The influence of MMORPGs
I’ve finally gotten around to playing Final Fantasy XII. I know, it’s two months after it came out; this is really late for me. I should disclose right now that I’m a huge Final Fantasy fan; throughout all of middle school and high school, my gaming friends were all Final Fantasy fans, and I guess it kind of rubbed off on me. I don’t really play many PlayStation 2 games anymore, but a new Final Fantasy release will always bring me back for more. If you don’t know, the Final Fantasy series is one of the few consistent blockbusters of the gaming world. Final Fantasy games have very nice production values, great gameplay, and of course, so much to do, you could easily spend over a hundred hours playing it. That used to seem like a lot of gameplay, but in this modern world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), it’s really not that much. More on that later. The first opening fifteen minutes of Final Fantasy were basically an introductory movie. It draws you into the game in a way few others manage.
I’m going to spare you a full review though. Much better reviews have been written by all sorts of gaming magazines, and even some publications you wouldn’t expect to be writing videogame reviews. Final Fantasy is that huge, though. It’s already sold millions of copies. So rather than writing yet another review, I’m going to focus on one little aspect of the gameplay that I’ve noticed already in my first few hours playing around with the game.
Final Fantasy XII feels a lot like playing an MMORPG, except the other characters in your group aren’t controlled by other people. There are significant departures from earlier entries in the series. Final Fantasy X was very much a traditional RPG. Final Fantasy XI was an MMORPG, not unlike World of Warcraft, but less popular. I never played Final Fantasy XI, but I can see how it rubbed off on XII. XII almost feels like a hybrid. Pre-placed treasure items are replaced by randomly-placed, randomly-generated treasures, exactly like any number of MMORPGs I’ve played. Monsters are encountered and fought on the world map, not in separate battle scenes like previous Final Fantasies. Monsters even respawn over time, exactly like in MMORPGs. Monsters drop loot, which you have to bring into town to sell off … exactly like MMORPGs (and unlike previous Final Fantasies, in which the monsters dropped money directly).
See where I’m going with this? XI seems to have rubbed off on XII. I can’t yet tell if I like it. In XII, running around outside of towns in the wilderness with all of the monsters feels a lot like playing an MMORPG in the middle of the night when no other players are logged on. There’s the inevitable grinding for money and experience. But there are positive aspects. Combat is more fluid, and doesn’t interrupt the gameplay as much. In previous Final Fantasy offerings it could take up to ten seconds for the world map to transition to the battle screen before the player actually took over and started fighting. In XII it’s instantaneous, because there is no separate screen. You end up spending more time overall fighting enemies, but you don’t realize it, because it’s handled in a much cleaner fashion.
I suppose it was inevitable that the ascendancy of MMORPGs would heavily influence how traditional RPGs were made. Luckily XII still retains the excellent interactive storyline that simply don’t exist in MMORPGs, but I really worry about the future of where this is all going. If the traditional RPG does morph into a sort of a single player version of the MMORPG, with all of the shortcomings that entails, it’s going to be a sad, sad decline.
