Imagining GTA Online - Diverse Genres In MMORPGs

Thanks to 1UP for their 'Pray For It' article discussing an ideal, but unfortunately fictional game of their dreams, Grand Theft Auto Online. In envisioning "taking the basic template from Grand Theft Auto III and just adding more than one enterprising thug", as well as players banding together ("Once you get your own criminal operation started - kind of like a clan or guild - you can start enlisting the newbies to do jobs for you"), the author gets into a sure-to-be-controversial mini-rant regarding a perceived lack of diversity: "What's wrong with online RPGs is content. Why are they all fantasy games?... Who decided that you couldn't make an online RPG about anything?"

Comments

The never-ending problem of content and MMORPGS

[Sierran]

The problem with imagining online versions of games with cool worlds is that the online version will always suffer (and if history is any guide, usually fatally) from the fact that 95% of players are lazy and can't be bothered to participate in them. The fact that Ultima Online, the MMORPG with perhaps the lowest-tech engine, survives and thrives is because it demands more from its players than just appreciative ooh-ing and aah-ing at the eye candy and content that the dev team has slaved to put together. Players are actually required to interact, transact, form social arrangements and the like, and are 'encouraged' to do so 'in-character' if for no other reason than the game mechanics make it easier to do that than to sit around an l33t-ch4t with yer h0m13z. At least, they make that relatively boring.

One of the great things about GTA is the world that has been set up by the developers. Player behavior is guided much more subtlely and much more pervasively by the use of single-player storylines and rewards/penalties than it first seems. GTA Online would, in fact, make a decent game initially, but (IMNSHO) there would need to be some carefully thought out mechanisms that would provide for the formation of (and motivation for) player-to-player social structures, both dyadic and multiple-party (partners and gangs).

I would think GTA has an advantage in this arena in terms of immediate playability, because the game world is presented as pretty much an anarchy (well, with limited law). The problem, however, is that much of the 'fun' of GTA is the fact that you (and your immediate interactions) are stand-outs in the world, because everybody *else* is mostly law-abiding...which is what makes it so much fun to hear them scream in terror when you mow 'em down with the ambulance. :-) If everyone in the environment was behaving like you, it wouldn't be GTA anymore, it'd be a demolition derby with bystanders - a DeathRace 2000 with missions. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, I would tend to believe that it's going to pall a lot faster than the secret joy of running over that old lady while chasing down a hooker for a little of the old bouncy-bouncy life renewal.

Now, what *I* want is someone to extend the GTA system into vehicular weapons. Then we could FINALLY have a worthy online Car Wars environment. Heehee. Uncle Al's catalogs, here I come...