Update: The word “on” in the second to last paragraph had a “0” instead of an “o”. We have corrected the error.
When most people think of a massively multiplayer online game, they think of long hours and late nights, social isolationism and illegitimate sick days. That’s because playing an MMO is a commitment. If you want to see everything the game has to offer, you must not only commit countless hours to leveling your character but even more to organizing large groups of people to cooperatively take on the end game content. The vast majority of MMOs fit this description and so, for one reason or another, a lot of people will never touch one. Now imagine if you could shrink that experience down to the essentials, where your character gains levels in a matter of minutes and all the organization is taken care of automatically. Oh, and also it’s a bullet hell shooter. Welcome to Realm of the Mad God.
Realm of the Mad God isn’t new. It launched in beta in January 2010 and was officially released in June 2011, but it was released on Steam on February 20th. It’s basically a class-based bullet hell shooter. You create a character (a wizard to start, but you can unlock more classes later) and are given a brief tutorial of the game’s controls. After testing your abilities on a few helpless chickens, you’re thrust into the world. From there you explore a randomly generated landscape with up to 85 other people while shooting at monsters who are, in turn, shooting at you. The game will sometimes give you quests to kill specific monsters, which is nothing more than a picture of that monster and an arrow pointing in their general direction. And that’s it. You just go do that until you die.
What sets RotMG apart from other MMOs is that death is permanent. There’s no resurrecting a dead character and you don’t get to keep your stuff. While that may sound infuriating, the game does a few things to ease the pain. First of all, dying is the only way to unlock new character classes. For instance, you start with a wizard as your only available class. Get him to above level 5 and die, and you unlock the priest class. Reach level 5 with that priest and you unlock the archer and so on. The game currently has 13 classes that can be unlocked this way.
Also, your character is given a stash that can hold eight items as long as you remember to drop them off before you die. (You can pay for extra storage through micro-transactions.) This is especially useful when you’re playing your warrior and find an excellent item for your priest character. It makes it so that dying doesn’t always feel like you’re starting from scratch.
That brings us to what I believe is the most interesting feature of RotMG: grouping. Grouping is handled like this: Once you’re within a certain distance of another player, you’re in a group. That’s it. Experience, unlike most MMOs, is not shared. If you’re in a group with 5 other people and one of them kills a monster worth 100xp, you all get 100xp, rather than it being split among the party. This means that there is literally no reason not to group with other people and is what takes RotMG from interesting shooter to social experiment.
Since most of the game’s social aspects (grouping, quests, etc.) are handled automatically, almost no one talks. And yet, everyone seems to follow a general understanding. As I walk around the map doing quests on my priest, I stumble upon another player playing as a rogue. I deal slightly less damage than he does, but I have an area of effect healing skill so he starts following me around for survivability. We’re much more effective as a pair and the game automatically starts recognizing us as a group, giving us the same quests. We become an unspoken duo, wreaking havoc across the land without a sound. Pretty soon, a warrior stumbles upon our group and begins to follow as well, followed by a wizard, then a paladin, etc.. We essentially snowball into a giant mass of players, like a swarm of killer bees, rampaging through the countryside shooting bullets in all directions. Enemies die the moment they come on screen and the experience notifications are popping over everyone’s heads so densely that they’re impossible to read. It’s not clear who’s leading the group anymore; everyone is just trying desperately to keep up. A few people get left behind as they stop to check out what loot dropped, but most of us know that no amount of loot can make us more powerful than we are as legion. No one says a word; they just participate; and it’s super effective.
It’s an exciting proof of concept for non-verbal communication. When words are taken out of the equation, people start acting on what’s best for the group rather than the individual and that, more than any other aspect, is what sets Realm of the Mad God apart from other MMOs. If that’s not enough incentive, it’s free to play, which eliminates the barrier to entry (though you can pay real dollars for more character slots, storage, vanity items, etc.). Also, you can experience most of what the game has to offer in just a couple of hours, rather than a few months like typical MMOs. What else did you have to do today? No, wait! Don’t tell me.
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