More Than Shooters, More Than Looters

I am not now, nor will I ever be, an Anthem player. All the same, I seem to know quite a lot about it. For one thing, I know it's a "Looter Shooter", a term I don't ever recall seeing until last week.

The name itself may be relatively new but the looter shooter genre (sub-genre, whatever) claims a history stretching all the way back to the 1970s. It also seems to encompass a staggering range of games, most which, on the face of it, have little in common.

The PC Gamer article from last summer (linked above) traces the origins as far back as Dungeons and Dragons' random loot tables, which sounds a bit like tracing the origins of cyberpunk back to Caxton's introduction of the printing press. Still, it's an intriguing timeline that goes some way towards explaining, or at least illuminating, a few anomalous entries in the MMORPG catalog.

I always thought there was something off about including Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa, Defiance and even Warframe, the only one I've actually played, in the core genre. That's indicative. Even though I sometimes trawl the web for new MMORPGs to try, and even though some of these games arrived when the field was considerably less crowded than it is now, most of them never appealed to me. I was never really sure what they were.

It was always clear, even from the few crumbs of detail I was able to scavenge back then, that neither Hellgate: London nor Tabula Rasa was likely to play much like the MMOs I enjoyed. There seemed to be altogether too much desperate running and shooting and nowhere near enough pottering around pleasant countryside performing trivial tasks for locals too lazy or inept to manage for themselves.

By the time Defiance arrived I was somewhat more inured to the idea of roaming the wasteland, ever alert for the whoomp of an inter-dimensional portal that would herald the imminent incursion of death from above. Rift pretty much turned the key in that lock for me.

Even so, I never really connected the dots between those distinctly low-key entries to the MMO genre and the more recent surge of big names like the Destiny and Division franchises. As for linking any of them to the Diablo series or Borderlands...

Diablo, of course, is another game I've never played in any of its incarnations, although sometimes it's hard to remember that, so very much have I read about it over the years. And, anyway, I always thought of Diablo and its ilk (Path of Exile, Torchlight), as "ARPGs" not "looter shooters".

ARPG is another slippery term. I first encountered it when I bought Dungeon Siege back in 2002. By that time I'd already been playing MMORPGs for several years but I was still interested in some kind of offline alternative as backup for those occasions when my Internet connection was having issues. It's hard to believe now, but back around the turn of the millennium some ISPs considered a day or two to be a very reasonable response to a hardware failure in their system.

Dungeon Siege was a big disappointment. It looked fantastic and it was as slick as butter but I found it utterly pointless. Who wants to run from place to place, mowing down hundreds of enemies, stacking your bags with junk and then sorting through it for the good stuff? Not me. It seemed like the dullest kind of busy-work. Still does.

So much so, in fact, that when I ran into what felt like a similar always-on loot fountain at the start of EverQuest II's Rise of Kunark expansion in 2007 I walked away in disgust. I ran all the way back to the low-loot safety of EverQuest, where I stayed for six months until the taint of too much, too fast faded.

Ever since then I've been extremely wary of anything calling itself an "ARPG". Not that it's always been easy to sift out the suspects. The waters have been muddied by the adoption of the acronym to describe games that use the mouse for combat, like DCUO, Neverwinter Online or Black Desert. Technically, I believe, we should be using the acronym ACRPG (Action Combat Role Playing Game) for those but no-one ever does.

It would, then, be quite useful if the term "looter shooter" replaced ARG for those games whose primary purpose is to kill vast numbers of enemies for vast piles of loot. I would safely be able to put all of those to one side and forget about them, leaving me to concentrate on trying to work out which mouse-mode ARPGs deserve a closer look.

Given my well-established predilection for inventory management it is, perhaps, somewhat surprising that I don't like loot fountain games more than I do. Or, indeed, at all. I'm not entirely sure why it is. There are probably a number of reasons. The foremost, however, is undoubtedly that I find such games silly.

For any form of entertainment there's a point beyond which it becomes impossible to continue to suspend disbelief. Once that point is passed there's really no return. If you're watching a movie or reading a novel and you find yourself thinking "Well, that would never happen..." you might as well give up.

In video games most things that happen would never happen so the bar is set slightly differently. For me, when it doesn't make any real difference what I kill because everything drops everything all the time, well that would never happen...

About the only MMORPG - well, kind of - that used something like this mechanic and got away with it was the original Guild Wars. There was (still is, I guess) an awful lot of loot in that game, all of it color-coded, most of it non-specific to the mobs that dropped it. I didn't like it but it wasn't quite annoying enough to ruin the rest of the game, most of which I did like. Sometimes it came close, though.

