casting shadows on anything other than the ground) — you may think these are unimportant details, but consider, you’ll be spending a vast majority of your time outside and immersion is a very important part of any game. On the other hand, the water looks great…
Graphics, and GUI aside, there’s still the gameplay issue. Let me break down the gameplay of every MMO that I’ve played to date:
First you go talk to an NPC and get your quest which will be one of the following:
(Substitute X with any number between 3 and 40)
- Collect X of Resource
- Kill X Beasts
- Find X loot drops
- Take this item to this other NPC
- Go ‘rescue’ another NPC from a ‘dungeon’
That’s it. Seriously, that’s all there is to these games. There’s variations sure, and each quest has some kind of a story tied to it, but for all intents and purposes they can be placed into one (sometimes multiple) of the above categories.
Outside of the missions you have to ‘grind’ to get to higher levels of whatever it is you’re pursuing (crafting, hunting, trading, etc, etc). Sadly, I feel the ‘grind’ will always have a place in MMOs, because unlike traditional games and movies, the time line is continuous and cannot be interrupted because you’re sharing the world with a bunch of other players. Thus, you can’t skip from good part to good part, you have to have all the in between parts too — and what can you do to fill the time?
Finally, my last beef. Why is it still acceptable to have to wait 3+ minutes for your game to ‘verify’ before playing? I remember being pissed off when this happened with Star Wars Galaxies over 5 years ago. I understand updates are required and that making sure your clients all have identical content is equally as important, but surely there is a more efficient way of doing this!?
I’ve laid out a bunch of problems, but no solutions. I do have solutions, I just don’t want to share them on my public blog. In fact, this experience with Age of Conan has spurred me into action. I’ve always had an interest in video games, and being a programmer, I’ve always dreamed of becoming a big shot games coder, but the state of the video game industry is so revolting I opted not to follow that path. However, after seeing the problems with MMOs simply being glossed over, repackeaged and resold — I’m getting in there. The technical challenges alone are more attractive to me than programming websites and I feel that a video game revolution is coming (similar to what happened to the movie industry in the early 30s - we need a ‘Game Developers Guild’) and I’d like to be apart of that.
Massively multilayer games are indeed the next step for video games, there’s no doubt about that, but if the industry is allowed to stagnate such as it has, MMOs will be doomed to repeat the exact same archetypes and remain in the hands of hardcore geeks forever.
Jul 21, 2008 - 1:31pm - (0) Comments