Tabletop RPGs vs MMORPGs

Ryan Dancey has a timely series of blog entries on how he would redo the entire RPG industry (ditch Role-Playing and stick with Storytelling). The third step caught my attention as it does emphasize the biggest difference between tabletop gaming and MMORPGs (first example is a MMORPG, second a tabletop):

Most of the games that followed UO tried to “learn” from this experience by downplaying the elements of persistence. World of Warcraft is at best “quasi-persistent”. The only in-game effect over which the players have control which has persistence is the creation of certain objects, which can be exchanged between players, or sold for cash, but which cannot be left in the environment for others to find, given to (or used by) NPCs, etc. The trend of development for MMORPGs has been to follow this path, keeping persistence to a minimum, and there is no reason to expect any major changes in that regard. Even in games where more persistence is permitted, such as the creation of buildings, for the most part, that persistence only affects players. In virtually no modern MMORPG that I am aware of, do the players have the ability to permanently change the environment in any meaningful way, outside of rare and special “events” which are usually scripted battles for territory. (Obviously, I carve out an exception for Second Life, because I see it is a toy (like SimCity), not a game; it has no “rules”, and is mostly just a simulation environment.)

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The lowest, most basic level is the game group. At that level, the world has essentially total persistence. If a PC decides it is appropriate to dig a hole in the center of town, then there’s a hole in the center of town as long as the group remembers it is there. Another example would be a shared community scenario involving a part of the world being terrorized by ogres. An infinite number of groups might play a scenario where they track down and kill an ogre chieftain. For each of those groups, “they did it”, and for those characters, that ogre chieftain is defeated. The impact of actions taken at the group level is then fed “up” into the community space, to be distributed to other groups as appropriate.

PangYa Pacman

Yesterday I was at Station 168, killing time as I waited for the rest of my gaming group to arrive for our DotA slugfest. Anyway, tried logging on the Korean golf game PangYa to check if I still had an account and apparently I still do. Anyway, I was checking the game's new additions (it's been more than a year since I last played) and lo and behold, I see Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao paraphernalia available.

Stories in Video Games

What younger gamers might not realize is how gaming has changed in the past three decades. One merely needs to look at a Pinball machine as an example. As a kid in the 80's, I never understood nor enjoyed Pinball machines. What was the point of throwing the ball around? What was the goal?

Of course I was a product of my generation. Preceding my birth were games devoid of story. The gamers of an earlier generation played video games not to reach the game's ending but to obtain a high score. That was video game replayability in that era, to get the highest score possible (as opposed to finding every secret item/monster/boss/card in the game or discovering all the multiple endings). It wasn't until later on that games developed a plot and an ending to hook players. When viewed from this perspective, it becomes clear why games like Pac Man utilized the same map over and over again.

Video game designers aren't at fault for this "lacking" however. Hardware technology similarly played a role as well. I mean back in the day, memory was at a premium. For example, this was already in the early 90's, but one of the games I really wanted to play for the PC (as opposed to console games) as a kid was SimCity 2000. Unfortunately, my PC lacked the 4 MB (yes, 4 MB of RAM) it needed to run the game at minimum settings (my friend solved this problem by creating a boot disk). Of course when talking about 80's games, it's not even fair to use MB. KB was the more appropriate unit for measurement of memory.

I don't think a story-centric game (i.e. RPGs) could have been possible on console systems in the early 80's. There was movement, however, towards goal-oriented games such as Contra and Ninja Gaiden. For me, the golden age of gaming was easily during the NES era because game designers not only had to design games that were compelling and addictive, but had to do it with memory constraints in mind. While games like Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda were great games in their own right, what made them innovative for its time was how they got over the memory constraints of their game system that makes the memory-saving techniques of Adobe Flash look inefficient. The Legend of Zelda was similarly one of the earliest games to feature a "save game" to keep track of your progress instead of relying on passwords.

Ever since The Legend of Zelda, console RPGs started to pop up more frequently (at least in Japan if not in the US). This is where gaming history for me personally becomes interesting. Many popular console RPGs such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy has their roots in both pen-and-paper RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and in PC RPGs like Ultima. Of course it bears mentioning at how divergent console RPGs were from PC RPGs at the time. Whereas the former was more story oriented, the latter was more character oriented and dealt more with what you could do with your character rather than focusing on a cohesive, linear plot (this fact would later evolve however).

I think it also bears mentioning at how RPGs became such a hit in Japan, and in several ways even overshadowing its popularity in the US despite the genre originating in the latter (the best analogy I can think of is how Starcraft is so popular in Korea). Whereas game publishers in the US were publishing RPG books and modules, the Japanese took it to another level with video games, magazines, manga, and anime.

When the SNES finally came out, memory was still a problem but it wasn't a hurdle in telling a good story. Most of the memory problems the SNES faced only came into play with regards to graphics (a hurdle that was overcame in games like Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country). While "Saved Games" weren't the norm for that console, they were almost always present in most (if not all) RPG games. This was easily the golden era of console RPGs as it was at this time that games like Final Fantasy IV (many modern elements of Final Fantasy such as different jobs and character development) and Chrono Trigger (multiple endings) got released. It wasn't until Final Fantasy VI however that console RPGs hit it mainstream in the US market (in Japan, RPGs were always popular and were labeled as "interactive novels" thanks to their compelling albeit linear storyline).

At this point, next generation CD-based consoles hit the market such as the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation. It was at this point that in my opinion, video games slowed down in terms of game play innovation (that's not to say there weren't any) and a lot of focus shifted to graphics (more specifically 3D models).

NES and SNES Nostalgia

As a kid, it wasn't RPGs or books that caught my interest: it was video games. One of my favorite "toys" was easily the Nintendo Famicom (also known as the NES in the US). Of course playing a Famicom game in the Philippines was quite a unique experience. Unlike the US, we were getting our games from Japan. Which wouldn't be so bad if we knew how to speak and read Japanese. So most of the games we played meant that we didn't have to understand the dialogue or never read the manual.

Speaking of manuals, the games I bought didn't really come in manuals. You see in the Philippines, most of the Japanese games didn't come in boxes. We bought them as cartridges only. They didn't come with anything else, whether it's a box or a manual. Of course because of this, games were significantly cheaper than they would have been. I had a few games that came in a box with gorgeous art and a manual I couldn't understand, but it cost around twice what the cartridge alone would have cost me.

For a time, it was interesting to see the competition between Nintendo and Sega, mainly because the former was still using an 8-bit system while the latter a 16-bit system albeit with less games that appealed to me.

And then came the Super Famicom. My biggest motivation for purchasing the system was due to the release of Street Fighter II. And yes, I bought every version of the game that got released for that console. Street Fighter II was quite a hit back then that Sega's Mega Drive, which had a three-button controller, had to release a six-button controller for the game (and subsequent games made use of this controller although they were similarly handicapped by the fact that their games needed to be backward-compatible with the three-button controller).

Unlike the games released in the Famicom, we didn't buy games in cartridges alone but in their complete package. Again, it wouldn't be so bad if we could understand Japanese and the beautiful game manuals, but alas, I had to purchase US games for that (and a game converter to play them).

Of course one of the interesting things is that while we didn't get the Famicom Disk System, one was eventually released for the Super Famicom. My friend bought one and he was buying games at a tenth of what it would normally cost (because you know, diskettes are cheaper than cartridges). This was easily the beginning of video game piracy in the Philippines, although bootleg PC games were already cropping up at the time.