Guild Wars 2 has followed that path, somewhat. The sheer quantity of items that drop there these days is staggering. It's also a frequent source of complaint. For a long while it didn't really bother me too much, mostly because GW2 also has a decent range of options for disposing of the detritus quickly and painlessly - auto-loot, auto-banking, mass salvage...

It does seem to be getting worse, though. I am starting to find even the parts I used to enjoy, like opening all the little boxes and bags that drop to see what's inside, irritating. Once again, it's nowhere in itself enough to make me stop playing but add it to the game's other ongoing longueurs and things mount up. I've reached the stage where even one more minor annoyance makes me feel like playing something else instead.

The other major thing I have against ARPGs or Looter Shooters or whatever we're going to call them, something to which I alluded earlier, is the way the mechanic emphasizes the sheer pointlessness of the whole endeavor. Video games are pointless enough to begin with, without having that meaninglessness repeatedly driven home by a never-ending shower of stuff, almost none of which you want or need.

For me it turns the entire process into the fantasy equivalent of sorting your garbage for re-cycling. And yes, I do understand that that's ironic given, as I said, my love of inventory management. It's not for nothing I chose Emerson's oft-misquoted line "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" as my personal motto. Some inventory management is fun and some isn't. It's important to know the difference.

The upshot of all this is that it really makes no nevermind to me whether BioWare sort out their loot tables or not. No doubt they will, eventually, although whether anyone will be left to care by then is probably the bigger question. Meanwhile it's moderately entertaining, watching them flail and fail.

The real concern from my perspective isn't so much whether any of the particular Looter Shooters gets its looting or its shooting right. No, it's more how that success might cast a longer shadow across the wider genre.

With both EQ and EQII opening retro-servers today that at least pay lip service to returning to the values of the past, I'm kind of looking forward to a return to the days of camping specific mobs for specific drops. I always liked doing that.

Looking ahead, I think limited loot is going to feature quite high on my tick list of features that make an MMORPG worth trying. Assuming we get ever any new MMOs that look worth trying in the first place...

Money Is The Anthem

BioWare's Anthem is The Big New Thing. There seems to be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind about that.

I foresee finding myself in a very familiar position: reading thousands of words about a video game I have no interest whatsoever in playing. I predict there will be a torrent of posts, varying from the gushing to the gutted. Some will skate across the surface on a wave of feels; others will dive into the depths, dragging up a deadweight of extraordinary detail.

After a couple of weeks the torrent will turn to a stream then a trickle. In six weeks only a couple of die-hards will be left, working the pump-handle for those last few drops. Everyone else will either have moved on to the Next Big New Thing, if there is one, or back to an Old Favorite. Either that or they'll be posting about how bored they are and why doesn't anyone make any good games any more?

The game's not even out yet and already the dam is breached. There are leaks springing up all over the place. I've already heard plenty about the Demo Weekend and its issues. Isey and Gevlon had a sparky little interchange about that.

The post that prompted me to join in, however, was Alli Rense's compelling anti-Anthem rant at The Parent Trope, unequivocally entitled Anthem? No Thank You. Alli isn't just uninterested in playing the game, like me; she sees it as an active threat to the future of the kind of games she enjoys. Very specifically she imagines that if Anthem is successful it will lead to future BioWare games following the Anthem model and abandoning the narrative RPG format on which they built their brand.

She's probably right, too, although she doesn't speculate on what might become of BioWare if Anthem isn't successful. Hard to imagine that would have a positive outcome for the company or its future projects - if any.

I don't have any emotional attachment to BioWare, either past or present. They made one game I really liked - Baldur's Gate - and one I quite liked - Baldur's Gate 2. That was twenty years ago. Since then they've made nothing I care about at all.

I did try the first Dragon Age and found that, while it had a powerful impact at first, it very rapidly became tedious, repetitive and obvious. I played DA intensely for about a week and then one day I couldn't stand the thought of ever playing it again.

It was a useful learning experience. The most important thing I learned was that I really, really hate the "Companion" mechanic, where the player character is expected to schmooze, romance or otherwise jolly along various NPCs, either by buttering them up with flattery or giving them gifts.

Who ever thought this was a good idea? And how old were they? Six? Will you be my best friend if I give you my Action Figure?  No, cos I can't be your friend any more, cos you like Jimmy and Jimmy's bad! Geez. Give me a break.

