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RPG Devs Should Beware MMOGs
CVG is reporting on comments made by Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. In an interview with the site, he points out that traditional PC RPG developers are in danger of permanently losing out to the developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. "He believes it's key that developers of non-MMO RPGs look closely at what the genre offers over MMORPGs to ensure the RPG genre doesn't lose out to the increasingly popular massively multiplayer online world. 'I think those of us that make non-MMO RPGs need to look at what a single-player/small multiplayer RPG can do that MMOs can't and spend our time and effort on those things', Urquhart said. "
The MMORPG and the RPG genre are completely different, one is for socialising with people in a vast world with only a backstory guiding them while the other is more oriented to dicovering a story by yourself....
The biggest advantage is the lack of 13 year olds whining and asking for help. Just focus on games targeted to mature gamers.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
For me the biggest reason to play a single player/ small group games vs. an MMOG is that I can play in smaller bouts. It is a bit of a waste to play an MMOG for 20 minutes, yet it works OK to play 20 minutes at a time in a single player game. Two year olds tend to dictate when you can and can't play.
Bobo Mahoney
One of these days someone is going to come up with a game that both supports MMOG play but also has a single player campaign running on a mini-server. This title will rule the RPG world until someone brings out one that lets you run your own server, and create a portal from the mmog to your server (the portal simply doesn't appear unless your server is up; it could even be flickery if you have a poor history of uptime.)
One thing that we have all learned from the mod communities in this world is that players want open-ended, customizable games.
I can't speak for anyone else, but many people have told me that they won't pay for the client for an MMOG because it could become useless in the future, and they're offended by having to pay for a client AND pay a monthly fee anyway - this is precisely where I stand on the issue.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NWN2 and KotOR2?
I think it's key for Obsidian to develop games that don't have 50 bugs around every corner. I started the first act of NWN2 5 times, and they all ended up with corrupted save files after crashing, before I gave up on it. For KotOR2, I lost both my main save and my back up save to some weird bug.
Maybe they should worry about ironing out their bugs before they worry about competing with MMOs.
Single-Player RPG's have always excelled, and will always excel, at what they do: They tell stories.
Like books, before them.
I don't see any danger here to the RPG.
That said, it might be fun to read a book (play an RPG) with others some time, and if they made it possible in the game, that might be neat, if it worked out.
Perhaps you get cues, on what to say and act, but you do it in your own words, with language tips to the side, and briefings before-hand? (Like a computer-mediated LARP?) Could be neat.
Probably the first things Obsidian should worry about are: 1) Releasing products that are finished. Hi KOTOR2 2) Releasing products with an adequate amount of performance optimization. You shouldn't have to turn NWN 2 settings down to the point of making the game look 6 years old in order to make it playable.
Oblivion - 3 million, Baldur's Gate 1&2 - 2 million each, and the various Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Games from Square - Around 3 million each
How are these games different from the most successful Fantasy MMO, WoW? Depth and immersiveness of combat comes immediately to mind. Also Story, all of these games have a much more cohesive story than WoW itself (whose story is mostly conveyed reading background information on the WoW website. To be honest, that really ought to be enough to build games around. Create a game with a solid combat system and a story, and you've got the basis for a solid single player RPG. The trick really, is not to be misled into thinking you can build a WoW-killer. You can't. Blizzard has the budget and the installed base to bury you. So don't even try.
Well, consider the possibility of a MMORPG where only mature players log on and no one uses "omg, u cast heal 2 late" leet-speek. Hard to imagine with the games today, but think of it as a lazy-man's Live-RPG event. Now, instead of pre-generated content very loosely based on what can barely pass as a "story", the developers actually "develop" story content that drive the game forward - in addition to just pushing pixels. Maybe this will be expensive, but maybe there is a market for people willing to pay big bucks and feel like a real swashbuckling hero with real character development. This type of gameplay isn't here in MMORPGs - far from it, but look at what works well in text-based MUDs. It is just a matter of time before some big publisher copies the ideas and pairs them with 3D graphics.
(By the way, I hate that 'no-brainer' phrase. As if people don't have enough encouragement not to think, the phrase emphasizes that conclusions can be met with no thoughts. I doubt there are any questions that cannot have multiple answers and also require no thought to obtain.)
Never ending trips into UBRS, LBRS, MC, BL, Strat, Scholo, ZG, etc. does not equate to never-ending opportunities for character advancement and development.
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You, the player and your character/party, are the only important part of a single-player RPG. The game revolves around you and you goals and whatever characters, locales, etc. that your goals entail. This provides the opportunity for creating a truly unique character that actually stands out in the game world. An MMO, where you're just another level x [insert class here], can never touch that.
Also, in a single-player RPG, there are no griefing assholes out there to camp your corpse or talk smack about how you're a n00b or spam the chat. Some people are willing to put up with the grief or find ways to avoid it cuz they like a world filled with people, and that's why MMOs are so popular these days. But there are people who don't and need to get their RPG fix in a non-MMO form.
Personally, until there's a massive paradigm shift in the general attitude of MMO communities and people start playing nice with each other, I'll just stick to Star Wars: KotOR, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and the like for my RPG needs.
NeverWinter Nights allowed you to have persistent multiplayer servers as well as single player campaigns and let you run your own servers.
Without those things it hardly felt like any kind of immersive story-telling experience at all.
BTW, an incompatible EULA for a GPL-project? Yikes, and small chance it'll stop the onslaught of Vivendi lawyers. We'll see...
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Daggerfall can only be considered a classic by those who never actually played it. It was a buggy mess. The only people who enjoyed it were obsessive-compulsive types.
Oblivion barely qualifies as an RPG. The skills and armor sets were drastically reduced from Morrowind, and the combat was morphed into a Quake-like first-person twitchfest rather than a stat-based combat system. Classes don't matter, because you can do anything anyway. You can be the Arena Champion as a level 1 warrior, and then join the Mage's Guild and work your way to the top without ever actually using magic. The world and most of its quests (especially the main quest) are totally bland and meaningless.
It's endemic of the "next-gen" hype that leads to budgets spent on crap like SpeedTree and FaceGen rather than making the fucking game.
"Sufferin' succotash."