Way back in the heyday of Star Wars Galaxies, the game introduced a new concept that never really took off to the same degree elsewhere. It had a system of animated emotes and moods that not only changed how your chat looked in the chat box but changed how it looked in the world space too. If you adopted the angry mood, your character would glare and cross her arms, not just once as an emote but all the time, in and around movement, until you changed the mood. Then you could’ve emote on top of that, plus your chat would come with little flourishes like “Barkeep, this blue milk has spoiled,” Owen yelled angrily. And then, on top of it all, there were speech bubbles for all of it.
In other words, it was possible to sit in a cantina and just watch the dialogue and moods and emotes in speech bubbles float by and never actually look at the proper chat box – and it felt a lot like riding the chaos of a live physical gathering, where it’s easy to “hear” local players, but chatter from folks a bit further away was diminished.
I certainly never realized that the game’s emote system wasn’t the start of a new wave of MMORPGs that actually embraced the RPG part, but alas.
Tell me about some other cool MMO communication systems that aren’t just chat! Built in voice? Calendars? Target symbols? Mailboxes? That cool thing in Meadow where you just click glyphs to chat? What else is out there?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
