File Under...?

There's a new Producer's Letter out for EverQuest II and I feel I ought to say something about it. The only problem is I'm not sure I have anything I want to say about it. 

I am not playing EQII right now. I'd like to be. I'm paying for it, along with all those other Daybreak games I'm also not playing, namely EverQuest (Where I should be logging in every day so I can slowly grind my Magician up to max level through Overseer quests.) and DCUO (Which has a new update that looks both interesting and controversial.) 

The sad fact is I'm just not feeling it for any of those games right now, whereas I really am feeling it for a whole bunch of much newer titles, like the revamped Nightingale (Unconvincing though that attempted rebrand has been.), Once Human (Just waiting on that new PvE season.), Wuthering Waves (Ditto the upcoming huge content drop for that one.) and of course the almost-but-not-quite-here-yet Throne and Liberty.

There are more but I won't go through the list yet again. I'm more interested in the why than the what this time. Why have I pivoted from being more than happy to re-tread old ground to falling prey to every new fancy that comes along? Is it just typical fickleness? A butterfly mind? Or is there some more fundamental change going on?

I can't help but notice there's been a blurring of the lines over where the kind of games that interest me get shelved in the Great Genre Library. For a long time all multiplayer online games with persistent worlds and some kind of progression system got labelled MMOs, with a more specific but still very large subset being called out as MMORPGs. 

Now they're marketed as all kinds of things. "Open World RPG" seems to be popular but there are numerous variations. I asked Gemini to give me "precise genre descriptions" for the games I've already mentioned and this is what it came up with:

New World Aeternum

    Genre: Open World MMORPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in a fantasy world, where players can explore a vast open world, engage in crafting, PvP, and PvE activities.

Once Human

    Genre: Action RPG
    Description: A single-player action role-playing game with a focus on fast-paced combat and a dark, futuristic setting.

Wuthering Waves

    Genre: Open World Action RPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online action role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic world, featuring a focus on exploration, combat, and social interactions.

Throne & Liberty

    Genre: Open World MMORPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game with a focus on dynamic weather systems, real-time combat, and a vast open world to explore.

Nightingale

    Genre: Survival Crafting MMORPG
    Description: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game with a focus on survival, crafting, and exploration in a procedurally generated fantasy world.

All of those seem about right, even if the marketing departments wouldn't necessarily agree.

Nightingale's official description on Steam is both wordy and awkward: "PVE open-world survival crafting game played solo or cooperatively with friends". It might be that, now, after the revamp, but it definitely used to have an endgame identical to a lobby MMO like the original Guild Wars. Not sure if that's still the case. I'll tell you when I get there.

As for New World Aeternum, it's amusing to see that even an AI hasn't been fooled by Amazon's desperate attempt to rebrand the failing game as something other than what everyone knows it to be - an MMORPG. The actual description as per the FAQ on the official New World Aeternum website is unequivocal: 

What kind of game is New World: Aeternum?

New World: Aeternum is an action RPG.

Yeah. No, it's not. I mean. it's their game. They can call it what they want. It doesn't mean the rest of us have to follow suit. We call Beryl a princess (God knows she behaves like one. A cartoon one, anyway.) but she's still a dog to everyone else.

I'm starting to believe that all of this nitpicking over tags is kind of missing the point, though. I've seen certain people getting quite grumpy about these sorts of rebrandings and repositionings but maybe that speaks more to their own insecurities than to any intrinsic problem with the terminology. 

The companies involved in sending out the publicity material and giving the interviews in which these labels are used obviously have their own agendas but so do those who earn a living by writing about them. No-one likes to see their specialisms infringed or compromised, especially if it means losing ground in the marketplace.

There's also the academic argument, that nomenclature and classification matter. If you're in the business of keeping records, it's annoying to have to refile everything just because someone else can't keep the names straight and it makes life harder than it need be for future researchers.

As players, though, does it really matter? I'm not playing games because of what their makers call them, am I? The tags and descriptors are only there to help me pick out the ones that might be of interest. If I'm flipping through my feeds and I see "platformer" or "side-scrolling beat-em-up" I know to move on. If I see "survival" or "open world rpg" or "mmo" I stop and take a look.

It's taken me longer than it should have to come to the realization that playing MMORPGs isn't equivalent to a vocation or a religious calling. Individual games possibly might merit the kind of emotional commitment you'd give to a sports team but getting agitated over what to call the sport being played is just silly. (And yes, I know people do it!) 

In the end it's all just shorthand so you can find what you're looking for and don't have to keep describing the whole thing when you talk to other people about it. Working that out has come as quite a surprise for me. It was nowhere near as intuitive as it should have been. 

