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Slashback: MMORPG Trends
Some additional details on stories we've previously discussed. The Garriott brothers gave a talk at the DICE conference earlier this month, and while Next Generation offered the gist of the Garriot keynote, Gamespy has a detailed look at their predictions. We also talked earlier about World of Warcraft as the new golf. C|Net has a deeper look at the trend of networking in Azeroth. From that article: "With more than 5.5 million people now playing WoW and joining guilds for everything from police officers to soldiers returning from Iraq, it was bound to happen: The rich guys have carved a virtual space to call their own. In fairness, the six-month-old guild isn't just for rich folks. There are plenty of bartenders and regular workaday types in the group as well. But what sets 'We Know' apart is its concentration of movers and shakers in the technology world."
do CEO's of companies have time to sit around playing WoW?
I barely have enough time to post to slashdot these days!
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
We have to let you go. Having a ninja-looter like yourself on our team undercuts morale.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
... that even with the amount of new subscribers (more $$$) in WoW and the new servers they keep adding, I still see heavy lag and wait times to get into servers. Why when I'm paying $15 a month should I have to suffer like this?
World of Warcraft as the new golf.
That is the dumbest thing I heard all day. And I just watched an interview with Cindy Sheehan.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Other MMORPG trends:
Awkwardness, sexlessness.
Tell: OMFG CN U pl my job PLZ!!!111!!!
(Original version rejected by Slashdot lameness filter...sigh...)
I bet you're the type of person who goes around calling people "Care Bears".
Rock on, 10-hour day gamer! You win the contest to see whose time is the least valuable!
although true there is a business reason for that. UO, Everquest, Shadowbane all combined still dont have a fraction of the subs that a game like WoW has.
Dont get me wrong I dont like WoW all that much but I respect what they accomplished.
Bashing in all the sacred cows like death should mean something(only to hardcore players obviously), progession should be hard and slow(again hardcore niche players), etc.
They went against the norm and made a game that although viewed as "too easy" by many,
just dominated the market.
so lets see, spend 50million dollars and make a niche game that gets 150k subs, or spend 50million to make a more casual "easy" game that gets 5million subs.
when it comes to getting investors to spend that kind of money on a game you know exactly which one they want.
for the niche hardcore market your going to have to figure out how to make them a lot cheaper which probably means a lot less content on launch. figure out how to run it on super cheap hardware, and support it with minimal people. probably can be done but not much incentive to do so from a business standpoint, but there is certainly room for more niche/hardcode MMO games.
as for this article, Im not really interested in what Garriot has to say, the guy that takes reasponsibilty for UO when he didnt have anything to do with its success (he wasnt even there anymore he had already sold origin to ea). He has been working on UO2/TR for almost 7 years now and he is trying to tell us whats going to happen to MMO's..please Id rather hear from the makers of WoW, or some of the even larger MMO games that are in China then here anymore unfounded crap from the garriot team.
How well did Shadowbane do by the way? That is, before it was pwnzored by the truely hardcore that had you crying to the devs asking them to make the hurting stop?
cos im crap at golf, but can certainly hold my own in WSG. Finally all of us un-coordinated geeks get a chance to network
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
I would but there are too many of you and you all speak many different languages. Is there a way to tell 5.5million subscribers that they're all care bears?
Rock on, 10-hour day gamer!
::cue background music::
Announcer: Bud Light Presents: Real American Heroes
Vocalist: (real american heroes)
Today we salute you, Mr. 10-Hour Day Gamer.
(Mr. 10-Hour Day Gamer)
In a world where most people only play a few hours a day, you're not afraid to stick it out - all day long.
(playing all day now)
Aspring to new hights of simulated glory, you endure sitting at your desk for days at a time, ignoring anyone and any bodily function that could possibly get in the way.
(gotta pee like cra-zy)
Thanks to you, we know what it means to really play a game and look impressive while doing it!
(IM S0 teh Aw3s0m3!!1!)
So "Rock On!", and grab yourself an ice cold Bud Light Mr. 10-Hour Day Gamer. Because without you, there'd be nobody else to teach us what 'noob' or 'pwn' really mean.
(please speak english to me)
- Pragma
Wow thanks for me reminding me I had this account.
Indeed.
If you're trying to appeal to a large segment of players, you have to make it mind-numbingly easy.
People tend to play games (MMORPGs especially) to relax or escape, and they don't want to waste a lot of time 'thinking' or 'figuring out stuff'.
UO has gotten nothing but more complicated over the years, and that huge learning curve is undoubtedly intimidating to new players.
I can't say the same about WoW from what I've seen.
If you want to keep your numbers up, make it like pop music, or anything else popular: Dumb it down.
Quality does not equal popularity, and popularity is where the money is in the subscription world.
"Can I have your stuff?"
Best... MORPG... Ever.
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/
It's not exactly massively multiplayer, but it's beautifully written.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I posted in the other story that my workplace was crawling with WoWers. We got firewalled. Now they watch FRAPS movies and look things up on thottbot.
Carebeard is a term used to refer to anyone who does not play on a player-killer only server (such as DarkTime on Asheron's Call) not about whether you spend 10 hours a day in the game.
I've given a lot of thought recently to what a MMORPG based on DaemonEye Publishing's "Dead Stars" scci-fi setting should look like. One immediate factor to put in would be to take advantage of their scaling difficulty technology system.
