Should MMOs be more like single-player games? - by Joao Beraldo

      Posted 03/15/11 01:33:00 am  

Most of today’s single-player action games like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed have around 15-25 hours of gameplay. These games share some similarities as the player progresses: the character gains more abilities that affect gameplay (weapons, moves, new mission types, etc), he advanced in a linear story, meets new characters, kills new enemies and often has the chance to explore something extra. Also they all share about the same payment method: you pay around $40 and you have access to all the game for as long as you like.

They are also, of course, single-player experiences.

In most MMOs today, like in World of Warcraft, you take 20 minutes to reach a third or less of the your game progression. And, most of the time, that means little gameplay, hardly any story, a multitude of disposable npcs and tons of variants of the same enemies, all of that often focused on a limited repetition of completing the same kinds of quests with the obvious lack of effect to the game world.

I am not oblivious to what is new or is to come. Cataclysm has added many minigames to their quests and Guild Wars 2 promises much with their dynamic events, but the question remains: Did we need to make MMOs so much differently then our single-player games?

The first thing that came to my mind when I wrote the above question was that it was a matter of using a different media. Just like a scriptwriter has to adapt when he turns a novel into a movie, a game designer must adapt as he turns a single-player into a massive multiplayer. But how much of this adaptation has actually occurred in MMOs?

If you go back to Ultima Online and other similar ‘original’ MMOs (and you might add MU

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