Slashdot Mirror
Academics Speak On 'Life After World Of Warcraft'
simoniker writes "Are MMO populations 'tribal', and if so, what's the next tribal shift after World of Warcraft? At Gamasutra, academics including MIT's Henry Jenkins and Ludium's Edward Castronova discuss what's next for the MMO market, based on their research and play patterns. Jenkins states that WoW is getting _too_ much analysis from researchers right now: 'WoW deserves attention because it has so captured the imagination of gamers over the past few years. That said, I don't think it is healthy for the field of games studies, which is still emerging, to be so fixated on a single game franchise — no matter what the franchise. A few years ago, it might have been The Sims or GTA, now it's WoW.'" For more on this topic MMOG industry veteran Gordon Walton spoke on this topic last week at GDC Austin, and notes from that event are also available at Gamasutra.
That it captured the imagination of anyone. It has certainly attracted the interest of bunch of players, but the game is not imagination-grabbing by any stretch of the... oh you know.
Ready for your life after Warcraft? It's time to get started on your Second Life.
Printer Friendly version of the article that is one page instead of 5.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Well jee-whiz, mom. Once they get done farming, they have a raid to attend at 9pm SHARP, which won't be over until 4am, which is then time to sleep so they can get up at noon and start farming again before the next raid...
"Games Studies"? Are you kidding me?
Are they studying at the University of We'll-Take-Your-Money-And-Give-You-A-More-Useless-Than-English-Degree?
(BTW, the franchise or brand should probably be "Warcraft" - Vivendi, Inc. is probably pretty keen on making sure its "Warcraft" brand extends beyond its MMORPG product.)
Hi my name is Bob and I'm a WoW addict. I used to be 3rd in my guild as a level 60 night elf mage. I played so much that I grew these b*tch t*ts...
Now I'm in recovery and am once again a productive member of society.
I seriously thought the article would be something like this based on the title. Imagine my disappointment...
Maybe envisioning a "Life after WoW" is hard because their game studies department is now based exclusively in WoW itself...
Maybe I'm just being cynical, but at this point I suspect WoW will continue to dominate until Blizzard creates WoW2. It's so far ahead of all the other MMORPGs on the market that I don't see anyone being able to displace it.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
If were to guess I would say that whatever Blizzard's next MMORPG is will probably be the next leader in the industry because they currently hold a growing pool of 9 million customers in their grasp and have a had an extremely long time to perfect the genre. They also have the popular Starcraft and Diablo universes left to MMORPGify.
With that said, there are many alternatives releasing in the next six monthes that also have the potential to become the next big thing in the gaming world, such as Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.
"Henryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Jeeeeeeeeeeenkinnnnnnnnnnnnns"
Before running into the office all by himself?
"At Gamasutra, academics including MIT's Henry Jenkins and Ludium's Edward Castronova"
Hennnnry JEEEEENKINS!
Try saying that World of Warcraft is the best MMORPG ever created, and watch people defend "their" MMORPG.
Read through the recent Protecting Final Fantasy XI From the Gil-Sellers Slashdot article and you can watch this happen. Just peruse this thread to watch people slam the game and tribe members springing up to defend it.
Yes, MMORPG players are intensely tribal and defensive over their choice of MMORPG. As for the rest of the question: what's the next tribal shift after World of Warcraft? Who knows? But I can guarantee it won't come from Sony or Blizzard or any other established MMORPG publisher. People will get tired of WoW eventually and want something new just for the sake of playing something new. What will it be? I have no idea.
But it won't be revolutionary. It'll be a glorified WoW clone, with different graphics and some slight gameplay improvements. It'll be new enough to intrigue people, but familiar enough that they won't run from it.
If I see one more franchise going "MMO" to try to get a bite of the WoW pie, I think I'm going to puke. After playing WoW for five months, grinding to 60 and grinding on "end game" content, I've come to the conclusion that offline games (i.e. games with ENDINGS) are actually a much more rewarding expenditure of time.