You have a laundry list of common items you can buy with a simple Shopping check, the better your roll the more you find for sale. That represents the lowest scale of items, simple "point and purchase" acquisitions. Unfortunately the reason they are so easy to get is becasue they are easy to make, and frequently not the best thing for a particular situation.
The next level would be items that are built to your specifications. This entails finding a person to Craft it (Gather Information check), then paying them half up front to make something with a feature or two you desired. Mostly this is aong the lines of taking that crappy unmodified Qulaity 4 Laser Rifle you picked up and having them attach a Cyber Sight. Slightly more complicated since it gets into the nuts-n-bolts of the technology system, but it does not require any real depth of knowledge with it.
The final level is for the do-it-yourself characters. This means you have to spend skill points to purchase the desired Craft skills, but it also means you can make items for only parts costs and also get exactly the item you want. Or break down the cruddy items you scavenge for mateirals to make better items. I figure the best way to model this in an MMORPG would be to have a window in the log-out screen where you can design new gear and set your character to Crafting it while you are not logged in. Then when you log it you find out how much progress you have made towards finishing the item.
Obviously the last level is for advanced players who have been at the game a while, but all told it should provide enough of a customized learning curve that noobs woul not feel intimidated.
SETTING
Each world in the "Dead Stars" universe would be its own server, with a common "space" server for runnign characters on orbital habitats and space ships. Characters could be mvoed form one server to anotehr simply by going to the planet's space port. By clustering this into server groups that are isolated from each-other, you can have multiple versions of the setting runnign with each in a RL geographically distinct location for minimum lag.
Space travel would be handled similarly to do-it-yourself crafting. Time spent logged off on the space server, but not building anything, would accumulate "travel days", which can then be chashed in to take trips. Want to take a 2-week trip to the neighboring star system? You just need to accumulate 2 weeks of down time. This has the effect of making space travel form one server/world to another POSSIBLE, but the downtme necessary makes it unlikely.
CHARACTERS
In addition to the d20-variant system design for characters, players choose from a number of character goals. These goals determine two things: when the character earns bonus role-playing XP, and what special quests they can participate in.
For instance, a character with the "Crafting" goal would earn bonus XP whenever they make an item and sell it to the local ShoppingNet. The more valuable the item, the more XP they earn. The same character would also be able to access quests wherein they have to travel to someplace remote and acquire a downed sattelite.
In order to better fit into the adventuring party mold, these character goal quests would be eligible for invitation. You could invite a character WITHOUT the "Crafting" goal to share in your quest, and if you are successful then they gain the same amoutn of XP as you do for it.
Then, just to be faithful to the setting, you could ahve goals that produce ANTITHETICAL quests. Take "saboteur" fppr instance. You gain bonus XP whenever you screw up the local government's devices. Your quests could be to STOP somebody on the "satelite recovery" quest as well!
FACTIONS
There aren't any. Instead there would be a web of interlocking quest goals and bonus XP reward conditions.
As somebody who played EQ for about 5 years and WoW for about a year, I'd have to say WoW can be just as complex as EQ. Blizzard didn't "dumb it down", they took out the "camp this location for several weeks on end until blah spawn" nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, the dummies are the ones who mistake endless tedium for complexity.
There's a big difference between dumbing a game down and removing the tedium. I'm not an expert on MMORPGs by any means, but I was really turned off by the ridiculous tedium that was so prevalent in the genre pre-WoW. From what I've seen, WoW still requires plenty of strategy and thought, but it doesn't require as much time as previous MMOs.
Maybe WoW is easier than most MMOs. I don't play it, so I can't make any claims either way. However, challenge is (mostly) unrelated to the learning curve of the game. Game developers should stick to the mantra, "easy to learn, difficult to master." It appears to me that Blizzard follows that rule better than most MMO devs.
It's funny that many of the new "second generation" features he mentions, are already in Eve-Online. Yet he doesn't mention it...
I think that blizzard could balance hardcore with casual by making competative cross server BGs. Esports is taking off in the FPS world, the MMORPG/RPG world should follow. PvPing takes a well coordinated team, with everyone knowing what they're doing. Tons of practice and experience. If Blizzard fixes WoW pvp, or makes it right in Diablo3, maybe we can see 3 blizzard games at the CPL next year.
WoW is as complex as any other MMORPG. What WoW did differently is that for the first 40 levels or so they made it so that the game wasn't a massive time sink. They realized that tedious (ie "hard") games drove casual gamers away. EQ is a perfect example of a game that was "hard" for power gamers, and utterly intolerable for casual gamers. It wasn't that EQ had superior and more complex mechanisms to master. What made EQ was the fact that it was such a horrible time sink. Your average casual gamer played it for about a month before realizing that their leveling had slowed to a crawl and that they were doing the same thing every single fucking time they logged on. The only thing "hard" about it was mustering up the will power to waste so much of one's time.
WoW took an entirely different path. They made the first 40 or so levels quick. You could log on for an hour each day and end that day feeling rewarded as you leveled up and moved onto different areas. WoW discovered what everyone else already knew with common sense. Casual gamers don't like games that require you to spend 40 hours a week on in order to get anywhere. It has nothing to do with complexity and difficulty, and everything to do with the amount of time you need to dump into a video game to get somewhere.