Vague Patch Notes：评测MMORPG之困，现在与永远

Recently, YouTuber Majuular posted his penultimate Ultima retrospective video about Ultima Online, and he faced a real conundrum: how do you review an MMORPG? Now, his answer in that particular case was to have a community member run a shard he had worked on before, which was mostly like the original vanilla game with a few tweaks, and he trusted other players to join him without knowing it was him to replicate something like the original dynamic that was found when the game was new.

It worked well for the video. It’s a good video! But it’s also a problem he acknowledged right out of the gate in the video, because it seems like an impossible task. And he’s right! It is an impossible task, but I’m not here to talk about why we don’t do it and instead opt for first impressions. I’m here to get people thinking about how impossible a task it actually is, because I think a lot of people consider one or two factors that make it tough and then move on. But there are not one or two factors that make it tough. There are a lot, and they compound. So let’s talk about them.

The obvious factors that people tend to understand is that MMOs are difficult to review because they are both online games and they are slow games. The former means that they don’t just have the ability to change but a certainty of change. Patches will come out that rewrite the game experience even before major updates or expansions do. The slowness, meanwhile, means that the odds of being able to beat an MMORPG are nil. There isn’t a single win state, but even if you can get a lot done, you are unlikely to get it all done in a meaningfully short amount of time.

Both of these elements are true. But they are also the least important part of the experience. To explain what I mean, let me tell you about my friend Zed and when I started playing Lineage II.

Zed and I had met during our time in Final Fantasy XI but both of us had grown rather disillusioned with both the game and with the social circles we were in, but we kept chatting outside of the game. At one point, I mentioned wanting to give Lineage II a try. He had played it before, but he was a good friend and despite his lack of interest he agreed to join me. So when I first logged in, he had a friend of his gather up some early money to get both himself and I started as just a quick bonus.

As a result, I started with a nice bonus of money and equipment, but then I quickly ran into a problem. I don’t remember the character’s name, but someone had decided to set up a toll gate right outside of the second town I needed to go to. The toll in question was all of the blood inside of my body, and since he had arrows he would collect that toll at high velocity every time I made my way toward the town. This went on for a while, with a gaggle of people surrounding him and laughing as he sniped me (and any other low-level players) the second we approached.

This was not fun! In fact, the prospect of this happening again kinda soured me on the game right then and there. And since this wasn’t anything I was doing for work, I could just kind of leave it there. But the thing that’s easy to overlook is that from a review standpoint… like… how do I review that?

What I experienced definitely wasn’t fun. It wasn’t fun in a way that is, in fact, part of the game. A lot of the earliest games in the space had far more open PvP, but the thing that’s hard to necessarily talk about is the fact that even though these parts of the game are vital to a review, they’re also kind of impossible to review. Because the guy shooting me with an arrow wasn’t a feature of the server. Noting that the game has open PvP is definitely important, but is it more or less likely to happen to a random player? Did I somehow attract added attention?

For that matter, I was starting the game with a friend, and the fact is that this is necessarily going to have an impact on my impression. Zed was there because he liked spending time with me. I had asked Zed to join me because we were friends. That would color any attempt to review the game. If I start playing a new game now with my friends, that’s going to color my impressions of the game. If I start a new game now and quickly make friends, that’s going to color my impressions of the game.

Now, to a certain extent… like, no duh. This isn’t surprising or controversial. How easy an MMO makes it to meet people and find new friends is relevant here! But some of that is also going to come down to me. How much is one or the other. If I don’t find any friends around me, is that a result of the game itself? Bad luck? Bad vibes? I have no idea, and the worst part is you can’t know either.

The reality is that no matter what you do in an MMORPG, you are influenced by other players. I did several whole columns about this. Playing solo is still being influenced by other players, and trying to hold to some insane standard of “no one else should ever affect my play experience unless I consent to it” doesn’t just make you a tedious dullard, it means that you are definitionally defined by other players. (Living your life in a pointless cycle of spite is like that.) No matter what narrative an MMO spins, or even how elaborate it might be, at the end of the day the played experience is going to depend on other people.

And other people are a constant squirming wildcard you cannot control on any level. I have my regular play group in a bunch of games, people I can rely upon, but I don’t control them. And the fact that there are games they play with me and ones they don’t influence the ways that I tend to play. The fact that I have a friend who is a dedicated healer influences my decisions, too! These facts are important!

Oh, and let’s also note that most MMOs at this point are free-to-play, which means that the value proposition and monetization is even more weird than just saying “you should buy or not buy this game.”

None of this is to say that no one should try to review or evaluate MMORPGs. I’m going to do a number of first impression pieces moving forward, I know that for a fact. Rather, it’s to point out that even if you’re not trying to play a scored review game, evaluating a game that is fundamentally shaped by social forces is by its very nature provisional. We do our best to cut through that, but it’s important to be aware that it is still a foundational element.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.