Circle Strafe the Moon

Way back a while ago there was a very clever Real Life Comics comic. Here's the link for the interested.

The joke made is a good one I thought. Given a gamers interface, well a gamer can quite probably do anything.

On a related point, Brent over at Virgin Worlds recently made a post wherein he decided he did not like WAR. He said it was not fun and proceeded to give reasons.

In the interests of fairness, linked here is the blog in reply that Brent thinks "got it".

My view? Brent didn't like WAR and thought it wasn't fun because like the pizza analogy from Serial Ganker, he didn't want to play an MMORPG.

MMO's as they stand have certain mainstays. People may not like them, others may find ways to evolve them, but without them, MMO's as we know them would be unrecognisable.
No one has ever suggested that a First Person Shooter could do with less guns and none of that shooting people lark. So why should an MMORPG be entirely stripped of RPG elements? Just because there's more than one player? Soooo what?

A very good response to Brent is as follows

'From Meridian 59 to Warhammer; From Castle Wolfenstein to Halo 3' by Theo
Submitted on 2008-08-20 19:09:46 CST What are we looking for that is
revolutionary?
Has Halo revolutionized FPS gameplay since the days of say doom more than War does from the days of Meridian 59? Pick any genre and answer a similar question. What would suffice? Honestly, the greatest revolution in gaming is the Wii and that is because it changed the entire control scheme - yet is casual and at times ignored by hardcore gamers.
Brent, my point is this. The basis of your disappointment should not be limited to War, but every new release under the sun that has the limits of mouse, keyboard, standard bandwidth, etc. I believe you have now set for yourself a standard that should never find approval with any new release.

In a nutshell, to revolutionise an MMORPG, it needs to stop being an RPG. You're always going to have to kill ten rats. Rats are a major concern for lowbie NPCs. Without regular new guys coming by to kill ten rats, the world in theory would be over run by them.

MMORPGs are based on numbers because the numbers describe the universe.
In City of Heroes I can walk up to one of my Super Reflexes friends and try to blast them point blank in the face. I miss. The numbers calculated, I couldn't beat theirs, I miss. If the game was as real as it is in your imagination, they dodged.
We're always going to kill rats lest they breed. That's the reason. That's the world trying to be real.

If you want a revolution or if like Brent something approaching the world of Snowcrash, you don't want an MMORPG. You want a virtual world, a second exsistence. You want somewhere that has no digital rats and is limited only by the visual representation of the numbers you tweak.

Hell they want Second Life with better graphics and a sword so they can claim it's a poor clone of EQ. Just to make it feel like home.