Alright, I figure I’ve kept you waiting long enough. My test was successful by the looks of things.

A while ago I wrote this to try and make a point - that gamers want a good to hear a good story. Numerous people kept asking me when part two was going to be uploaded (I cheekily told them to wait, knowing full well there was actually no part two at all) because they wanted to see more.

I devised this little test based on a major grievance I have with MMO games. Do not misunderstand me, I mean every last MMO game in existence. There are no exclusions, no exceptions… nothing.
Every MMO I have ever played has failed to deliver any kind of immersive story-based experience whatsoever.  By now you’re probably bright red with rage and ready to throw whatever  potentially dangerous instrument you can find directly at my head, but allow me to explain further before you decide to severely injure me.

MMO’s have only ever been designed to kill time. Questing, grinding, questing, etc… all very repetitive, all designed to delay the players from reaching the end of an “open” game. If this process is followed as predicted by designers, then the latest patch/expansion will be released milliseconds before you get bored with the game and quit. However, there’s nothing wrong with killing time (I’m actually a big fan of time killing myself), my problem is with the quality of the time killed.

Think of every opening cinematic you’ve seen from each MMO you’ve played. For the most part they’re well presented with stunning graphics. RF Online was the perfect example:


Amazing isn’t it? That video alone had me dreaming about the adventures that could be had within that world. How wrong I was. Though RF Online was itself a great game, the cinematic was very misleading. RFO consisted of the same quest/grind diet that other MMO games rely on, adding the element of mining for various ores to spice things up (the mining consisted of purchasing a small blue machine and leaving your character unattended for hours on end while they dug up ore… loads of fun).
As I said, RFO was a great online game, but the cinematic had raised my expectations far too high.

Still wondering what the hell I’m babbling on about? Well then let’s have a look at Squaresoft/Square-Enix.


Any MMO gamer worth his or her salt will know that FFXI is lacking in quality in the most extreme sense. For many gamers, be it hardcore MMO gamers or Final Fantasy veterans,  the general verdict was overwhelming: FFXI was little more than a huge grind that relied solely on its name to sell. While the game was poorly designed it did attempt to give players something a little more involving. FFXI included cut scenes and short storylines (albeit very half-hearted) to try to live up to the legend created the previous standalone titles in the series. Although when FFXI is compared to any other Final Fantasy game (possibly excluding the first and *shudder* FFXII) it falls way short of the storytelling quality that many gamers have come to love about the Final Fantasy series and were desperately hoping for from FFXI.

It seems that when designers make an MMO they lose all sense of storytelling direction and focus entirely on expanding the life of the game in order to milk the extra cash out of dedicated players, but by doing so sacrifice so much that could have been used to immerse the player in an experience beyond that seen in any MMO to date. To create an experience similar to what we see in the slick cinematics should be the ultimate goal for designers in the next generation of MMO games. According to the results of my little test, we know that this is what gamers want. Give them an experience. Give them a story to tell. Give them memories.

The gamers have spoken.

-Tob