Peeling the MMORPG onion

A MMORPG is a product with many layers, a bit like an onion. At it's heart are the basic repetitive units, like combat. The next layer can be for example quests. One quest consists of several combat units, plus the bit that ties them all together. Then there is the level layer, do several quests and you gain a level. Then the zone layer, gain several levels and you are strong enough to move to the next zone. And the final outer layer is the whole MMORPG world.

The problem with game previews is that they often look mainly at the outer layers of the MMORPG onion. Whether you get the information from game developers or from game reviewers, they often tell you about the wonderful world the game is playing in, but rarely about the details in the heart of the onion.

For example the official introduction to World of Warcraft starts with the paragraph "Four years have passed since the aftermath of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and a great tension now smolders throughout the ravaged world of Azeroth. As the battle-worn races begin to rebuild their shattered kingdoms, new threats, both ancient and ominous, arise to plague the world once again." Which tells you exactly nothing about the game World of Warcraft, it might as well be a real time strategy or first person shooter game.

Okay, now we can play WoW or get reviews from people who played it, but what about games that don't exist yet? The Tabula Rasa website tells us that "Tabula Rasa™ is a massively multiplayer online action game that takes you into the heat of battle at the frontlines of an epic war between a xenophobic alien race bent on galactic conquest and the coalition of rebel soldiers who’ve traveled across the galaxy to stop them." Again, the emphasis is on telling you that the game plays in a Sci-Fi setting. It's left to you to guess what exactly a "massively multiplayer online action game" is. Will combat in Tabula Rasa be "twitchy", and depend on your reflexes? Or will it be standard MMORPG combat fare, and depend on the stats of your character? I don't know.

Peeling the onion, and digging deeper, is sometimes possible when you can find interviews with game developers. The quotes I reported yesterday from Vanguard are typical mid-level information. They talk about leveling and zones, and are already much more interesting than information about the world in general. But they rarely go much deeper than that. Any developer asked about the combat in his game will swear that it will be "exciting", but everybody claims that, and it doesn't really tell you much.

Once you get actually hold of the game and play it, your impressions move the other way, from the inside to the outside of the onion. If the combat is boring and the interface cumbersome, that will be one of the first things you notice. It takes a while to find out whether the leveling speed is okay or too slow. And if the worst flaw a game has is in its endgame content, some people will never notice.

I would like to be able to play any MMORPG for one hour before I decide to buy it. Unfortunately that isn't possible yet. It isn't always easy to get into a beta, especially if you live in Europe and the beta is restricted to North Americans. There is a trend towards free trial versions. These used to be a sign of a game's decline, but nowadays even successful games offer them. But again these free trials aren't always easy to get hold of. With games getting bigger there is often no download option, but the free trial version is packed on a CD that comes with some game magazine.

So in the end I'm often forced to take a $50 bet: Buy the game and risk to find out that I don't like it. Now is that a deliberate strategy of MMORPG companies wanting to sell me dud games, or is it bad marketing of companies that could sell more good games if they just let people try them?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:13 AM Permanent Link