Lens on the State of MMOs: The Ugly

Wait...why The Ugly before The Bad?  Because in the movie, The Ugly wasn't good (well, The Good wasn't very good either) or bad, he just wandered around in the expanse of territory between.  He and The Good blew up the bridge together to stop the mindless fighting going on, but he was also a murderous thug.  Ugly is a mixed bag.  Bad is just bad.

The Ugly (Eli Wallach as "Tuco" ["Wanted in fourteen counties of this State, the condemned is found guilty of murder, armed robbery of citizens, state banks, and post offices; the theft of sacred objects, arson in a state prison, perjury, bigamy, deserting his wife and children, inciting prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, passing counterfeit money, and contrary to the laws of this State the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice..."]).

See?  A mixed bag.

TERA

How, you might ask, can I call this game ugly when it's one of the best-looking games around?  Because pretty is skin deep but ugly can go clean to the bone.

I saw a lot of buzz when this game was in the works as to how the action-based combat was going to revolutionize the MMO genre.  There were a few problems with that analysis...  In general, the MMO audience is more mature than, say, the console-based action game audience.  (Chronologically mature...general chat in most MMOs is often somewhere between an elementary school playground and a bunch of excrement-flinging howler monkeys on meth.)  Us Elderly Folk are generally not as good at, or as interested in "action-based combat" as you Young'uns.  So much for the revolution.  I understand the action-based combat is awesome.  I think I speak for a good-sized chunk of the MMO players (although not necessarily the majority) when I say "Yay?"

But where the game is truly Ugly, is in the bones and muscle of the MMO.  Gabe from Penny Arcade (who absolutely LOVED the game and the combat especially) put it this way, "Tera suffers from the worst sort of old school MMO grind bullshit. As bad as the quests were I kept doing them because I wanted to keep fighting. But there is something wrong with an MMO when you would rather grind than do their quests."  Now that's what I mean by Ugly...embrace evolution in part of your game while reducing other parts to the bare minimum expected and required.

One more thing about TERA...at the risk of sounding like a cultural imperialist running dog, the social norms of the developers are different (not inherently better or worse!) than most Americans.  Google up images of "TERA elin".  That's the playable race a friend of mine, who was in the beta, referred to as "twelve year-old slut bunnies".  He also said they seemed to be the most popular racial choice.  That's creepy enough to call Ugly.

World Of Warcraft:  Mists of Pandaria

If you turn an April Fool's joke into an expansion, you have a bad case of the Uglies.

Make no mistake, WoW is a GREAT GAME.  I wanted to capitalize it because it's clearly both true and important.  Too many MMO players love to crap on WoW.  But it changed the MMO world in just about every way imaginable.  Here's my summary to explain how it changed things...

Everquest 2 launched on November 8, 2004.  WoW launched on November 23, 2004.  The difference between the two was simple...EQ2 was designed to be an MMO for MMO players.  WoW was designed to be an MMO for game players.

Before WoW, MMOs were for a relatively small segment of the gaming populace.  That's the single biggest reason WoW has been the success and influence it has, because it has redefined what an MMO player is.

Having said all that...Mists of Pandering.  Ugh.  Lee.

When it was first noticed that Blizzard had nabbed the trademarks, I hoped it was a feint to keep people off balance.  I commented that if true, the cover art needed to be a panda on a motorcycle jumping over a tank of sharks, thumbs up, going "Aaaaaaaaayyyyy!"

"How are pandas any worse than space goats?"  Let's see, the space goats are descendants of red-skinned, horned, cloven-hoofed servants of evil.  Nothing says "cute and fuzzy" like the blue-headed stepchildren of pure demonic evil!

All the rest of the stuff in WoW has a basis in literature or mythology.  It has some root reason to be in our collective "fantasy worldview".  Pandas?  Nope.  Ugly.

Let us examine the overarching narratives of the various releases, all based on the lore of the previous games, including the RTS's...  WoW:  defeat Onyxia and Ragnaros.  Burning Crusade: journey to Outland and face Illidan.  Wrath of the Lich King: defeat the Lich King Arthas.  Cataclysm: survive the breaking of the world and foil Deathwing (yeah, OK, I'm sick of dragons by this point too).

Mists of Pandaria:  oooo, look at the cute pandas!

