Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game: Difference between revisions

 

 

 

[[Zero Punctuation|Mumorpugers]] add a social and collaborative element to standard gaming, which obviously alters the experience. It creates the possibility of team-based gameplay elements; as anyone can tell you, playing a soccer video game by yourself, with only the AI as company, is not nearly as fun, spontaneous or challenging as having friends over. Now imagine 40-a-side soccer, 'cuz MMOs can do that. MMORPGs provide quests or dungeons which can take dozens of allied adventurers at once (and bosses that ''require'' them), or "[[Player Versus Player|Player vs. Player]]" zones where duels or team matches can take place. The competition between "Guilds" (player-organized adventuring parties) can get heated ([[Serious Business|just a little]]), and there's always [[Just One More Level|one more boss to kill or piece of loot to collect]]. Innumerable friendships, both online and in [[Real Life]], have started or been maintained via MMO games. There's even a bit of an industry grown up around it, where people pay real money for in-game objects, currency or even characters; some companies discourage this, while others facilitate it or even make it part of their own economic model by selling such things themselves.

Having said that, you're paying a monthly fee, anywhere from $10 to $15, for this game. The math does line up; if you bought (say) ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'' at $50 when it came out and then played it for 50 hours, all you need to do is play your MMO at least 15 hours a month to keep up the same monetary efficiency. And some people find 16 hours a ''week'' to be a slow pace. Nonetheless, the whole ongoing-fee thing does rankle gamers who are just getting into the genre for the first time. While free-to-play MMOs do exist, they often contain reduced content, or restrict certain features to people who are willing to pay. Furthermore, because an MMO company's livelihood is in those monthly subscriptions, it's in their best interests to make the game as [[Fake Longevity|draggingly slow]], [[Fake Difficulty|nitpicky]], [[Fetch Quest|indirect]] or [[Level Grinding|tedious]] as possible. Of course, get ''too'' un-fun and people stop playing, so MMOs are constantly figuring out ways to give you little achievements that keep you interested (to the point of allegedly employing [[wikipedia:Skinner box|"Skinner Box" operant conditioning techniques]] to keep you playing). [[Gotta Catch Em All]] is a big part of the genre's addictiveness: there's often a wide variety of [[Sidequest|Side Quests]] the player can choose to achieve, and pursuing them will often bring the player's character all the way up to maximum level. Finally, the team-based aspect of the game can make victory a dicey proposition; depending on the game and the situation, just a single [[Leeroy Jenkins]] can result in death for all forty of his teammates. In other words, you can lose even if you play perfectly, because ''someone else'' screwed up.

 

 

For tropes related to MMORPGs, see: [[An Adventurer Is You]], [[Allegedly Free Game]], [[Perpetually Static]], [[Alt-Itis]],

[[Fake Longevity]], [[Fake Difficulty]], [[Fake Balance]], [[Fetch Quest]] (and subtrope [[Twenty Bear Asses]]), and the ubiquitous [[Level Grinding]].

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'''Note: As this is an index, make sure any added series don't have italics and are immediately after the asterisks. Don't link to any pages that don't exist. If you want a link, make the page first.'''

 

* ''[[Alteil]]''

* ''[[Anarchy Online]]''

* ''[[Auto Assault]]'' (cancelled in 2007)

* ''[[Battle Stations]]''

* ''[[Cantr II]]''

* ''[[Champions Online]]'' (free to play)

* ''[[Club Penguin]]''

* ''[[Dark Age of Camelot]]''

* ''[[The Endless Forest]]'' (free to play also, art game about deer)

* ''[[Epic Duel]]''

* ''[[Eternal Lands]]''

* ''[[Evony]]''

* ''[[Faery Tale Online]]''

* ''[[Fantasy Earth Zero]]''

* ''[[Fantasy Online]]''

* ''[[Final Fantasy]]'':

** ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]''

* ''[[Forum Warz]]''

* ''[[Free Realms]]''

* ''[[Furcadia]]''

* ''[[Fusion Fall]]''

* ''[[Rohan Online]]'' (free to play)

* ''[[Rusty Hearts]]'' (free to play)

* ''[[Runes of Magic]]'' (free to play)

* ''[[Ryzom]]''

* ''[[Tibia]]''

* ''[[Tokimeki Memorial]] Online'' (Taken down in 2007).

* ''[[Trickster Online]]''

* ''[[Ultima Online]]''

** ''[[Phantasy Star Zero]]''

* Games by [[Sony]] (Under Sony Online Entertainment)

 

 

** ''[[Aika Online]]''

** ''[[Allods Online]]''

** ''[[Heroes Of Gaia]]''

** ''[[Iris Online]]''

** ''[[Robo Smasher]]''

** ''[[Shattered Galaxy]]''

** ''[[Aion]]: The Tower of Eternity''

** ''[[City of Heroes]]'' and its counterpart ''City Of Villains'' (used to be pay, free to play)

 

{{examples|Fictional examples:}}

* "The World" from the ''[[.hack]]'' anime, manga, and games.

** [[Defictionalized]] at one point in Japan (under the name Fragment, the name of The World's beta version), but it flopped hard and wasn't released anywhere else.

** Fragment (The real world one) wasn't a as much an MMO as it was the first four games repackaged with an online mode. You could choose one of the pre-existing charcter models or a recolor and that was the extent of costomzation outside class choice. The dungeons had to be made by players and were stored on their PC. There was an offline mode which was mostly the first four games with your "Custom" character replacing Kite and Rena and Shugo added as extras.

* The Piers Anthony novel ''[[Killobyte]]'' is about just such a game, in [[Cyberspace]].

* The [[Metaverse]] from the Neal Stephenson novel ''[[Snow Crash]]''.

* The ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' story arc "Years of Yarncraft" is all about spoofing MMORPGs (though the strip calls them MMORGYPOOs: Massively Multiplayer Organized Roleplaying Game Yarn Providing Outward Obnoxiousness). Most of it focuses on a ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' style game, but a bass fishing MMORGYPOO is briefly featured as well.

* "Clichequest" from the webcomic ''[[The Noob]]'' which satirizes MMORPGs.

* ''[[Megatokyo]]'' features ''Endgames'', a [[Medieval European Fantasy]] MMORPG that Piro, Largo and Miho all played at one point. The game, along with standard statistics like "Strength", "Magic" and so forth, had hidden "Emotional Statistics" built into the player characters to [[Character Development|add depth]]. {{spoiler|Miho cheated by [[Manipulative Bastard|manipulating the Emotional Statistics]] of a vast number of other player characters, bringing them under her control via statistical [[More Than Mind Control]]. Piro was too in-tune with his character's Emotional Statistics for her to be able to manipulate them, and Largo's character [[Heroic Sociopath|ignored them completely]]}}.

* The entire series ''[[The Guild]]'' is about a group of MMO gamers playing an unnamed ''World of Warcraft'' clone. Except they're never shown ''playing'' it...

* [[The Onion]] parodied World of Warcraft in a video about an MMORPG that lets the gamer play a gamer playing World of Warcraft.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Video Game Long Runners]]