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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."
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