It's not that long ago that I was mostly only interested in MMORPGs. It was all I wrote about on this blog for quite a while. I didn't even look at RPGs or survival games, which I now realize often contain most of the things I always liked about MMORPG gameplay, only condensed to a solid core. 

For the longest time, I also had what now seems to me a weird affectation: the sense that playing RPGs offline, alone, was somehow a lesser, more hollow experience; that playing online in a multiplayer environment, even when I never actually saw, let alone interacted with another player, was somehow innately superior.

There clearly is an existential difference between inhabiting a gamespace that contains only one living person, you, whether that's on or offline, and playing solo in a shared world, where you see other players moving around, even if you never speak, group or communicate with them in any way. Whether it's a greater, equal or lesser experience is open to debate. 

I have, however, played plenty of MMORPGs where I never once saw anyone else at all. Ever! Any sense of shared experience there has to be metaphysical at best.

There's been no moment of epiphany for me when I realized I no longer cared whether the game I was playing was called an MMORPG or an Action RPG or anything else; whether I was playing on my own, with a handful of others or with multitudes. The penny only began to drop fairly recently, when I was writing about certain games I'd been playing and found myself having to google to check whether they were solo or multiplayer. I mean, if you can't even tell...

The first time I remember that happening was with Genshin Impact. It played exactly like an MMO but when I came to post about it I couldn't actually remember if I'd ever seen another player there. That sort of thing happens more and more.

GI, of course, is an online open world action rpg with optional co-op multiplayer. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? No wonder we shorten these things. 

These days, almost every online rpg has some form of multiplayer option but the multiplier is frequently very small. Four players in the same shared world or instance is common but it can be even fewer. Wuthering Waves only allows two other people to join you in a shared version of the game. Noah's Heart, on the other hand, which seemed to be an almost identical type of game, had other players running around all over the place.

Clearly, the word that's most negotiable in the MMORPG acronym has to be "Massive", which may be why MassivelyOP seems to be so exercised about the linguistic shift that's taking place. I don't really think they need to be worried. It's just the tectonic plates of the language shifting and grinding against each other as they always do. 

There's no sign that players in general have lost interest in shared worlds capable of accommodating hundreds, thousands of people at a time. If anything, it's more that marketing departments are increasingly wary of the residue of negative sentiment that's attached itself to certain acronyms over the years. 

Gaming isn't just a business, it's a medium and if there's one thing we know about pop culture and media it's that nothing feels as stale as last year's Next Big Thing. Or last decade's, for that matter. Change the name, change the perception; that's the hope.

And yet, under the surface, the gameplay remains remarkably consistent, something I've really noticed when it comes to gathering, crafting and collecting. Non-combat activities in Nightingale or Once Human can be extremely similar to their equivalents in EverQuest II or any older MMORPG. 

The animations are a lot more dramatic, sure, but if you flow-charted the processes they'd look much the same. In fact, the original, 2004 version of crafting that EQII launched with and later scrapped because almost everyone hated it was even closer to what both those games use now, except that in EQII you couldn't make all your own sub-combines and had to ask someone else to make them for you.

And that may well be why crafting in modern open world RPGs can be so much more complex than we tend to see in MMORPGs any more and yet be better-accepted than it ever was in those games, where if we're honest with ourselves, it was always something of a niche activity. It's much the same gameplay but with most of the inconveniences boiled out and that applies to the whole game, not just the crafting.

As for crafting itself, I'd have to say that, when you're doing it all yourself and not tendering it out to
contractors, it feels like crafting. When you have to liaise and negotiate with others for resources, materials and skills it feels a lot more like administrative work and who wants to do admin for fun?

All of which doesn't exactly explain why I'm finding it so hard to motivate myself to play any of the older MMORPGs right now, or even come up with any comments on Jenn Chan's latest letter. (My attempted return to Star Wars: the Old Republic isn't going anywhere, either.) What it does is suggest it probably has more to do with surface factors like appearance, style and convenience than any substantive differences in gameplay. The new games aren't really all that much different from the old ones - they just tend look a lot better and waste a lot less of your time.

Of course, slick, frictionless surfaces have their drawbacks. They're not sticky, for a start. As we've discussed many times, people mostly don't hang around for long. It's a few weeks and on to the next thrill ride. The old MMORPGs don't seem to have that problem. EQII is twenty years old in a few weeks and half of that Producer's Letter I'm not talking about today is given over to news of the next expansion, the twenty-first, coming out in November.

Maybe that'll feel new and exciting enough to get me back and playing again. Having seen where we're going, I kind of doubt it but I guess it could happen. Still, I somehow managed to get a whole post out of the Producer's Letter without talking about anything that was in it until the final couple of paragraphs, so I think we'll call that a win.