One of the reasons I chose this genre as my topic is that I am a devoted MMORPG player, having spent a long time engaging with and playing a wide range of games within this genre.
Over the thousands of hours I have spent playing, I gradually began to question where the true appeal of MMOs really has.
At first, I did not consider narrative to be the definitive answer. While the story is an extremely important part of my overall experience, I continue to play even during content droughts when no new narrative is being added. This suggests that the story is only one component of the MMO’s appeal.
The same applies to social interaction. Social systems are undoubtedly important to MMOs, yet many of the friends I met in-game eventually stopped playing for various reasons, while I continued on my own. This made me realize that, at least for me personally, socialization is not what sustains my long-term passion for the genre.
After setting these elements aside, I came to understand that what truly keeps me invested in MMOs is my deep fascination with the dungeon quests.
In the game I play, there are nearly 300 dungeons, and I can recall the content of almost all of them. Through this experience, I have developed a fairly systematic understanding of MMO mechanics.
Naturally, this understanding is largely grounded in the mechanical framework of Final Fantasy XIV, but the same analytical approach can also be applied to other action-oriented games. For example, certain boss mechanics in Split Fiction can be easily interpreted by MMO players by identifying familiar patterns and parallels.
With this background and experience in mind, I chose this genre as one of the three candidate topics for this project.
Mechanics prototype
From my experience, the mechanics of MMO raiding and bullet hell games are essentially based on combinations of geometric patterns. Based on this insight, I used Fungus in Unity to create a simple prototype of the system. If I choose to continue developing this idea, the specific level designs will be explored further at a later stage.
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