Could Non-Persistent World 'MMOs' Work?

While not having the best social network, BioWare (perhaps unintentionally) presents an interesting question.

To say that I’ve been enjoying BioWare’s latest RPG Dragon Age would probably be somewhat of an understatement. The throwback to classic gameplay with an interesting world, fairly good story, and great characters, has done plenty to capture my attention for more hours a day than I’d care to admit to. However, while it is solid game, I’ve found that it has done a lot to interest me in entirely different areas than I would have expected. This is largely due to the BioWare Social Network. While as a social network it is… weak, buggy, and generally flawed, I do think that it proposes a few questions, that sadly Dragon Age itself cannot answer: could a game be run without a true persistent world running on the servers of some game company, but still feature MMO-like community and gameplay?

Dragon Age doesn’t feature any multiplayer capabilities – which I feel is quite a shame really – but it does integrate with this social network. Players can upload their statistics and character portraits, post status updates, mingle on forums, and even seek out other people who are interested in building mods for the game. Yet, what would have happened if the game included multiplayer, and truly made use of that social network, which I have no doubt few people actually use as is?

If it wasn’t for the fact that that you were controlling four characters at one time, and that you are frequently pausing the game when playing through combat in Dragon Age, the game would basically play like an MMO. If you happened to have a few other people in your game, who were controlling the other characters as you traveled through the depths of some dungeon, it would be indistinguishable from an MMO instance. If characters were kept persistent, that would be even more true.

The social network would allow for the community to form. You could have ‘groups’ like Facebook, which would function similar to guilds. Just, instead of grouping up to grind out a level somewhere, you’d be grouping up to run through various instances in the game. In a lot of ways, if you’ve ever played Warhammer Online, and experienced the Scenarios, I’m sure you could no doubt imagine similar things in such a game, as well. In fact, if Warhammer Online had cut out the over-world, they could have created a game focused on a variety of scenarios, and still even retained the zone control mechanics.

If you combined similar PvP scenarios, with dungeon instances – even ones that allowed full-sized raids, as after all, Neverwinter Nights allowed for 64 or so people to play on the same world – you could have a strong framework for a game built around a similar social network. The really crazy part though? Unlike an MMO, you could let users host the servers, just like your general FPS games. I imagine it could work well with a free-to-play model.