The List

There's a lot of things we like about video games, but nothing seems as memorable as a downright cool character. There's a reason we keep seeing Mario over and over again! With a little help from our friends, we've begun to compile a list of our all-time favorite video game characters. It'll be changing a lot over the next little while as we continue to add and subtract, but now that we're up to 87 individual characters, take a look and feel free to comment below. The current list can be seen here. Enjoy, and be glad I didn't make a "Link"-ed list joke.

UPDATE: The count is now 98 as of 4:23 - 7/24/2009

Putting the RP Back in MMORPG - BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic

by Jared Evans

These days, you can’t talk about the world of Massive Multiplayer Online anything without talking about World of Warcaft. The terms are almost synonymous in most people’s minds. But, as many are starting to realize, World of Warcaft isn’t the perfect MMORPG. It’s simply one incredible example. It’s likely that no one will do WoW better than Blizzard. The answer then is to do something else. With the upcoming release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, developer BioWare hopes to do just that, by making role-playing a part of the MMORPG experience.

With a rich universe, unparalleled customer and content support, and a variety of fun and balanced classes to choose from, WoW has earned its place at the top of the MMORPG pile, but is it really an RPG? There are a lot of games that fall under the umbrella of Role Playing Game. At its most fundamental level, every game is an RPG. However, there are specific mechanics and settings that come to mind when the term RPG is used, and WoW has a lot of them. In particular, there are three elements of the RPG that make WoW what it is today:

1) A universe with a rich back story; a compelling environment for players to spend their time.

2) The ability to create a personalized character, manage that character, and interact with others and the world as you see fit.

3) A deep and multi-faceted combat system.

These elements are fundamental to the RPG system, and are immediately recognizable to anyone who has played a game of Dungeons & Dragons. However, there is an unfortunate circumstance that has risen out of the complicated rulesets that make up most RPGs: combat becomes the focus of the experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I like melting the face off an orc just as much as the next guy. The problem is that to make this experience satisfying, there is often an inordinate amount of attention placed on the combat system. In World of Warcaft, combat is the main way that you interact with the world. Most quests revolve around battling creatures to obtain items, or simply to rack up a high enough body count to satisfy the quest-giver. The best items and materials are obtained from bosses and creatures. These items fuel the in-game economy, which exists primarily to allow you to then kill things more efficiently. While there are PLENTY of things to do that don’t involve combat, they are all secondary to the main focus of either PvE (player vs. environment) or PvP (player vs. player) play. All of these elements are brilliantly crafted in WoW, but at the cost of any substantial role-playing.

While there is an effort made to give context and weight to the combat you participate in and the items you collect, it is only there on an “if you so choose” basis. Instead of feeling like your character is participating in the events around him, as an actual member of this universe, the experience is something more akin to a renaissance fair. You’ve got the costume on, and so does everyone else, so it looks like you’re all living in medieval times, but everyone knows that it’s just for show. The same is true in WoW. Everything fits the part, but the focus is not on how your character interacts in the world, but on how you interact with the game.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this. Blizzard has listened to their players, and created a system that their over 11 million and growing player base continues to love. Nor have they done anything to actively discourage role-playing. Dedicated RP servers are still available for play. Visit one though, and you’ll notice that things run very similarly to the non-role-playing servers. Why do people who play on an RP server choose not to role-play? The reason is that the game is built on a system that doesn’t require or account for role-playing in terms of game mechanics. For example, a bit of role-playing might be to add some back-story to your character, such as, “My orc only uses axes, as his father did before him”. However, the swords that just dropped off that monster have +4 to Str. Do you use the swords, or stick with your back-story? In WoW, you’ll take the swords, because that’s the option that allows you to play the game. That isn’t to say that you’re forced to do something you don’t want to, but rather that the game is built around such mechanics, and frankly, you pay for the game because you want to play by its rules. If the game is fun, you want to play it, and to play it, you have to use the swords because they have a +4 to strength, which will help you in combat. Choosing not to use the better equipment doesn’t allow you to play the game. It’s entirely separate, like the cellophane TV overlays of the early days of video gaming. It’s an entertaining façade that makes the game feel different, but has no impact on what is happening mechanically.

Now, I’m not calling for Blizzard to change the way that WoW works. Their game is built incredibly well, and is a blast to play. The important thing to recognize is that there is a fundamental element of the RPG, role-playing, that has not been capitalized on in the leading MMORPG, and that to do so, it must be made integral to the game play experience. If it isn’t valuable to the player, they won’t do it.

By all accounts, this is what BioWare aims to do with their first entry into the MMO market, and their latest entry into the Star Wars universe, Star Wars: The Old Republic. With a slew of successful titles in the role-playing genre (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: KotOR, Mass Effect), BioWare has made a name for themselves by creating story based games, but more importantly, by making role-playing a part of the way you play the game.

