I think it's a great idea.
One of the reasons I don't play many MMOs is - you play long enough, eventually you get to the level cap, and as the game progresses, everybody gets to the level cap. It's not a function of skill. It's a grind. Then the world doesn't feel realistic, because you have a tremendous number of godlike players running around who aren't actually all that good at the game, but because they're willing to play for hours every day, the game makes them think they are, and gives them the stats to match.
WoW does much better than the rest about having unique kinds of loot you can go after, but it's still pretty much the same in the end. Role-playing-game worlds were never supposed to have everybody guaranteed to become a god in the end if you play long enough - in the original versions of D&D, it took a HELL of a lot of skill to make it up to, say, level 9, much less level 20, and even if you hit level 20, the most powerful items and spells came with severe drawbacks. Anyone else recall how the Wish spell took a year off your life? And I don't mean the One Piece kind of "oh sure 2/3 of my lifespan lulz" kind.
The problem is, of course, that on a commercial level most players will whine and bitch if they can't get to the highest power levels just by playing forever. It's the MMORPG equivalent of grade inflation. Take it on long enough, and the curriculum gets really stupid and everyone at least gets a B-plus.
I personally want to throw the dominant paradigm in a trash can. The other reason I don't play MMOs is - I was already doing that shit years ago in text MUDs. It's really sad to me that the gameplay HAS NOT CHANGED between me playing the SlothMUD DIKU years ago and WoW today. I remember trying WoW last year just thinking "It's an amazing update of graphics on top of the same tired paradigm."
Instance dungeons, spawning, random loot drops - all of that shit should have gone out with the birds years ago. It's like a Disneyland animatronic ride in terms of the interactivity. We ought to be seeing genuine monster economies and modeled populations with reproduction, where adventurers can't just come in and clearcut the entire dungeon once an hour and wait for a magical respawn. There should be real player positions of power in in-game guilds tied to actual game events and scripting - i.e., you can join and gain power in a mage's guild and at the higher levels of responsibility actually change fields of magic that have an effect on players over a wide area radius semi-permanently, something besides the immediate battle - maybe something like building or destroying magical walls that actually stick around between two competing provinces. Or join an army as a fighter and actually issue generals' commands to armies of monsters which start a real offensive across a whole territory. "Death" needs to start meaning something for both monsters and players, maybe not complete permanency, but somewhere between that and "lol rez plz". Capturing territory shouldn't be this stupid "capture the flag" shit, it needs to introduce dynamic change in the game world. And much as it might hurt, you can't just make it guaranteed that if you play long enough in the right guild eventually you'll get to the level cap.
What I hate is that, ultimately, you can be the grand high VIP of your server and put everyone else to shame, and basically what you have are fancy numbers on your stat sheet and shiny armor. The game was the same before you got there, it will be the same after you leave, no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, were, or ever will be. It's a slightly more interactive amusement park ride, but not much. For me to want to play an MMO, I would want to feel like I could ALTER THE WORLD somehow. And offering that experience to thousands of players at the same time is not easy, but it IS possible, and it would be incredibly exciting.
The problems inherent in doing this are - 1. the VAST majority of developers out there are stuck in the same "on rails" kind of thinking as the games are, when it comes to programming. A lot of videogame programmers that I've met are arrogant as all hell and think they're so cool for being able to do what the rest of the industry does that they have no incentive to try to do something different than the rest of the industry does. As Don and I talked about on another thread, everyone's working so hard to polish animations, graphics et cetera that the idea of a gameplay toolkit to introduce a dynamic world is just not on the table. Might screw up the milestones, somebody might not like the innovation, so - work on the next incremental graphics increase. And, 2. the vast majority of MMO players have gotten so used to the "grade inflation" so to speak that a game that required more actual skill would be likely to induce a lot of complaining. I think that the "play long enough and we'll give you a biscuit" kind of gameplay that the industry has developed to try to attract as wide a userbase as possible has really cheapened the interactivity something awful. But when you're putting out the kind of money these projects are, you don't want to risk offending the vast segments of the user base who DON'T want to have to play skillfully, who DON'T actually want a challenge - just the illusion of it to bolster their own egoes.
But I still kind of don't understand it. I played a game something like twelve years ago called Magic Carpet, which was this kind of third-person flying game where you flew around an area and cast spells, but the spells you could cast ALTERED THE PLAYFIELD. You could cast a volcano, and it wouldn't just pop up and spit fire and disappear. There would be a big volcano there for the rest of the stage altering the way you played out the rest of the level. And it was single-player and not an MMO, so obviously it was much easier, but I haven't seen any game like it since that's innovated the gameplay around having a dynamic playfield instead of just the stats and loot tables. And I wonder why.
We need smaller, riskier projects with less development costs where it might be okay to lose out if you actually do something innovative, and where you can feel okay with your revenue if you just attract the kinds of players who want genuine interactivity, not just a number on the level gauge that increases with playing time.
*huff huff huff end rant*
