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I recently read a pretty mind-opening quote from the Mortal Online webpage. Obviously there are classifications or subgenres of MMORPGs, and the sandbox genre is an age old one. I’ve never thought to call games with levels and raid bosses anything other than an Everquest derivative, but this quote has shown me what they really are: theme parks.

The overwhelming majority of MMORPG’s today belong to the Theme Park category. A Theme Park is often carefully planned and can deliver some very unique attractions. On the other hand, the attractions usually require you to be of a certain age or length to ride them, you have to stand in line, and none or minimal interaction is needed from your part. Like a real theme park it always looks the same and chances are you grow tired of the rides after 20 times or so, unless the theme park creates new exiting rides to keep the park entertaining.

In a Sandbox game you are able to create your own rides, and you interact with other players most of the time instead of NPCs. Every time you play will be a unique experience as the player interactions determine the outcome, and the world changes and reacts dynamically to their actions.

As quoted, everything in this genre of game is an attraction. You slowly become bored of the ones you’ve done over and over, since you already know what’s going to happen and when that once-interesting rollercoaster takes a sudden dive to try to scare you, you can’t help but yawn. While going on the same old rides, you are stuck waiting while the developers create new ones. After the new ones are implemented, the old ones are forever forgotten and unused.

One of the great flaws of online RPG’s is that they have character levels. You gain experience from doing certain things and artificially advance your character via these levels. This means there needs to be specialized content for certain level ranges, since the entire point of levels is to restrict what you can and can’t do and keep you playing the game to keep increasing that all-important number.

While it may sound like levels are a harmless and even novel concept, they bring to the table countless serious flaws. First is the fact that they almost always are associated with player classes: this means that when you make your character, you pick your class at the beginning of your character’s career. As you level up, your character will get stronger and ultimately change, meaning that the very first choice you make as a player and the most important one – your class selection – is ultimately a blind decision. As well, you are almost never allowed to change this decision once it is made. This means you are left to the developers’ mercy to hope that the class is balanced and plays as it is advertised (which is almost never the case, extra text is always added to spice the class descriptions up but ultimately it is a falsity). Due to levels, which are a time sink by design, if you end up with a class you dislike you have no choice but to start over from scratch.

Another tremendous flaw that may be less noticed by players is that the inclusion of levels bring an amazing amount of added development time along with them. While the actual act of implementing the leveling system itself is most likely nothing more than throwing some numbers around in the code base, these levels demand specialized content. Common themes in a game with levels are things such “newbie zones” – where players start out with very weak monsters to kill, or “group content” which are scenarios or monsters that only a group of appropriately leveled players can tackle. Thousands of quests are hand written and implemented for no purpose other than to make leveling a little more interesting.  While this content can sometimes add spice to a game, there is no point to designing a newbie area that players will only see and use for a limited time in their career. Extrapolate this into the numerous zones dedicated to nothing more than housing the monsters and quests needed to get players to level up past that zone and into the next leveling area, and you can see where the countless wasted hours upon hours of development time could be used elsewhere to much greater effect.

The other ways in which levels ruin games are numerous: any game with levels usually has them as an easily viewable statistic, and since it is almost always the single most important statistic on a character or NPC, being able to view it ensures that all encounters are boiled down to be predictable and boring. If a friend joins the game at a later date in time, you usually cannot play with one another due to level disparity unless the game implements something like a mentor system like City of Heroes did – but if levels did not exist in the first place, this unnecessary code wouldn’t have even been written. Again, levels do nothing but make development time drag on and serve as an excuse to keep players in a game rather than make the game genuinely interesting. Nearly every MMORPG that has levels is released in what most believe to be an unfinished state. And lest we forget, when has a level pattern been referred to anything other than a “grind”?

Again, referencing the quote above, if you give players an environment that they can truly interact in they will find their own fun. Theme park games have to constantly produce more and more content and better and better items, a side effect called “mudflation” (item inflation in MUD games). In a sandbox, the items can be stale as long as players can interact with them in interesting ways and keep things fresh on their own terms. An item called “a rusty sword” that you can pick up, throw on the ground, trade to another player, melt down into it’s base components to use to craft a different item, fight with until it breaks, or get a player who is a blacksmith to repair it before it does is a much more interesting item than an item called “Karlore’s Greatsword of Demon-slaying” which drops from a special monster that you can only kill once a week and once you pick it up you can’t do anything aside replace it with a better item.

Here’s hoping that the sandbox genre will rise again, as I’ve grown very weary of standing in lines. I’ve got my plastic shovel and bucket ready.

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