Tiny Steps Across Cosmic Sized Gaps
Are all of these games perfect in their quest to achieve better socialization? No, but they're steps in the right direction. Last year brought us Fallen Earth, a new entry in both the sandbox and futuristic genre. Also, we saw City of Heroes receive a mightily impressive user generated feature update via Mission Architect. So progress is being made, albeit at a slow and steady pace.
The problem is that we can see so far into the future -- we can see what "could be". I fully understand how that reality can drive a person to demand far more in the now, rather than the later. Said issue it further worsened by the fact that a group of people exist solely to sour you and me on the whole playing with "other people" concept. Griefers and trolls permeate the digital aether like some kind of poisonous fart from a connoisseur of onions and cheese.
F-wads roll in legion, and only a tightly-knit phalanx of politeness can deflect their vicious blows to the human psyche.
Not all hope is lost, because things will get easier one tiny step at a time. Guild tools can be iterated upon. Cooperative concepts can be lifted to new heights. In fact, social design will eventually win out. Why? Because so many of us want it to happen, that eventually it will happen. I know that such knowledge is merely a consolation prize in this moment, but a time will come when the bottom feeders won't have discourse with anything but themselves.
I'm talking of course about Darkfall, which is a game that appeals directly to these kinds of players. Wide open sandbox games -- ones lacking strict and effective tools with which to neutralize trolling grief machines -- are slowly going to become a thing of the past. Been there, done that; sights have henceforth been seen.
Structured chaos will slowly catch on, in time. Fallen Earth features all kinds of sandbox concepts, but it also has a crafting system calling into requirement the kind of player cooperation that soars above most other titles, with perhaps an exception to EVE. This will be the tool that finally kills off a great amount of anguish that can so deftly disinterest most people from ever logging into a new-fangled MMO, let alone feel the tickle of excitement at the prospect of an upcoming one.
But, for now, we'll have to make do with what we've got. Hey, anyone want to build a LEGO rocket ship with me later this year?
