The Perfect MMORPG
I am, like many other MMO fans, looking for the perfect MMORPG. I have not found it yet. I wish I had, then I could blissfully spend every day playing it with my friends.
Since I have now started my own website that is about the best MMORPGs 2015, I feel that it is appropriate to define exactly what I mean by “the best.” What is the perfect MMORPG?
Let’s talk basics first. Keep in mind that I am only talking about my personal idea of a perfect MMORPG. Your perfect MMO is likely a much different game from mine.
Basics:
- must be PC – Mac is fine, too. What I am saying is that I don’t want a mobile MMORPG. If I want to play on my smartphone or tablet then I will play Candy Crush, Bejeweled, or Disney Bola Football. I do not want a mobile MMORPG, I want the deep gameplay mechanics that you can only find in a PC game. I also do not want to play on a console in the living room while my family members complain about them not being able to watch TV.
- free to play or buy to play – I am fine with dipping into my wallet a few times but a bill every month is too much
- good customer service – if the game is free then I am willing to pay something to get a reply from customer service. If the game is paid for then there is no excuse not to have good customer service
Races/Classes:
- cleric/healer – I like to play the healer and support class. It’s just what I like. I realize this is playing into the stereotype of girls playing a support class but I don’t care.
- melee – for variety I also play melee/tank characters
- non-human – generally, humans are boring. I almost always try to go for something more exotic than that. Races I like are elf, vampire, alien, etc.
- playing as a monster – it’s weird but I like it. I want to play the other side. Instead of being a human and killing monsters, I want to be the monster and complain about those terrible humans or sabotage the game
- adult character designs – I am not comfortable with kiddy-looking characters, especially the female ones that are inappropriately dressed
Social:
- guilds, clans, groups, etc. – there should be support for the social side of MMOs. People should be able to form clans or guilds easily and raid dungeons with a group
- chat block – we all know there are abusive players so it should be very easy to block people in chat and possibly report them if they repeatedly harass a player. Girls like me get stalked sometimes.
- emoticons/emotes – I love them
Gameplay:
- dungeons
- PvP
- PvE
- bosses
- fun and humor
- a good story
Summation:
In short, I want a free to play social MMORPG game in which I can play as a elf healer. My needs are really simple!
Dislikes
But I have only been talking about the things that I want in an MMORPG. The flipside of that is that there are also things I really do not want in a game. I mentioned some of my dislikes in the text above but here are a few more:
- Daily tasks – dang it, why are there daily tasks? And they are always so mundane like bringing 10 herbs to a specific NPC. It’s just as exciting as taking out the trash in real life.
- Inescapable quests – I know that many MMORPGs have thousands of quests. Okay, that’s fine. What I don’t like is when it is impossible to skip quests. I do not want to have to complete 20 different quests just to be able to travel to a new area. In console games there is always a skip button for cutscenes. How come some MMORPGs force you to sit through all of their content? I want to have the choice of what I can play.
- Showing everyone my status – I want to hide. Do I really want my boss to find out that I spend 10 hours last weekend playing games? Um, I’ll have to go with no.
Bonus content:
What I have outlined are my basic likes and dislikes. If you read this rather long shopping list, you will find that many current and upcoming MMO games fit the bill. But it’s not enough to have the right basic ingredients of a good game; the perfect MMORPG goes above and beyond that.
- Player economy – I greatly enjoy dynamic, changing MMO economies in which the prices of goods change depending on player actions that affect supply and demand
- Few restrictions on trading – hand in hand with the idea of a player-run economy is free trade.
- Politics – I am sad that the upcoming World of Darkness MMORPG has been cancelled because that game, as described, would have been the perfect political MMO game.
- Sandbox elements – these days many developers have been adding more tools for user-generated content. I like that. I also like skills, professions, player housing, and other sandbox gameplay features.
Conclusion:
That’s what I think. It’s not a lot, is it? What about you, what do you think is the perfect MMORPG?
I kind off disagree on the free to play part. To look at the whole thing realistically; the publisher want to earn money with their game so they have to drive their customers into buying stuff. You can either force to them to pay to be generally able to play or to force to pay if they want to do/have certain things. But if you would have anything and could do anything right from the start, most ppl wouldnt spend money. So that leads (if we dont consider b2p with sub fees at all) to two models. Buy2play and free2play. For the first one you ofc can expect access to all parts of the game as well as all functions as well at least some basic customer support (cause you actually already paid for it). For free2play you actually cannot expect anything, at all…cause well, why would you? They simply want to attract you to their game to make you spend money on it. In the end this often ends up being annoying with a lot of focus to the itemshop.
So I think purely free2play is way more toxic for the player than buy2play or sub-based is. At least thats for MMORPGs. There are way less hidden costs and shop-driven content updates in the least 2 models. And if you offer a good trialaccount-system the barrier for ppl to try the game out is fairly low as well.
Thougts to the other points:
well, whilst I was loving pvp back in the earlier days of WoW (tbc arena) and warhammer online I then started to realize that true competitive PvP can never exist in a MMORPG that wants to maintain PvE integrity. So Im thinking some PvP action is fine (like some form instant action with battle grounds) but its just really not that important. For true PvP there are RTS, FPS and Mobas which all do a way better job for this.
for pve I like the trinity (i think its necessary…gw2 pve showed how boring it is without) but maybe not all bound to classes too much.
I think all that stuff like Priests as healers, Warriors are tanks and Rogues are dps is getting boring as hell. I want free character customization! And as PvP doesnt matter anyway, screw pvp balance! I want to completly develope my characters abilities to what I want to play, how I want to play.
The Secret World hat some good ideas there as well as Rift.
To round things up, a stable engine which can show multiple characters at once without dying or eating up all of my ram and a stable, user-friendly would be needed (gw2 showed how it can be done…displays tons of ppl at once without lagging, doesnt kill all my memory and looks really good).
A persistent, open world that actually feels like a big gigantic continent.
Several ways to get the same stuff (explanation: in every game you need something…be it gold, gems or w/e. I want multiple, equivalent ways to achieve this. Like farming, grinding, doing dungeons, crafting+selling stuff etc. Im fine with dailies…really…but they need to be optional and the same thing has to be able to be acquired in another way).
I dont think I need to list all of the QoL things which should be common these days (like every you stated like showing status etc)
Oh and I actually would love to play a good storyline in an mmorpg but I dont think its the most important thing out there. If I had to choose between a great endgame and a mediocre storyline and a great storyline with mediocre endgame, I would ofc always pick the endgame. If I want to live a story I can always fall back to single player rpgs.
So far, I could elaborate way more on that topic, but this is supposed to be a comment, not an essay so Ill leave it as it is for now.
greetings
shan
I was wondering…. i bet you have. but have you played Tera By gameforge. sounds like it may be something you like,