The idea of facing Illidan or Arthas gave a lot of WoW players WoWoodies.  These were established characters that the players already had given a certain gravitas, a narrative inertia (well, as much as you can get from a cartoon).  Pandaria is a complete tonal shift from the primary narratives we've seen in the game before.  Silly has always had a place in the game (I got what you need!).  Cutesy has had a place in the game (Daylight's burning!).

Diablo 3 has Whimseyshire, but I can't see them making a Whimseyshire-based expansion.  That's what Pandaria is.

That's ugly.  Titan anyone?

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Because of my level of disappointment with this game I was sorely tempted to put it on The Bad list, but that wouldn't be a fair assessment.  I will, at some point soon, do a thorough post-mortem of SW:TOR, but not today.  Today I'm about The Ugly.

My first day in the beta I had a friend ask me how the game was.  I said, "It's exactly what I expected, a multi-player BioWare KOTOR RPG with MMO trappings stapled on."  Towards the end of the beta I had another friend ask me if I expected it to be a hit.  I said, "For it to succeed for any length of time, they are going to need a very aggressive pipeline of new content or people will play through once and unsub."

Sometimes, rarely, I am right on the nose.

I talked above how TERA had embraced evolution in part of the game while skating by on the bare minimum in other parts and that is true in spades for TOR.  They have greatly improved the story-telling part of MMORPGs with the use of voice-over everywhere.  This is good, but not sufficient for success.  If the BioWare Boys had a nickel for every time they used the phrase "story-based MMO" the game would be a runaway financial hit.

The root of The Ugly goes back to the moment of creation, where they said "We'll turn KOTOR into an MMORPG!"  That's the problem, MMORPGs aren't just MMO RPGs.  If you take the components for an MMORPG and Krazy Glue them onto an RPG, you don't have an MMORPG.  No, I'm not joking!  For that matter, RPGs aren't just single-player MMORPGs either!

Let me give an example...what made the KOTOR games so compelling (metacritic gives KOTOR a 93-94 and KOTOR II a 85-86) was choice.  You could choose which planet to go to when, what quests to follow in what order, what Big Storyline Choices to make (especially in KOTOR).  These options made for, arguably, the best computer RPG ever.  (Yes, I know, "Baldur's Gate", or "Skyrim", or "Dragon's Age: Origins" or "Mass Effect", or...shutup!  I said "arguably"!)

Your choices made KOTOR, and the other BioWare RPGs, so successful.  And TOR (the MMORPG) has almost none.  Because things like "alienating Khem Val (Hah!  See what I did there?), your companion, to the point he leaves, never to return" or "killing your companion Mako because she keeps disapproving of your ruthless nature" which were the source of so much of the narrative power of KOTOR, simply are antithetical to a successful MMORPG.

BioWare removed "choice" because they had to.  Because somewhere late into development somebody said, "Y'know, people are going to be pissed and ragequit when they hit the level cap and realize they don't have access to a healing companion and have nerfed themselves at level 15."

They built TOR as an extension of KOTOR, but in the act of making it MMO, they had to gut what made the RPG so great.

The design needed to go the other way...they needed to take the things that make a great MMORPG (now that's a design document I'd love to read), whatever they thought those things were, and then pull the desired parts of the RPG across into the MMORPG framework.

That way the question would have been asked early on, "How can we make choice both important and practical in an MMORPG?" instead of getting late in development and saying "Choice is breaking our MMORPG."

One last ugly...Money.  They spent a lot.  They needed to earn it back.  So they fell back on tried-and-true (or is that tired-and-true?) game mechanics because they couldn't risk alienating vast swathes of potential customers.  People have called TOR a "WoW-clone", but it would be more accurate to call it an "everything-clone" because they needed people to understand the game mechanics and be comfortable playing right away.  So, excepting the VO work, TOR is like most of the other games out there.  With lightsabers.

TOR will likely be the last Big Huge Money MMO that ever gets made.  The numbers bandied around have been big (likely, inaccurately big in most cases).  The risk was huge.  The game will probably be profitable in time, but nowhere near the return investors will consider worth the risk in the future.  The lure of WoW-type-billions will be outweighed by TOR-type-risk.  GW2 isn't cheap, I'm sure.  SOE is putting some big bucks into Planetside 2.  Ain't nothin' gettin' nowhere's near TOR money.  Maybe ever.

One more thing...imagine everything you know about SW:TOR the game...

And...remove the Star Wars.  Now that's an ugly game.


Next time...The Bad.