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Where Do You See MMO Games In Ten Years?

Posted by simoniker on from the crystal-lag-ball dept.

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.

4 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Fewer McJob Games by frenchgates · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
  2. Swami sez... by Captain+Beefheart · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Swami sez... by shaitand · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Where have you been? Most MMORPG players would rather go for a hunt then out for dinner NOW... 10yrs from now we will have MMORPG anonymous meetings for them. I don't know anyone who spends as much time browsing as a MMORPG player does on their game.

      They build their computers centering them around how their game functions on it. They spend between 12 and 16hrs a day on the game, sometimes doing nothing but getting up and logging on, logging off before bed, catching meals and bathroom breaks when it won't disrupt the group.

  3. User driven, changable worlds by Drakino · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.