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Where Do You See MMO Games In Ten Years?
An anonymous reader points out this Stratics Central story, which talks to gaming executives about where they see the massively multiplayer genre in ten years time. Respondents, including representatives from Codemasters' Dragon Empires and Majorem's Ballerium, talk about genre changes, different spectator experiences, and, well, virtual knights running around Santa Monica.
Perhaps in ten years they will have figured out how to make playing MMORPGs less like working at a really boring job interspersed with waiting in huge lines.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Not this one though, on a better monitor. Perhaps in 3D.
But I don't see any of those games being Duke Nukem Forever.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Until I got a chance to read past the headline, I thought we were discussing the games insurance companies play to prevent paying claims. Oops.
Back on-topic: I think MMO games will only continue to get larger, as more people get the network capability installed in their homes to make it practical. While the Sims online didn't do as well as some expected it to, Evercrack is still addictive (from what I've heard anyway.)
Add to wider adoption of broadband, reduced costs for computers and game consoles and it seems obvious that more people will be playing games online than ever before.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I suspect photo- and audiorealism will bring a level of immersion that will make for a very thin line between reality and gaming. Movies, television and the Internet will fall by the wayside in terms of entertainment appeal. Fiber optics will probably allow for almost instant transfer of relatively huge chunks of data. Compact discs will become as quaint as vinyl as everything gravitates towards solid state storage and 'Net based game streaming a la Valve's Steam project.
I suspect gaming will also be eventually offloaded onto consoles, assuming the tech gap continues to close and prices remain rock-bottom cheap.
Moving onto MMOGs proper, you will probably see the market dominated by three or four "games," akin to the dawn of television with NBC, ABC and CBS. Mergers galore, as only huge corporations would be able to deliver complex, stable and immersive games within remotely reasonable time frames. I suspect new terminology will arise to describe MMOGs, although I won't venture into any guesses that will likely look hokey even five years from now. Language and dialect move too rapidly for that anyway. "Neophyte" becomes "nub," "yay" becomes "w00t," etc.
Monthly fees will become steep as MMOGs become a habit occupying hours every day as television and Web surfing do now. The breadth and depth of available game elements will be as complex and configurable as a cable channel lineup.
All pure speculation, though.
Imagine how many soj I'll have amassed by then!
Already, newer MMORPGs are showing that dynamic worlds will probably become the norm. I'll use Shadowbane as the example. Out of the box, players log in, and start playing a normal seeming MMORPG. Once a player advances enough, they can leave "newbie" island and enter a user created world. The guilds of the world create the majority of the cities, and guild warfare ensures the map will change over time. Games like Star Wars Planet, err, I mean Galaxies, will eventually add such features.
Other things I see games doing is allowing more people to interact. Something Shadowbane had planned on was interconnecting all the servers, allowing any player to travel and meet another player. This didn't ship, but should be in by the summer.
Beyond that, I hope to see some other generes go MMO. We have RPGs, and hints of FPS with Planetside, but I would love to see an MMO RTS. Shadowbane has a few RTS elements, but 10six was the only true RTS type game I can thing of in the MMO space. I also see MMO becoming the next hype item for game makers, much like 3D was. So many early 3D games did 3D just because they could, and not because they should.
I'm hoping that there will be a shift between MMO games that benefit from being MM (FPS war games where it's fun to have hordes of opponents and allies battling it out at once) and those that are weakened by it (most MMORPG's where you really have very little effect on the world around you).I'm still hoping to see a Dream Park type experience where you can role-play in a smaller, more controlled environment drawing from a large pool of participants. Ideally being able to observe games during the course of play. NWN has done much to capture this feeling, but it's not quite there yet.Maybe a MMORPG where instead of one huge sprawling world filled with legions of players you have many smaller pocket worlds with coherent plotlines/games going at once. What will be most interesting to me is how the standard multiplayer games ability to handle larger numbers of players will effect the tolerence of people to pay for MMO games. When you play a game can you really appreciate the difference between 128 players at once and 3,000?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. -Plato
Nub is slang for newb is slang for newbie is British slang for new boy.
Not neophyte.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Funnily enough, I just finished my report on my MMRTS game.
e gentle with the screenshots :)
http://130.88.226.154/project_report.sxw
and
http://130.88.226.154/freecraft/screenshot/
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I would hope that it would go in the direction of Neal Stephenson's concept of the "Metaverse" from his book Snow Crash. I would not be suprised to see something like that (immersive, with the capability to be as realistic as the coder makes it) and would not be suprised in the least to find the same divisions that spring up today in online "content"...some people are content with the front page, dreamweaver, and WYSIWYG edited pages, that have 50Bn extra lines of code, and there are hackers, who would have simple, elegant avatars, and probably also garish ones to show off to one aother with. sure it would be the same old technocracy, but hey, it would be photorealistic, and probably over fiber. sounds fun to me! =D
Inevitably, the interface challenges that we are struggling with now using keyboards, mice, monitors, and other physical constructs will be overcome. Specifically, once we can place an image directly onto the eye (likely in 10 years) or into the brain (not so likely in 10 years), many of the challenges current game developers face in getting people online will vanish.
