Slashdot Mirror
MMOFPS Games The Next Big Thing?
GameOgre writes "Despite a few lackluster attempts at a major MMOFPS like PlanetSide and now (in some ways) Star Wars Galaxies, could the MMOFPS genre one day rival MMORPGs in popularity
and become the next big thing in MMO gaming?" From the article: "Imagine the possibilities of the MMOFPS genre for a second. Instead of going through the tired old tread mill of generic missions and level grinding, blast through a combination of other players and intelligent bots on a massive scale. There would be no rooms or lobbies that you have to scan through to find a vacancy, but one persistent world. The game would be as simple as an FPS but would have enough depth to keep you coming back. You would also not be able to camp a certain monster for treasure, because their would be no monster or treasure." The big issue I see here is pricing. The monthly fee for Planetside is just too high for what they offer.
I would definitely love a MMOFPS.
RPGs bore me to tears.
I think instead of having a big server where everyone connects to, it would be nice to have individual private servers like FPS use now.
However, they would be overseen by a master server (sort of like how they implement anti-cheating and anti-piracy now). So that your "profile" would carry with you. So each individual server could be like a country. With set dimensions, and rules, maybe even textures. And once you reach the limits of the server you are on, you would connect to another server. And the servers would be arranged on the master server by latency. So that if you live on the east coast, you would get the best pings on east coast servers. But you could still travel to the west coast servers, and that would add a different dimention to the game.
That I imagine would defray the cost, so that no monthly fees would be needed. And yes, you would depend on the kindness (and uptime) of strangers, but that community (strangers hosting CS, TFC, CoD, BF, Q3 servers) sprung up out of nowhere and it's very robust.
The monthly price for Planetside IS too high. But if a similar game was published for, say, 1/3 the price, I would definitely pay for it. I love the game, and the concept, but I play FPS in too rare of a pattern to pay the same monthly fee as for a MMORPG where i spend 20 hours a week.
Being someone who has played plenty of FPS's and MMO's here are the essentials to a great MMOFPS:
1. No Guns! (or the option to play without vs those who choose the same option)
- guns mean aimbots, you need some swordplay like the Jedi Knight series, Rune, etc. to prevent cheating.
- gameplay > all. sometimes complicating a game by allowing you to have super leet grenades only makes it less fun. Think of a chessboard double it's regular size with twice as many pieces. Anyone can aim a gun, it's not fun anymore and it's not competitive unless you decide to stick to one gun game for the next two years to avoid having to relearn aim in other games -- an absolute nightmare if you own multiple gun games.
2. Clans!
- FPS's main method of keeping a steady population years after their release is by allowing anyone to make a clan, screw MMO's and their factions, I want to choose from factions real people create.
3. Make organized clan matches result in territory wars a la risk, but make them scheduled like real FPS clans schedule matches.
- That means whenever they want as long as all parties agree, but no set period where they must protect their territory because even though all those stories about some kindergartner being god at Quake sound appealing, most of the really good FPS'ers are young adults with lives, too. The clan matches should revolve around my clan's schedule, not the game's schedule. You can make the control a clan has over a certain area gradually disappear with time so clans can't sit forever on a piece of land and refuse to fight for it.
4. Balancing an MMO's duels between different classes is easy. A FPS is much harder, in fact I would say nearly impossible unless they're restricted to the same weapons vs each other in a symmetrical world or something ridiculous @_@. Either, spend a lot of time ensuring this is balanced, or force players to use the same weapons vs each other to make it fun -- or even make the stats/experience system allow for a higher gain if duplicate weapons are used.
5. Fair fights are fun because the other person can't claim a handicap if you win!
6. Tie "virtual material possessions" to the land a clan fights other ACTUAL PEOPLE to retain. Basically, make it more like life.
Some other ideas:
-Use the Instancing model to support low ping duels.
-Crafting has a place in a FPSMMO, think about clothing, it shouldn't hook into your gear, though, because that just leads to unfair fights which, as said, I believe to be the cornerstone of a FPS.
-So what's there to do? Kill people to earn stats, higher stats go to new areas opening up and allowing you certain privileges in your clan such as the ability to arrange a clan match, or the ability to induct a new member.
To be honest, I would be satisified with current FPS's having some kind of "teleport to another server" portal, but if you're going to go all the way please do it right.
MMO's like everquest while having a share of kiddies (or mental retards, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference) are still havens of silent intellect compared to much of the net.
Certainly compared to one MMOFPS Joint Operations by Novalogic. I was an early beta tester and it was fun. Then they opened the beta more and more and wow. The designers had made a mistake. They had spotted the obvious kiddie dream of just gunning down their own team and disabled that. However satchel bomb could be dropped anywhere (including vehicles) and then remotely detonated. So cue endless hours of fun of not so good players running into a helicopter (the slightly better ones waiting to pick up some other players) then take off and blow up. If the explosion did not kill you you died in the fall or had a long long swim ahead of you.
Free gaming lowers the barrier and doing that invites people that will be in the game for no other reasing then to upset other people.
Frankly I sony does it pretty well. Just charge a month and allow people to cancel right away so they are not billed again unless they decide to resubscribe and they can just game for 1 month.
It is how I play now. I usually get tired off a game then cancel it only to come back 2-3 months later to play some more.
As for advertising paying for an MMO, Anarchy Online has shifted to that model. It is not exactly a shining example of success.
Oh and I not some snobbish people hater. I am old enough to remember that ALL fps online games were without password for the server. Then clans added them for their own servers. Then it became common to see more password only servers as a game got older. Now it is rare to see open servers at a games launch.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My heart yearns for the age in which my trothkin and I shall finally carve our way through the surat scum of the Inner Sphere and take back that which is rightfully ours: Terra. Cradle of humanity.
