Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMORPG column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
The year is 2025, and every major MMO is shoving more of your old collected junk at you than your mum’s attic. Stop me if this sounds familiar:
You open your inventory. You have ten scraps of linen cloth, thirteen XP boosters, two halloween candies, three Helmets of Refulgent Anger, seven different types of ores, ten Tokens of Nightmare, and an Essence of Catastrophe.
Okay, you say, let’s start with currencies. You stop playing the game and open up a wiki page. If you wanted to spend your loot as intended, you’d need to visit three separate vendors. One of them’s in a city you didn’t know existed from an expansion that was released four years ago. You don’t know how it even got there.
You close your bag. The next time you open it, you delete almost everything. One week later, you open your inventory.
You have ten scraps of linen cloth. You cannot escape.
It’s not unusual, or even bad, for MMORPGs to have a lot of items. In isolation, all of those bits and bobs serve their purpose—but we’ve still all wound up in a spot where inventory bloat is a hallmark of the genre. And while I’d like to sit here, guffaw, and say ‘we shouldn’t be putting up with this!’ I know an inconvenient truth. Us and our full bags are stuck together. Sorry.
But first, definitions
There are a lot of bag-clogging items in MMOs, and for the purpose of grumbling about them, I’ll be simply referring to them as ‘tat’, a lovely little British word that means a shoddy thing. Tat can include, but is not limited to:
- Item tokens, exchanged to vendors for gear.
- Miscellaneous consumables, including XP boosters and buff food.
- Crafting materials.
- Currencies that are not the default currency of the game.
- Items that contribute to optional content, such as Mythic+ keys in WoW, or FF14’s “Sacramental” items for Pilgrim’s Traverse: Quantum.
- Seasonal holiday items.
- Bags-within-bags.
- Upgrade materials.
- Usable items, not equippable by a character, that have some secondary effect..
- Glamour or ‘vanity’ items.
…and so on. What I won’t be including in this list, confusingly, are junk items. Junk items are entirely inoffensive, since most MMOs now come with a “sell junk” button. As a matter of fact, I actually respect the junk item—flooding your bags with easily-disposable garbage creates natural break moments and directs you to social hubs to sell your crap. The junk can stay.
No, I’m talking about items that do allegedly have a use. Basically, anything you’d have to Google to discover what it does—miscellany that serves no immediate purpose, but might, conceivably, someday soon. If it prompts the thought ‘wait, what if this is important?’ then it’s tat.
And while most modern MMOs do try to solve the problem of tat, very few solve it entirely.
Points for effort
As regular PCG contributor and WoW enjoyer Heather Newman observed back in January, World of Warcraft has a currency problem. It has around 200 of them.
