Just wanted to gather some people's opinions on this. Why is it that most MMORPGs seem to lack an epic feel to them? In my mind, that's what makes RPGs great, is the sense of immersion. Yet MMORPGs have evolved to be nothing more than MUDs with fancy graphical clients. Which wouldn't be bad, except they seem to be rehashing the same OLD OLD MUDs. MUDs that barely had a story or purpose, let alone gameplay (DIKU type muds). In my opinion modern MMORPGs are nothing more than hack and slash. Yet...what have RPGs like Final Fantasy been? Random encounters, storyline, boss encounters, upgrade equipment, rinse and repeat. Hack and slash, essentially, just like MMORPGs. What made them stand out? Storyline...and EPIC battles. Those boss encounters are what made the games so memorable, at least for me. To get to the point, why do MMORPGs lack this today? I'll use WoW as an example. WoW has a storyline, but it's not immersive. WoW has boss encounters, but they're not epic. In my opinion, even encounters such as Onyxia are not epic in the same way as old school RPGs were. But does it have to be that way? With million dollar budgets, sound teams, story teams, level design teams...this kind of immersion SHOULD be possible. Things missing in WoW: 1) The bosses don't ever "talk" to you. There's no interaction. They are not antagonists, they're simply "mobs" you farm phat lewt from. You don't encounter a boss multiple times (they never get away, they never kill another NPC in front of your eyes, they never steal anything from you or destroy something valuable to you.) 2) There's rarely any special music to highlight the battle. This would go a LONG way to making the game feel more alive. 3) Timing, anticipation, backstory. You do a quest line, and sometimes the quests will be related in a meaninful way, but usually it just ends up with the NPC saying "Oh, by the way, this one guy did something naughty, go kill him!" So, am I asking for too much? Is this stuff undoable in an MMORPG? If so, why?

I agree with you to a point on this topic, I agree that alot of MMORPG's seem to just be about leveling and not about the RPG part, but I don't know if this is always the games fault (I haven't played WoW but I do play UO so I'll be using that as a base)

What I mean when I say its not really the games fault is that the players don't worry about Role Playing in these games, what they care about is winning, which is odd in its self because you can never "win" while playing a MMORPG. The thing with MMORPG is that players have all the control about what happens so the developers can right any story they want and they can add tons and tons of it into the game but a player doesn't need to worry about that, they can walk any direction they want, they can skip all the little things, or never go to the big things.

Because in the end the story of an RPG doesn't really matter, people can make there own story, and I think the problem is that most people don't make their own story, they just go out an farm items. This then makes other people think "Hey why does that guy have 20 of those and I have 1, I better go farm some of them so that I'm not losing"

Also you talked about the enemy doing things like attacking NPC's and stuff, the issue here is that your not the only one playing the game so this doesn't quite work, you shouldn't be able to get a story that someone else doesn't get because they happenned to be somewhere else when the boss killed that NPC in the corner of town.

Basically thats all I have to say, the Developers can place you in a setting but they don't really have control over your story. Thats where you have the control

What makes a game epic is that it has content specifically geared for a set universe with a set group of characters, and provides gameplay that will follow a dramatic arc.

MMORPG's generally lack that control. Players want customizability and freedom, and that requires a ton of content just to get right.

Not to mention the fact that MMORPGs are, well, massive. You're not the hero - well, you are the hero, but there are thousands of other heroes and they are all doing pretty much the same thing you're doing. How epic can that be? To boldly go where everyone else has gone before.

Oh, and World of Warcraft does do the boss drama stuff. Check out the bosses in the deadmines, fighting Mograine in the Scarlet Monastery, or pretty much all of Stratholme.

MMORPGs aren't about the NPCs. NPC boss battles aren't the main objectives and aren't what makes MMORPGs fun for me. It's the interaction with other people in an almost-real-life experience. I played Galaxies for a little over a year and the fun wasn't grinding out jedi or killing the biggest baddies in the game, it was actually the thing about MMOs that I hated the most...PvP. Now, I still don't like duels and everything, but with friends it is a whole other story.

I think the "epic" battles from traditional RPGs that you say are missing in MMOs (which I agree there should be more "antagonists" in MMOs to give a sense of unity to the game) are actually replaced by PvP. I say this because when you fight against other people (especially in galaxies with Rebels/Imperials) you are always constantly watching your back and looking over your shoulder for that "guy in the shadows". That person who busts into the cantina while you and your rebel friend are having a shot of jawa juice. PvP battles like this would happen anytime, anywhere. You would fight and die along with your friend, exchange battle taunts as you fought and chase down the cowards who ran during the heat of battle.

