Legacy of the MMO

Good Morning Friends! I am still very much enshrined in my current play-through of Horizon Forbidden West. At this point I am somewhere between 40 and 50 hours into the game and still have so many little side objectives to finish. There are some that I don’t really look forward to like the hunting grounds… largely because I hate gimmick fights. Then there are others like the Tallnecks that I have just been avoiding because it slows down the action as I try and figure out how to jump up on top of them. I need to focus on completing those however because generally speaking a whole slew of things that I didn’t even know about open up. The story continues to be super interesting and while on some level it mostly just feels like I am playing Zero Dawn, there are so many general quality of life improvements.

It was one of these that started a twitter thread yesterday. Something that Horizon Forbidden West does that I adore is that it puts a little thought bubble exclamation mark over the head of any of your companions that have new dialog options. Something that I have always found exhausting about RPGs in general… and most specifically Bioware RPGs, is the need to keep checking in with your crew to determine if you can make any forward story progress with them. Essentially the old adage is that after every single quest you need to run around and talk to everyone, just to make sure nothing has opened up because you certainly do not want to miss it. With Horizon Forbidden West not only do you get an indicator that there is something new, but you also get an indicator on the specific dialog tree you can find the new information.

I had a friend try and share his frustrations with this style of mechanic twice, only to end up deleting the messages. Essentially it went down to something like this… that he hated to see MMORPGs bleeding over into single player games. So it made me think, is the lasting impact of the MMO the quest giver? Since the advent of World of Warcraft it has become ubiquitous to see an exclamation point over something and immediately translate that into “they have a quest for me”. Personally I adore this because it gives a universal language that makes it easier and more efficient to navigate the world. However I think it largely comes down to which side of a discussion you are on. I am very much on team “Efficiency and Better Communication” with the player.

Then I think there is the opposite side of that coin which is team “Mystery and Immersion”. This team tends to dislike obvious quest markers out in the world because they draw them away from the immersion of living in the game world that they are playing. This is also the team that loves Diegetic Interfaces in games, where when you click on a screen the menu options appear on the in game screen and not some popup that happens in your heads up display. A lot of times this sort of player might prefer to turn off the HUD entirely to allow for only in world queues to guide them. Based on the two deleted attempts at a comment, I am guessing my friend falls in that camp, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play the game. Personally in truth… I think both options should exist and often times when a game does not support them… I install mods that give me back my better visualization elements.

This however got me thinking, and I firmly believe that the true legacy of the MMO is not the quest giver system, but instead the codification of color coded loot systems. In 2020 I wrote a piece attempting to divine the origins of these systems. While there has been quite a lot of shifting over the years as to what color means what rarity, we have more or less stabilized on a specific standard moving forward. The more games that I find myself playing, the more I am seeing this exact scale repeated over and over. Currently I am playing Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2, and Lost Ark and in all cases the scale is alive and well.

• Grey – Junk
• White – Base Rarity
• Green – Common
• Blue – Rare
• Purple – Epic
• Yellow/Orange – Legendary

It truly is staggering just how common this loot system ends up being in modern games. This sort of thing has happened over the years with different systems and arriving at a “solved” state. Prior to the early 2000s for example, there were some wildly different solutions to how to do three dimensional movement in a video game. Then almost as if at once, we coalesced upon a standard for how third person movement in a video game should function. Similarly over the years we have arrived at what appears to be the best solution to easily giving the player visualization that an item you just picked up, might be better than the item you were previously using. I personally think this is a positive thing, but poor team immersions is going to ultimately find the walls closing in on them as we get better visualizations.

The other lasting impact of the MMO that I have seen starting to trickle into other sorts of experiences is that of the Item Level. Ultimately every single item created in a game has some sort of item budget, that denotes how many attribute points are granted by using it. For years this was an opaque system, but that did not mean it was not there. World of Warcraft, and more specifically the modding community created a way to transparently visualize this number and give a reference that this item had a larger item budget which was quantifiable. That did not necessarily make that item better, because some stats mean more than other stats, but it did assign some numbers to an obtuse system. It is very weird to see this same concept being applied to otherwise single player experiences. It is not necessarily a system I would have carried forward, because it can be the source of bullying, but I guess anything that helps a player better interpret the value of gear is not completely awful.

So I am now curious. What other systems have you seen trickling out of the MMO space into Single Player games? Drop me a line below and lets talk about whether or not you find them good changes.