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The Future of MMORPGs
Fargo writes: "How often do you get the creators of EverQuest, Asheron's Call, World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online, and others in the same room together? It happened at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Jose. GameSpy pulled together notes from three days' worth of talks and drew some common conclusions that point toward where the genre is going in the future. A good read if you're interested in where Virtual Worlds are headed."
The problem with MMORPGs right now is the players can't shape the world. It would be so much fun if players could build cities, destroy cities, take power over a nation, remove a person from power, eliminate an entire species of animal, etc. Sure at times you'll have things unbalanced, but as long as you have methods to rebalance it shouldn't be an issue (like destroying a boulder that stopped a river). Also it would be nice missions involved more than one person. For instance the game could give a high level character a mission that would take too long for him to finish by himself, but he could hire lower level people for a negotiated reward to help him along.
;)
But like all people on slashdot I only have ideas and no plans to actually implement the crap I think up.
I've always wondered why the 'supervillain' players aren't just allowed to be supervillains... Some gameplay addition that gives them a fatal flaw, or restricts them to certain 'evil lands' when they PK. The 'good guys' could then search dungeons (after finding out about the fatal flaw at the local tavern/wise man) for the 'special thing' needed to kill the evil PKer. (note: the dungeon would be off limits to the PKer, and probably anyone 'evil' and just contain monsters and the such)
It'd be just like the predictable, mediocre plotlines of soo many stories we all love and enjoy. The PKers are happy that they can PK people foolish enough to enter their wicked realms, and the good guys can go off and fight 'eeeevil' (for great rewards of course)
This article raises a number of interesting points. Not the least of which, is what are these things? Are they games, of other worlds of existence? A place for enjoyment, or a metaverse of sorts?
In my mind, they need to evolve beyond games and give users a reason to take part rather than stat building and killing progressively larger monsters. As a beta tester for Ultima Online, and short term user of several other systems I can tell you that gets boring real quick.
The problem, as I see it, is how to deal with that small percent of the population who want to just cause trouble for everyone else. Pkilling, newbie killing, etc will always be something people want to do. The key is to protect people from it while not breaking the suspension of disbelief that gets us so caught up in the world, and still allowing these sorts of things for those who want to take part.
Can you imagine how boring the metaverse would be if Hiro Protaganist just slashed through all the black and white avatars, simply because he could? That wouldn't go far to lure new users.
To continue the metaverse analogy, allowing users to carve out their own niche is a real bonus. MUDs, MUSHs, etc. have almost all had some capacity to allow the players to build the world. The metaverse allows people to create homes, buildings, hell even the Black Sun.. but in MMORPGs so far that feature has been poorly implemented. UO allows for building houses and hiring shopkeepers, but the former just cluttered the landscape, while the latter became pack animals for most players.
In short, this article asks some good questions. I can't think of any easy answers to any of them, but it's good to see people discussing this in an open forum.
I think that as we become more and more online, games will be the first to switch from a product like it is today to a totally service based system. You may goto a store and buy a cd that starts you off, but eventutally the game will be totatlly downloaded off the internet. It's already happening today in small amounts with EQ, UO, AC, and AO. Valve just realeased that technology that allows you to download a game completly from the internet.
If content providers hooked up with cable and DSL providers, and provided caching servers closer to the customer, there would be almost no wait for your games. That's something I can see people paying for.
Old school distribution is definatatly going to dissapear in the long run. Maybe not until the X-Box 3 or the PS5, but there will be a console released that you just plug into the internet, monitor/TV and wall. No CDROM/DVD drive, just games. The only thing that is stopping it today is bandwidth and the fact that Sony makes an amazing amount of money for those silver disks.
It really makes sense because right now they are almost doing it right now. Think about how many times you have had to buy the same game but slightly updated for the new system. Is Civ III really 50 dollars better then Civ II? Most sequels are just the same game, better graphics. The only difference is that you can NOT buy the new game, but if they charged a monthly fee then you have no choice, it's pay to play. Though I hope that they will charge less since they will be able to get much better market data from the consumer if the consumer has to download the game to play it.
I worked in online gaming from 1992 to 1998 and we built a MMORG that never got to see the light of day.
During it's development it suffered from many of the things mentioned in this article.
