Coul...Could we have a Role-play forum?

[Fensfield]

Actually there is already an 'mmo' out there that's designed more for roleplay purposes and doesn't focus as much on the normal battling/crafting/end-game that other mmo's do (though it does still have them in there)

It's called Mabinogi

Good point. And a lot of the things Mabinogi did right, I saw in Final Fantasy XIV. .. 'Course they're also the things the new Dev' team are chewing on with abandon (seriously, I've seen high praise given to the same decisions by critics and players alike that simultaneously got called stupid over here, like flexible role definitions and gear having a limited (but still important) influence on stats beside skills. I can only think FF XIV didn't go far enough either way and got stuck in the mediocre middle ground).

Still, Mabi is definitely a wonderful game, with some of the best instance vs open-world balancing I've ever seen. The people who made it obviously cared desperately about the world and characters they were presenting (an entire element of its custom-built Pleione engine is dedicated to making one particularly important character memorable) and enabling people to have characters, rather than 'toons', not to mention they obviously knew a lot about The Mabinogion itself.

Mabinogi however, has two unfortunate drawbacks, neither all that reconcilable:

1. From a roleplay perspective, it suffers a bit from Special Snowflake Syndrome. It justifies game mechanics by having all player characters be Milletians - immortal travelers of the Soul Stream. It makes playing a character a tad awkward having to fit into that frame, and led to Mabi's roleplay community becoming fractured over who is a Milletian or what groups allow characters to be Milletian, or whether it's okay to roleplay a 'normal'... Not to mention the 'what's the point of it all?' issues arise from being outright told your character's never in any real danger.
   
   Not to mention the reincarnation system, while brilliant fun, is a right sod to roleplay around.
   
   
2. Mabinogi's battle system is pretty close to true realtime, relying heavily on timing and not having latency issues - it was built to operate over a landmass the size of Japan and can just about cover a continent at a stretch. While great fun, it's really sensitive to lag. Thus there's an NA version, a European version, Korean, Japanese.. and massive latency problems aside there are regional IP blocks operating and Nexon work unusually hard to block proxies and VPN tunnels. We can't play with our international friends. For us Europeans, it's even worse: it took several years to take it into the EU market, so now it's a 'new old game' with all the playerbase issues that entails.