What will emerge in its place is a kind of reality flipping mode of entertainment. Once people can carry a display with them, and flip over to that view any time they like, games worlds can become a reality channel that you flick to while sitting on the bus riding to work.
In this way, games become a kind of many-layered reality spread above the 'real' base world, limited only by the unwillingness of the mass market to focus on anything not distractingly vulgar.
So: in 10 years, games will be layered into the world like reality channels, each drawing viewers based on their interactive stimulation value, rather than their dramatic value.
One: the sheer amount of them causes the genre to kill itself off
Two: several winners will emerge and the rest will die slow deaths
or Three: the genre will continously reinvent itself and only those companies with the bankroll to come out with a new game every year or two will even bother with the concept anymore.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
IN MY PANTS!
I'd really like to see an MMORPG similar to what was featured in .hack//sign.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
"Massively Multiplayer" is a bit of a misnomer, in my opinion. NO game today actually allows you to participate with other players en masse. At best, you might interact with dozens of other players at once, but in the current crop of "massive" online games all that means is a big lag fest. You get that many players together and one or both of the following happen: Your 3D card chokes on all the polys and your framerate drops; or your bandwidth can't handle simultaneous updates from all the other players on your screen.
What does it matter if several hundred thousand people play the same game? Only about 10% of them will be logged on at any given time. Only 5% of *those* will be on the same server as you. And of the ones actually logged in, you'll only be able to play with less than 1% of them at a time.
I predict that within the next 10 years we will see games that can rightfully claim to be "massively" multiplayer. These games will have millions of simultaneous players, all sharing one huge game world (instead of dozens of copies of one). Line of sight restrictions won't exist as such -- there won't be any fog keeping you from standing on top of a mountain looking down on a city and being able to make out hundreds of players milling about, all in high resolution breathtakingly clear rendered 3D and in glorious real time.
I can picture a massive starship battle, in fully 3D: There are two sides involved, and each armada has thousands of ships. At the helm of each individual ship is a player much like yourself. You are somewhere in the middle of your side's armada, so you can see hundreds of friendly ships flying in a loose formation toward the cloud of approaching enemies. Your mini-map has a dot for each ship in your fleet and each enemy in sensor range. You tense for battle, then the two fleets collide. The destruction at the leading edge is massive, but it takes practically no time for both fleets to occupy the same space.
At first your only thought is to avoid a head-on collision, but reflexively you start blasting away with your foreward cannons as you begin to dodge. Dozens of explosions dot the spacescape around your ship. Cannon and laser fire arc around between tiny dots you know to be fairly distant ships. You narrowly miss an oncoming enemy and as you bank around you are treated to a glorious explosion as one of your comrades is obliterated. Too bad for him -- but also too bad for the hostile flying cockily through the debris. You're quicker than he is and your cannons shred his ship before he even sees you.
Now that the initial charge is over, the pace slows a bit. Allies group together for the strength of numbers, flying slowly for more maneuverability, surveying the part of the battle nearby to determine where they can deal the most damage...
Something like that could never happen with today's hardware and bandwidth limitations. In ten years? It'd probably be a piece of cake.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Ignoring the whole technology advance thing, I see two schools of players right now: the power gamer and the role player. I have rarely seen anyone balance the two well. Having both co-exist in the same on-line game is difficult and one ruins it for the other (usually the role player loses out). Worlds such as detailed in Snow Crash are obviously a derivation of a role play world but is it the future? I don't think so. While I wish the role-player environment would win, todays kiddies want to slay other players. That involves hacking and power leveling, not building an on-line persona. -sigh-
B O R I N G
None of the interviewees mentioned sex. Odd.
Mind you, I still have this delusion of seeing a MMO Nethack.
You hit Groo the barbarian! --more--
Tim the wizard casts slow monster on you! --more--
Groo whispers to you in private, "DIE DIE DIE" --more--
Groo the barbarian hits! --more--
Joan the archeologist yanks your Vorpal Blade off your hands with her whip! --more--
You are caught in Tim the wizard's fireball! --more--
You die...
h@hh@hh@...@.&.... "You shall not pass!"