I Want Plot, Dammit!

I could be rooting rats to the ground with magic and then clubbing them to death with a mace right now. It's perfectly possible and, in fact, quite accepted in the online world that is EverQuest.

I could also be mowing down newbie players with chain lightning spells in Ultima Online (which is frowned upon by most players, but allowed). I could be baking bread, fighting Orcs, improving my "faction", collecting experience points, or taking turns leaping over the heads of dwarves to see how long it takes before they get annoyed. So why is it that, with the uncontested popularity of "massively multiplayer" online RPG's, I'm still playing Fallout2?

Today's online RPG's, the first of what is likely to become a genre of its own, are still lacking depth. I don't think even the most die-hard EverQuest fan would disagree that the game is about as deep as a puddle, compared to oceans like Baldur's Gate, the Final Fantasy series, or even System Shock (which is hardly a traditional role-playing game). EverQuest, while being a technological miracle in its own way, is a long way from a traditional RPG, so much so in fact that I barely feel comfortable labeling it as such.

The nature of a role-playing game is to immerse players within a world where their actions have a direct effect upon their surroundings. In other words, they play a role. Be they heroes, villains, or a little combination of both (like my current Fallout character, who's "idolized" in several villages despite having robbed them blind), RPG players know that their actions will alter the storyline, and affect many or all of the characters they interact with in the game.


Or at least... that's what they used to know. The problem with the current crop of online RPG's is that this simply isn't the case. No matter how many Gnolls you slaughter in EverQuest, they will always continue to plague Qeynos. You can not relieve a town in Ultima Online of the Orc menace threatening outside of their borders. You cannot emerge from the battle fields, bloody and exhausted, with the still-beating heart of an evil overlord in your hand, proclaiming peace across the land. You cannot, in fact, "win" in any way that conforms to the standard definition of the word. Instead, what you can do (and what is, to be truthful, probably the biggest draw of the current crop of online RPG's), is socialize. My experiences with EverQuest, especially, have convinced me that most players treat it as a virtual chat room where you can see one another (or at least, their equivalent fantasy-based polygonal representations).

There are inherent problems with this system, not the least of which is that many, many players get rapidly bored with fighting, bartering for items, and stats-watching. I am not at all hesitant to say that in the past, most people played RPG's to be "The Hero". As "The Hero", your job varied. In Fallout, it meant finding a water chip and returning it to your vault, thereby guaranteeing the survival of those living within. In Diablo (which lacked enough story to be a "true" RPG, and thus is usually labeled as an action-rpg), your goal was to defeat an evil demon who had taken possession of the dungeons below a small town. In EverQuest, your goal is to bake enough bread to afford a sword, at which point you should be able to sell enough animal pelts to afford a better sword, after which you will move on to selling items found on monsters in order to buy an even better sword. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you can get your sword enchanted. I hear the sales figures on those are really impressive.

You cannot be "The Hero" in EverQuest. You mainly fight rats and skeletons. Even in the case of certain "scenarios" (such as the Gnolls laying siege to Qeynos), anyone can go ahead and join the fight. Virtually everyone is capable of magic, everyone can carry a weapon, and everyone quickly learns the process of "fight, sit, fight, sit, fight, sit" that one follows to become a phenomenally high-level character... at which point you look for bigger enemies to repeat the process with.

There are many possible ways to inject "story" in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs). Perhaps the quickest and easiest is the "ongoing peril" method, adopted by soap operas and comic books for decades. When an adventuring group of heroes finally clears out that nasty dragon who's been demanding virgin sacrifices, some other threat that's been brooding in the background, biding its time, shows up. This prevents the problem of having all of the "quests" either be insignificant, or eminently solvable (you can't kill the same dragon twice, obviously). This method allows the quests to be solved, and simply generates new ones. It is conceivable that a large group of players could go through several quests in a day, but given the proper database of possible combinations (dragon + village + sacrifice + pile of gold = quest) this wouldn't necessarily be a problem. You're still not going to see a controlled, pre-written plot like in a single-player RPG, but you've at least given people the chance to actually change the world that they live in.

This method can be approached on many levels, from a dynamically generated evil menace, to smaller individual quests. In Fallout2, for example, you're given the chance to take part in a gang war, which eventually leads to a switch in the balance of power between two rival NPC's. Wouldn't it be possible for an MMORPG to dynamically generate an entire gang structure, that changed and altered as players "freelanced" for the non-player gang members?

Further, wouldn't it then be possible for a player to rise to power as a crimelord himself, thus amassing fame, notoriety, money, and a legion of both live and computer-controlled players to do his bidding? And isn't it conceivable that this rise to power is based on that player's strategy and tactical capabilities (as well as his real-life charisma and ability to persuade people to do his bidding), rather than a set of predetermined stats? That sounds a hell of a lot more interesting to me than repeatedly magic-missling kobolds.

This method is not without its difficulties, however. NPC dialog would be a nightmare in itself. Conceivably, if the game was making enough money, developers could actually hire people not just to administrate, but to actually play key roles in the game. This would be pretty expensive, though, so it may be awhile before anything of that sort occurs. It's true that financial restrictions dictate that It's unlikely that we'll see anything with a depth approaching that of single-player RPG's show up online anytime soon, but that shouldn't discourage developers from trying.

It's a fact that MMORPGs lack the strong story that is the backbone of most traditional RPGs. This is an unfortunate problem that will keep many (though certainly not all... look at EverQuest's sales figures sometime) RPG fans from remaining interested in the game past the initial few days. Until developers can manage to give that feeling of actually changing the world that they're interacting with, many RPG fans are going to leave MMORPGs with the same dry taste in their mouth that I did.

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