MMO-based games have changed a lot over the years, and perhaps I am just old, but I have found one of the things that has changed a lot is the distinct lack of a world. I used to play a lot of WoW and with Season of Discovery I was itching for that feeling of walking into a living, breathing, real world. So I went back and what I found was a mix of the good and the bad.

Gaming has come a very long way in the past twenty years, going from a niche topic to a global force that is largely accepted. New game genres have come and swept up the world of gaming and old ones have fallen off. Gaming as a more hardcore subject has taken the form of meta-gaming, min-maxing, and other key concepts to being the best there is, but is it a bit too much?

The issue I’ve found with gaming lately has been that the objective of simply being the best is pervasive across all games and those of us who want to be good at the game need to almost take a hard study of the game just to be able to achieve this. Perhaps as I get older I miss the days where things were simpler, but perhaps also I fear that trying to be good takes away from something that used to exist but has diminished over the years and not doing this means simply not playing the game.

With Season of Discovery, I had hoped for a some what relaxed environment, LFGs for raids and dungeons, and just general exploration. But, the be the best attitude quickly showed up: GDKPs, gear checks, parsing, rushing the PvP bosses to try to achieve the objectives as fast as possible, and, of course, lying about clearing bosses in raids to get into the raid. Almost like the meta-gaming starters pack of things you need to do to even participate in games these days.

Watching Asmongold’s video on Pax Dei got me thinking about taking the game away from specific objectives, such as completing a raid or winning a battleground, to a more community based objective. What if, instead of trying to be the max level in the fastest time, we aimed to just exist in a world.

Some games have this concept, to a certain degree, mostly defined as sandbox games, but they all have a specific objective that drives the game forward. Take EVE online for example, been around a long time, successful sandbox, but ultimately you want to have the best ship and trade and make the most money. Still meta-gaming can creep in and tell you that you need to do X, Y, then Z and you will be more successful then others, which ultimately takes away from the community.

So what would just existing in the world look like? Let’s take Pax Dei as a baseline, in it you can craft entire castles, weapons, armor, etc. In this baseline, let’s say that the world is nearly endless, lots of room for people to stake their claim. There would be limits to this endlessness, to ensure that players do stay close enough to each other to retain the community, so just assuming that players would be incentivized to make their own claim, but not to stray too far away. The final condition of this baseline would be to give players a reason to want to interact with each other, perhaps in pursuit of economic profit or to develop trust.

Using this baseline, let’s say you enter Pax Dei and there are castles nearby, made by players with active trading communities. There are some monsters around, they drop items that can be traded. There are ore veins around, but because of the proximity there are a lot of people actively trying to mine them, cause that’s there profits. So a bit like EVE in this sense.

As you begin to realize that the area you started in isn’t that great, hard to make a profit, highly competitive, not that fun. But as you’re thinking of logging off, a guy comes buy with a horse and a wagon offering rides to less inhabited areas, for a fee, to incentivize you to join their guild, or just cause their nice. As a new player, you may not be able to pay the fee, so perhaps there is something else you can do, maybe paying a cut to get back to trade your haul or perhaps through a contract system, where if you go out there you agree to give 25% of your haul to the driver.

So now you are in this persons wagon going off to a somewhat far off place to kill monsters, mine ore, cut trees, all sorts of things. The same wagon that dropped you off comes back with a new batch and takes you back to town and soon you are able to trade your haul and make your first bit of gold. During this time you got a chance to interact with the driver, see other players in this uninhabited place, collect items, and then sell to buyers on a local market, all community-based.

These items are then used by players to craft new outfits, weapons, armor, buildings, all sorts of things. The key might be to ensure that the trade is local, similar to New World perhaps, where certain areas may have different prices for items than others, but without the fast travel. This could then promote the idea of having to transport goods to other kingdoms to get the better price, wherever the desire for those goods are needed.

Given that the players can create their own castles, villages, and other key infrastructure, there would be an inherent demand in certain kingdoms for specific goods. New kingdoms will require more stone to build their castle, established kingdoms will want the basics to adventuring to promote more players to come their market for the goods they need, or kingdoms in war for an abundance of weapons.

These differences in the state of kingdoms, as well as the competitiveness of the area will require a player to be in-tune with the community to know where to go, to ask questions, to try and inquire about their surroundings. It may also push players into guilds to take on massive projects, such as taking a new plot, building a kingdom, defending it, and promoting goods to travel to this region. These kingdoms can impose their own taxes to generate profits and bolster their own progress, but taxes require people, so they also need to give them a good reason to come into the kingdom.

Therefore the whole thing becomes circular, kingdoms push to have players come to their kingdom, players deliver the goods needed to make the kingdom strong in exchange for profit, the kingdom uses the goods and taxes in their kingdom to further expand their own domain. Negative experiences in a kingdom could cause players to want to leave, such as too high taxes, disagreements with the opinions of the ruling guild that owns the kingdom, or perhaps overly aggressive PvP in the area, either due to war, aggressive players being allowed to run free, or just not suitable infrastructure to defend against bandits, invaders, or overly aggressive monster.

Ultimately, the idea is to have the users create the world, giving them the tools to shape their own destiny. This concept could take a sandbox game, such as Pax Dei, and allow it to become its own unique MMO, simply from letting the players explore, expand, fall, and new ones come in to take their place.

We are coming to an age where the idea of a stream-lined gaming experience, going to the max level in a min-max fashion is the norm, but if we could take away from this, if we could try to put the community first and maximizing second, we might be able to find truly unique experiences in games again. Let’s see if this is the next genre for us to experience.