We are in an age of stagnant online entertainment my friends. We now live in a time where creativity and innovation have been trashed for statistics, mindless grinds, and false achievements. Story and plot have taken a backseat to repetition and grinds. We are players in games where the destination is now more important than the journey. We are a people starved for innovation and lacking the key narrative element.

Read on my friends and I shall try my best to discuss what’s been bothering me and many others regarding this famine of RPGs.

World of Warcraft is a lazy dungeon master. Rather than mystify us with smoke and mirrors and throw red herrings at us to veer us from our path, WoW simply just tells us to go kill a certain number of this monster, grab components from that mob, or deliver a parcel to this NPC. WoW does not make us guess or have choice in our game. There is no mysterious figure lurking in the shadows or some hidden force with evil motives placing pawns in our way. Nope. Things are pretty cut ‘n dry in World of Warcraft.

We’ve often compared MMORPGs to their roots from tabletop and pen ‘n paper games, but how often have we turned the tables (excuse the pun) and looked at how MMOs these days would be translated into a pen and paper game? How would WoW measure up as a pen and paper game? I know Warcraft has a PnP based game out there, but it’s using a core ruleset based off of White Wolf’s previous games. How would the MMO as we know it measure up in a basement of people crowded around a table with only paper, dice, and their imaginations to drive the adventure? After killing ten rats, twelve boars, and finding ten red silk bandannas, we’d be pretty bored out of our tree.

MMORPGs have now been sterilized down to simple move and click combat simulations. Immersion is no longer a design decision and placed on the backburner in terms of priorities. Questing has been turned into a factory-line repetitive grind. Gone are the RPG components of these games and they’re now being referred to as simply MMOs. How did we come so far from those ancient days huddled around tables, tossing dice like they were made of molten lead, and using our *gasp* imaginations?

Some MMOs (yes I’ll use that term now) have tried and to some degree have been successful. With Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine has been unparalleled in their ability to mix the almost sacred stories of J.R.R. Tolkien directly with their gameplay. Their opening sequence for new characters is fantastic as it starts you right off talking with key characters and making you feel like you’re taking part in something heroic.

Even the free to play Dungeons and Dragons Online: Unlimited manages to sneak some key elements into their gameplay. Facing a dungeon instance and having a narrator tell you: “You wish these bones were a little cleaner. The air reeks of rotting meat.” – you know that something is amiss!

This has been a fairly common topic these days as the MMO field has grown rather stagnant these past two years. Many folks like Scarybooster and the guys over at Ten Ton Hammer are screaming for something better and innovative than grind fests like WoW. Syp over at Bio Break longs for those pen and paper days where imagination was the driving force.

It’s funny because one of the initial sparks was single-player games like Bioware’s: Dragon Age, where people got to see what story meant to a game and how good immersion truly can be. Maybe if enough people talk about it, MMO developers will finally listen?

We need to make our demands. We need to demand that story and plot get put back in our MMOs. That we can once again label them as MMORPGs with confidence! Developers throw us some curveballs and don’t be afraid to mix things up now and then. Why not place some traps and red herrings along our path and see if we’re intelligent enough to find a solution? Have us use our brains and, more importantly, use our imaginations!

Having said all this, there are some hopes on the horizon. Many out there just might be seeking to destroy the current MMO mould. One popular example, Star Wars the Old Republic, totes itself as a fully story driven MMO. Here’s hoping they succeed with that. With fully voiced quest lines, and separate quest chains for each class, they’re evidently on the right track, but will that immersion carry through the rest of the game? Will we see an MMORPG out there that breaks out expectations and really makes us pause and think about our next step? Will we have an MMORPG with decision based consequences?

I feel we’re on the verge of a new way of thinking. Here’s hoping that having enough people talk about this, it will make it clear to developers they can start taking risks. Here’s hoping we’ll see a new generation of games over the next couple of years that simply blow our notions of what an MMORPG truly should be.

My imagination is bored and longs for something better. Let’s hope it will find it soon.

Want to stay up to date on Rackham’s posts? Follow me on Twitter @RackhamGreg