What does it mean to role-play? Let’s just break the term down into its component parts: first, you need a role, which could be classified as a character or persona, and second, the ability to play, or to act within the established world of the chosen role. I can’t think of an RPG that doesn’t have the first element, but a surprising few have the second. Simple interaction is not enough to be considered role-playing. Rather, the play in role-play is a specific type of action that stems from player choice, and has real impact in the game world, thus changing the game experience.

Let’s head back to the basement and revisit our D&D example. There is a reason that tabletop RPGs continue to be popular, and that is because it allows for the purest and most dynamic role-playing experience. The player has the ability to take on any role he can think of (given that the rules you’re using permit it). Moreover, the Game/Dungeon Master has the ability to create any world or setting he can think of. Then, the player can interact with that world as he sees fit, and the world actively responds to his choices. Don’t want to track down the thieves in the forest? You don’t have to, but maybe they come back to haunt you later. Choose to help the small child on the side of the road? He could be royalty, and now you have an in with the King. The players exist in a world where their decisions have real impact on their experience in the game, because the world reacts back. Without a reactive setting, the role-playing element loses its power.

So it is in World of Warcaft, where other elements have become the focus of fun, as role-playing offers no reward in terms of game play. BioWare, on the other hand, tries to make their worlds ones in which your choices matter, and the world reacts to them accordingly. While there is nothing akin to the freedom of a human reacting on-the-fly to your decisions, players still have a great sense of freedom within the game’s setting. Maybe you can’t decide not to save the galaxy, but you can decide whose aid you’ll enlist, what you’ll do to achieve your goal, and then watch as the game reacts to those decisions. These effective (and affective) choices, decisions that have real and recognizable consequences, become the centerpiece of the game play. So much so that, as in the case of Mass Effect, players will look past other elements that would normally hinder game play, and enjoy being involved in role-playing. Try imagining Mass Effect without the dialog and role-play elements, and you would have one annoying attempt at an action game on your hands (blasted elevators).

So the answer should be simple; make an MMORPG where effective decision making is a part of the game play, which in the case of BioWare, is often done with branching dialog trees. However, there is a fundamental disagreement when attempting to marry the massively multiplayer system with effective role-playing. The central tenet of the role-playing experience is that the world reacts to your decisions, but a main focus of the MMO is that the action takes place in a persistent world populated by hundreds to thousands of players. If each player can make decisions that affect the world around them, the game would become a convoluted mess. How do you get the multiplayer into that kind of experience?

One answer is perspective. While the world is persistent and populated by other real-life players, the only way the player interacts with that world is on a one-on-one basis. Simply put, the game doesn’t need to be adaptive to everyone for you to feel like you’re a part of a reactive world; it just needs to react to you. While some may feel that this is just a clever bit of misdirection, it’s simply a choice on the developer’s part. WoW chose to focus on tight and interesting combat, and BioWare wants to involve you in a compelling story, while giving you freedom to explore that narrative. They aren’t creating a world with no focus and direction, where everything you experience is based on what other players are doing, a model that EVE Online has worked hard to develop. Rather, like our friends in the basement, there is a focused campaign to keep you interested and engaged, but the DM allows you to explore that closed narrative to a large degree. And, with a promised unique campaign for each of the eight classes, there will be an incredible amount of role-playing to experience within the universe of the Old Republic.

However, there are still plenty of issues that will need to be addressed. If you’re choosing to focus on one player’s perspective, it begs the question of how you include other players in a storyline which is unique to only one player. Instancing is one way to ensure that players can experience their own events and stories without the interference of random participants, instead choosing their own companions specifically. This has been done successfully in games like City of Heroes and World of Warcaft. The difficulty, though, is maintaining the illusion of a unique event, when someone else has already experienced it, an event common in the MMORPG. This is one of the benefits of WoW’s style of play, where nothing is ruined if you do the same quest and fight the same bosses over and over again, but if the goal is to maintain the narrative of a single character, this is an obstacle. There will be countless times when someone’s Jedi character has teamed up with her Jedi friend, and she’s helping you get information from the same arms dealer she interrogated last week. BioWare has confirmed that conversations will allow for multiple players to interact in the same conversation, which is surely an attempt to alleviate this problem. Perhaps they’ve prepared different dialogue options if a character in the party has already interacted with an npc. It certainly wouldn’t be beyond the developers, but even this solution only goes so far.

Really, the problem is the same as it has been since games like this have been made: reconciling the limitations of game play with a larger vision. Ideally, you put on the VR goggles, and everything just goes from there, but we live in a world of joysticks and buttons. It would be incredibly difficult to convince someone that they weren’t playing a game when they have one hand on the mouse and another on the keyboard, and really there is no obligation to make your game completely immersive. The goal is not to create a world that is so convincing that people don’t think they’re playing a game, but to include role-playing as a part of the game mechanics. It isn’t an all or nothing deal. If it’s engaging enough, people will want to play it. That’s the key to WoW’s success. In the end, people like to play it. BioWare is certainly hoping that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be enjoyable enough to keep people around, and an increased emphasis on role-playing just might be the way to do it. Or it might be the promise of lightsabers. That’s worked pretty well in the past.