The Quest to Find the Perfect MMO

A few months ago, I downloaded Everquest II. Everquest was such a big thing, and it was F2P, so I figured, why not.

The interface defeated me within the first couple of minutes. 'Wow, this is really difficult to navigate all these freaking menus,' thought I as I clicked X numerous times as a consequence of opening my inventory. 'Also, why is it so hard to equip things and compare things? WTF is up with this,' my thoughts continued. After completing a couple of quests, I left the game, right-clicked on Steam, and told it to delete.

I am often defeated by MMOs. They offer many advantages. Their games are usually really interesting looking and I always want to play them, but then when I get them, I realize that it's kind of boring, a little bit of a pain, and I'm not that interested.

I downloaded Forsaken World and then I waited a while. I ended up deleting it without playing. I played a whole lot of Skyrim in the middle (let's say about 30 hours worth and leave it at that). It was also at this point that I first heard of Secret World and nearly had a heart attack trying to figure out whether a preorder needed to happen or whether I needed to wait, given how I dislike MMOs.

Then I got into The Secret World beta. The first thing you do in this game is choose a faction-- Illuminati, Templar, or Dragon. Each faction has its own recruiting video, so to speak. I chose Illuminati after a seriously badass video and proceeded to try to make a character that as looked as much like FemShep as possible. Because I could.

There's a lot about this game that appears to be like a standard MMO. But there's also a lot of this game that ISN'T like a standard MMO. The dialogue is witty, as if Joss Whedon decided to turn his hand to video games. There are lots of Cthulhu references and tentacled zombies. (No, I shit you not.) The landscape-- at least in the beta-- was a little bare. I don't know if that has changed since the game came out, but there it stands. I started off in Brooklyn and where I could go and what I could do was bleak and a little linear. However, since I played the beta, and how much of that stayed and how much went is something I'm not quite sure of. However, within the locations I could go to had people who were awesome. The voice acting in this game is killer. The people just-- shine. Sample dialogue: "We have stocks in hell, and compromising photos of angels." -- the line that made me choose Illuminati. "Roleplaying is the only avenue of control." -- multiple self-referential jokes are made of awesome.

The way to move from one area to the next is Yggdrasil. Yes, the World Tree, with branches that reach to heaven and roots in hell. This is the perfect reference for this game. It also has so many branches that it means, as an MMO, the game can evolve and spawn new branches whenever it wants.

A few cons, which I strongly suspect were worked out after release: character models were limited (only to be expected in beta status). Having several copies of yourself wandering around is freaky. I was also in the stress test for the server, and kept getting kicked off because of that. The first quest after you leave the Illuminati headquarters was also one of the standard "kill a bunch of x" quests, which I hate. However, it was kill a bunch of zombies and attract them by making car alarms go off. So. That was fun. However, the quest progressed weirdly. You were supposed to be figuring out how to attract the zombies, but apparently after you kill a certain number of zombies, the information is mysteriously beamed into your brain, since the quest objective changes to jumping on cars. That was irritating.

All told, though, The Secret World didn't grab my interest enough for me to actually buy it, especially given that it has monthly fees.

20 or 30 more hours of Skyrim passed.

Then we have the Korean F2P MMORPGs, e.g. Maple Story and Trickster Online. These are actually the only MMOs I have ever been able to get into and play continuously. The cute graphics, easy storylines, and Engrish have never disappointed me, largely because I don't expect more. With games like The Secret World, I do expect more. I expect the same level of detail and tight storylines as a single player game, and an MMO is too big-- it just can't deliver that, not that I've found. With the coming of Elder Scrolls Online, I only hope that I won't be disappointed-- I don't know that my heart can stand it.

Furthermore, a note on my quest for the "perfect" MMO. I think my largest problem with MMOs is that I always want an MMORPG to still identifiably be an RPG and it never is. I don't really LIKE the MMO genre, so the stronger the MMO elements are in a game, the more likely I am to dislike it. It has nothing to do whether MMOs are necessarily "good"; it's more that I personally need an MMO where the RPG elements overpower the multiplayer elements, and that is precisely what I'm looking for. So my quest to find the perfect MMO is not a quest to find one that is perfect for anyone other than me. Perfect is a term relative to the subject and can't subsequently be defined or transcribed to the object. My perfect MMO is essentially a single-player game expanded outward; my hopes for Elder Scrolls Online, which I sincerely doubt will be fulfilled, are that it will be as if a single-player character took a step sideways and suddenly became embroiled in a mess where all her fellows had as strong of a personality and ambition as her. I don't know if an MMO like this exists, but I hope that someday it will.