MMORPGs have become stale. They've become uninteractive and linear. And it worked for a while. It worked really, really well from the perspective of the game companies and their incomes. A quite large amount of people have gotten bored to the grind. I'll offer an explanation as to why we have landed ourselves in this position and a few ideas on how I think you could turn the situation around to the developer's benefit. An essential part of it is not conforming to the norms of a stereotypical themepark MMO, finding followers from the market which isn't ran by the monopoly of WoW and paying attention to the elements below the surface, general drives, which make mainstream games accessible rather than their pixel shells.
Current Situation: Quite Shabby
I'll start off by explaining some of the problems the linear desgin has risen on the long run: When true interaction (a player run economy and capturable areas, to name a few) has to step aside for linear gameplay, there's no dynamic content. This means that you're going to hit a brick wall at some point, because linear succession has to have a beginning and an end. The beginning and the end alternate in an infinite loop with such speed, that you don't even notice it starting all over again and you'll be hyped up to see what happens at the end again! Levels were a genius invention, right? Well, sooner or later, player by player, people will realize that they're only attending a polished rat race. There's a very specific pattern you go through, which never, ever, changes. Only the cosmetics of the situation change. You kill a rat to gain one experience point, you kill a goliath gain a million experience points. Now, more and more people are starting to get fed up with this pattern, but there's nothing else on the market to hold their attention and developers not going to gain it by continuing to sew the same texture of the same pattern.
How do the game companies react to this, then? By putting out more of the same old, of course! Investors might see it as the safest route to go, as copying the hit has always worked for single-player games. The thing is, that at the moment, playing it ”safe” in the MMO business is more of a slippery slope than doing something different with your game. You can't expect to see success with an imitation of the market's biggest MMO, because these games are continuous experiences. They don't have a definite ending like many single-player games, despite being linear. Hence, people would rather play the real deal than the imitation of it, because they can and they have already bonded with their e-persona in it. I mean, it's common knowledge that a great deal of the big budget games in the MMO business have horribly flopped in the last few years.
I'm quite concerned about the future of the largest upcoming title, Star Wars: The Old Republic, because it focuses on the completely wrong ideals. From what I've read, their main selling points are the epic storyline and a complete voice acting. That would be amazing, if it was 2003. And if the game was a single-player. Making a solid storyline as the centerpiece of a massive multi-player game is senseless from the get go, because I highly doubt that they're going to create a story that last more than a hundred hours per character. Even that's quite the reach, when you look at the length of the conventional modern RPG's storyline. Now, let's say they succeeded to make the storyline epic. How are they planning to keep the players interested for over than a month? What about a year? Are they going pay more attention to the first ten percent of the gaming experience, rather than the last ninety percent? The problem all the MMOs that have flopped lately share has been the lack of longevity.
Stability is the Key to a Successful MMORPG
The amount of people buying the game doesn't define an MMO's success, the amount of people staying does. Actually, it would be a much more solid way of approaching the making of an MMO to start up without a huge amount of hype around the launch and build up from there. That's because the servers are supposed to be running three years later. There's time to make up for your mistakes when you are working on an MMO, and that time should be given, because the launches of this genre are hard enough to pull off without hype.
If we assumed that your monthly subscription was 15 dollars, having 25 000 players stick around for a year is as much money as having 100 000 people buy the game on the first day and leave after three weeks. Now think about those numbers with a community that slowly builds up all the time, over years. MMOs are always are at a fetal stage when they're launched and if their most active days are seen at launch, the game is pretty much dead and nobody will have to chance to see it actually blossom. This is where all the imitators of WoW have fatally missed the mark, because the game grew up to be the goliath which it is today. It didn't have anything near to the amount of players it has today when it launched, it had around a million players in the first quarter of 2005. This is the reason you want to build a strong community rather than a peak of hype around your game.
How Could a Sandbox MMO Benefit from the Situation?
I'll start by stating this: You can't fight World of Warcraft. Not with a fresh out of the oven MMO, when the Blizzard's game is going through its plateau years. It's impossible to draw an actually faithful playerbase to your game when you need to start from a premise like that. WoW itself would have failed if it had to start out from a situation like this. You need a community who will stick around and let you build the game. WoW's success has clearly divided the MMO fanbase into two crowds: There's the people who despise the game and the people who don't. The dilemma is that the people who have grown to hate the typical themepark will never cross over to such a game, but the community that plays those games does not have such hate for sandbox games by default.