That experience beyond anything else is why I have yet to even download Star Wars: the Old Republic. The mere thought of having to deal with managing the imaginary emotions of a bunch of virtual pre-schoolers in battle-armor gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The other lesson I learned from Dragon Age is that I really can't take any more Generic Fantasy Plots (or Generic Science Fiction Plots for that matter). I can stomach them as background in MMORPGs, where all narrative is set dressing for the main performance - building my character - and I can get on board when  narrative provides atmosphere for enjoyable mechanics, as in the two Baldur's Gate games or Pillars of Eternity, but the last time I encountered a plot in a video game that I found as immersive or compelling as a good novel or movie...well, if it ever happens, I'll let you know.

When Alli says "I think video games are the best way we have to tell a story. Better than TV, film, and even books. Because they’re the most immersive, they have the biggest impact." I imagine she speaks for quite a few people who might be reading this. Even I would say that the medium has the potential to compete on equal terms with established narrative forms.

It's potential that's gone largely unfulfilled for decades, though, primarily because of the mechanics involved. I have a big issue with all video game mechanics when it comes to storytelling. Video games are clunky. They persistently pull you out of the moment to fight things or solve puzzles or click through dialog trees. It's the equivalent of trying to watch a movie with someone sitting next to you going "Who's that guy? Wasn't he in that movie we saw last week? Are you sure you switched the lights off when we parked? Can you hold my Coke, I want to get a mint out my pocket...no, wait, your pocket. You had the mints, didn't you?"

The ones that do it the least and which probably make the best stab at telling an uninterrupted narrative come from the sub-genre often somewhat derisively labelled "Walking Simulators" but what those mostly seem to me to be doing is trying to edge as close as possible to being movies. One of the main criticisms often levelled at them is that they aren't really video games at all.

We do all make some sweeping assumptions at times, about what a video game can or can't be - or should or shouldn't be. At one point, in a piece that has enough comment hooks to hang a dozen blog posts on, Alli asks "Aren’t video games supposed to be an introverted hobby?".

Are they? I don't know. They certainly have had that image at times, particularly in the eyes of worried parents or politicians in search of a headline. I did think the image of video games as the exclusive province of the socially maladjusted was behind us but it does recur disturbingly regularly, even now.

Getting back to Anthem itself, while I don't feel as disturbed by the prospect of its success as Alli, I do see it as not so much a straw in the wind but a bloody great haystack in a hurricane barrelling towards the traditional MMORPG. Belghast said something very revealing in his recent post on returning to FFXIV: "I am trying to get back into playing an MMORPG again…  but it just feels weird considering how much of the Destiny style MMO Lite I have been playing of late."

Pete S in reply to Belghast clarified that feeling with some solid reasoning: "I’m really struggling to engage for that same “been playing quasi-MMOs too much” reason. I just feel like the time-invest:reward ratio is off now."

Pacing in MMORPGs is something many of us have been talking about and around for years. People have argued that leveling is too fast, too slow, too uneven; gear ladders have been both too long and too short. The genre suffered years of post-WoW speeding up that then slewed into a "Slow MMO" car-crash that threatened to bring the entire crowdfunding process into disrepute.

While all that was going on deep in The Niche, the hinterlands were filling up with somewhat successful hybrids like Destiny and The Division and bona-fide hits and mega-hits like PUBG and Fortnite. If the last five years have told us anything, it's that there's a huge market for Massive Online Games - provided you don't add those fatal three missing letters.

So I can see why Alli is worried. The current trend in large-scale online games, supported by sales, would seem to have little to do with either narrative storytelling or traditional rpg character-building. What's more, I would contend that, with Destiny, Warframe and now Anthem all choosing to house the player character in form-fitting, personality-occluding body armor, the current version of "character building" has closer affinities to driving games than to any imagined ancestry in Dungeons and Dragons.

Beyond any other reason, that was why I lost interest so fast in Warframe and it's very high on the list of things that put me off trying Anthem: I don't mind my character owning and driving a vehicle but I draw the line at them being one. But no-one cares what I think because not every game has to be for me.

Anthem will be a success. Possibly not as big a success as it needs to be but there or thereabouts. The trend of narrative-light, combat-heavy, fast-paced MMOs set in open worlds or open maps, using or at least including Battle Royale and Survival mechanics is going to be with us for a good while yet.

Will that trend prejudice the production of other types of video game? Of course it will. That's what bandwagons do - roll over everything else. Will there be anything left for the rest of us? Of course there will. Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's another story...