What Can Be Changed to Make the MMO Industry Produce Stronger Games

What Can Be Changed to Make the MMO Industry Produce Stronger Games By Dominic Strohmeyer Dominic is currently a student and an active participant in the MMO industry. He has worked for the press and has helped out a few gaming companies , and has played nearly every game on the market today.

Hey guys. Over the course of the next month I am going to be writing a continuing series about redesigning the MMO industry. I will take a look at prime examples of what was done correctly and what could have been improved, and discuss overall changes that the industry should be looking to make in the next few years. This first part in the series is all about the foundation of a massively multiplayer online game and how it can be changed for the better.

Currently, we are looking at a foundation for every single MMO game that has become outgrown. Developers see the genre as a three stage process consisting of an early-game phase, a mid-game grinding phase, and a late-game phase. We are going to be looking at the three phases and analyzing them. First we have the early-game phase.

Nearly every game will now start you off with a brief tutorial and some cool cut scenes, and this is done simply to make the transition smoother and keep you drawn into the game. Developers believe that if they can keep you interested past a certain point, you are less likely to abandon all of your progress and quit. As an example, let us look at Aion Online. When you start off in Aion Online, it is like your typical MMO. The graphics are still beautiful, yet no longer anything too special. You begin by completing your average quests and reaping the rewards to gain experience. Eventually you get into the meat of the early levels, developing a storyline of quests that must be completed to advance, along with your sideline quests from random NPCs throughout the world.

As you complete these storyline quests you are immersed into a fantasy world, and with the help of interactive cut scenes and interesting dialogue, as well as forcing player involvement with party quests early on, players are drawn into a game that resembles what they would hope from the late-game phase early on. When you get past the early levels however, Aion undergoes a transformation. The cut scenes become less frequent, and you finally achieve the ability to fly like you had been waiting for. However the game becomes less immersive, and there is no longer any special ability that you are waiting for, grinding towards. The game then leaves you grinding until you can enter the Abyss, the mid-game phase.

Now, it sounds pretty good so far right? Well that is the one part of the MMO foundation that developers actually work on, the early-game phase. This is the phase that is meant to trick you into subscribing, into playing for long periods of time. They want you to believe that the gigantic boss you fight at level three is the type of monster you will be fighting throughout the next forty levels, that the entire game is as fun and fast-paced as those early levels. However the problem is that this is almost always simply an act of deception. The fun ends eventually, and you are introduced to a phase where the game becomes less immersive and your purpose is then solely to grind upon boring quests with an actual interesting quest every few levels.

Developers need to carry over the early-game phase into the mid-game phase in order to keep gamers hooked. Deception is an interesting technique, yet it Is short-lived most times. In fact, the sheer change in game style between these first two phases is a major contributor in why gamers quit early on and never get to see the late-game phase. What developers need to do is make a game that is fun throughout the first fifty levels, not just the first ten. We need party quests, quest immersion, and boss battles the entire journey.