One element that seems to follow around many fantasy genre MMOs is the idea of putting the lore’s gods in the game as defeatable content. Largely, when this happens, it leads to my arguments of why I feel raiding is stupid. Its not that I think the act of raiding or the existence of raid content is stupid, I just feel that often times it is done poorly. I always love beating up on EverQuest at times like these… so lets continue the trend. In the Planes of Power expansion, they put in a long series of flags with a lore to back up the players storming the planes, the homes of the gods, and killing them. You fight and kill pretty much all the gods on the EQ Pantheon, and at the end of the story ***Spoiler!*** one of the surviving gods makes time go backwards to before you went through the Plane of Time and killed off all the gods for good. Actually, not too bad of a story, and if this were a fantasy novel, that’d be a fairly nifty end to a series.
The problem, of course, is that EverQuest didn’t end. There have been more expansions and more mudflation, and now you can defeat the god of fire with a single group. There are insignificant monsters in the new worlds that put the gods to shame.
Wait… what?
Exactly. The biggest hurdle with putting gods into your game as defeatable content is that, unless it really is the end of your game, your gods will become trivial content in the future.
In my opinion, the gods, and the true homes of the gods, should never exist in the game world. Your players should, at best, fight the creations of gods, avatars of the gods imbued with power, but distinct from the gods themselves. If you feel that you must absolutely put the gods in your games, consider making them nigh unkillable.
You bastard! I was poking around for WP themes, found one I liked, uploaded it and got it all nice and personalized, then took a break and went through my daily blog list only to find YOU had Shades of Grey, too!
KHAAAAAAAN!