It’s a slow news day so I’ll link an interesting article on mmorpg.com. It discusses historical based MMOs and specifically one set in the Wild West era in US history. The author talks about his vision of what a Wild West MMO should be and different game mechanics that would be involved.

To summarize, he describes an FPS PvP driven game based around “reputation” earned and lost on either side of the law through gun fights, cattle rustling, bank robberies, bar brawls, things of that nature. He touches on other MMO aspects such as crafting, economy, services, and so forth.

Sounds like a cool idea but I see a major flaw, there would pretty much be no end game. There are only so many gangs to bust up or high noon gun fights to sling bullets in. I think the focus of the game would have to be shifted to the other MMO aspects such as exploration, crafting, and survival.

Think of Oregon Trail on steroids. There you are constantly fighting for survival against disease, hunger, and raiders. A wild west MMO would be an excellent scenario to inject the feeling of danger into. Who cares how many bandits you can grind out in one sitting when your character’s body is being ravaged by a particularly savage case of dysentary? How long can you hammer away on an anvil repairing cart wheels when your dude hasn’t eaten in 5 days? What happens when you come back from a successful hunting trip and find your house/wagon ransacked and burned to the ground?

A huge problem with MMOs these days is that there is no feeling of mystery or danger involved. You can just go to each game’s version of WOWHead, type in a quest name, and instantly get a step by step set of instructions on how to complete every quest in the game. You can even download plugins that points you where to go and gives you popups on what you should be doing.

I would picture a western MMO as starting out as a clean state. Just the original US states and a vast expanse of wilderness and the occassional frontier town to the west from there for players to explore and populate. If there was an ever changing terrain of players moving and towns popping up it wouldn’t be practical to establish any sort of detailed map on a website. There would be mystery and danger involved, like how the old west really was.

So yeah, you could incorporate the FPS elements into the game that the original author was speaking of, but that should only be a part of a larger picture. I’m hoping that the next generation of MMOs evolve past the do X amount of quests and kill X amount of creatures until you hit the max level mold that developers are beating into the ground right now. Hopefully they move towards dynamic areas and dynamic content that can’t be tracked and cataloged on 50 different websites.