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Murder, FFXI, and Ninety-Nine Nights
Gamasutra has a few great writeups of some of the sessions I didn't make it to. Murder, Sex, and Censorship covers some of the moral elements that go into game creation. Creating a Global MMO was a talk given by some of the folks behind FFXI, on the challenges of creating a multi-hemisphere online title. All about Ninety-Nine Nights was an examination of the character design put into the 'massive warfare' title for the Xbox 360. Interesting stuff. The morals session actually became quite heated, thanks to the presence of CA Assemblyman Leland Yee. From the article: "'How many people do you think have been hurt by video games? How many people have been helped by video games?' Gee asked. 'This technology will allow us to have a full spectrum chemist, or a full spectrum virus,' which school children, scientists, or doctors are able to experiment with in a safe environment. Gee also noted that, socially, legislators should care not only about keeping children from harm, but also about helping them."
I've played the demo, and it seems to be just a button masher. I expected a lot better from the Rez/Meteos guy. Maybe someone who's had more time with it can say if it has any depth/skill/strategy to it at all?
The title should be something like "Why not ask the World of Warcraft developers about global MMORPGs?" but that's way too long to fit, so, what's there will have to do.
FFXI has, according to the article, 500,000 subscribers. WoW has 6 million subscribers and is also a global MMORPG.
So why FFXI? Because they were the only MMORPG company stupid enough to dump the entire world on the same set of servers. Technically challenging? Of course. Allowing people from China, Japan, North America, and Europe to play together on the same set of servers is an interesting technical challenge.
It's also a completely worthless one. As most people know, very few people in America speak Japanese. Many people in Europe would also like to play with people who speak their native language. Which means that most players would like to be segregated by region anyway. (In fact, Blizzard had to add "Australia perferred" servers which are hosted in North America, since peak Australian hours are almost exactly opposite peak NA hours.) Dumping the entire world onto one set of servers is essentially worthless, since most players will attempt to segregate themselves back into regional groups anyway.
Then you get the latency problem. Between the east coast and the west coast of the US I get, on average, anywhere from a 70ms to a 100ms ping time. Between me and Japan, it's considerably higher. (We're talking 200-500ms, well beyond reasonable.) With WoW, I get local servers and a good ping time. With FFXI, I'd get a lousy ping time because I'm connecting to Japan. (Well, maybe not directly to Japan. It's speculated that they use "edge servers" in each region which then use a single dedicated line back to the "core servers" in Japan, but the article never mentions that, and that's still an added hop.)
Oh, and I wonder if anyone else found this amusing:
They also focus on making game updates as smooth as possible by having the player download only the bare minimum of files required for functioning, as they want to make sure anyone with narrow bandwidth can still play the game. For any massive updates they just make sure to include it in the expansion packs.
When released in NA, the game required a 7000-file download to update. The first new expansion pack in NA required a 1500-file download to update. The update servers are frequently down, and the entire thing is often a mess.
Compare with World of Warcraft. They distribute a single update file via a custom BitTorrent client. The client has to download the torrent, and then the torrent downloads the potentially large update. Much less hastle than FFXI's "one file at a time" method.
I really think I prefer WoW's approach to global MMORPGs far, far above FFXIs.