(1) was it a game? No one knew, it ended up being made into an interface for our other previously developed games (like Spades and Poker and Bass Lake Fishing). The RPG aspect and personal space customization were to be done later, after this was decided. So the answer was, no it wasn't a game.
(2) it's for adults more than kids, and at the time people still thought only kids played video games (ooops, kids grow up and... still play)
(3) we were hot enough to be bought by AT&T and then AOL... ug, death!
(4) finally, we were around before the (commercialized) net and had a you-have-to-build-it-yourself mentality. This is not a "not invented here" syndrome, when we started making network games in 1991, you really did have to build it yourself. Email, chat, everything. We didn't survive all the help we would get, and never leveraged the explosion of the net to our advantage... instead it was a sort of tsunami that swamped us.
(5) Violence: it sells, the 3d "revolution" in games is associated with it. Making a peaceful game hedging on community and social play, construction exploration and politics... why, it's a hard sell now, it was even harder then. Thank god for the Sims for opening this up a little, potentially.
BTW: I still remember how to make these things... our technology could support tens of thousands of people on the hosts where there was no limit to packing, but you saw only the closest couple hundred people. It sits unused, now owned, I think, by EA. The hosts are in use for non-mmorg use, oddly enough. Inside these hosts people playing mundane card games have existence in a 3D world because the message passing paradigm is great... but they don't move in the 3D space and essentially sit in a matrix keeping track of an unpresented 3D position in the world.
-pyrrho
I'm going to disagree, but not for the reasons you might think.
The true jump in quality won't come from masses of gamers deciding in unison that, yes, I feel like pretending to be a sweaty dwarf named Argus McGinley of the Axehandle Clan today -- or whatever one's idea of traditional role playing might be.
Rather, it'll arrive when these online worlds become immersive/enjoyable enough that you don't even have to think about role playing. Not consciously, at any rate. That is to say, as these games evolve and their in-game mechanics grow to be more fluid and natural (instead of the hundreds of little annoyances -- zone loads, clipping bugs, slash commands -- that constantly remind us of a game's limitations), a majority gamers will begin to act more naturally within them.
Setting influences behavior, in a sense.
I would of agreed with this until the Sims came around. It seems that if gameplay is challenging/rewarding enough, poeple will be quite happy to play a member of the mob. For many people the escapism/fantasy element is still there(the desire to be Aragorn) but for others, being a productive happy hobbit is escapism enough. Particularly if(as the Entropia people are trying to do) a system gets developed which fully supports gamecash==realcash, rather than just really-cool-game-stuff==cash/fraud-from-EBay. I can imagine a lot of people who might think that spending a lot of time doing challenging and rewarding but unspectacular game tasks and making real world coin for it was as worthwhile as spending a lot of time trying to be a hero and maybe just ending up with a character who dies a lot(with a possible gamecash/realcash cost for resurrection). Of course you would still want a healthy helping of heroes, or else the game might get boring(only might mind you, there are No heroes in the Sims), but still... someone might just be able to pull off a game world which actually supported a heroic framework, adoring mobs and all.
lysergically yours
How much one participates in this living world is up to the player, but the designers will have to stay on their toes to keep the world interesting. I figure this can be done, but it will take committment.
Please for god's sakes don't attempt to publicize medievia on a forum like slashdot. Medievia's owner essentially downloaded the open source codebase "Diku", removed all the copyright information (violating the Diku license in ways too numerous to mention), and then began to charge players money ("donations") in exchange for in game items, in clear violation of the Diku license. It would be a valid business model if he had written the code himself, but as you'll see from this websitem ed.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/r.woolcock/
which contains code snippets from this closed source MUD, the game is a ripoff of Diku. This game has been utterly discredited in fora like rec.games.mud.diku, and it's only the lack of time and money on the part of the Diku creators which prevents them from sueing Mr. Krause, the creator of medievia. In any event, there are tens of text based MUDs which are as play worthy or better than medievia, so please don't support someone who makes money by stealing code and putting his name on it.
Most developers agreed that in small communities you can rely on the user base to police itself. But large-scale games with tens of thousands of users logged in at any given time can't be counted on to effectively self-manage. Conclusion? Control the environment. Just as Disneyland keeps its attractions clean and ejects any troublemakers from the park.
