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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.
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.
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
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.