I've played a number of massively-multiplayer online games [wikipedia.org]. I have played Ultima Online for 6-7 years, Earth & Beyond from the beta test to its death, Eve Online for a few weeks, and City of Heroes a few times. I've come to the conclusion that rigidly-defined character types detract from a game's "fun".
Games Mimic Real-Life, Encourage Learning
As Raph Koster [raphkoster.com] discusses in A Theory of Fun for Game Design [amazon.com], games are abstract versions of real situations and decisions that we have to deal with in life. Perhaps this is one reason why researchers have indicated that surgeons who play video games make fewer mistakes [usatoday.com] in the operating room. The games help them sharpen eye-hand and decision-making skills that translate into actions they perform in the operating room. While it may not be the reason we play, games help prepare our minds for dealing with real life. They allow us to try our hand at things which would be expensive, dangerous, or impossible to try in real life - and we learn from those experiences.
More Challenges = More Fun
Koster suggests that games are fun when they provide a challenge that's just a little beyond our grasp, and get tougher the better we get at dealing with the challenges. When game designers limit players' options by saddling them with characters that are artificially limited, they remove some of the challenges and strategic options. This makes the game less fun.
For example, consider checkers [wikipedia.org] and chess [wikipedia.org]. In checkers, you have two types of pieces (regular checkers and those you've "kinged"). Pieces can move in only one way. Chess meanwhile, is more complex. There are many more kinds of pieces to move, and each piece has a unique set of rules governing how it moves. The chess player has many more options available to use to "trap" or win against the opponent than the checker player. Both games can be fun, both can be challenging. All things considered, chess is more challenging and for most people more fun than chess.
Earth & Beyond Made Too Many Choices for You
Translating the chess/checkers analogy to MMOs, consider the late Earth & Beyond[ign.com] from Electronic Arts. This game made many of the player's choices for him (or her). The player chose which of three kinds of characters to be. This choice limited the kinds of items the player could create, its effectiveness in combat, and the kinds of skills it could learn. Skills had to be unlocked before they could be developed, usually through completing mundane tutorial missions. To develop a skill, a player had to (irrevocably) assign skill points to them. To get skill points, a player had to progress the character through levels.
Thus began the leveling "treadmill" in Earth & Beyond. Players learned that there were certain tasks they could do which maximized the speed at which they could level up and gain skill points. These turned out to be "trade routes" between star systems. Players clustered around the terminals that dispensed a limited number of these tasks every few minutes and tried to snatch them up before others did. Players who filled their plate with trade routes ran to their ships, flew to the destination, collected their experience, grabbed some trade route jobs there, and went back. If this sounds really boring to you, it should. It was deadly dull. But it was the easiest and fastest way to gain levels, to gain skill points, to be able to do things you really wanted to do. There were other ways to "level up", but most people hopped on the "trade route treadmill" and rode it to level 150 (the maximum level a character could attain).
In an attempt to "balance" things in the game, EA designed things so that each character had a serious limitation. Warriors could fight well but couldn't heal themselves and couldn't gather resources. Explorers could gather resources, heal others, and travel quickly, but were lousy in combat. Tradesmen could manufacture all manner of items for players, but were mediocre fighters and healers. Warriors could "solo" their way through most enemies, but needed Explorers nearby to heal them for others. Missions were designed that no single class could complete alone, forcing players to work together. They had no other choice.
Economically, the classes were forced to work together as well. Explorers could gather resources but couldn't make anything but reactors. Tradesmen couldn't gather resources but could make parts, weapons, engines, and shields. Warriors could make weapons but couldn't gather resources. Players who wanted to make the more advanced items needed an Explorer to gather their resources, a Tradesman to make the parts of which the items were comprised, and (depending on the item) a Warrior/Tradesman/Explorer to make it from the parts. Again, players had no choice. Certain components could only be made by players, or obtained by destroying a particular enemy.
Thus EA made a lot of the players' choices for them. Once a player had chosen a given type of character, there were certain things that character could never do. Once a player had assigned skill points to a skill, even a skill that turned out to be useless or selected accidentally, the player was stuck with that decision. (Later, they did give players an option to "re-spec" their characters, but this was not a simple thing to do and you needed the help of other players to do it.) The only way a player could succeed was to join a guild or to have multiple accounts (so that the player's Explorer on Account #1 could hand resources to the Tradesman on Account #2 to create parts for the Warrior on Account #1 to use to fashion a weapon).
While there was some fun to be had in Earth & Beyond, players were constantly cursing the limitations of their character types and the hoops they were required to go through to get help completing missions. Too many decisions were made for the player, leaving too few options available for strategy. It got boring.
City of Heroes Forces Cooperation and Limits Choices, Too
Similarly, City of Heroes has specific character classes like Blasters, Tanks, and Healers. Blasters do better at ranged combat but suffer considerable damage at close range. Tanks do well at close-range melee combat but are weak against opponents who can deal damage from a distance. Healers generally suck at combat but can keep everyone around them alive during a fight.
