On the Subject of The Future of MMOs

Misa Campo

The internet hype machine is starting to grind into gear in preparation for the (allegedly) forthcoming release of the supposed saviour of MMOs, Age of Conan.
Of course it won't save anything, and will be another by-numbers combination of mindless grind and cheap, lazy PvP designed to cater to some focus group's notion of the ideal MMO experience. With the added bonus of a no doubt clumsy, limited interface designed not to intimidate the poor little console kiddies.
Meanwhile the ambitious but ultimately tiresome pirate MMO "Pirates of the Burning Sea" has closed 7 out of it's 11 servers, just months after launch. Just like Vanguard did. Vanguard meanwhile continues to crawl along on it's bloodied knees, barely kept alive by a handful of hopeless idiots who refuse to let go and admit the game was a tragic disaster.
It seems to me that the glory days of MMOs are over. Developers and publishers should not fool themselves into thinking that their "next big thing" will ever achieve the astronomical success of WoW, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, while WoW had only limited competition during it's formative years, we're rapidly approaching the time when all those games that were spawned by companies desperate to cash in on it's success are reaching the final stages of development. Well, they would be if they didn't keep getting delayed. In any case it's not going to be a "WoW vs. EQ" competition like in the olden days, a competition WoW won by choosing to embrace a player-base beyond the tedious PnP D&D RPG purists that played EQ in between wanking over life-size statues of Brad McQuaid.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a lot of people have played WoW. That might sound obvious but consider that those people have "been there, done that". The depressing trend of games like LotRO trying to lift WoW's design wholesale will only result in games which might emulate it's style, but fail to emulate it's success because all those millions of WoW veterans will actually want something new, not just a cheap knock-off of a game they've already played to death.
Personally, I've never played WoW. The toy-town style never appealed to me and at the time I was content to play subscription-free Guild Wars. But the same principle applies, to a lesser extent with GW's own sequel. I don't want GW2 to be GW1 + a minor facelift. I want it to be different. Keep the lore, I'm not bothered about that, but I can't stand the attitude of people who more or less demand that the sequel is just more of the same, preferably without having to sacrifice their achievements from the first game. Those are people who would, in that case, undoubtedly power through the content in a matter of days and then proclaim the game is too easy, too short, too boring. But heaven forbid they should actually have to start over along with everyone else. Surely they should get some sort of head start, some sort of advantage over newer players? No, they should not. Catering to those people will only hurt the game itself. Unfortunately I foresee A-Net being much too scared of offending the vocal minority of GW purists to introduce anything truly ground-breaking. Rather than keeping the veterans amused with new mechanics and challenges I would put money on them doing it with the sort of mindless grind that is all too common in MMOs, and has sadly become an insidious "feature" of GW1 in the form of titles.
AoC's approach to advancing the genre is mostly by virtue of it's "mature" themes and content. That could work out one of two ways. Either they'll find a clever balance where the more adult themes are kept in check and work with the wider themes and design of the game as CD Projeckt did so well in The Witcher, or, more likely given it's an American game, it'll be cheesy, gratuitous and disjointed and generally undermine the cohesion and immersion of the game world.
Conan's other gimmick, and as far as I can see it is just a gimmick, is some sort of "advanced" combat system. If they pull off a system that offers more than the "1,2,3,2,3,5,1" idiocy that is the mainstay of pretty much every MMO released to date then I will applaud them. On the other hand I foresee a very simplistic, clunky, console-tastic system like in Assassin's Creed. They've already admitted they've "streamlined" it, or in non-PR-speak "dumbed it down".
I think MMOs should stop trying to be the next WoW, and especially that they should stop trying to do that by simply copying WoW's design. Why not design an MMO that's essentially a single player game set in a multiplayer world? The obsession with grouping and ultimately raiding, with leveling as fast as possible to reach the endgame before the next person, with making more money than the next person, with having better armour, with grinding for more hours than the next person and pretending that that makes you "better" at the game than them, is tired and old. It's time for a radical shift in the whole philosophy of MMO design if we're ever going to progress to the Next Generation(tm). Vanguard was supposed to take us there, and failed spectacularly. Unfortunately that particular failure was not limited to Vanguard, as I suspect we'll discover over the coming months as the next crop of contenders appear, and no doubt they'll fail to to deliver anything inspirational or even remotely ground-breaking. People will get all excited about them, will play them heavily for a few months, and then realise it's just the same old MMO they've been grinding for the last decade and start looking for yet another alternative.