Thinking And Drinking

Sometimes I wonder if I even like MMOs any more. MMORPGs. Whatever.

Certainly, the "MM" part no longer has any real relevance for me. I rarely even bother with the big, hot-join events these days and the idea of linking up with other players in a formal group to do small-group content seems both slightly dangerous and faintly ludicrous, like it would be if I tried to go back and do some other things I enjoyed doing when I was much younger, climbing trees or vaulting over fences, say.

The Online part, once so thrilling, feels like more of a necessity than an attraction now. Everything is online these days. It's not something anyone gets excited about any more. I rarely bother to think about it. The whole concept sits at about the same level in my consciousness as electricity - I'm vaguely aware it has to be there in the background, making stuff happen, but I don't consider it to be material to whatever pleasure I'm deriving from whatever it is I'm doing. 

As for the RPG, if we're going to go all the way to the bottom of the niche we've dug for ourselves, I doubt there's any meaningful definition we could all agree on any more. Those three letters clearly no longer have much of a connection to the words they used to represent and I'm not even convinced they relate to the same kinds of progression mechanics they once implied, either. 

Whether I still like or don't like MMO(RPG)s is unclear but either way I don't seem to be playing many and when I stop to think about it, I haven't for several years. About the only true MMORPG I still put any significant amount of time into is EverQuest II, where I do at least play through each year's expansion storyline and do the minimum required outside of that to ensure I have a character capable of handling the newer content.

Eyes left, buster!

Even there, though, I play the game entirely like a solo RPG, something the developers have openly supported for a long, long time. Just about every kind of content in EQII is available in parallel for either soloists or groups, including one hundred per cent of the narrative and story, marking a recognition on the part of the team of the audience they're serving. 

That's increasingly common in older MMORPGs, many of which have done more than lip service to enabling solo play. We hear an awful lot from the other side of the fence, the smaller developers seeking to bring back the glory days of grouping from fifteen or twenty years ago but all the traffic in the established titles has been going the other way for years. 

There is, of course, room for all denominations under the very broad MMO church and some of these retro games will be successful and popular within their sphere of influence. It's just not likely to be a very big sphere.

Despite my decreasing interest in playing any of them, there do still seem to be quite a lot of fairly successful new games that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call MMOs or even MMORPGs. New ones pop up all the time, some of them making quite splash. The latest, Dune: Awakening, the Funcom MMO/Survival hybrid that just launched, has been both a critical and commercial success. 

A while back I'd have felt honor-bound at least to try it but now I have no desire to play it even for free, something if precedent tells us anything, may one day be an option. As has been observed , and often, many, maybe most, of the MMOs that launch to huge acclaim and great commercial success lose most of their population in a matter of months, after which there's a slow drift down until, if they're lucky, they reach some kind of equilibrium at around ten per cent of their initial population, by which point they're willing to let anyone in for nothing. 

Play one I know!

I suspect D:A will avoid any such embarassment, though. My sense is that games that promote survival mechanics, even when they employ those mechanisms in the service of a broadly MMORPG agenda, tend to do better than those that wear their MMORPG colors proudly. 

I'm less than sure whether the evidence bears that out and I'm not really prepared to do the research necessary to prove or disporove it. It's just a theory based on casual observation and that nebulous aura that sometimes surrounds games that are doing quite well rather than quite badly, which admittedly may have more to do with the skill of their PR departments than the sustained success of the games themselves.

Successful or otherwise, one thing that's less likely to be disputed is the degree to which both survival games and sandboxes have moved in on the territory that used to belong to theme-park MMORPGs. I can remember when both were considered somewhat niche, while theme-park MMORPGs were thought of as about as mainstream as the genre got. I'm not sure that's the case any more, even if almost every list of the most popular MMORPGs in 20205 is still dominated by theme-parks such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online.

I have, as I so often seem to do these days, wandered off whatever point it was I started out trying to make. I'm not really all that interested in re-hashing yet again all the old arguments about which games are succeeding or failing, something for which we never have the data needed to come to any solid conclusions anyway. 

What I was hoping to talk about were the reasons why I might have drifted away from the one true path I'd followed so fervently and monomaniacally for the more than two decades. Why am I playing so many games now that aren't MMORPGs?

I'm gonna feel it in the morning but right now I don't care.

