I’ve been playing MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for several years now.  My MMORPG experience includes:

• EA’s Ultima Online (from “The Second Age” through the Samurai expansion)
• EA’s Earth and Beyond (from beta up until the plug was pulled)
• Midway’s Lord of the Rings Online (for the trial period)
• NCSoft’s City of Heroes (for a month or two)
• NCSoft’s Auto Assault (for a month or two)
• Flying Labs’ Pirates of the Burning Sea (account still active)
• Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (account still active)

Each of these games has unique qualities that separate it from the others, while at the same time sharing many characteristics with them.

Of all of them, I found Ultima Online to be the most fun, owing to the sheer depth of options available to a player.  For example, there are no fixed character classes in Ultima Online.  If you want a character to be an expert healer, archer, and mage, you can work with those skills until your character is exactly what you wanted.  This is something you won’t find in any of the other games listed above.

Ultima Online also allowed players to own an in-game house, permitted them to custom-design that house, and to furnish and decorate it.  Your house also served as a guild meeting place, a storage location, a place to practice crafting, and museum for the trophies you collected during your exploits.  Again, this is something not found in most MMOs.

Earth and Beyond had an incredibly complex, but very cool, crafting system.  Explorer class characters could mine ore from asteroids.  Tradesmen class characters could turn that ore into components, which could in turn be fashioned into weapons, shields, engines, or reactors.  If you looted an interesting device or component, you could attempt to analyze it to obtain its blueprint.  If you were successful, you could create that device or component and sell it to other players.  Rare devices and components commanded a lot of in-game money.  It was the most interesting and challenging crafting system I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

NCSoft’s Auto Assault had a cool post-apocalyptic premise, and made you feel a bit like Mad Max as you drove around battling other vehicles and scavenging resources.  Unfortunately, its crafting system was incredibly frustrating to work with. 

World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online had some of the best graphics found in the MMOs I’ve played.  World of Warcraft also has a very impressive user interface, which can be expanded and extended with macros and addons.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has a great ship combat model, though hand-to-hand combat in the game feels pretty chaotic.

All of these games have one “tragic flaw” that I think will be remedied in what I’m calling “the next generation MMORPG”.  In all of the games, there are no permanent changes in the game world.  If you slaughter every monster in a dungeon, eventually those monsters will re-spawn so that someone else can come along and kill them again.  If you complete a series of quests, nothing permanent changes in the game world.  Someone else can come along later and complete those same quests.  The next-generation MMO will change all that.

In the next-generation MMO, the game world will have epic battles and quests which actually change the logical and physical landscape.  For example, there might be a key bridge which connects two land masses in the game world.  NPC forces might view this bridge as a target to be destroyed, while players view it as a key strategic point to be defended.  If the players fail to defend the bridge, it will be destroyed and they will be unable to access the land on the other side.  To regain access to that land, they would have to commit time and resources to rebuilding the bridge.  But this is a very small element of a much bigger picture.

The best way to illustrate what the next-generation MMO will be like is to describe a hypothetical one.  Let’s imagine an MMO based on the World War 2 conflict.  In this MMO, players could choose to be manufacturers, government leaders, or soldiers.  The manufacturers would supply munitions and other needs to the soldiers and governments.  The government leaders would handle diplomatic negotiations and oversee captured territories to prevent civilian uprising.  Soldiers, naturally, would fight to capture and defend territories.  As you’re probably guessing, the next-generation MMO won’t be open-ended like those of today.  It will have a beginning, middle, and end.  The hypothetical World War 2 MMO would end when either the Allies or the Axis control the game world. 

In other words, where today’s MMOs operate in what is largely a “static” world without any sort of global “campaign” or “storyline” the next-generation MMO will operate more like a real world with players’ actions having lasting consequences.  In the next-generation MMO, if you assassinate an enemy leader, that NPC is dead for the rest of the game.  If you destroy a building, it’s gone unless players work together to rebuild it.

To help “guide” or “structure” the conflict in the next-generation MMO, I predict that there will be human beings receiving wages from the game manufacturer to participate in the game.  For instance, in our hypothetical World War 2 MMO, Adolph Hitler might be played by a real person who works for the game company.  This real person would pick the targets players should attack, pitted against other game company employees working the other side of the battle. 

In the next installment of this series of articles, I’ll discuss how “leveling up” in the next-generation MMO will compare and contrast to current-generation games.