Getting worse through improvements

MMORPG are getting better all the time, due to improvements of game design and technology. Unfortunately many people don't experience this that way, often complaining that the current crop of games isn't as good as the first MMORPG they ever played. Why do so many people think games are getting worse, in spite of all those improvements?

The problem is that people tend to compare the game they are actually playing with an ideal "dream" MMORPG, which has all the best features from all the games they ever played. Every new game they play adds to this list of dream features, and so the ideal improves faster than the actual games, and actual games seem to become worse.

For example look at quests. Compared to the early games, many improvements have been made. Final Fantasy XI invented cut-scenes, in which the story of the quest was told. Everquest 2 introduced voice-overs, telling the story not only with written, but also with spoken words. And World of Warcraft did huge improvements in the way quests were directly integrated in the core gameplay, instead of tacked on as an optional extra. And once you played all three of these games, none of them makes you totally happy, as each is missing the improvements of the other two. World of Warcraft seems too silent, the quests in Everquest 2 are too randomly distributed, and both games are missing the cut-scenes.

The worst thing is that this is irreversible. You can't simply go back to Ultima Online, or Everquest 1, and recapture that old magic. You will think that these games have fundamentally changed since the good old times you remember. But in fact it is you who has changed.

The good news in that is that you don't have to take too serious all those doomsayers, the people that claim that games are getting worse and worse. Whatever you may read for example about Everquest 2, the second version is undoubtedly much improved over the first. If you let somebody, who never heard of either, play the two games in parallel, he will definitely prefer EQ2 over EQ1. Whether EQ2 in 2005 evokes the same magic in your heart as EQ1 did in 2000 is a completely different question.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:54 PM Permanent Link