This is where sandbox comes into play: If you release a foundation for a themepark MMO there will be no space for it to breathe whatsoever, but there is a community craving for a sandbox. Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not saying that a sandbox could beat the Blizzard's flagship product off the bat, it simply wouldn't get ran over by it like every new themepark MMO.
This situation would make it an actually valid option to create a massive multi-player sandbox with a sufficient budget. EVE Online is the only well executed sandbox to still live and breathe today. I personally think it is a great game, but it only attracts a very specific crowd. It has unfortunately got a way too steep learning curve for many and the pace of the game is often deemed agitating. CCP have taken the technique of bulding a strong sense of community to heart and they've seen great success because of it.
The common gamer in a sandbox is not a myth, either, they just don't want to see a too much of a hassle for having the fun a sandbox may offer. As the dedicated sandbox crowd will allow the project to grow into its full potential, I think that it's very possible to create a sandbox without the usual problems which may turn off the casual gamer, while not diluting the gaming experience for others.
Essentials of a Casual Sandbox
Let's have a look at Minecraft. That game is a perfect example of what a casual single-player sandbox game is capable of. As far as I know, it was mostly created by one single guy and it was never advertised. However, people found it and it spread like a wildfire through the word of mouth, because it was fun to play. You can get started very quickly, get your own house going in twenty minutes, but the possibilites are limitless. I think that's one of the game's main attractions, actually. It can suck even the most casual player in quickly, because you can get invested in the game with your own base and a cave during the first time you play it. It tickles the primal needs of sheltering yourself. I think that The Sims was somewhat driven by the same sort of mentality. You could call it a sandbox in the sense of how dynamic the game was; you could never really tell where would you end up with it and what your house would look this time.
If you look at niche sandbox games like EVE online, it might take you very well several months to get into the game in a way or another, to get addicted. Of course, on the other hand we have an MMO and on the other we have a single-player game, so it's a bad idea to start comparing them, but my point is to show what makes it easier for a casual gamer to get into a sandbox. The ratio of time you're needed to invest into a game in order to fill any kind of a role, to get into the experience, is not hitting the mark for most players in any of the modern sandbox MMOs.
Another thing that makes casual gamers repel from sandbox games are the often harsh death penalties and the fact that more often than not those penalties can face you pretty much anywhere. I think EVE has handled this problem well with the security rating system, where you're (almost) absolutely safe in some areas, not all that safe in some and not at all safe in the zero security systems. This system gives the players space to progress in a pace they want to and face the risks when they're ready.
The great part of the system CCP have created is that even the people that aren't all that interested in getting into fights with other people will be able to enter zero security space, because it's all controlled by different alliances and the players be protected by their own if they belong into one of them. Players can act on time, avoiding complete surprise ganks, mainly because EVE's world is basically a gigantic collection of small maps: The world is divided into thousands of solar systems and you can tell if someone enters into your territory through the public system chat. (Example: The same thing could be done in a non-divided world by giving guilds the ability to assemble watchtower buildings that give a notification to the guild's players if someone enters the vicinity of them and limit the amount of them in a ratio of one tower per one city in order to not have the whole map covered in them.)
Making the Sandbox Accessible
Levels can still very well be used in a game even if the levels weren't the only direction of the game, though, because it's always been a working reward system and nothing's going to change that. The system in itself isn't flawed, whether it be separated into multiple skills which you can choose to level up or a solid progress bar for all advancement, but people have gotten tired of the methods used to reach a new level. That's why people have started referring leveling up as grinding in the first place: It isn't fun anymore, because the bar is set too low or it has been made far too repetetive.
The most crucial thing that has been wrong with most sandbox MMOs is that they've been unable to give a direction to the player. The new players who enter the game are so overwhelmed by all the choices that they stop seeing any. Many players want a path to follow, kind of get seduced by the game instead of having to find out what the game is capable of and what you want to do with it all by yourself. Some people know exactly what they want from the game after you've been simply dropped into the world and given a tutorial that scratches the surface of the game's fundamental features it's no wonder new players often get confused in games like EVE. Having the player feel lost is never a good thing. Levels being the focus of all progression give that much needed direction in themepark MMOs, but what could this direction possibly be in a sandbox game?
