Conflict and MMOs

 I brought you a gun!

The landscape of the massively multiplayer world is well trodden by just about every single style of game that one can feasibly come up with. We've had MMOs that based themselves on the rigors of colonialism, several set in vast fantasy worlds that span dozens of interwoven cultures, giant sci-fi MMOs that throw players into the cold reaches of space and sets them off to explore its depths, MMOs that take roleplaying as such an integral part of it's systems that it's developers throw themselves into the game and roleplay as high level quest givers, and MMOs based on famous books and movie franchises with giant overarching narratives to explore. But throughout all of the grandiosity of the MMO genre, it's actually quite surprising to find that the core successful  few MMOs all seem to revolve around the same simple ideal: Player driven conflict.

Now you might frown a bit and recount how all stories are driven by conflict in some manner, and you would be pretty much absolutely right- but what I'm taking about here is player driven; and I'm not limiting myself to the scope of the narrative. I'm talking about the games that base their audience in one of several camps, typically at odds with one another, and uses the momentum of that natural competition and conflict between opposing teams to fuel the player base (and retention) beyond and between major content drops. It's a similar heart beating in the chests of some of the biggest MMOs out there, and within that may lie the secret to creating a functioning and sustainable MMO formula that at least has a chance to exist in the very inhospitable space that MMOs inhabit in the modern day.

Of course, whenever I'm thinking of MMOs the first that comes to mind is going to be World of Warcraft. There is a game within which the player base is split between the arbitrary line of 'Alliance' and 'Horde', between those party lines the various playable races are scattered. The narratives of the game were originally heavily driven by the conflict between those two factions, even providing exclusive areas and questlines for each side, as established and built upon by the Warcraft games. Whilst that is always important in the heart of the story, some of the as later expansions have taken a more lax approach and brought those two sides together to battle against common foes more often than not. (Player bases don't like being split down the middle, afterall.) These faction lines decide who's going to facing the other in the arena, as well as in the general struggle for minigame side activities across the world- fuelling some natural space for players to provide their own motives and goals.

We also have Star Wars The Old Republic, which is an MMO built within a world that already had a very workable divide of 'Dark and Light' to split it's players between. Just as with WOW, players of either faction have their own selection of classes and race, which would influence the places that players start, where they explore, and even the majority of the narrative they resolve. And, once again, players would find themselves going against each other in PVP sectors of the game, and coming together for later-on PVE crossover expansions. Again, relying on the conflict for between-content fuel, and subtly ignoring it when it's easier to introduce a wild third NPC faction for everyone to beat on. (It's easier than designing distinct routes for each faction and class within that faction everytime you want to drop some new content, I suppose.)

Perhaps the most recent example of this sort of MMO set-up would be for Amazon's New World, which doesn't explicitly establish battle lines from the moment that the player spawns in, but does build the majority of it's higher gameplay ideals around the movement of factions known as 'companies'. These organisations battle for territory and market supremacy in a dance that can feasibly be entirely ignored by the solitary player if they so choose, but there's no pushing forward to the best gear sets and facing the toughest challenges without getting embroiled in that political hot plate eventually. Still, the conflict of PVP drives the decisions of the endgame content producers, although additional content has been PVE geared for the time being.

And then there's my MMO of choice, The Elder Scrolls Online. From it's very concept this game was based around the three faction war, split between the races of Tamriel and presenting three entirely separate questlines across distinct tacts of land. The centrepiece of the game was even a giant board of 'secure the territory' played across all of Cyrodill in a brutal no-mans-land that was PVP heaven to a lot of the 'killers' in the playerbase. This was a direction that Zenimax even stuck with for a while, with the first official expansion being the Imperial City, through which you could either battle with enemies both player and NPC for the above-ground districts or mount strike teams through monster littered dungeons. Of course, this was only for a time. Eventually one Tamriel released and broke down all barriers allowing any faction to visit any land and leaving the 'war' to PVE only sections.

What we're seeing consistently is the way that MMO's seem to work best when they stoke some interaction between players, typically conflict. And as I've alluded, I think the reason is simply because it allows the player base to keep themselves completely busy whilst actual new content is made behind the scenes. Although, interestingly, most MMOs know that further development is better served veering towards the wider player base of those who don't want to engage with the pressures of PVP, which creates a strange dichotomy wherein for a lot of these games, the PVP landscape doesn't really change as the game around it evolves to complete distinction. But a game that practised what it preached would end up simply backing it's potential for growth up in a corner, so what is there to do?

As it happens there are endless unique ways to handle an MMO that don't get the chance to shine so often. I'm often left in complete awe by the likes of The Matrix MMO wherein the server hosts played 'Roleplay' with the ordinary folk to stir something of a narrative within their world, or 'Star Wars Galaxies' wherein the draw was to literally adopt a role within the Star Wars Universe and simply evolve within that. The sideways progression MMO's are woefully underserved in the modern MMO market, and only the unhinged kickstarter pipe-dreamers seem interested in giving that style of development a shot anymore.(Well... them and JAGEX) Perhaps a game that doesn't rely so heavily on the aura of conflict wouldn't need to betray it's own identity quite so often. But that's just food for thought, I suppose.