There are many different types of MMORPG players and many different theories on how to categorize them. No matter how you choose to categorize them, there are two categories that always come up in some form or another; gamers and socializers. Gamers are players who play MMORPGs because they are a game. Socializers are players who play MMORPGs for community and socialization. While not mutually exclusive, these are two important distinctions to make in terms of design. Nowadays, developers seem to be intent on trying to capture more socializers in their demographic. This seems to be rooted in the idea that a strong social community can make up for weak design choices, lags in updates of new content, and keep an MMO thriving after its pinnacle of activity. The most interesting case of this is in a fairly new MMORPG titled Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO).
DOMO focuses its design almost entirely on the social aspect of its game. Every part of the gameplay is made for players to work together. Every player is allowed to level every class in the game on any of his characters. Upon leveling multiple classes, the player can choose to use skills from other classes to augment his main class's power. Four of these classes (the doctor, the musician, the dancer, and the merchant) seem to be built entirely with teamwork in mind. While possible to level these classes in solo play, it is significantly easier to level with the aid of other party members. Even the classes that can level by themselves easily have at least one skill that seems to benefit another class more than their own class. On top of this, quests are designed to be incredibly difficult at the levels they are given without a group backing the player up. DOMO even uses the Chinese Zodiac to match people up with your character that would be compatible as friends, rivals, or lovers in real life so you can have an excuse to party with someone. Finally, DOMO uses a relationship system that allows players to designate players as friends, teachers, students, or lovers. These relationships actually give major combat bonuses to the player while playing near the person they have this relationship with. All of this is built in to give social players a gameplay advantage while encouraging more gameplay oriented gamers to team up more often and make friends.
However, this system, while fascinating, doesn't seem to be entirely successful. After having played for three weeks, I have noticed some interesting facts about the players in the game. Despite being very heavily balanced towards multiple players, a large number of players still choose to work on missions as a solo effort. This is clearly harder to accomplish, but it doesn't stop solo players from playing solo. Furthermore, despite it being a major mechanical benefit, only one of my real life friends that chose to test the game with me decided to form a friendship. General player reaction on forums and in the game also seem to show a general avoidance of these relationships. Even the lover relationship, which gives what some consider game-breaking level benefits, seems to be avoided. As a matter of fact, the idea of having an “online lover” seems to freak people out so much that it is avoided even more. The only reason I can seem to find for avoiding these relationships is the fact that once you have a relationship with someone, it seems like you almost have an obligation to party with that person. Does giving someone mechanical benefits really give someone a social responsibility to follow? Is this a job? On the other hand, the extremely social gamers with no interest in power seem to have no problem with forming relationships in game. Boards with these kinds of players are filled with topics asking for new friends, lovers, and teachers. It's odd that the people that would desire a mechanical benefit the most would shy away from it the most because of an implied social hierarchy.
In the end, I don't think DOMO's party friendly engine is necessarily a failure, but I think their attempt to turn their more game-driven gamers to a more social attitude is mostly a failure. It seems to be conclusive evidence that you can't change a player's inherent style of play. With everything focused so heavily on the socialization aspect its a wonder whether DOMO will be able to keep their game-driven audience overtime. Either way, DOMO is always going to be a great place for social gamers.
2 comments:
GW also tried to make players more social (even though they made henchmen and heroes, which seem somewhat contradictory). There are a couple missions where two teams enter the field, and both teams must do their part to keep everyone from failing the mission. This is not good if the other team fails to keep a certain NPC alive, because no matter how well your side is doing, the death of the NPC on the other side of the map out of your reach will be the total loss of the mission. The missions, too, cannot be bypassed if the players want to continue in the story and unlock the rest of the world.
Like in DOMO, players in GW would not be coerced into socialization and were getting around it. In the two-party cooperative mission, if there were no players to pair you up with, you would get paired with a full henchmen group. This group was sometimes more reliable than a player group, so many players just did the mission with henchmen by doing the mission at odd times when no one else seemed to be playing.
It seems like a lot of the MMOs are set up to encourage group play and basically all but punish those who chose to play solo. If it is so obvious that there is a large number of gamers who will only play solo I wonder why this trend continues. I think your point about the social aspect driving the game past its prime must be the main reason.
Post a Comment