Ah yes, Oregon Trail. I will never forget being glued to the green on slightly darker green text on a screen about as small as my grade school noggin. I forded rivers, hunted buffalo and squirrel, and watched as my family members perished due to the piss poor survival training I received from my 1st grade teacher. It was educational gaming, yes, but it was about as much fun as I would have in grade school beyond pegging people in gym with a dodge ball.

I’ve been considering a purchase of the new Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood game and my thoughts trailed off about the Wild West as a setting. Why haven’t we seen more game adaptations of this slice of history? Is it too far gone or is its reality too blurred and marred by the early Hollywood misrepresentations? Is the real Wild West too gritty and depressing for games? I doubt it. Especially when you look at the myriad of World War II games that have been flooding the market ever since Saving Private Ryan hit theaters in 1998. Maybe we just need a truly epic western movie to spark people’s interest in the period.

Until that day comes, I wonder, what would a Wild West MMO be like? In my head, a Wild West MMO would have a dusty, barely habitable environment. There would be one main city that was populated by NPC shopkeeps, guards, ladies of the evening, and a bevy of various folk in between. There could be some smaller settlements on the outskirts of the main hub which were also computer driven. Maybe there could be caravans to go between these and the main city which would bring in goods to the smaller towns (protect the caravan quests anyone?). There’s where the NPC control would stop. Outside of this small non-player driven world would be the frontier. A vast expanse of wilderness to be explored and which would be ever changing based on player created settlements and how they react to the environment and its inhabitants.

I can see a broad array of classes from which to choose. Maybe even allow players to be an opposing faction of natives who have to defend and attack settlements themselves, and who have an entirely different form of economy. Mix that with the ability to be a third “bandit” faction who have to steal to survive and you have the making of a seriously volatile PvP game.

I think there are a lot of possibilities with an MMO based in the early days of the Western Frontier. The only way I see it working though is by factoring in a shallow leveling curve (maybe no levels whatsoever, just deep skill trees). It also needs to have only one character slot and permadeath. Yes, this needs to be realistic to be taken seriously. When you die, you die. Then you reroll and start over. But the shallow (or no) leveling curve should take care of some of the gripes from restarting. There should also be disease brought on by interaction with the games many whores and hygiene depraved beggars. Also, death from malnourishment after you run out of food because of a bad crop season, yeah,….hmmm.

This is pretty gritty and depressing. Maybe that’s why there’s not more games based in this period.