The mules have liked Snipehunter’s thoughts on MMOs since… well, since most of them got waylaid by the travesty that was Auto Assault (RIP), in which he had a significant designing hand. In a good way.
And so he posted recently that “Quests in MMOs Suck – And It’s Your Fault” – and he’s generally right. No use rehashing what he wrote, except to say, there’s more than one reason MMOs (and quite a lot of FPS console games) are extremely weak in the story department.
The brains department in general, for that matter.
NPC AI (artificial… uh, intelligence) is universally rather stupid. Quests and missions are map marker “to do list” (as Sniperhunter notes) stupid. Arcs of story are either contrived or just plan stupid. The whole bloody game is often, yes – stupid.
Both gamers and developers are to blame. Hollywood plays the same tune – seen a thinking mule’s summer blockbuster recently? Nice try, Iron Man and The Dark Knight were visually impressive, had a few good lines, and generally decent acting… which is entirely different than being intelligent.
Games, like movies, often “need” to translate easily into several languages. Well there goes the idiomatic use of English. They also need to swing teen-up, so sayonara to anything above grade school vocabulary (and hello crotch shots and gas-passing).
The problem with an MMO is not dissimilar to that of movies: the damned things are a major investment, and they have to pay back, big, to make a return.
And that’s where intelligence can be found. While not an MMO, the promise of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. lends itself to one. Indie developed, not in the United States, and a superior game to many with 5000% the budget for all that. Graphics and voice files are the CGI and special effects of the game world, and they’re not only expensive, they indicate quality.
Quality – but backwards. The more sound files and graphics are touted for a given game, the more the average mule recognizes went into that… and not story. Plus it means the game, FPS and MMO either one, has to swing stupid to get enough market to break into the black.
If there’s an MMO with a shot at difficulty, story, complex AI movements, lack of “meme” player focus, and realistic combat (tactics and trajectory, not just blood spray and physics), it’s probably Apokalypsos.
Much like STALKER, the “Apok” crew is independent, probably has a low or no budget, and yet continues to generate buzz and content, though much of that is presumably locked away in the dev wiki and chat channels.
If not them, there will come another.
As with movies, falling costs of technology make independent game development ever more accessible. Someone will swing it out of the park. The game won’t kill World of Warcraft any more than Juno could Transformers – but the audience it serves will be captive… because there won’t be anything else like it.
