Slashdot Mirror
Why Are There No Sports MMO Games?
Brian P. writes "With the online gaming market growing at a remarkable rate and new games being announced frequently, why have developers and publishers shied away from creating an MMO sports game? Online fantasy leagues are bigger than ever and online sports games such as Madden '05 are huge franchises. It seems to me that a logical evolution of this trend would be a gaming experience that lets a player start out as a street-baller and work their way up to virtual super-athlete status. The possibilities are endless...but obviously there's something seriously wrong with the concept because all we keep getting are tiresome sword and sorcery games and online adaptations of megafranchises such as Star Wars."
Why are there no team sports games where more than one or two people can play against eachother at a time? Why not large amounts of human controlled players on each side? I call first baseman!
Plus, sports games tend to be more based on the skill of the actual player than the character, and someone who was good at basketball games would be mighty pissed if they got schooled by some noob who had just played a long time.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Well, the idea is pretty neat. There are a few things about it though that might turn off _regular_ sports games players
,moving up to the major league, and along the way breaking away from 'guilds' of players whose skills they have surpassed. There could even be roles for managers/coaches of teams .
1) Licenses - Players would generally like to think that they are playing for a major team (say Manchester United in football). They might not enjoy the experience of playing the game if they were playing street football. (One of the reasons why the FIFA 200x series is so popular despite having relatively shallow gameplay as compared to Pro Evolution Soccer).
2) How do you address the aspect of every player wanting to be a part of the action. Take the case of football again. Almost everyone, would like to be in control of the player who is dribbling the ball. Playing the game sort of loses it's excitement if one has to stand at the back of the defense.
Of course it's highly possible that there does exist an audience for whom the above two shortcomings don't really matter, and who would like the concept of starting out as a street player
A lot of it comes down to bandwidth problems. Compared to sports games, RPG-ish games take considerably less updating and refreshing, and are also less time crucial than sports games.
If each person could control a player on the team, you would have to have every client synched, otherwise the play experience would be terrible. It's no problem if one person happens to see you walk in a slightly different path than someone else does in an online RPG, but if I'm playing football, you better be running the same route that my fellow defender sees. These types of synchronization problems are what made simple two player online sports games take so long to perfect. A lot of games use some type of motion prediction algorithm to make these games seem smoother than they are, but this is unacceptable for sports games where accurate "reproductions" of athletic skill need to be created using joystick commands.
I hope someday this does become a reality though.
In MMOs, the game is based around you being a character in this alternate world. It's something you probably aren't in reality for lack of monsters or foes you can legally slay.
Sports games revolve around one person controlling an entire team. In an MMO, assuming your character finds a team, they have to:
1) be online at the same time as the team
2) the designers need to come up with an entirely new way of playing sports games online from a 1 player=1 player perspective
3) the new way of playing has to be fun
This is not remotely easy and might not be possible at all. Otherwise, if you're just looking for seasons, doesn't X-Box Live have support for that?
"If the good lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates." -Willy Wonka
100-200 milliseconds isn't much when you're deciding whether to attack that orc or not, but when trying to intercept a pass... Ever play Everquest? Sometimes you have monsters running off and then 'porting right next to you. That's because the clients use prediction to show where the mobs are and what they're doing and they have to catch up to the servers sometimes. That works fine for an RPG where you're sitting in the same spot for 30 minutes waiting for a certain MOB to spawn, but not so well in fast-paced action games with 20+ human players trying to react quickly to what's going on. They do more advanced prediction in action games like Unreal Tournament, but I don't know if it would be fast enough for a sports game.
http://www.ultimatebaseballonline.com/
- and -
http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/
Yeah, I'd love playing a Nose Tackle... or maybe Guard! Then I can block for people I don't even know so they can make that big play! That'd be fun for all of about three plays.
Most people play video games to be the hero. There's a lot of positions on a football team that aren't exactly "exciting" but they're necessary. It's fun when playing with a bunch of friends outside. But to even approach that type of play in an online game you'd have to have a well-coordinated guild. You're not going to just log in have a fun pickup game with 20 people you don't know.
So to answer your question: Not nearly as cool as getting your friends together and going down to the park.
Let's take american football, 11 players on each side, so that's 22. What's so massive about that? Is the other 10,000 people on the server sitting in the stands.
Actually this sounds very cool, I'll play the virtual peanuts vendor... I can annoy everyone within my sector by yelling "Peanuts get your peanuts..." or even better I can be the streaker in the game and try to avoid security while running across the field...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
I suggest that the easiest way to resolve the problem of the boring team positions within football, hockey and so on is to create a MMO sports game but replace the real-world games with fictional. For example, Speedball.
OK, obviously it would need to a different game, and certainly be in 3D, but this would seem to have the necessary attributes: the positions in the team are balanced; it's fast; tactical; requires team work; and by Dog is it fun ! :)
First of all, many people have already pointed out, you have to get people to play all the positions. Not just that; you need people to play BENCH players, too. Who's going to do that? Second, they all have to be at the games at the same time. You're talking co-ordinating anywhere from 25 to 50 to 100+ people to all show up at the right time, every day or every week, to play a game. That's going to be a nightmare. What do you do when a team doesn't show up, or doesn't show up with all its players? Modifying the schedule will be a nightmare. Thirdly, what happens when a guy gets disconnected during the middle of a game? Does he disappear? Is the game suspended until he returns? Do you replace it with some lame AI player? Great, now you have to go code AI players somehow. What if the guy comes back? Finally, what do you do about seasonal rosters, trades, and so on? If you require the guy to be on the same team all season, he may just not want to play anymore when his team is 0-12. What do you do when all of your QBs quit the game? Can you get a new QB? They're not retired; what if they suddenly come back? On the other hand, if you let players just move around all the want and play on whatever team all season, the league will be a joke, not to mention very confusing to follow. You could do this at the managerial level, but then it's not really a MMOG. But having everyone control their own player? No way. (It should be noted, however, that there are some MMOGs in development that are trying to solve these issues.) Bruce