The honorless freebirth will be no match for our superior technology and tactics. Glorious battles could be waged on an epic scale if only FASA had not sold themselves to Those who Shall Not be Named! What a treachery that was!
I wish it would come to pass. Battles consisting of battlemechs, elementals, aerospace fighters, infantry and more would surely call warriors together from across known space. Unfortunately it seems that Those who Shall Not be Named do not think these "intellectual properties" should be developed as the odds are against them. To those developers I have only these words: think of the victory if you should win.
May honor sharpen your steel, warriors.
World War II Online (which the article doesn't mention, even though it is about 5 years old) has a much steeper learning curve than Planetside. It demands a lot of time due to its scale - the single map is huge, and a lot of time is spent getting to a fight (and dying right away). It is also very unforgiving to the new player due to its realism. It is a "history-buff" type game - those really wanting to fly a Stuka or drive an Opel will endure the system. Planetside isn't particularly quick-paced (if you seriously care about defending acquired bases, and the base isn't contested, you'll may spend 15 minutes doing little to nothing), but it certainly moves quicker than WWIIOL. The maps are small enough to travel across relatively quickly, as long as you have the right abilities. PS isn't really ideal as a pick-up game: you may not be able to jump in and just start blasting away, like you might in your standard deathmatch. In that sense, it is a relative time sink. Planetside is more of a thinking-person's FPS.
Huxley seems more catered to small groups of players in instanced combat. The combat is probably faster, but the scale probably won't match the others. But, seeing as the game is in development and I've never experienced it firsthand, I can't really comment on how good it will be (I'll let the "article" do that for me). From what I gather though, it trades more detail and thought for "twitch"-style gaming.
Some gamers will want the historical immersion, others will want almost pure twitch, and still others will want something in-between. Unfortunately, the article doesn't consider the real variations in the genre. That's the more important discussion in my opinion - what combination or amount of elements (scale, speed and time requirements) will make MMOFPSs really take off?
If you've played that game, you'd know that it almost fits into the MMOFPS genre with being able to play on a single map with 64 people. I wouldn't want to play a massive MMOFPS with 2-4000 people though some reasons:
:P.
* Latency: Your average FPS game server will kick anyone over 200-300 ms ping because they either have some sort of a script or an active admin. An MMOFPS will be there to make money and I hardly doubt that they will be kicking paying customers off.
* Scope: The problem with MMOs is that events are always taking place wherever you are not. You're gonna need to travel an assload of distance to get wherever the current battles are taking place. What if you die? Where will you spawn? That's a major PITA. Even if they implement "spawn anywhere your team is," it's still rather annoying to find out where you can frag the most which is the beauty of simple server hopping in FPS games.
* Teamwork: Unless you have a dedicated clan, which most people won't have, you will simply be playing with a bunch of idiots who do everything to further their own gaming experience without any regard for the people on their team. An example of this in BF2 when nobody will ever stop to give you a ride, look at your landmines covering the road (and then punish your TK when they ignore the glaring red skulls), and then shoot you when you spawn and run halfway to grabbing the vehicle. Imagine that, but on a massive, thousand player scale. Fun, huh?
So, for my quick fix of shooters, I'll stick to smaller (in comparrison) games and have my fun there
The biggest issue as I see it for any MMOFPS is to avoid boredom. FPSs generally cater to people who want action, lots of it, and all the time. The word "active" best describes the state of the player. In the small maps of Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, CounterStrike, Unreal Tournament and Halo, whether you are moving or stationary there's always that chance that you'll suddenly need to blast the crap out of someone.
In a large world, that becomes more difficult. If you happen to be in the middle of nowhere, it's hard to be on edge. If you know the frontline of a huge battle is miles and miles away from the base you are defending, are you really going to say, "I'm sure glad I paid $X a month to sit here and rot."
As long as the game mechanic throws the players into the action consistantly, it can work incredibly well. It would be tricky, but doable.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
An MMOFPS has a few technical problems to work out, but in the end the only thing that matters for any MMO is community.
If you can build a healthy community around your MMO, (be it MMORPG, or MMOFPS) then you can succeed within reason. I think alot of the failure of Planetside is due to the lack of community building. IMO Planetside was a mediocre game, but its biggest fault was lack of community.
And alot of this might be attributed to the old idea of system design governs player motivation. If you have a system that primarily emphasizes ACTION on other players, then that will be the motivation of your player base. ACTION not INTERACTION.
And so in a way, FPS shooters have a disadvantage when building communities.
Now I've seen Everything
There are a lot of problems when thinking about making an MMOFPS.
First, you're appealing to very different demographics. I know when I play MMORPGs, I consistently come across (relatively) older (and mature) people, including married couples. Additionally, pretty much anyone is capable of doing well, regardless of reflexes and hand-eye coordination.
The appeal of an FPS is to a much younger crowd. If any of you have played FPS games online, you know that it's not uncommon to have many pre-pubescent kids playing on the same server. This is a double knock for an MMOFPS - it lowers the overall maturity of the game world, and these people also don't have their own income or a credit card.
Additionally, people either have 'twitch' skills, or you don't, and I've had enough experience with my non-twitch friends to know that people don't enjoy losing at a game every time they play it. This necessitates adding 'support' roles that don't require quick reflexes for shooting, thus pushing the game closer to the RPG genre.
The main problem I see with an MMOFPS is this: is it a unique game experience? My answer would be no. There are already tons of FPS games you can play online (and for free after you buy the initial game). These can allow anywhere up to 64 people to be playing simultaneously. Granted, it wouldn't be quite the same scale, but it is free, and you get the same adrenaline rush that most people are looking for when they want to play an FPS.
In short, I don't see MMOFPS games becoming a large market any time in the near future.