Beating most missions in the game requires a combination of character types, again requiring a "forced cooperation" and limiting the player's choices in creating their character. For me, these limitations and being forced to work with other players detracted from my enjoyment of the game. I ended up dropping the account soon after opening it.
Eve Online Gets a Lot Right
Eve Online's design is far more open than either City of Heroes or Earth & Beyond. The type of character you choose has few limitations and an individual character can learn any skill the player wants it to learn. There are many things that a player can do in Eve Online. Unfortunately, during the time I played the game it seemed I spent all my time mining or traveling from place to place. The Eve Online universe was so massive it once took me 90 minutes to get from one place to another. That's too much time to invest in simple traveling. I also hate "player versus player" (PVP) combat. In Eve, it's theoretically possible for you to be attacked anywhere, anytime, by another player. Travel time, the boredom of mining, and the chance of death at the hands of another player turned me off about Eve Online. I think they get just about everything else right.
Ultima Online Has Fewer Limitations, More Challenges
Ultima Online is far less limited than City of Heroes or Earth & Beyond. It's probably not as expansive an environment as Eve Online, but it's quite large. PVP combat is an optional element. If you want to participate, you can. If you prefer to cooperate or solo without the risk of some 12-year-old punk cutting you down, you can do that, too.
In Ultima Online, if you want a character who can heal and deliver damage from a distance, you can have one. If you want a character who is fantastic at combat but can't heal to save his life, you can have that. Once you've created a character, if you find that your choices in skills weren't the best, you can begin training that character in a different skill set immediately. Unlike Earth & Beyond, a single character could complete a quest/mission without the help of others. A miner in UO can also be a fighter, and thus defend against enemies who attack while mining. While there are some enemies too difficult to fight without help, the majority can be handled by a single player with the right combination of character skills and tactics. Unlike City of Heroes, it's possible to have a fighter who can deal damage at a distance as well as up close. He might not be, say, as good a healer as someone who doesn't have both of those skills. On the other hand, he might not need to be. Characters are much more open-ended, allow for some subtlety in their design, and can be quite effective soloing against a number of enemies. This, for me, has always made UO a more interesting and fun game than the others and explains why I'm still able to enjoy it 6-7 years later when I've dropped all the other MMOs. (UO is by no means perfect, unfortunately, and one day I'll outline all the reasons why. But it beats the others I've played.)
I think the reason UO tends to be more fun for me, for a longer period of time, is that there are multiple options for dealing with most situations. For instance, a swordsman/healer could slide in close to a dragon and take it down by using a dragon-slaying sword, backing off occasionally to heal or rest up. An archer/mage could pound the dragon from a distance with arrows and use magic to deal additional damage. There are many other ways it can work as well, including teaming up with other players to take it down. There is also a variety of gear available to characters, such as armor with higher resistance to heat damage or which regenerates hit points. This leads to a seemingly infinite array of strategies for dealing with a difficult foe. When you compare this to a game like City of Heroes, where beating some enemies is virtually impossible for a certain character class to do, or impossible to do alone, UO is more interesting and challenging because it's more open-ended and flexible. It beats Eve Online for me because near-instantaneous travel to any point in the game world is possible and PVP is optional.
Unfortunately, the UO economic model has been more or less totally obliterated lately and I've lost some interest in the game because many of the crafting skills and treasure I worked hard to get became more or less valueless in the game world (and outside it). I still have my account, but only for a short time longer, I suspect.
The Myth of Balance and How it Applies Here
Part of the reason game designers use rigidly defined character types is the mythical notion of "balance" [mikesalsbury.com] that I've talked about before. They believe that there can't be balance unless each player character has specific strengths and weaknesses, that too much flexibility in character design means that players will find some way to "beat the system" and make characters that overpower those of other players. As I discussed in the article linked above, this is a mistaken idea. Even when characters can be balanced against one another and enemies, you can't balance the human element. Some players will always be smarter than others, have more time to play than others, more experience than others, more in-game or out-of-game wealth than others, etc. You'll never have such a complete balance that a brand new player and a veteran player given the same character, equipped the same way, will achieve the same outcome every time. If you do, you've eliminated the incentive for there to BE veteran players.
Tying It All Together
As I noted at the outset, the appeal of games is that on some level they are a simulation of something in the real world. They allow us to practice a situation without suffering the consequences of a mistake. They allow us to test strategies for dealing with a problem and develop a method that works for us.
When MMOs artificially limit a player's options by creating rigidly defined character classes that have to be grouped together to do anything significant, they limit their appeal to a particular audience to the exclusion of all other types of players. For example, I don't necessarily always want to band together with a bunch of other players to complete a mission or kill an enemy. Designers do this in an attempt to invoke a mythical "balance" between player characters.
But the real world isn't balanced. It isn't always fair. Some people are smarter. Some are stronger. Some are faster, richer, better-looking, taller, shorter, or more flexible. Since games are a crude simulation of the real world, it isn't necessary for them to be totally balanced, fair, and equally accessible at all times. Nor should they cater to any one particular mindset (e.g., those who thrive on combat). They need to provide a world we can interact with and experience, offer us problems to solve, and as many options for solving those problems as possible.
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