I can understand how these epic battles are missing with NPCs...MMORPG NPC are insanely stupid and uninteractive, especially when a supossedly "high profile" bounty hunter target simply says "you gonna die!" and proceeds to stand in one spot and shoot at you until either he or you return to the respawn queue.

So yea, Turt's right, the devs provide the stage and you as the player have to write the script and act it out as you go.

So anyway, There's my two cents. I'm off to class.

-Pigpen

>>Oh, and World of Warcraft does do the boss drama stuff. Check out the bosses in the deadmines, fighting Mograine in the Scarlet Monastery, or pretty much all of Stratholme.<<

I agree up to a point. I havn't done Strat, but I've done SM and DM and I still wasn't very overwhelmed. When a boss talks to you it's not very impressive when his text is in 12 pt font in the lower right corner of the screen.

I'd like to see more scripted encounters and voiced dialog with boss music. Like, when Mr. Smite stops the battle to go grab his axes...that was pretty cool. I agree that you're just one hero in a world of heros, but when you have instances, as in WoW, that really opens up tons of possibilities I think. In situations like these the boss CAN kill the NPC. With instances, you take the sandbox and shrink it down so that you ARE the only heros at that moment.

Also agree about people wanting to "win" and power level. Do any of you think an MMORPG could work if it severely restricted the benefits of farming? For example, WoW has soulbound items, which works somewhat in that direction. What if enemies rarely dropped combat items at all, and instead combat was more skill based and less dependant on items and item levels and character level?

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why do MMORPGs lack this today?

You can really only do boss battles once. If you get the same battle again, you will "know" it. In a 40-hour RPG, you can put in about 5 of those without too much work, especially if character advancement is paced through the game.

Meanwhile, many MMO players go through 40 hours of play in the first week. MMO make their money when people pay for months and months -- you just can't create the same kind of content and mechanics for 1,000 hours of gameplay.

That's probably also why all the raid-level encounters in games like EverQuest don't come until you leveled all the way up.

it would be cool if mmo were more imersive but there one basic problem
in most rpgs the events center around you but in a mmo not everyone can be the most important person in the universe

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Original post by hplus0603 Meanwhile, many MMO players go through 40 hours of play in the first week. MMO make their money when people pay for months and months -- you just can't create the same kind of content and mechanics for 1,000 hours of gameplay.

especillay if you have 1,000 players

the best i can think of is insted of all the players being heros have it so some players can be villans, can build a tower, summon some monster in it and terrise nearby villages

So would anyone be willing to say that the genre MMORPG is inherently false advertising? It'd almost be like calling Halo 2 a multi-player fighting game. Sure, there's fighting, but it's not "real" fighting like in Tekken.

MMORPGs have been around for years now, but is it too late to give the genre a better, more apt name? Already I've seen reviewers using the term "MMO" and dropping the RPG altogether.

Can a REAL MMORPG be made? If you forgot everything you know about UO, DAOC, WoW, etc gameplay and started from scratch, could something that really lives up to the genre of MMORPG be done?

That's a very strange point of view, Penance. The label Role Playing Game implies that it is a game in which you take on the role of another character—something that you surely have more room to do in a world with other humans than when limited by scripted events and dumb NPC's! Final Fantasy style games, for example, don't really offer much in the way of role playing at all. (That said, I am a great fan of games like FFVI and Chrono Trigger, and I have no interest in MMORPG's.)

I think i'm on Kaze with this one, and not all the players in WOW could be considered heroes (well, good ones anyway), there are two factions in WOW that the designers have specifically created to oppose each other.

I think the key to any story is the ability to have players become super villans. You know there is going to be power players no matter what, players who want nothing but the highest score and the most gear, so why not make the most powerful stuff evil? If only 1 or two players could obtain ultimate power then a band of players would obviously have to stop them, keeping track of these stories and creating an ingame "history" built by the players would be an excelent way of making a game epic, or at least more interesting because the designers are only setting up circumstances, the players are the ones making history.

Things like releasing the Uber-The-Enormous Demon to terrorize the gameworld, some monsterously huge creature the size of a map that players would have to try and stop. Or giving a power players some ultra powerful weapon/ability and letting him loose on other people. Or perhalps giving control of a hoard of undead or creatures so he can invade regions. ;D