If you’re craving old-school pen and paper RPG style gameplay, I have two recommendations. Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall Director’s Cut,, and Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong. They are really old school in how they work, and the writing, world building, and choices you have to make on your first few playthroughs are enthralling. I like the series so much that now, as I am playing through the hong kong campaign blind, I’m narrating all of the characters in character to my sis as we go through.
I suppose that is where I come from. Long before I played games online, playing a videogame was a social thing. My father would play top gun and airplane games on the NES, my siblings would sit down and try to think of ways to find hidden dungeons in Legend of Zelda, and we’d come up with elaborate fantasies together on the game itself. I suppose that’s why I like lets-plays so much, long before they were popular. A lot of it was childhood bickering, but the fact that me and my brother beat Ocarina of Time by alternating dungeons was something beautiful.
But if I were to summarize my earliest true “mutliplayer” experiences in RPGs, that would come three examples: Phantasy Star Universe, Runescape, and City of Heroes.
I had played PSO, but not online. PSU, I managed to play before the servers shut down. For quite some time, too. And, the thing with PSO and PSU was that, though it used many systems that would be archaic by today’s standards, there’s was one simple truth to the game that I have not seen since, and I miss the fact that this is no longer true. Let me pose it as a question:
You are in a game with no scaling whatsoever. You’re level 100. A random level 60 player joins your instance. Do you:
A) Yell at him because he is lower level until he leaves.
B) Kick the n00b without saying a word.
C) Be totally cool with him joining anonymously.
D) Keep him around but lament that he’ll leech rewards from you.
In every single MMO I’ve played since PSU, the answer was never C. But the way phantasy star handled stats and equipment, it wasn’t such a big deal if your teammates were lower level than you. There was no “min/maxing”, only level. The challenges were hard and didn’t scale, so every body you had helped. It was an action game after all, so if the lower level guy could handle himself, you were happy to have him around, at least to be a decoy.
So many games I’ve played are built to be the exact opposite. City of Heroes, even GW2 have systems built in that discriminate specifically against level itself, to avoid the pratfalls of a system that inadequately handles stat progression and open world challenges. With the way events scale, you can’t have lower level players joining and scaling up, because then they’re a detriment to the whole thing. The levels are superficial. But, I miss that. I miss both being the new guy everyone welcomed. I miss being the experienced guy who helps the new guy out.
The challenges of the game weren’t accommodating. They existed, whether you had a full party or not, if you had the levels or not, or if you had the gear or not. Seriously, for anyone who still has the old game, try a low level rush to ultimate difficulty in PSO going through both episodes, and suddenly it is one of the most tense and entertaining things you’ve done. You’ll learn that the first time an invisible robot one shots you with a flying head-bash out of stealth.
Second is Runescape.
Now, runescape is a very old game, and it is a very simple game. An utter grindfest. Built out of Java, it is literally a point and click adventure. You click somewhere, then your toon walked there. You clicked on a thing, then your toon did a thing. Very simple. Some would say very boring. They’re right, of course, but there was an advantage to this system. Because the interface was so simple, nearly anything could happen. The range and diversity of skills and minigames and environments, the general interactivity of the world is unlike anything I have seen since.
Want to manage your own kingdom? You could do that. Host an international port for trading and exploration? Got it. Hunt reptiles for voodoo witchdoctor potions? Got it. Manage a multi-person industrial sized blast furnace? Had that. Grow tomatoes and make pizzas? Do that, too. Delve into a roguelike randomly generated dungeon? Got it. Wander a dangerous PVP wasteland? It was there. Command armies in a turn based strategy game? Had it. And the quests… the storyline and the quests in the game are great. They’re funny, they’re interesting, they’re tense, and they add just a bit of mystery, and doing them gave you rewards other than “loot”. I still quite vividly remember having to navigate a parkour maze of a shanty town that was ruled by flying vampires who would demand blood tributes if they saw you in the open.
Nearly anything could happen, because it is just point and click. I miss that open diversity. Though the playerbase was young and the community was hostile, it still had that “the challenge exists, whether you’ve got enough people or not” system, and sometimes when a random dude ran by, you were glad he happened along. But modern MMOs aren’t like that anymore. If anything happens in GW2, 99/100 times it’s just going to be combat, where nameless loot rains from the sky, and the only thing that is important is that you survive the encounter.
The last one is City of Heroes.
Now, City of Heroes had level restrictions (and a way to bypass them eventually), a slightly shallow loot system where drops rained from the sky (but not as randomly), and a crafting system that was basically a components check. But there is something that City of Heroes did that other MMOs don’t, and that is character customization.
I’ve talked about it numerous times in the past. But basically, the character and build customization, both functionally and aesthetically, was exponentially higher than any other MMO I’ve ever played. Exponential is not an exaggeration. By today’s standards, it was literally a hundred times deeper. Every single skill was highly customizable, every skill set was highly customizable, every class had a highly customizable list of skill sets. You didn’t just pick your class. You picked your class, the skill sets that were available to that class, the skills that were in those skill sets, and then every little facet of every single skill could be customized. To top it off, after making each toon you could write a character bio and a catchphrase.
Also, you could completely design your own instanced missions and stories from scratch, and then put them up for the public to play, using either established characters or your own designs. Never has their been a game where I was more attached to the player characters than in CoH. Each one was truly unique, and many were extremely memorable. One of my favorites was a gigantic African-American guy named Hare Splittor (or Douglass Bane). He was dressed up as a gigantic pink and purple bunny with a battleaxe, and his origin story is that he is just a normal tough guy on a crusade to make it socially acceptable for men to like bunnies and tea parties by being the most aggressive and frightening vigilante possible. Anytime anyone would say anything, I’d RP a pseudo social-commentary conflict where I’d aggressively demand people be accepting of men dressed as pink bunnies. You can’t get that in experience in most games.
I’m going to paraphrase Arin Hanson here: Though videogames are covering more and more adult subject matters, by design they are catering more towards kids. They are being streamlined and simplified, and that isn’t a good thing. GW2 is not a complete “MMORPG” in the sense that I grew up with and am familiar with. It is an MMOG that stripped away a lot of the features that I’m familiar with, and it happened to take away enough of the right ones to resemble a playable game that has other people running around.
And that is it. “People running around”. I am a nameless (insert class here) using one of 3 peak builds as I traverse the world filled with people I will never remember, who will also never remember me. Whether someone is nearby or not doesn’t matter. The systems the game is built upon seem like vestiges of previous designs where those archaic systems actually mattered. Raids are more of a build check than anything else, having rigid structural requirements instead of an experience you can go through. Yes, the combat is solid, but that’s all there is.
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
