Some of you wouldn’t realise this, but a lively debate on the then “secret” BioWare MMORPG (this is back in the days when everyone knew is was an Old Republic era game, but BioWare wouldn’t comment), occurred on the main BioWare forums for a long, long, long time before these forums were ever invented.

And one of the themes I found myself repeating (and arguing), again and again again over there was a very simple one… yet it seemed to elude a great many of the “brains” over there who wanted to debate.

Ready? Here it is…

MMORPGS are not single-player RPGS

Staggering, huh? You probably thought I was going to reveal some massive secret, or divulge something that would truly shake the time-space continuum with its freshness and insight. Alas, no…

MMORPGS are not single-player RPGS

So, with that on the table, the question begs, why are games like this being designed, like so many other MMORPGs that have gone before, with one foot firmly in the single-player RPG camp, notably, the part that allows the gamer to be “the” hero of the story?

It makes NO SENSE for everyone to be “the” hero of the story. Note: this doesn’t mean that people can’t be “a” hero, if they want to be, but the way MMORPGs construct quests in EXACTLY THE SAME VEIN as single-player RPGs, has to stop. It’s fine, in a single-player RPG, to go and kill the Big Bad that has been hassling a small village and, in the process, become “the” hero, but it’s something that has never, ever, sat comfortably with me in MMORPGs, when someone knocks over the Big bad then, five minutes later, the Big Bad is back, for someone else to knock over. Again and again and again and again, ad infinitum.

Call me weird, but I think it devalues what is supposed to be a “heroic” achievement when every character can stroll past and do exactly the same thing. It becomes meaningless. It’s a suspension of disbelief that I think takes a step too far when it comes to MMOs.

So what is to be done? Would you rather see a game that DIDN’T have single-player style quests and where a character wasn’t “the” hero of the story? I would. And there are ways to do it. I just have an awful, sinking feeling that the way this game is being designed around “stories” for our characters, we’re just going to end up doing the same stuff as everyone else.

And again, that is FANTASTIC, just AWESOME, in a single-player RPG.

But it’s stupid and boring and, dare I say it, kind of pointless, in an MMORPG environment.