Fantasy-Themed Accounting
There are lots of reasons why I don't play MMORPGs. One is that I don't have enough friends who would want to play with me, and am unwilling to 'make' online 'friends' while playing the game. Another is my fear that should I start playing, I'll get sucked in, be unable to stop, and my productivity will be reduced to zero.
But one great big reason that I never even want to try to get into these games is this:
This a screenshot from World of Warcraft. Just look at it. Look at all that stuff. There's so much interface on screen that there's possibly actually more interface than there is game.
This is something of a problem I have with a lot of PC games; developers seem to think that because they have a whole keyboard to work with, they ought to spread their controls over every single damn key. I can never remember the controls for a PC game if I stop playing for more than a day, and I find this massively offputting.
That WoW interface is like the ultimate conclusion of that theory of design. If there were any more interface there, you wouldn't be able to see the game. Now I'm sure each tiny bit of information and little icon thingy has its use, but I find it hard to believe that it's absolutely necessary for all of it to be onscreen at one time.
I like menus in games. Maybe a bit too much. I think designing the interface is one of the most important considerations of game design. Good game interfaces are brilliant. Remember the menus is FFXIII? Say what you will about that game, it had some beautiful menus.
But I strongly believe that a game's interface should be as streamlined as possible. Because you're there to play the game, and when navigating the menu becomes a big part of playing the game, I feel the developers are missing the point somewhat. That's not gameplay. Menus are an unfortunate but necessary break in flow that facilitate higher-level gameplay, and as such should be kept as minimal and unintrusive as humanly possible.
This is the major, all-pervading reason I can't get into MMORPGs; outside of interface management, you pretty much don't do anything. You click on a place/person/monster, and your dude walks over there, maybe starts a fight. Everything else in the whole game seems to be an exercise in juggling that stupendous interface.
I get that this is a draw for some people, a system that symbolises strategy over twitch-reaction. And I approve of this; most my favorite games are the ones where you pause the action and assess your next move, prioritise strategy and watch it carried out, proper RPG style. But looking at that WoW screenshot, I can see that that's way, way too much for me to deal with.
To me, that's not playing a game, that's doing fantasy-themed accounting. And until someone comes up with an MMORPG that doesn't end up resembling a very fancy Microsoft Excel document, I'm going to stay the hell away.
