So with the “free to play” (F2P) release of D&D Online, I was all jazzed up to get going with some of my pencil-and-paper (ok, MapTool and Skype) D&D buddies only to be stymied by their inability to find the requisite hardware and to get the s/w to install and run properly. I’ve played through the intro and gotten to town but I’ve stopped and hope that someone who wants to play with me will get it going eventually. (This is the primary reason I dropped out of WAR; my friends stopped playing so I had little draw to the game.)
In the meantime, I thought I’d check out the rest of the F2P landscape and ended up playing Runes of Magic (“Claudnine” on the Osha server). It’s just addictive enough in the player vs. environment (PvE) gameplay to keep me coming back. It’s polished and doesn’t seem to have significant limitations on the free players, unless you want to compete in the player vs. player (PvP) world.
Anyways, playing has got me thinking up ideas for MMO’s:
Immersion and extroversion – One thing I’ve found most/all MMO’s lack is the any ability to communicate outside of the MMO world. It sounds like Eve Online is going to break down that barrier, connecting their game and their game economy to the web and to a laundry list of devices. Bully for them! This is where I think MMO’s can shine, keep you connected in some form or fashion 24/7 from your net-capable phone, your public library’s web browser, whatever. Sure, you aren’t going to get the same experience on the phone, but you could get involved in trading, communicating (all MMO’s have internal e-mail and text chat) and the like.
“Turing’s World” – Imagine an MMO where the sharp distinction between player and non-player character is blurred. You log in to an existing character in the world, perhaps to play him/her/it for a session, perhaps for a long time. You battle other creatures, some of whom may be computer controlled, some of whom may be player controlled, some of whom may switch between computer and player control, and you’d often have difficulty telling the difference. Would be extra-cool to incorporate some game mechanic for determining who is computer controlled and who is player controlled, besides the warm fuzzies you get from trouncing another human player (which is the whole draw for PvP, after all.) Many MMO’s are fairly quiet in the virtual face-to-face encounters; much more occurs on region/world-wide chat and within guilds and groups; casual walking-by folks rarely chat. So in “Turing’s World”, who’d know if a particular creature was backed by flesh-and-blood or not?