This week’s Massively Overthinking is entirely inspired by a fantastic argument made by YouTuber on Bluesky. Iron Pineapple declared that “a good game can turn into a great game if it sucks a little bit in an interesting way.”
a good game can turn into a great game if it sucks a little bit in an interesting way
— Iron Pineapple (@ironpineapple.bsky.social) 2025-01-14T21:26:06.755Z
I’m sort of in love with the idea, and clearly I am not alone, given how many other people showered the post with hearts. So much of the creative, weird, clever, inspiring stuff in MMOs is not actually particularly good game design, but as long as the foundation is fairly sound, something unexpected can kick it up a notch instead of down. A lot of what’s good in MMOs happens in between the cracks of the intended gameplay, after all! Let’s come up with examples of MMOs or MMO content that fits the bill. Which MMOs or MMO mechanics suck a little bit in an interesting way?
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): Immediately the first MMO that came to my mind was Star Wars Galaxies – OG SWG specifically. That first year of the game really was kind of gloriously terrible, and yet because of how cleverly the devs had piled all those janky systems together and wound them around each other into something much greater than the sum of its parts, they felt worthwhile. Like, we can all agree that the resource and crafting system is simultaneously genius and dreadful, right? I say this while still being addicted to it two decades later, so please know I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s really onerous and not really fun, but it’s brilliant and compelling. It was sort of the massive spaceship that drove the entire economy of the game, which drove the social and combat angles of the game too, and all of that lifts up the game’s quality, even though individually a lot of the pieces kinda sucked and you would never do them on purpose anywhere else in any other context separately.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog):Â I’ve got a rather interesting example of something in an MMO that kind of sucks but does so in an interesting way: Instant Adventures in RIFT.
Personally speaking, I think IAs are kind of middling in terms of content. It feels to me like I’m being led along on a leash by someone who doesn’t have the patience to let me try to absorb my surroundings as I’m flung from battle encounter to battle encounter at what feels like a breakneck pace.
Yet at the same time, doing that content kind of reminded me of the time I spent when RIFT first released and most of what I did was join the random roving caravans that formed in the open world as we rumbled around to close up rifts. Again, nothing particularly compelling about the content from a gameplay standpoint, but it was good fun to be doing that together with a bunch of others, and that’s kind of the neighborhood IAs felt like they lived in to me.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog):Â An obvious example of this is any type of game that gives you a really dangerous monster that just roams an area as a threat. You don’t need to intend for people to kill it, so you can just put it there as flavor, but if it’s out there, players will band together and try to kill it because of course they will, and now you’ve invented world bosses by accident. But I don’t actually want to use that example, and so instead I’m going to talk about a game that sucks a little in an interesting way in an odd department: City of Heroes’ character creator.
Everybody loves making characters in that game, right? And it’s not hard to see the ways in which the character models in that game sort of suck. Old faces are flat masses of pixels, old hands are mittens, and so forth. It’s not great even by the standards of when the game launched. But that’s also the trick because by making the character models pretty simple, it was easier to make the whole thing fit together consistently so that more costume parts could be a constant thing. Does the compromise ultimately make the game kinda worse? Yes. But it also makes the game more interesting. Whether it was entirely by design or partly by design and partly by accident, the game sucks a little bit but gets better on a whole and lets you make truly bizarre creations.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): I know people always like to dump on Star Trek Online’s ground game as the inferior section of the game, which is objectively true, but I still love that it’s there. It allows for more diverse missions, two different styles of combat (ship vs ground), the ability to outfit and control an entire squad, and the exploration of some memorable locales. It sucks, but I’ve warmed up to it and appreciate its little quirks as a net positive to the game.
Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): I’ll have to go with the gravity boots players were locked into in the original Guild Wars. That’s right, I’m going there. Mostly because I’m highly unoriginal, but also I have the memory of a goldfish. Yes, the lack of jumping in GW was a thing of ridicule. I recall honestly being so annoyed with it at first. Like what? How can a game in 2005 not have jumping? And yet… it actually added something to the gameplay. The lack of jumping gave the game’s maps a more deliberate flow. It became a part of the combat. Body blocking was an absolute party. It felt restrictive as all get out! And yet looking back, I know it was part of the charm.
Tyler Edwards (blog):Â Maybe I’m just being too pedantic, but I’m struggling to see how something “sucking” can be a good thing. I’ve even been a real champion of the idea we need to be more accepting of janky and unpolished games if we want to see real innovation, but even then, the jankiness is not a desirable end in itself; it’s just a nigh-inevitable side effect of doing new stuff.
I’ll use The Secret World as an example as I am wont to do: Its build system was so hard to understand that most people ended up thinking the combat sucked because they couldn’t figure out how to build a good character, and it severely limited the game’s appeal. At the same time, you can’t simplify the build system without losing what made the game special to its fans. But that doesn’t make the confusion a desirable outcome. It’s just hard to have one without the other, but if you could, you would. Maybe that’s what they mean by sucking in an interesting way.
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
