1 post tagged “mmo”

If you're one of those rare readers wandering what's going to appear in the next column, well, frankly, so am I. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Mercifully, that daily battle with my brain to come up with something original for tomorrow's entry seems to have spilled over into the territory of my sub-conscious, for last night I had a dream about a worthwhile topic. Wait! Come back! I'm not going to bore / disturb you with a Freudian tale of Sam Fisher rolling a long, cylindrical Katamari around the twin-mountained island of Midwinter. Instead, I was rescued by a simpler bout of REM activity. One of those feasible dreams which you only recall a few hours after waking in which you think 'hang on, that surely didn't happen, did it?'. So, hooray for sleep for providing inspiration. Perhaps I should have more of it.

To put it simply, I dreamt that Blizzard had decided to quit while they were ahead and close World of Warcraft early. Quite. They more you think about it, the more you realise how fantastical it sounds. Blizzard are rolling in it: World of Warcraft is making millions, its recently-released expansion pack, Burning Crusade, is revitalising the online lives of thousands of players, and no doubt they're busy beavering away on the next one. Critics adore them. Fans love them. I wouldn't want to stop either. Nevertheless, to put a pessimistic tone on proceedings, all good things must come to an end. Maybe not this year. Maybe not even in five years (though that's an aeon in gaming terms, admittedly), but sooner or later something much better will come along and WoW won't be the shining star it once was.

But when the servers empty and the guilds run dry will the game go out with a bang or a whimper? Blizzard have triumphantly mapped out their plans for the future, but have they mapped out a potential endgame too? Certainly not outright: to state that your ongoing online RPG has a limited shelf life is tantamount to commercial suicide (or at least commercial cutting your wrists for attention).

Indeed, even announcing a sequel is asking for trouble. The topsy-turvy world of MMORPGS is one place where putting out a brand new, bigger and better version of your game stuffed full of great new features and top-end graphics can end in failure. As long as the masses keep hold of their low-tech, cheap PCs, the creaking 3D worlds of the old MMO have a tendency to keep on gasping for air just when you think they'd finished them off. The fact that the original Everquest, up and running since 1999, received its 13th expansion pack last month despite being superceded both graphically and feature-wise by Everquest 2 seems bizarre to offliners currently on their eighth Tony Hawk's game. The first Ultima Online saw off the Todd McFarlane-styled sequel before it even hit the shelves to remain happily in its backwards realm of isometrics. And despite Asheron's Call 2 being cancelled in 2005, the original is still going strong. There's a reason these worlds are called persistent: they just won't let go.

It's not just technology, either. Players can develop an attachment to their world and community that they're not willing to break. You don't invest that much time in one place without it affecting you in some way, and emotional bonds are harder to break than graphical ones.

The fact is, though, despite there being more than enough MMOs to go around, not that many have actually closed their doors. If they're still in the development stage, there's more chance of them being cancelled, but once they're out the door, they'll keep on rolling as long as they turn a semi-decent profit. Games like Neocron 2, Horizons, Saga of Ryzom etc. - games that don't exactly make headlines these days - all pall in comparison to WoW, but you can still jump onto their servers today, if you so desire. Again, it's an odd situation when single player games can vanish into bargain bin obscurity in just a couple of months.

Back to the original point, though. What happens in those rare cases when a commercial online world switches off for the last time? For Asheron's Call 2, it was a poignant but largely uneventful time; the remaining avatars waited around for the futility of their existence to wink out. Turbine knocked up a quick plot reason for closing access, counted down and then it was back to Windows with a 'connection failed' bump. For the same fate to happen to World of Warcraft would be ignominious. Blizzard's game contains too rich a world, too intricate a background and, chiefly, too many players to see it fade into obscurity with a pull of the plug. In order to prevent that, some day, before the returns diminish - and despite those big dollar signs floating in front of their eyes - Blizzard need to say "enough is enough. This is as good as it'll ever get: let's not ruin it." And once they confront that, they can come up with an event - a standout in the MMO world - that will mark the coming Game Over apocalypse with an earth-shattering bang. One that will see it go down in gaming history for how it died as much as how it lived.

What that event could be, I couldn't possibly say. However there is one example to lead by. The otherwise shoddy Matrix Online closed its beta servers memorably. As the computer-controlled world announced a reset, the sky turned red. Eyeballs glared menacingly from the heavens. Agents of the computer began to hunt down and kill player-characters before the world eventually imploded in one server-resetting 'I've actually got to start paying for this?' pop. That's how you do an apocalypse. Now imagine the Armageddon effect they could achieve in WoW. Just imagine.

Still, in a world where people still grind Everquest, that's not likely to happen. Maybe it'll fall to one of the lesser MMOs like Dark Ages of Camelot or Anarchy Online to make that leap and bring about the end of days before their hand is forced. Cash-wise it might be some dumb thinking, but infamy would be assured. Besides, once you've successfully killed off the past, it'll be easier to get people signed up for the set-one-hundred-years-in-the-future sequel.