A clear direction to players in a sandbox could be given through a survival experience. When it's a survive or die situation for your character in a game, you'll have a very clear goal, but you'll have the sandbox there to give you an abundance of different ways to go about accomplishing the goal. Survival is the driving force of all human existence and testing yourself in such an environment would be what Raph Koster himself (in the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design) describes as one of the very activities where fun derives from. The player would slowly evolve from the very basic needs of survival to the stage where you start in a normal sandbox MMO and beyond it. This would make diving into the experience smoother and more intuitive.
Another direction to give the players is through competition. Just about all the multi-player FPS and RTS games thrive on this ideal. Another example of this owuld be Guild Wars. In its very core, competition is about solving a problem within a given framework better than your opponent. This gives endless variation, if the opponents are human players. Players have to adapt to the situation created by them and their opponent. The dilemma is that most MMOs rely on computer generated numbers with terms dictated by the action you use on the opponent. If you know the opponents skill and gear loadout, it's easy to tell the outcome of the fight if the player who you are against knows what they're doing. That's because many of the games lack the variables that makes the opponent humane.
The more space you give for mistakes, the more compelled the players will be to better their performance. People making mistakes are good for a game, because they will not get bored as long as the mistakes they make aren't out of their reach to fix. If you played a flawless round of Call of Duty multi-player every time started a game, you'd get bored in no time, because you would have nothing to learn from the game anymore. People want to learn from a game, even if they exclaimed that they absolutely hate making the mistake and dying. Making the mistake, however, only makes their will to win much bigger than it was before the mistake. Therefore, an infinitely enthralling game design would be something where the player can't have a perfect play or it happens rarely. To keep the player going towards the direction, there needs to be some sort of reward for succeeding. It can be simply the joy of being victorious or something the designer has decided to put in place, like getting a new skill when you level up.
However, at the core of a true sandbox there always needs to be the ability to create, socialize and relax. The game needs to give some well thought out space for that kind of activity. Darkfall, for example, failed at this and that's the reason it is more of an empty box in which you can whack other players with a sword, rather than a box with actual sand in it. Allowing the players to settle down somewhere and relax is important for even the most hardened ganker sometimes, because everyone wants some sort of pacing from the game. The game has to allow the player to find their optimal balance between action and relaxation. Relaxation is basically accomplishing tasks with a very low skill treshold and the fact that you have a complete control over the situation. Doing these kinds of tasks allows the players to socialize well on the side if they feel like they want to do it. However, if this fills up too much of the player's time, it becomes boring.
The ability to create comes from granting the players a freedom to customize things to their own preference: Their house, their character, their equipment, their perks and so on. There is a very fine line between giving the players too much control over creating and giving just the right amount for the players to be able to have something rather unique. The line needs to be tailored in a different manner for each game, but it definitely needs to be there, in order to not have the game world fill up with phallic architecture and unwanted blockades overnight. The basic equation is that the more you want your game to be based around creation, the more freedom should be given to the players regarding it, but the more freedom you give the more you have to sacrifice the intended setting and meaning of the game to the players' visions.
MMOs with successful pacing between non-action and action are capable of creating the strongest bond between the player and the game.
Conclusion
Most people have had the best time of all the themepark MMOs in the first one they played, because they were new to the system. A larger chunk of the people who have played WoW hadn't really played an MMO beforehand, thus it was their first contact with the system. Either way, the novelty has worn off for everyone now. That makes one thing sure: MMOs can't stay in the same spot anymore, be it going more linear or un-linear, be it going less or more massive.
BioWare views that taking more distance to the original concept of massive multi-player games, by including more single-player elements in their game is the right route to take. It seems like the reason developers who lean towards a more instanced gameplay is to make the MMO experience easier to access for the common player. What makes an experience easily accessible, however, is the amount of direction you give to the player and like I explained in the last chapter, a direction doesn't necessarily have to be a linear direction like an implanted single-player storyline.
Directions are at the very core of an enjoyable gaming experience. All the directions the game mechanics give to the player can be pretty much layered in one game, but you have to be careful with using too many of them in order to not make a full circle and come back to the point where the players are confused by the amount of choices. A successful design has to create a flawless interplay between the reward and the direction, while not cluttering the game with an abundance of them.
