[MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?

[Koster, Raph]

From: Oliver Smith

> It may not be replete with what other games consider "content" and
> that may result in an absence of what you consider gameplay, but
> but what it does do is deliver an activity that players are
> entertained by, a variety of settings for them, a storyline
> linking them together, and the means of arriving at the next
> personalised piece of entertainment.

> In short - it is to date the MMORPG most akin to being a graphical
> MUD.

Now, that's an interesting statement. If anything, it reads
backwards to me. CoH is a great game, it's incredibly fun, and it's
the LEAST mudlike of any of the MMORPGs, from where I sit. Why do
you say it's the most akin to a graphical mud?

> You don't need to *defend* depth, because nothing on the market
> has it. The harbingers of what currently passes for depth simply
> have a sizeable library of content and a lot of rules to limit
> what you can access and how quickly.

I think saying that "nothing on the market has depth" implies you've
got a different definition of depth than most do. Can you clarify
what you mean by that?

Typically depth is described as gradually unfolding many subtle
variations on a system. This doesn't imply content at all, though
content can certainly be an element in it. It also does not imply
breadth of feature set (i.e. number of systems), since each of the
features may well be shallow. Howwver, interaction between multiple
systems can also lead to depth.

By that metric, the successful games on the market all certainly
meet a certain level of depth, CoH included, though in many cases
not as deep as the text-based games (Achaea comes to mind as an
example of a deeper game than most of the commercial MMORPGs).

>  In essence they are selling you weekly > serials but somehow
>  expecting you to stay tuned to the channel > throughout.

Here you stretch your analogy to merge the issues of time or
accessibility of entertainment with the issue of depth.

I think it is fair to say that just as many mud players can log into
any Diku derivative and say "I think I get it, I am bored already,"
and many MMORPG players can log into any level-based MMORPG and say
"I think I get it, I am bored already, this is a treadmill," many
MMORPG players can log into CoH and see the really cool combat
system, play it for a while, and then say "I think I get it..." To a
player with a certain level of experience, depth is irrelevant; to a
player with a certain other level of experience, accessibility is
irrelevant. That's just a normal play pattern. Arguing over whether
it is the right reaction is sort of strange.

If we're going to discuss CoH, it would be much more interesting to
discuss the relative weight of "instancing" versus "world," the
feasibility and desirability of adding an economy, etc.

-Raph
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