Out Of Game Interaction: Is It Ever Going To Happen?

A few years back when Vanguard was being developed, there was a lot of talk about the "next step" in MMOs and what could be done to further enrich the MMO-playing experience. One of the biggest things being talked about at that time was out-of-game connectivity such as being able to chat with your guild via AIM or managing your auction house or inventory from a website instead of having to log in to the game proper. The idea was to give players something to do with the game even if they can't log in to the game so that they stay engaged. Players loved the idea and soon every MMO being developed was talking about adding similar features.

Fast forward a few years and not a single game had done anything like that yet. We had World of Warcraft's Armory and Lord of the Rings Online's My.LOTRO, but nothing quite like what Vanguard had promised (not to mention that Vanguard itself did not have those features). In fact, it wasn't until last year that we first heard rumblings of real, out-of-game services that could affect things in-game. And the first game to deliver the goods: Champions Online, and that's only if you count being able to check and send in-game mail from their website (I do). Yeah, Champions Online actually pioneered something… go figure.

Putting that aside, we players are all of the sudden getting lots of treats from our MMO developers for out-of-game interaction, assuming the devs pull through on promises. First, there is the much talked about Fallen Earth iPhone App coming any day now, which will allow players to manage their crafting queue, inventory and auction house activities, among other things. I have to admit that this sounds awesome and one of the things that could potentially draw me into that game.

But now we're getting even more word on even more out-of-game connections with the announcement of two new Facebook Apps: one for Runes of Magic and another for Fallen Earth. However, both of these apps are a bit different because neither provides direct in-game interaction like the FE iPhone app. The FE game on Facebook is purely a promotional tool, so far as we know. It's a casual game based on the world in FE. The RoM game, while similarly designed as a casual game/promotion tool, will actually provide some codes and such for people to plug into the actual RoM game for in-game items, so there is some incentive for players of the game to play the Facebook game. Neither quite live up to the promise of in-game interaction, but I think they both clearly point in the same direction.

The MMO industry is a bit insular and it's time that the industry do its best to reach out to new types of players. It is also a daunting genre to break into as a new player, so anything designed to ease the transition from traditional console or PC games to persistent online world games is a plus. Reaching out to people via Facebook and iPhone is great because not only does it bring potential new customers to the table, but it allows current players to stay immersed in the setting and (hopefully) keeps them more likely to stick around for a while longer.

My concern is that the great hope of all this talk was that we, the players, would be allowed to interact with our game somehow while not at our computers, or at least while not at computers that have access to the game. And while the FE iPhone app seems prepared to deliver on that hope, these Facebook games seem poised to be just more poo in the cesspool that is Facebook games. Look, I know Facebook Gaming is the new "it" right now, but the marketplace to find games is terribly designed, all the games are designed to spam every person you know all day, and the amount of "me too" titles in the market is just disgusting. So diluting your product with a Facebook game that really threatens to limit the users understanding of what your game is, while not actually delivering anything of value to your current players, just doesn't seem like a great idea. It seem Trendy, just not Good. Further, most people can't log into Facebook from work (where they are most likely to play these games) and when they get home they are more likely to play the actual game than some casual spin-off of it.

So this still leaves us with two games that have anything close to what Vanguard and the games of that generation promised. We can check in-game mail and manage crafting queues… nice, and a decent start, but not exactly what I was hoping for.

- Dickie