Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own MMOG
yebb writes "CNet reports about a company called Multiverse that has just begun beta testing of its platform for creating and integrating online virtual worlds. They are allowing developers and companies to use their online framework to expedite development of online games. Their network is free to use as long as you don't make any money from it's usage, but they also provide open source client applications to use or modify as you see fit." From the article: "'The business model is long-term,' said Richard Bartle, one of the pioneers of online games and an editor of Terra Nova, a leading Web site about virtual worlds. 'Although Multiverse's software will help speed up the to-market time for companies, it's still going to take developers ages to create content.' While Bartle is cautious about Multiverse's business model, he's fascinated by its potential."
How long before somebody creates a knockoff of World of Warcraft (ala the bnetd fiasco), and this company gets sued by [insert Blizzard parent company here]?
But seriously, what's to stop people from implementing their favorite games here, and what kind of liability is assumed by this company for providing the platform? With the current legal climate, services (such as Kazaa, morpheus, even bit-torrent) have been held accountable for copyright violations despite not having any control over the contents.
How long until the same issue effects this system?
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Sounds sorta like the dream behind Neverwinter Nights multiplayer where you could build your world and link it to other servers via portals. In theory it would create a zoned MMORPG if you had enough people working together to build and host content. In reality though, it never came to be since it required more work than the average user wanted to put in.
User generated content is only good if it's made so insanely easy to do that it's a no-brainer. As soon as you make it so users "design" the content, you're toast.
The general solution is to have pre-fab structures and templates for users to plop down and then to some limited extent fill in *some* custom content (usually smaller prebuilt objects the devs provide).
Player generated content is the holy grail of a lot of MMORPGs, but the trade off in a system like that is so much work has to go into making a workable world for players to create within, and a system robust and simple enough to make creation accessable to players, that there is almost always very little GAME built. Look at Star Wars Galaxies for an example of that. It's a beautiful sandbox system (prior to NGE) that allowed the users to define a vast majority of the game world through the economy, player towns etc... But there wasn't any gameplay or real content in there.
The portion of MMO players who want a toolset to create a universe is vanishingly small. Most people want a game to play, so devs like Blizzard don't bother with the player creation and focus solely on game content.
Plenty of NeverWinter Nights servers attract larger consistent followings with no advertising.
The only real difference between this idea and NeverWinter Nights is that:
This product supports ANY setting (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it support anything other than the vanilla fantasy setting they first thought of)
This product supports ANY ruleset (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it not support something other than the default fantasy ruleset)
This product is MASSIVE whereas NWN isn't. Although NWN or a descendant probably will be before they ship anything.
This product provides developers with an SDK. NWN provides developers with a fully functional IDE allowing a person only one skill (e.g. writing / programming / art) to contribute to or create a world.
This product provides a revenue model for content developers. NWN kind of does (they can commercialise a module you develop) but so far this hasn't worked out well for anyone except the developers of NWN.
This product doesn't exist. NWN does.
Apparently I'm starting to get too old for the /. crowd.
I made it through the entire page of comments (ok, only 2+, didn't read the others) and not a single person mentioned where this has all been done before in the MU* (MUSH/MUX/MUD/etc..) realm. You know, hundreds of players at a time in a multi-user game. Game services that did nothing but rent game accounts for you to build and run your own. All of the software highly customizable, with the better ones (Like PennMush, TinyMU*, etc..) having an in-game programming language that still has list and string functions easier to use than most high-level languages today have.
You know, the things that today's MMOG are built on top of? Heck, if you looked at Everquest, you could tell it was just a MUD with a GUI thrown on top.
This "Multiverse" is simply bringing the current crop of graphical MUDs back to the previous realm of how things were before some big budget guys starting spending the cash necessary to stick a GUI on top of some MUD software.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.