I'm occasionally fascinated by older MMOs for making design decisions that would be huge no-nos these days, usually because they add friction between players and the game (or players and each other). I've been playing a bit of FFXI on a new private server lately and I'm in awe of some of the ideas going on here:
- Players collide with each other and with NPCs. You can walk through someone if you really need to, but it takes some wiggling. I absolutely love this because it means people actually watch where they're going in the street, and do their best to steer around each other. It's maybe the only MMO I've played that sort-of justifies the existence of the usual grand overscaled MMO-style urban design... or at least, that's what I tell myself when I have to trek from Southern San d'Oria all the way up to the bloody port.
- Aggroed enemies will chase you to the ends of the earth (or at least, the edge of the current zone). If you actually want to lose a pursuer, you either need some kind stranger to peel them off you as you run past (great! I love this kind of organic cooperation!), or you need some ability to get out of their sight altogether. It's not uncommon to see players cross-country running to the city gates with a slightly-too-strong mob in tow—and yes, since you lose experience when you die, a humiliating jog across the map is often preferable to a heroic last stand.
- So many quest actions are performed through the trading interface, of all things. You can't just 'turn in' your six rabbit skins or whatever—you have to explicitly trade them to the questgiver. Handing out fliers? Trade them. Need to fill a waterskin? 'Trade' with the river. It brings to mind old point-and-click adventures, being simultaneously deeply pedantic and burdened with a limited, ill-fitting vocabulary of actions. I'm hopeful that I can see some deeply insane applications of this system further down the line.
- Macros are king. The game has an extensive library of macro commands and arguments, and it's in your best interests to use them if you want to avoid extensive menu navigation in the heat of battle. Some might call this a crutch for bad UI, but after doing a lot of interface customisation in FFXIV, I feel like I'm warming up to the idea of games where this kind of tinkering is encouraged. The idea that learning to play the game comes not just from understanding the mechanics, but from building a user experience for yourself that facilitates execution, is weirdly compelling. Controls aren't a neutral layer of abstraction—they're as much a part of the experience as anything else.
This game is slow and miserable but I can't look away.