Personally, I’d profess to be different from the majority of MMO players seeking innovation when they really mean fun. Or successful. Or popular. Or addictive.

When I say ‘innovation,’ I really am looking for something different and I do play varied MMOs to experience different systems. I used to mud-hop in the same way to comb through various MUDs and see what neat new ideas had evolved from various ancestral roots.

Some games I unfortunately missed the boat on, AC and EQ and UO to name the big ones, but I’m now hopping through a series of less-popularized or F2P MMOs seeing what they’ve done differently (ATITD, Wizard101, Saga of Ryzom, Vanguard, etc.)

Explorers of neat systems like me come few and far between, though, and we don’t keep very well. Once we get bored, we’re off again to find something else new and novel. :)

For example, I’ll point at City of Heroes. It’s had some truly unique innnovations, like the sidekick system. However, it has one particular innovation that even today, the devs don’t seem to understand just how valuable it is.

Namely, badges.

If you haven’t played CoH, it’s simple. Badges are simply markers of doing things in the game. Exploring the game world, learning about the back story, accomplishing various kinds of milestones. Most badges give a toon a title to display under its name. Some also count towards “accolades”, which are groups of badges that combine to award a benefit of some kind.

The WoW players in the audience are saying “Hey, that’s Achievements you’re talking about!” Which is my point. At the time that badges were first introduced into CoH, it was kind of a neat way of introducing some history to the setting, and give the Explorer types something to do. I doubt the devs could have predicted that badge-collecting would develop into its own sub-culture within the game.

Now, CoH may not be the first,but I’m not aware of any previous attempts at this sort of thing and I’ve played a lot of MMO’s over the years. Whether they were truly first or not, they set the trend and EQ2, LOTRO, WAR, and, just recently, even WoW have all incorporated some variation on the idea.

My point has to do with the way that NCSoft, the originators of the idea, still treat badge-collecting as a kind of mini-game in some ways, whereas when Blizzard embraced the idea, they embraced it whole-heartedly throught every aspect of the game. Further innovation at this point is coming, and I expect will continue to come, from other games that are viewing it as a “new” system instead of an old established game system.

One example – While Blizzard is stingy with the titles, using them as rare awards in comparison to NCSoft who make nearly every badge a title, Blizzard took a different tack by recognizing that the real glitz of an achievment system is that other people know what is that you’ve achieved. Blizzard lets you link your achievements in chat, view them in the Armory, and most importantly, they announce them to the world at large and to your guild channel.

Where City of Heroes treats badges as an award system for learning the backstory of the game and participating in game content, WoW treats achievements as a social system for building recognition and status within your community.

Innovation doesn’t mean just coming up with something new and enjoyable. It also can mean taking an established system and using it in a new way to accomplish something the original system didn’t accomplish well. I think it says something interesting about the philosphies of the design teams that WoW took this approach where City of Heroes has had badges for over four years and nobody every seems to have considered that something as simple as announcing badges over a supergroup channel might have a community-building effect.

MUDs are actually a great place to dredge up new game ideas, because implementing them is much cheaper than the GUI version (which tends to require a bunch of art and so on). And honestly, I’d love to just make and run MUDs if I thought I could make a living at it…

you know I’ve been telling people for YEARS, that all of these “new innovations” that most major MMO companies have been doing aren’t innovations, they are stolen from SoE, turbine, sierra, Just to name a few. But people rave it and give credit where credit isn’t due.

hell Blizz even claimed to “innovate storage inventory”

like hell… Mud’s had Storage/inventory

Could be that i’m so biased as an old AC1 and AC2 player that i can’t let go of the freedom and fun of those games (especially AC1). I absolutelly loved that i didn’t have to rely on others if i just felt like going hunting for a while.

I don’t know, im not a games developer, just a computer science student, but if someone combined the great things from AC1 and the great things from WoW they could be on their way to something really unique… but maybe it’s just a daydream i’m having haha.

P.S. Who came up with the idea of a “skilltree”? I know AC2 had one, just like WoW has it now. D.S

The missing factor is definitely on a gameplay level, not on the graphic level. Everybody is making games with excellent graphics and think that they will make it on the market. That is one of the mistakes being made. Gladly discuss more on this subject ;) but I will leave it to this today.

The truth — and one I think we failed to convey here, more’s the pity — is that MMO designers (and more to the point, company leaders) often worship at the altar of innovation without giving serious thought to the innovations they’ve already engineered and how well (or poorly) those worked out (and why).

I used to have frothing fits when people at Turbine would talk about our need to innovate. (Although to be fair, I also had frothing fits when they talked about our need to fall in line with EverQuest if we ever wanted to be successful.)