Hide In Shadows

Online Worlds Roundtable #10 Rebuttal

In the final stage of the roundtable at RPG Vault, Mark Jacobs of Mythic Entertainment misunderstood my post, so I felt I had to post again, to clear up any misunderstandings.

Claus, you criticize the current crop of games as being simply "bland and boring..." but I notice on your website that your game uses Elves, Dwarves, Humans and Orks. Hmm, I must wonder why you fall back on using the same conventional races as most games do, including Dark Age of Camelot. Why didn't you chuck all the typical races and create new ones? For the same reason that most games don't, because people want to see something that they are familiar with already. Pot, meet kettle; kettle, meet pot. :)

Mark,

I appreciate you taking the time to comment on my post and to glance through our website, but I'm afraid that you misunderstood what I was saying.

When I use the term 'bland and boring', it's not my intention to point the finger at Dark Age of Camelot or any other game in particular. I'm relaying the evolving sentiments of gamers expressed through posts on all the boards out there, and identifying this as one of the possible reasons why the massively multiplayer category has not grown as quickly as various observers predicted a few years ago.

I don't feel that the current crop of games being perceived as bland and boring by the gamers has anything to do with the use of familiar races like elves, dwarves, humans or orks - especially not if that's the extent of similarities a cursory examination of a website can produce. It's not the overuse of the fantasy genre either; gamers seem to find science fiction MMORPGs lacking as well. Facelifts, cloning and changing storylines can only propel the genre so far.

My point has to do with what's under the hood, the game mechanics; I am talking about what the players themselves are complaining about - like experience points, levels, leveling, camping, character classes and having to re-roll all the time, nerfing, turn-based combat, grinding, moving from one spot to the next for better experience points - in short, doing the same old stuff over and over again until your eyes bleed and you have nothing to show for it except a number indicating your level. A level that says everything about the time invested in the game, and virtually nothing about how good you are, or about how much fun you've had playing.

Dark Age of Camelot is one of the better and more successful MMORPGs out there, and it's fortunate to have the 200k subscriptions you've mentioned; however, there were predictions saying that this number should be higher, and that's what this roundtable is about.

Expanding the genre is what all of us in the MMORPG industry are working towards, and I believe that what the players are telling us on this merits close investigation.

Claus

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