When a game comes out that is just so damn good it seems to just completely change your standards, you tend to stop playing games mediocre in comparison. Basically, when standards rise, game companies work harder and harder to deliver better and better games. That’s pretty obvious.

One game market has, however, seemed to have completely failed in this regard. A few giants have risen out of the ashes, but hundreds if not thousands of games seem to have just fit in that “mediocre” category.

Dana Massey at MMORPG.com wrote about what is wrong in the MMO market today:

This week, I open with a simple test. I want you to honestly ask yourself or a gamer friend the following two questions:

Where are you in [insert any single player RPG here]?

And where are you in [insert any MMO name here]?

The answer to the first question is almost definitely a description of where you are and what you’re doing. The answer to the second is much simpler: “Level X of Class Y.”

I tried this quiz at E3 and not a single person answered any differently. Predictable and instantly, they’d describe where they were in Fable 2, for example, and then immediately name class and level for the MMO.

It’s simplistic, but this is the core problem that I tried to identify in my last column, but never quite arrived at.

When people measure their progress through the mechanics and math behind a game instead of what they’re doing in it, it changes how they approach it.

That is why people complain about the grind. That is why people demean the genre as paying someone to work.

….

It’s taken me two columns to get my head around it, but I honestly believe this test uncovers the simple problem of MMOs. As long as progress is mentally measured through an experience bar and not some other means, be it story, unlockable items or territory, then MMOs are destined to remain a niche genre (and yes, I am aware of how many people play WoW and I still think MMOs are a niche genre).

And that got me thinking: how could a game company fix this? Massey seems to think that eliminating the experience bar and replacing it with unlockable items & territory, etc. to show for progress will fix MMO’s. I completely disagree; substituting virtually anything for a progress bar to show for progress will no matter what keep the grind, because in the end those obtainables are an achievement gotten through work or just playing the game. No matter how you look at it, game devs will make these achievements a challenge, because otherwise no one will play.

The main problem game companies have with MMO’s is the ability to make the grind, or rather the “journey” (because grind implies boring and repetitive), to end game fun. Recently, I’ve been playing more single-player RPG’s on the PC, and it seems as though that games like Oblivion and Fable 2 are leaps and bounds ahead of any MMO in achieving that “fun” in the journey. This is probably in part due to the fact that these single-player games rely almost completely on their storyline, questing system, and gameplay to keep players playing, whereas MMO’s rely on competition or a desire for certain achievements (items, territory, etc.) to keep  players playing.

Think about it: when is the last time you thought you were grinding your way through a single-player campaign? Probably never, because repetitive RPG’s tend to just get negative reviews, and thus aren’t popular. These RPG’s aren’t classified as games with a lot of grind, but rather repetitive and bad. MMO devs simply create this “repetitive and bad” formula (grind) in their games and further slap some hard to obtain achievements to keep players playing.’

MMO companies need to look across the field into such games as Fallout 3, Fable 2, GTA4, and Oblivion and learn to create that fun factor in questing that these games have already mastered. Until then, we’ll just be stuck with mediocricy.