Now that we’re done with Leveling Month in Vague Patch Notes, is there another topic I can turn into a month-and-change of column topics? Well… maybe. But we’re going to have to start with an article that might seem like the most obvious possible premise out of the gate, but I promise it is actually interesting when you start drilling into it.
MMOs rely on having other people in them.
You might be looking at that and saying that it’s a “no duh” level of sentiment. I even specified the wider genre header of MMOs instead of MMORPGs so there’s no potential misunderstanding here. Of course this genre relies upon other people; it’s like saying that tabletop games require a flat surface (ideally a table).
But there’s more to it than that, and it’s in the fine details that I think things start getting interesting. Because what does it mean to have a game that requires other people?
There are a lot of games that can support multiple people playing. Loads of games have a two-player mode, for example. There was a multiplayer mode for Spec Ops: The Line for some reason, even. But the difference between MMOs and just games that have a multiplayer mode is that the latter can be played with others, but the former is built around it on a fundamental level.
Satisfactory is a multiplayer game. You can, if you wish, get several of your friends together to run around in the game world. You can all build a factory together, or you can demonstrate that you have a jet pack and rocket fuel along with a turbo rifle in a game mode I like to call “Why I No Longer Host The Game Night.” But if you don’t have your friends available, the game is still fun and playable. It is meant to be neat and playable and enjoyable if you’re all by your lonesome; it is balanced and paced around precisely that.
But World of Warcraft isn’t. And that’s not an accident.
You might think to yourself that you could balance the game around it, and numerically, you are correct. It would be possible (if not immediately practical) to tune the entire game around just one person being in-game at any given time. You could tweak numbers and mechanics to make that work. But keep in mind that I’m not talking about making the game work so that you could perpetually play solo if you wanted; I’m talking about making the game work for only one person. And that’s a very different prospect.
Just the design of the game and the structure of its quests don’t work well for one person. Having a bunch of enemies milling around in an area and you need to kill them for a quest? That makes sense if you want to make sure that two or three people could be clearing the same quest and would still have enemies to fight. But if it’s just one person, that turns into poor design. Why don’t you have a more structured, deliberate flow for a quest?
Auction houses and mailboxes become useless. The sheer size and scope of the world becomes pointless because there are more quests and things to do than one character will need to engage with. And the mechanics of the game itself are incredibly limited, meaning that you don’t really have much to do beyond going to new areas, killing some stuff, and then repeating until you hit max level and farm for gear to… do… slightly harder stuff?
“So you’re saying soloing is dumb.” Not at all. Because when all of this becomes a solo option, things are different. I can be out leveling on a character and I can see someone swoop in on a mount I don’t have, which inspires me to look up where that mount comes from. We can wave and help each other out or ignore one another.
I’ve had world quests done in PvP areas in WoW, which are specifically tuned for the option to fight one another. One of my most memorable experiences was running into a Horde player while on an Alliance character in a free-for-all area, but we both just waved to one another and kept doing things without hurting one another. Then another Horde player showed up and attacked him, and I jumped in to help him against that new player… at which point we both healed up and waved again.
We didn’t talk, but the whole fun of that moment was an impromptu experience of two people, ships passing in the night. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And if I just wanted to have a fun moment of interesting combat, well, in that scenario what I want isn’t an MMORPG; it’s Baldur’s Gate 3.
The thing about a lot of genres of video game is that at a certain point, you need to boil away a lot of the fine details that accumulate around the games to find what makes them really unique. You can burn away a lot of details about sports games and still have them be recognizably sports games, but you cannot remove “there is a sport and you have to play according to the broadly recognizable rules of the sport.” NBA Jam doesn’t play by actual basketball rules, but it feels like a basketball game just the same.
What makes MMOs interesting and makes them a genre unto themselves is not just being able to support multiple people. It’s that the gameplay, at a core level, relies upon other people. This can be as simple as the fact that Overwatch 2 has nothing else to recommend it (yeah, we’ll get more story missions any day now, sure Jan) or as complex as trade wars with another player in Final Fantasy XIV as you both try to corner the market on a new furnishing item in order to make fat stacks of gil.
And that’s not to say that everyone who plays an MMORPG likes everything that can happen because it relies upon other people. I have had evenings that got way worse in FFXIV because of another player being a jerk to me in roleplaying. I’ve had terrible group runs in City of Heroes. There are even entire games like EVE Online where the whole idea is that another player could just decide to wreck your entire day.
But at the end of the day these games require other people around. That’s the whole point of playing an MMO instead of something else. And I think it’s worth digging into the idea of why having other people actually makes a game feel different, from the design level on down – because there is actually a difference between an MMO you play mostly solo and wanting to be playing an MMO with no one else able to interact with you or affect you in any fashion.
And if you want the latter, you don’t actually want an MMO in the first place. MMOs rely on having other people.
Vague Patch Notes: Going solo isn’t a problem in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Living like a rock in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Solipsism and what it means for playing MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: The MMO world you don’t control
Vague Patch Notes: MMOs rely on other people – but what does that really mean?
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
