Friday, December 23, 2011

Why Online Role Playing Games Are Widely Used

By Nico Sullivan


Background

Online role playing games can trace its history back to the 70's, where the earliest multi user games began to appear. Rogue, a really well known dungeon crawler, was launched in1980. Monsters, items, and setting were represented by letters. Consequently, it inspired a whole genre of similar clones.

Dungeons and Dragons have long influenced the growth of role playing games. Console playing games', for instance Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, success split up the genre into two: the console role playing games and the computer role playing games. This is because of the cultural differences where game consoles are produced mostly for private computers in Japan and role playing games in the Western World.

Online Role Playing Games started as single player games when it was first introduced. However, with the advent of the internet, more and more improvements were made on role playing games. What started as a game for one now has all people coming from different countries playing together in one game. Multiplayer options have grown remarkably big that game companies find ways to improve it over and over again. With these improvements came massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) that continued to make online gaming more popular each year.

RPGs

Role playing games are games where the participants or players assume roles of certain fictional characters and follow stories as the game process continues.

These characters are usually called avatars and can also be custom-made according to the player's choices. Participants decide their character's actions whether or not it succeed or it fails. Like any other game, online role playing games also provide suggestions and formal system of rules and mechanics that needs to be met. Within this rules, the participant can improvise and shape the end result and direction of the games.

Stories

The games are based upon stories which can be mostly adventure and fictional in type. Online role playing games centers around fantasy and mythological genre were the gamer needs to achieve some goal to enhance further into the game. These targets are sometimes called "quests" or mission. They involve chasing after of dragons from the city, safeguarding a damsel in distress, or battling evil masters and sorcerers. How one wins these battles depends on their character's strength, characteristics, and skill.

More Info on the Characters

Players are given options on how they want to improve their character's performance. They can modify this through enhancing their character's skills, attributes, equipment, and special abilities. In most RPGs, these improvements are offered as rewards for accomplishing missions and overcoming certain challenges. These rewards have to be earned.

Status Bars

Unlike common video games where health or a character's attributes are shown on colored status bars and meters, online role playing games have a more complex way in presenting status levels. Instead of the simpler abstract graphical representation, they utilize numeric values which are constantly updated each time the character scores or takes a hit. These numerical values are displayed on the status screen of each player.

Multiplayer Options

At first, role playing games highlighted only a single player mode of playing. However, with the appearance of games like Diablo, multiplayer options of the games became available and in a flash became very prevalent especially during the mid-1990s. With increased popularity, these multiplayer games turned out to be massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) along with the coming of the World Wide Web. Games such as Everquest were developed as MMORPGs.




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