Trying to police and control your player base is a waste of time. 100,000 motivated subscribers will always find ways to circumvent arbitrary barriers and rules that game developers put in their way. Implementing these barriers steals valuable developer time and resources not only to implement these barriers but to also patch and maintain the barriers against their cunning player base. If you would instead give the player base and incentive to do the policing for you they'll do a far better job than a flotilla of developers could. I'll give you an example...
"In the land of Yore there lies a forest where the king's finest stag's graze. These stags are known throughout the world for their tasty meat and great horns both of which are highly sought after abroad (and are Yore's top exports). Now only the king and his servant's are allowed to kill stags in the forest as the stag population is cautiously controlled so as not to thin the heard too much. Commoners (controlled by player's) have been killing the stags illegally and ruining the game's economy. Do you...
A) Make the forest and no kill zone and technically implement this solution? Or
B) Deputize trustworthy members of the player base and pass laws against venison trading (punishable with prison terms for the character etc) by anyone except the king's men?
With A) your players will most likely figure out some clever way to either lure the stags out of the forest and kill them or figure out a hack which would allow them to kill stags in the forest. You'll end up spending all of your time fixing exploits that your players find and devs spend less and less time making the game more enjoyable and more time 'fixing' their game.
With B) you get an armed guard for the stags which never sleeps nor rests. Oh, and by the way you just made your game a lot more fun and interesting! Your player's are chasing dirty rotten thieves all over the forest and countryside to make them pay for trying to ruin their beloved land!
Some of you are probably wondering what stops a grief player from simply creating another account and griefing again? Simple, limit the number of player accounts a person can have per per credit card. In this way you limit grief players in the amount of trouble they can cause (although a little trouble can be fun and interesting). IMO it shouldn't be about trying to control user's and their experience. It should be about developer's injecting the right amount of reality into the game (where there are consequences for your actions) w/o removing the fun from the game. Game developer's: please allow players to police their own with the occasional encouragement and incentive from you to do so. The current model of "control the user's experience" is clearly broken and something needs to be done to fix it. MORGs are very costly to develop and company's don't like taking chances on unproven theories such as mine. I would very much like to see an atmosphere of experimentation and risk taking expand into the world of graphical MORGs much as was/is seen in the MUD community. This is one reason why I'm working with WorldForge. I would dearly love to promote an indie gaming scene where innovative games are created and interesting concepts tried. To take players where commercial game developers dare not tread.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Not that that's stopping people. I was involved with one group of people planning a persistent world set in the Forgotten Realms. And it wasn't the only one. But there were two big problems:
First, the game isn't designed to represent a persistent world, and the game system isn't designed to be played in real time. One spell per day? Hah! Who's going to play a first level wizard. There are some ways to get around this, but as of the last developer chat I attended, none of the developers had the time to worry about persistent world problems... they had enough on their plate already. And I'm sure it's only gotten worse. Some did express interest in going back after release (and after bug patches) and looking into a persistent world addon, but it was only talk. So, everytime we turned around, there was another hurdle to overcome, or question unanswered, specifically because we wanted a persistent world.
The other problem is cost. It costs a lot to run a server and provide the bandwidth necessary. How are you going to pay for it? Advertising? Monthly dues? Subscription fees? Sales of in-game items? Suggest any of these to your prospective audience and you'll get flamed and derided. The proposal to charge just $10/month pretty much ended our aspirations... the discussion forums where we GMs were coordinating and soliciting comments descended into namecalling and bagbiting, and I left. Eventually the project server went offline and never came back up.
The other thing we discovered was that there are a lot of people who don't want to roleplay -- they want to hack and slash, PK, or do both while playing a Drizzt clone. I can't tell you how many people introduced themselves with a character description of "Dark Elf with two scimitars" and half of those wanted to play an evil paladin or something equally far outside the rules. We got sick of munchkins even before we got our first look at the design tools.
Despite all that, there's going to be people using NWN to set up persistent worlds. But because it isn't designed for them, they aren't going to be very common nor very good. The best ones will probably be distributed over many interconnected servers with "portals" between them. However, until someone designs a toolkit for building persistent MUD-like worlds, DIY multiplayer online RPGs will be a thing of the future.
I can see the fnords!