Partly it's just the inevitable attrition caused by spending so much time doing the same thing, although I'd be fooling myself if I tried to pretend most of those same things don't still feel pretty satisfying and entertaining. It's not as though I've switched to playing completely different kinds of games, anyway. Much of what I've played these last five years has felt quite similar to what I played in the twenty before. I'm still mostly fighting monsters, leveling up, improving my gear and stats, decorating houses and gathering materials for crafting. The loops have scarcely changed at all.

When it comes to the newer games, the difference isn't really in the mechanics so much as the settings. It's a surprise to me but I think I might finally have found the limits of my tolerance for traditional high-fantasy. I can't summon up the motivation to care about all the Tolkein-inspired races any more and I really don't care to invest my limited intellectual capital in another imaginary pantheon or dynasty.

With the glaring exception of Valheim, which is still by a long way my most-played game on Steam, most of the games I've found, played, enjoyed and written about in the last few years don't really fall into the European Medieval trope so long dominant in the genre. To be fair, an awful lot of them still draw from it one way or another but they hide it beneath layers of rather more interesting local color, which these days suits me a lot better than listening to a bunch of elves and dwarves banging on endlessly about how everything's gone downhill since the Golden Age, when they were in charge.

Ever since The Secret World I've been hoping for something with either a more contemporary or futuristic setting that also has a touch of the supernatural. It's taken me a while to realise that my wishes have largely been granted, just not by traditional MMORPGs.

Can I just get a beer?

Once Human is probably the closest game in feel to TSW I've tried but Nightingale isn't far off, either and the reason I'm looking forward so much to Neverness To Everness is that it looks as if it might tick almost all those boxes even harder. It has the look and the theme. What it isn't is an MMORPG. Or it is. One or the other.

But who cares? It's becoming very hard to tell just what boxes these things will fit most comfortably into, by which I don't just mean the definitions have stretched and blurred, even though they have. I frequently find myself playing games these days without actually knowing whether I'm playing them with other people or not.

That seems unlikely but it's true. I said at the top of the post that, when I play MMORPGs now, I play them almost entirely solo. It affects my understanding and awareness of what I'm doing to such an extent that more than once, when I've been working on a post about a game here, I have quite literally had to go look up whether it was single-player or or multi-player because even though I'd played it, from context and experience I couldn't tell.

That was the case for Genshin Impact, which always felt like a multiplayer game even though it isn't. It has a co-op option but unless you invoke it it's 100% single-player and yet when I was there it always seemed like I was playing an MMO. 

I dunno. Is there any way I can stop you?

The runaway success of that game led to a flood of somewhat similar titles, several of which I've played, a couple of which I'm still playing, and I couldn't immediately tell you if all of those are single or multi-player, either. I'd have to stop and try to remember if I've seen other players in the cities to be sure and even then I have to think twice, in case those "other players" were actually NPCs. 

When you can't even remember if you're playing an MMO or not, does it really matter any more?  It did used to matter to me quite a lot. There are posts on this blog where I make policy statements about the importance of being in a shared space with others, even when you don't directly engage with them. I make reference to immersion and authenticity and all sorts of similarly ill-defined concepts.

And now it seems none of that matters as much as it used to, if it even matters at all. All that matters is whether I'm having a good time. And I am. These new games are fun, which it alos seems like the older ones should have been, and yet were they? I'm not sure I can tell any more.

I wonder if what's really holding my interest is the unexpected and largely unecessary level of detail. I spent twenty minutes in a bar in Crystal of Atlan a couple of days ago, having the kind of experience I always wanted to have in bars in games since I first played EverQuest. I could talk to the staff and the customers, I could sit at a table and order a drink and see someone bring it to the table and see myself pick it up and drink it. The drink gave a buff and there was a board on the wall you could interact with that showed you where you stood in relation to other customers in terms of your ability to get a bunch of drinks down you. 

I told you I could ride a horse!

Best of all, I could go up to the stage and chat to the woman providing the evening's entertainment and then sit back down and listen to her play two actual songs, all the way through. And they were strange songs, too.

And yes, you can do some of that in Lord of the Rings Online and they do it very well there, and I was very impressed by that the first time I saw it, too. And of course in LotRO you might very well get a real band that plays songs you recognize. And there are plenty of other MMORPGs that have musical instruments and bars and sitting and drinking animations and why am I even talking about this one as if it's any different?

I don't know and that's the point. I don't know. What I do know is that the pared-down, accessible nature of the gameplay in certain modern online games that use many of the mechanics familiar from older MMOs feels a lot more engaging to me right now than it does in the source material, as do the somewhat more contemporary-feeling storylines and settings. 

Or maybe I've just had to listen to one too many dwarf sit down and sing about gold.