The MMORPGs of 2005

MMORPGDot.com has a two-part piece on the upcoming Massive games of 2005. The first article in the series touches on big name titles expected out this year like Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa, while the second article mentions lesser known small budget titles. From the big-title article: "If a list of features could make a great game, Dark & Light would be the first. NP Cube is promising some really ambitious things like a 40.000km gameworld without any loading, the possibility to become the king or conquer a town and enough goodies to whet your appetite. The question is how many of those features will actually be present at release?"

Comments

Size != Content

[nick_davison]

NP Cube is promising some really ambitious things like a 40.000km gameworld without any loading

You know, with a fractal algorithm and high enough precision location variables, I could give you a ten bajillion square mile game world next week. It'd suck as there's be nothing to do there except go up and down some hills and mountains, maybe occasionally swim across an ocean or screen, but it'd be huge.

A large gameworld is utterly meaningless without content. Gameplay is about density of content. Once you have a good density, sure, more is always good.

I'd rather play a game with 4km^2 of content with five really well considered pieces of content per meter than a 40,000 km^2 world with one automatically placed generic feature every 10m. Sure, it may technically have even more content than the smaller world but the quality and density of content will make me choose the smaller one.

At the end of the day, do you really want to play in a huge 1:1 simulation of Nebraska or would you have more fun at a much smaller, well designed theme park?