Arcade Berg Game Designer

Bad Design – MMORPG Information Overload!

I've played some MMORPG's. I was, like everyone else, a World of Warcraft-player at its release, after being part of three betas and playing on a cracked server (oh, shame on me!) and I loved it. The game, not the cracked server.

I played some City of Heroes, a little bit of Anarchy Online, a tad of EVE Online as well as a bunch of Free To Play ones, like Maple Story and ROSE.

Last weekend I spent quite a lot of time playing the open Beta of Ether Saga Online:
http://eso.perfectworld.com/ (14/4/09) 

World of Warcraft was and is aimed at the masses. "Everyone" (read: a lot of people) should be able to play it but some gaming experience is a plus, while Ether Saga is focused on younger audiences (read: n00bs) and girls (read: n00bs).

I enjoy them both, but they both suffer from the same problem that every single MMORPG suffers from.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD! 

In all games of the genre, but especially the ones trying to be user-friendly for rookies, this is just horrible! I'm an avid gamer but that doesn't mean I like it.

Unfortunately I don't know how to solve it if we're to tell the player of all this information that is shown; HP, MP, Lvl, Target, Skills, Buffs, Cast time, Enemy HP, Hit-damage, Cooldowns, Orders, Chats, Potions and so on... And so on...

Maybe we don't even need to keep the player up to date with all this, all the time?

Anyhow, it's a problem I think it's really about time for some MMO-Studio to try and solve.

I mean, just look at this!

Ether Saga Online, like any other MMORPG