Questing for Heroism in MMOs

There’s an interesting editorial on dungeons in MMOs on Eurogamer, from the many design problems plaguing them to the developers’ seeming inability to fix them, as they are stuck between different segments of the audience with very different expectations. Here’s an excerpt:

Maybe it’s time for dungeons and raids to stand alone, with players following the classic Dungeons & Dragons “You all meet in an inn” template and simply teleporting to interesting places without all the wandering and FedEx questing getting in the way. It’s not as though there aren’t games like Skyrim that offer more involving solo experiences than any MMO ever will.

The big advantage there would be allowing designers to better cater to all tastes, but there are smaller ones too – a much easier basis for Neverwinter-style player-created content, for instance, where a team can come together, or be assembled from around a single town, hit a ‘random’ button and get a hand-crafted but still fresh test of skill. Long dungeon crawl? Quick hack-and-slash? As long as the content kept flowing, there’d be plenty of choice, turning an evening in a dungeon with friends into something more like joining them for a game of Dota.

By thinking in game terms rather than world simulation terms, there’s also a lot more scope to set things like daily challenges, mutators and bounties for specific enemy types, which should encourage even the efficiency-minded players to keep moving around.

What I’d like to see most though is an element of surprise value, ideally tied to the players involved. Making a dungeon feel heroic is primarily about achievement rather than narrative, with long, complicated stories getting in the way as soon as even one player knows what’s coming. There are ways to work a more dynamic personal story in though, like having groups that players have enmity with show up during a dungeon to back up the usual mobs, as well as scope for easy last-minute carpet pulls like swapping the boss for someone unexpected. Better still, we could have the first proper MMO roguelike, which it really seems like we should have seen by now.