MMORPG Challenge: Where To Call "Home"?

Now that the stupendous success of World of Warcraft has had a chance to inspire veritable legions of similar games, there is no more "end-all-be-all" MMO out there anymore. While most new MMO's seem to stay comfortably below the "bar" raised by feature sets in games like Everquest II, it is high time that a company figured out a way to be a little bit more innovative.

While there are varying levels of graphical detail present in MMO's, the feature sets have been static for some time now. The most recent trend has steadily remained in the PvP direction, unfortunately.

What areas are left to innovate in, though? I mean, now they let us group up and kill each other, right? What more could we possibly need?

One of the primary feature sets open to MMO's that is rarely taken advantage of involves player housing. SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) did one of the most admirable jobs of implementing a way for each character to have a major lasting effect in the game system: there were player cities; whole cities of what used to be a big flat patch of nothing at all before some players came along and said "yup, this looks good!"

But most fail to even provide pre-existing rental property for players (see Everquest II), which you can occasionally decoarate with some of the random crap that you've picked up in your journeys...

This sentiment is echoed over on MMOHub.org, but goes on to state that "there doesn’t seem to be much demand for playing housing".

I completely disagree.

I believe that there is an immense demand for player housing in MMOs. The problem exists in the execution of existing player housing schemes. In most MMOs where it exists, you can only lease existing units and decorate them; the equivalent of a paperdoll apartment, every one.

Apartments are for when you don't have any intention of staying long-term. They are also not places that care very much about beyond that they function properly (running water, electricty, etc). So, the designers of these particular MMO's shouldn't be surprised when their tenants move.

If you want me to care about the player housing in a game, let me build it myself, if I want to. Let me design my own house and move into it. Give my wizard the ability to climb a bare hill and say "I shall build my tower HERE!"

When my friends log on and go visit that hill, I want them to see my tower sitting there!

And, obviously, the more elaborate you can make it, the better. Let me put guards on my tower that fight off local mobs, a dungeon of my own under it, and a pet dragon to guard it with.

Make it persistent, ya know?

I suppose that is what it is all about, in the end, however; persistence. You want to play a game that you can make a change in and it is a change for everyone in the game, not just you. A recent article by <span class="post-footers">Simon Carless discusses more about the possibilities of having persistence in an MMO. In it, he interviews Ed Stark and Dave Williams, from over at Red 5 (home of many WoW alumni), about some </span>of the things they are trying to do in what is expected to be a major upcoming MMO. One of the key aspects seems to be persistent quests. FTA: "If you save the village, it stays saved – you saved it! But maybe now that village becomes an objective for another player; maybe something has to be done now because that village wasn’t destroyed."

Until Red 5 decides to unveil it's secret project, the game that would appear to win on the most fronts right now appears to be Vanguard. In Vanguard, you CAN construct your own buildings where there were none previously, and other players see your building once it's there. You cannot quite build your own dungeon on a mountain top, but you can build on vacant plots of game real estate set aside for player housing and you can build your own ships (117 different models to choose from?).

One of the most interesting and unique aspects of Vanguard that I've often thought was well ahead of it's time is the Diplomacy system mini-game that is used to attempt to manipulate NPCs through conversations controlled by cards that represent categorized dialog and responses (eg: Aggressive Statement, Crafted Insult, Embellish the Truth and Knee-Jerk Reaction). The mini-game can become quite complex and represents the first and only attempt to provide an interface for NPC conversation that I could actually get behind.

Everyone gets tired of constantly clicking through multiple-choice response lists for NPC interaction. Vangaurd puts a very respectable spin on that process. If you become good at Diplomacy, you can ostensibly manipulate more favorable outcomes from NPC interaction. At the very least, you can aspire to some degree of social engineering skill, even if that's not what they call it. Truly, it is a step away from being able to teach the under-socialized how to interact with each other IRL for the first time.

One feature that I am surprised nobody has implemented in an MMO is the ability for players to purchase and connect their own server where they host housing, etc. Figure that it would work just like website hosting: for a low fee, you get shared hosting and a limited amount of usage out of your housing but for a higher fee you can get a whole dedicated server with unlimited usage, etc. Each server just needs to run a copy of the software, but can manage it's own content.

When you have a hosted zone, you select a gateway or access point for it in the existing game world (or even in another player's zone). When your zone is available, other players can access it via the gateway that you established. Inside of your zone, you could be given any range of control over the game environment that the game designers can think of, from restricting who can enter to removing gravity completely (space environment, etc).

That's ownership. That's the persistent player housing that we've been waiting for. I don't even care which MMO takes the idea and profits from it: just let me play the game!