ArcheAge and Theme Parks

DarkgarX and I have been playing around in the Archage MMO lately and I walked away a little disappointed.

It is a game that promised unlimited freedom trading, building, and PvP - with a huge sandbox world. Our experience has been a typical level-based grind through a series of camp-to-camp quests that seemingly have no end. The PvP is endgame content at 50, and most all of the run up to that feels like a traditional MMO quest-based themepark grind.

It is important to understand the difference between a sandbox and a themepark setup for a game world. Themeparks are tightly controlled settings with clear quest lines, progression, and typically feature strong player protection versus any interference to leveling. The fact that our pair of characters is near level 30 out of 50 and we have not seen or had one PvP battle is depressing.

In old World of Warcraft, the PvP fun started at 20. In the old Warhammer MMO, it started at level 10. Both were a blast to play, and you learned your PvP role quickly. Both of those were still themeparks, but at least they made a conscious effort to start you with PvP early.

In Archage, I feel like PvP is held away, your character is auto-protected, and there is no war of big conflict I have any connection to. The game is beautiful and has wonderful technology with placable houses, farms, mounts, vehicles, ships, and all sorts of other really cool stuff, but I am not feeling the conflict or fight affect my character in much of a way.

Most of the house and farm building is locked up behind quests, and you can live and farm in a protected zone, so there is nothing much at risk for your placable structures.

In a sandbox world, everything is on the table. You can be ganked by level 50's in the starting zone, and even by people supposedly on your same side. There is no sides, it's everyone for themselves. If you want to team up for mutual protection, you are free to do so. If you want to form a guild that protects your new players, go ahead. It's up to the community to create groups and environments based on their desires, play styles, and wants. Yes of course there are problem players, but in these games community and social order usually creates safe havens to get started in.

EVE Online is a great example of minimal protection to start, and then letting people fly free and do whatever they want ion 0.0 space. It has a tiny themepark to get people started, and then cuts you loose in a universe-sized sandbox. It's a great experience.

Sidebar note here, on themeparks in MMOs and roleplaying games. I am becoming tired of them. They feel like engineered experiences that are boring and predictable. They are filled with the by-the-numbers lands and content. I don't need a Disneyland-style  "Egypt Land", "Future World", "Ravenloft Land", or a "Norse Land" in my games, nor does it make sense to me in these worlds. How would you feel if Lord of the Rings had these places added in by Hollywood types?  

For some people, okay, fine; but really, every world I play in doesn't need token tip-of-the-hats to every Earth culture to fill up some development and marketing bucket list. It's just, no, I feel it's just lazy and unimaginative. Plus, everyone's doing it.

If I want an Ancient Egypt fantasy game, I will set it in the original Ancient Egypt and paint D&D rules and monsters all over it. It's fine, you don't need to create a pseudo-Eygpt for me and fit it in some other world somewhere. Maybe now that you don't need to create this place, you can build something original and put it where you were going to put this.

To it's credit, Archage doesn't have these silly places, but it does have the same themepark structure as many other MMOs. The camp-to-camp grind is hard to want to play through, the "chosen one" plot line is the same for thousands of players, and it just feels like it tried to go in a bold new direction, but it fell back on the traditional MMO themepark-isms. We will likely play through our time and see what happens, but I am feeling a little down about the game.

What do I want? I want that free and open game where the actions of the community and players matters. It's tough, you get a lot of hype and pre-release journalism from everywhere, and your expectations are probably way off base than what the game finally ends up being.