Editor's Choice

World, Interrupted

It's far easier, by comparison, to get something out of designing a really beautiful outfit in City of Heroes. This, I think, is where player-created content in online games should be looking. Create tools that work and that allow individual projects to be accomplished quickly and effectively, in a way that makes us feel like we did something unique.

And then there are the insights of Guild Wars. I've long ago tired of Wars' soft-focus fantasy world, and its lack of humor and slightly irritating character design never really struck the right chords with me. What it did do, however, is demonstrate ways in which instancing can be used in gaming worlds to help them make a little more sense. One of the great travesties of Star Wars Galaxies was the moment in which you were sent out into the wilderness to club a log. The stump of your target caught fire and then disappeared, all to a blaring John Williams score. You didn't feel like a hero, you felt ridiculous. (Especially if you got killed by a butterfly on the way home.)

Guild Wars, meanwhile, doesn't doom you to start with such preposterous tasks - you are not at the bottom of a very long ladder, killing things that higher-level characters are glad to ignore. Instead, it creates a world in which real drama is taking place and where things will change forever. It does this by creating instances of the world for each party that goes off to adventure. The payoff, of course, is that it loses a sense of massively-shared world that games like World of Warcraft seem to capture so deftly. And there is a suggestion of a happy medium, too: City of Heroes mixes the two approaches with startling effect. Catching a train out of town is just one way that it creates challenges that are just for you, while the city as a whole feels like a bustling, shared environment. The next generation of MMOGs could be vast, open and explorable, but also avoid forcing players to line up to kill monsters.

I believe all the MMOGs suggest something about what the technology of putting thousands of people into the same game can accomplish, but I also believe that none of them have yet used that technology satisfactorily. This is, in part, because these games have been so ambitious, they have opened up immense spaces of possibility - spaces far greater than their capacity to fill them. The current generation of MMOGs almost seem like exercises in elements of what is to come, giving our imaginations fuel enough to see where the technologies of online gaming might take us.

The development studio that crafts a world to rival Warcraft, character-creation to rival City of Heroes, economics and breadth to rival EVE, and exploding vehicles to rival Auto Assault will, I think, have built a triumph of a game. But is such a hybrid even possible? Perhaps not. Only time (and a few more experiments in MMOGs) will tell.

Jim Rossignol is a writer and editor based in the South West of England. He writes about videogames, fiction and science.