After writing an endless essay about Guild Wars I need something where I explain that instancing is bad, bad! Or I’ll feel too guilty.

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Raph Koster copies HRose:

Raph Koster:
Because nothing you do in an instance affects the world state. That’s the realbenefit of an MMO, in my opinion–the shared world you inhabit. If you want all your gameplay in instances, you may as well just play Diablo–you still get 3000 people in the lobby to trade and socialize with.

Don’t get me wrong. Instances are a cool technique and tool. But fundamentally what they are is “single-player games or limited multiplayer ones embedded in an MMO.” They are not an MMO themselves.

I said (end of May F13 thread):

HRose:
The basic idea about why I said that mmorpgs have failed is just because they simply don’t take advantage of the massive aspect. This aspect is just a way to be included in a popular genre but it’s obvious that even huge projects like WoW don’t have A CLUE about why they should be massive instead of cooperative/instanced.

We have a bunch of mmorpgs that don’t know why they are mmorpgs. Like a case of lost identity.

[…]

Instanced is everything cooperative you already play, from Doom to Counterstrike.

This is Diablo with NOTHING different aside that you have a graphical chat instead of a textual chat.

I don’t see an innovation, nor progress. I see a natural collapse of a situation that hasn’t found an effective way to develop. We are going back because the technology ALREADY supports massive worlds. But the *ideas* still don’t support them.

[…]

As I said above the result is better and funnier because they brought the game where it belongs: in a cooperative experience. But CoH isn’t a mmorpg from this point of view. Take Ultima Online and CoH and you see that, aside the setting, one strives to be a word, the other strives to be an arcade.

Now I don’t say CoH isn’t a good game because it is an arcade. I don’t think that building a good game like that isn’t noteworthy, but it’s simply not what a mmorpg should be. Or where the true potential to discover is.

[…]

Dry design for me is a situation (a software house, a designer, a publisher or whatever) that doesn’t react the best possible to a situation. So, in this case, I rant about “instances” because they killed the purpose of building on the strenght of the genre (the idea of a world).

About this whole issue I just think that it could be easy to develop a successful game by exploiting the *strenghts* of a massive world and not just “reacting” passively to a situation that is the result of the design hitting a wall with no ideas about how to go further.

Raph Koster:
Retreating to single-player games to fix the problems in MMOs isn’t exactly solving the problems.

HRose:
Instancing is a profitable workaround but isn’t about addressing the real problem to move further.

Instead of surpassing the obstacle they are going backward.

He says “retreating”, I say “going backward” :D