MMO Diversity, Part 1: The East and the West

Note: This article is mostly about Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMO's)

There have been a glut of MMO's from the East (Korea, China, etc.) and the West (US, Europe). Both have somewhat different roots and they lead to very different game-play models. This is my theory on the history of the evolution of these various styles of MMO's. Under no circumstance should you take any of this as well-researched facts. That said...

How did western MMO's evolve? The earliest model would probably be the Pen and Paper games popularized in the west. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons being the most ubiquitous example. In these games, the classes were not so different from one another. Take one mage and compare him to another mage and the only difference would probably be the equipment and the player playing the mage. Both of them could learn everything the other mage could and more. Every warrior was at least proficient in their weapon of choice.

The next stage in this evolution was the gradual adaption of the pen and paper model onto an online model: The MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon. Modern muds have a terrific variety of game-play and settings but the very first few muds have, for the most part, a firm grounding in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules. If you were a level 25 warrior, you were going to have kick. No question about it. There wasn't a choice. When you leveled up, you got a skill. Barring very rare exceptions such as weapon choice, all level 50 warriors had the same skill set.

One of the first incarnations of what could be called a Massive Multiplayer Online Game was Everquest. In this, all classes followed the same general model. You hit level X, you get skill Y. All Bards that were level 30 had Spirit of the Wolf. All Monks that were level 30 had meditate and kick. They all had the same meditate and kick skill. You weren't going to suddenly find a level 30 Monk who somehow didn't have meditate, but had some god-like triple kick skill.

From Everquest onwards, companies have tried to emulate the massive success that Everquest has had. Most of these typically have the same class-based play as before. Warrior, Thief, Cleric, Mage. From this model, the western MMO's were born. You picked your class, and you stuck with it, and you flamed on the message boards when your class was depowered by those evil Game Masters.

Western MMO's are very role-based. At the outset, you choose a role. A warrior, a mage, a priest, a thief, etc. This stems from its Dungeons and Dragon roots where players would choose what type of role to fulfill in a party. These games give you tools (in the form of skills) to help you fulfill that role. Thus, it is vitally important that each role or class have the same set of tools to work from or they might be woefully under-equipped to handle it.

From my experience, Western MMO's typically ask you this question:
'How do I use the skills that I have effectively?'

What about the history of Eastern MMO's?

To tell the truth, there isn't much of one. Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds was one of the first MMO's out of Korea and it followed a straight-forward path akin to the Western Muds. It, however, introduced the idea of character-branching, that one base character could become aligned and subtly different. (Lineage is one of the direct descendants of Nexus, branching off from one of the Nexus sub-servers several years after it was released.)

To tell you the truth, there was a precedent for character-branching before. It was a Japanese game of all things that brought this to us. The game? Final Fantasy 5 J. (FF5J was never released for the U.S. Market.) You can see the class-change system in Final Fantasy XI has had its roots in one of the earliest incarnation of the game.

And then shortly thereafter, Korea spawned one of the most pervasive and well known game of the Eastern MMO's: Ragnarok Online. RO marks, what I believe to be, one of the earliest examples of the Eastern MMO marked by one thing: Skill-tree based character development as well as character class changes. While the game was officially released in 2002, the earliest alpha/beta of the games were many years before that date.

Shortly thereafter, the Eastern MMO market quickly branched off into derivative works such as Maple Story, Silk Road and other "free-to-play" MMO's which made money by selling in game upgrades. Individually these MMO's have small quiet markets but when taken together as a whole these small free MMOs have user bases that can compare with the large stable western MMO populations.

As a general rule, these games are all about defining your character through the choices you make while leveling. You choose what skills to get. You choose what skills to upgrade. You gain levels and sometimes you even choose what character class you will become. Not only that, sometimes you even choose what the next advancement of that character class you will become. It gives the player an amazing freedom of choice. The decision to make their character how they want it. The ability to branch out into multiple paths.

From my experience, Eastern MMO's typically ask you this question:
"How do I build my character up so that he has the best skill-set for me?"

...In the next part, we'll see how this affects the actual game-play of these various MMO's...