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Enough With the Mindless Killing Already!
By Cameron Sorden | June 25, 2007
Watch this: Define “an enemy” in an MMO for me.
…
Done yet? Ten bucks says you just started that sentence with something like, “Well, they’re the guys you kill…” and finished it with “…for loot, …for fun, …for xp.” Does anyone else see a problem with this? A pet peeve of mine in videogames, specifically in RPGs (and thus, MMOs), is that everyone knows who you are and tries to kill you on sight. Worse still, your primary goal is to do the same to them. It’s all kill or be killed with no thought or purpose as to why you’re doing the killing, what’s going on, or that the mob is anything more than a walking sack of shinies and xp.
I was playing Oblivion this weekend quite a bit, and I got so tired of this. “Oh, look, a cave! I wonder what’s in here? Hmm… bandits? I’d best kill them all. They’re already shooting arrows at me.” Why aren’t they curious who I am? Why don’t they see how awesome and lawless of a guy my character is and try to recruit me? Why don’t they try to sell me their ill-gotten gains? Why is every fucking cave and temple in Cyrodiil crawling with murderous lunatics who will fight me to the death simply because they’ve seen me in their general area? This gets even worse in MMOs. At least Oblivion has the random neat thing every now and then in their caves– an unusual encounter or a puzzle. When’s the last time a Furbolg tried to sell you a sword or a goblin offered you some gold to spare its life? It’s always a fight to the death.
Dungeon crawling is all well and good, but hack and slash gets SO old eventually. I’ve complained about the lack of role-playing in my role-playing games before, and this is just one more facet of that same idea. There simply aren’t enough options when dealing with NPCs. In most MMOGs, if they don’t give you a quest and you can’t kill them, you ignore them. If you can kill them, you do. Why not? They might drop something cool. It’s so boring. Kill enemy, get stuff, don’t worry about it anymore.
One way to handle this problem that I’m a big fan of is to not have any area where the enemies are just there to kill, and give all areas quests and vendors that you can use if you’re a friend to the creatures in question. Granted, this doesn’t get us away from the problem of flippant and frequent death-dealing in our games, but it at least forces us to think about what we’re doing when we’re off slaughtering so and so.
EverQuest did this with their faction system pretty frequently, most notably in Velious. You have three major groups: The Dragons, The Coldain Dwarves, and the Giants. Killing any of them lowers your reputation/faction with that group and raises it with one or both of the others. You can be a friend to two of the three at any given time, but not all three (well, technically you can… it’s just ridiculously time-consuming). Whatever factions you’re friendly with have quests, vendors, and amenities for you. Whichever ones are hostile act as just another dungeon.
Why don’t we see this mechanic more in our MMOs? If every area of the game had its own agenda and faction, the whole world would feel much more alive to me. Sure, you could still have the Scarlet Crusade. But if you feel like killing their enemies or doing some quests for them instead of stealing their phat lewtz, maybe you can use the Scarlet Monestary as a home base. You can quest and hang out there, chilling by the fountain. You can get their tabard and join their order. Or you could live amongst the murlocs, doing as they do. All it would take is a murloc suit to get you in there, and then you could slowly earn their trust by bringing them fish and killing intruders.
The point of all of this is that I want some meaning for my killing. I want repercussions. I want to have to think about who it’s going to piss off when I kill this guy and why that might be a bad idea. I want my enemies to do likewise. I want them to decide whether it’s worth their time to fight me or whether they should try to run away. I want to talk them into resolving the issue peacefully.
It all comes back to having more choices in our encounters. Enough with the mindless killing!
Topics: mmorpg |
June 25th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
A few times in my Oblivion gaming, I’ve been so accustomed to everybody in the wilderness being hostile that I accidentally shoot an arrow into the back of an Imperial ranger or wandering guard.
SWG did a good job of mimicking ecosystems, with many benign creatures. It also had also had many factions, though it didn’t make them meaningful. I didn’t like how the game would inform you about your faction hits and bonuses in clear, arcade-style numbers. It would be more interesting if the player had to find out during later NPC interactions, having to search for why everyone’s cheering for him or spitting on his shoes.
EQ2 has a good system of NPC responses to player power (or reputation, one might imagine). It was a cool feeling walking past some NPCs that used to pound me into the ground and watching them cower before me in fear. A more depthful and diverse version of that would be great.
Really though, a lot of these considerations boil down to where in the arcade-to-RPG spectrum you want your particular MMO to fall.
June 25th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Can I get an Amen, brother!
Vending machines and pinatas. Definition: Enemies are the pinatas.
And as far as I’m concerned, faction isn’t good enough. In EQ1, it bothered me that everyone in Qeynos (and their cousin) knew my Erudite was a Necro, despite that he wore the same &^%@^% robes and carried the same staff as every other lowbie Erudite mage in the area.
I’m guessing we’ll see that change about the time they are breaking out the ice skates down below, however. Polygon counts are the key to the future, no doubt about it…
June 25th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Although you are freaking me out with your suppressed desire to be a murloc, I think I understand what you are saying.
Did you ever get a chance to try the Diplomacy in Vanguard? I’m not trying to pimp VG, but its a great system and ties in great with the actual faction you can gain during adventuring. I think I remember once in a dungeon where there was a NPC you could “parley” with, though I went on and never got a chance to go back.
If you didnt get a chance, reserve some time on a supercomputer and login.
June 25th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I didn’t try the diplomacy system, no, but I do plan to go back and try VG again after SOE guts it and rebuilds it a bit.
My computer can handle it now, and I have to admit that the game still intrigues me.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Reason number 167 why XP is evil. I really should start a list. Pinatas=xp=loot=kill kill. Diablo on slow.
I wholeheartedly agree. Wouldn’t it be so much better if your reputation or faction or [insert activity consequence persistence mechanism here] really affected your game play? Imagine if it was based in part on your party, race, region of origin and even your guild? And there were ways to raise/lower that effect other than simply killing their enemies?
I would love a bunch of NPCs to say, “well you three can pass, but not the Dwarf! He killed Arglebargle! Get ‘em boys!!”
Or, “Oh, well, since you’re members of rOxXor uBer Guild, you get a *special* discount…Get ‘em boys!!”
June 26th, 2007 at 11:21 am
There are games that are employing this, but they’re offline single-player adventures, often tied to the D&D universe, or going further back, the Fallout series (from what I’ve seen 3 WILL be keeping this trend).
It’d be absolutely amazing to have such designs in an MMO. I say this because I’m not sure most developers would even consider doing it. Too often these days, they’d rather hold the hand of the player than let them make a mistake even if said mistake can be rectified later on.
For instance in LotRO, there’s no real chance of gimping your character, not due to the lack of death penalty, but due to the fact that stats mean so little and most traits are barely noticeable additions.
If that’s a sign of the future of MMOs, I’m scared.
Thank god (as much as I love LotRO) there are titles like PotBS, Spellborn, and Conan coming to try something different.
Maybe your idea isn’t so far off really.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
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