I’ve been thinking about what I like in online games. I started, with a lot of others, my first foray into Massively Multi Player Online Role Playing Games with Ultima Online. Its style of graphics and incredible lag just didn’t do much to interest me. Then along came EverQuest. I played EQ for a long time. Not as long as others I know, but very long for me, especially when you consider that I hated it. Until EQ all my online gaming experience was with first person shooters. Log on to a server and kill people. Sometimes there were team games and everyone would work together to kill the other team. I liked that. EQ I didn’t like. It was a groundbreaking game with outstanding graphics at the time and a persistent world, I wanted to like it. Everything I believed about my likes of game playing said I SHOULD like it. But I didn’t.

I blamed it on grouping, said I wasn’t social and didn’t want to hang out with other people; I only wanted to kill other people. It was a game after all. Why would I want to deal with all the real life complexity of group dynamics toward a shared (and sometimes not shared) goal that could easily eat up hours of time without killing a thing? Isn’t that what ends up happening in real life? I blamed it on paying a monthly fee to spend my free time in a world that was even more restrictive on what I could do and say than reality was. I blamed it on being far too time consuming. In EQ you could never just hop in and play for 15 or 30 minutes or even an hour. An hour was what you needed just to get organized to decide where you may be going in the game to play for the next 3-12 hours.

It turns out that for me, it was all of these things and more and none of them or rather it’s the way those things take so much time in EQ and hardly any in other games. But the root issue I had with EQ was that it wasn’t a RPG. There really hasn’t been a computer based RPG to date. They’ve gotten a bit better over time but still have reduced the entire RPG genre to “kill things and advance in levels”. You can’t really role play. In EQ you’d actually get banned if you tried to role play and what you were doing was in violation of one of the many vague and nebulous rules, like “diminishing another players FUN”. I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons, the perennial RPG. My fondest memories of playing it and the moments that stand out the most were the role playing aspects as well as the fact that your actions were limited only by your imagination and that of the Dungeon Master.

For instance, one time our little adventuring party had to kill a stone golem. None of has any idea how to go about this and lacked the required spells and special items. The best we could do was annoy it. Then we hit upon a great idea and asked the DM for more details on our surroundings. Our idea worked. We used magic to heat the golem while it chased us around; fireballs, burning oil and even walking it through a dry forest which we set on fire. Once it was thoroughly heated up we tricked it into falling into a nearby lake. The rapid change in temperature cracked it and made it brittle and our trusty warrior beat it until it broke into little pieces. Another time I was playing with DM who rewarded integrating your characters back story into the game. My character had a pathological hatred of melons as a result of seeing his father killed as a child when a melon cart fell on him in the town market. My character would seek out and assail with his swords any melons he found at every town market we entered. The group dynamics this created was hilarious and we spent a fair amount of time as a group dealing with the local law enforcement as a result.

Neither of these two scenarios, and the many thousands like them, can be recreated in any way in a computer RPG. If they could, I’d deal with all the things I didn’t like in EQ. It would be worth it because it would have a point. Role Playing Games are just that. They let you play a role with all the power of your imagination. The worlds are far more dynamic than any computer RPG to date. One day, someone will figure out how to create a true computer RPG, it will probably take humans as DM’s being online 24/7 but if they can do it I think they’ll have a true success.

Planetside has many of the same elements of EQ. But it’s faster. You can be playing in a matter of minutes. Grouping isn’t a long drawn out affair of trying to meet everyone’s needs. The needs are obvious. The goals are the same. Groups come together quick and people leave and are added frequently. And best of all you get to kill other people and not computer controlled monsters. This makes a huge difference. Not just in what they do, they behave very unlike any computer AI controlled critter, but the very knowing that your adversary is another human and that you will kill him/her or they will kill you is fantastic and addicting. At the same time you are working as a group, if you choose, towards an objective; take the tower, take the base, defend etc. The group dynamics though are a tiny shadow of what they are in EQ because there isn’t time for them to get in the way. Planetside moves fast. Danger is constant. There isn’t time to bicker about arcane discrepancies.