Platform: PC
There are a great many MMORGS around these days. For those of you who don’t psoeak nerd, that’s ‘Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games’. These are games like Ever Quest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft. It’s that turns every title into an acronym (EQ, DAoC, WoW, etc.).
This game genre has been very successful, with both subscription and non-subscription games. However, the biggest titles in the field all have one thing in common: grinding. They require players to spend hours or days playing to gain one item, or level, or whatever. The new trend is for developers to promise that their new MMORPG has removed the grinding, and is more single-player friendly – but any study will show that the most popular games in this genre require grinding, and, unless Critic has completely missed something, people play these games instead of something like Oblivion for the chance to play with other people. A big problem with removing grinding is that a lot of MMORPG players play to increase the size of their e-penis (i.e. their electronic dick, that thing which grows when they can say “I have a level 80 Paladin”) ... why would they want to play a game where they couldn't brag about wasting their life to obtain one item in a game that has no worth other than bragging rights?
Developers develop games for a target audience. It appears a bit pointless for them to make games targeting gamers who aren't interested. MMORPGs are played by a very specific audience. Players can play one game for years, so why not design the new games in this genre for them instead of saying “this game is for everyone, now give me your money every month!”
MMORPGs