Practically every MMO out there is either a glorified chat room, or a grindfest-turned-second-career because it want's to be WoW without being WoW and all it succeeds in doing is becoming one more WoW or EQ clone and even the most ardent fanboys would have a hard time saying otherwise. The guys doing Warhammer Online claim that even WoW was largely a ripoff of DAoC, and popular though it was, DAoC was not a super smash hit like WoW.
There's nothing earth shattering about WoW except being in the right place at the right time. It's moronic to speculate on what the next big thing is because it's as likely to be random dumb luck as anything else.
No other MMORPG has captured the audience that WoW has. This alone is a reason to study this MMORPG over all others.
As for upcoming MMORPG's, none of them will command the attention that WoW has. If Lord of the Rings Online couldn't make a dent in WoW, especially given the long, great history of the Tolkien Universe, what chance does any other MMORPG have?
Warhammer might have a chance to top some of the other MMORPG's like EQ, Eve, AO, etc... But that is only because they copied a lot of the aspects of WoW and present a very similar style of game and universe. Don't believe me, look at the goblins in both games. It's like looking at cousins.....
So yes, WoW deserves to be studied to understand how they could capture and maintain an audience many times over any of the previous MMORPG's.
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
Yeah, it's called Sociology. I might not have a problem with them if I ever met one who I actually liked or made any sense...
The introduction of the Wii morphs the gamespace possibilities, as do all platform consoles.
...]
I foresee a day when WoW is replaced by games where you yourself perform the actions of your character, using Wii-mote and nunchuck, to hack slash and parry your way through the world, or use the Wii-mote as a wand.
When? Probably next gen. So, I would say look for 2009, when the successor to the Wii comes out.
[caveat - I went to SFU at one point so I'm biased
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, I certainly see your point, but the cynic in me says that we've thought this before... and we were wrong.
When Origin invented the genre, they were literally the only player in town. They were so far ahead the other MMOs, that the others were just getting started trying to copy it. Even if you consider MUDs to be essentially the same genre, the difference between UO and your average text-based MUD, if nothing else in terms of number of players, was larger than between WoW and Anarchy Online nowadays.
Other people who arguably invented a genre, or made it mainstream, are still the Gods of Gaming in that genre. E.g., Id and FPS. You'd expect Origin to share that fate, wouldn't you?
You'd think nothing could possibly dethrone UO at that point, until Origin creates UO2, right? Well, we already know how that went.
Then came Everquest, and it was so popular it became synonim with MMOs. You didn't talk, say, about people losing their job and wife to MMOs, you instinctively spoke of them losing that to Everquest. It's also the game which caused the deluge of me-too MMOs. It was such a money-printing license, everyone wanted a piece of that market.
Worse yet, along came a long period of stagnation, and most new MMOs just managed to steal some of someone else's players, only to have them stolen by someone else in 6 months. It looked like there were a total of about 1 million MMO players total... and EQ owned slightly more than half of them.
Once you factored in their other games too, Sony _owned_ the MMO market.
Surely one would have thought nothing will challenge that until their own EQ2 came out, right? Well, wrong, actually. EQ2 peaked a lot lower than what EQ still had, never mind its former peak. It _still_ has less players than the old Everquest. (Not saying it's necessarily a bad game, as that's something highly subjective, just that subscription-wise it failed to be the block-buster everyone expected.)
Instead there came this WoW noone really expected that much of. What people wanted from Blizzard was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3, not a MMO. They hadn't proved that they know their elbow from their arse in the MMO arena yet. They had the Warcraft franchise and name recognition, but an unrelated franchise name only carries you so far: see TSO which flopped in spite of the The Sims franchise which had outsold all 3 Warcraft games _combined_.
Not only it handed Sony its arse at its own game, it managed something that noone else had managed in years: it actually enlarged the western MMO market. About 10 times.
So now we think the same all over again. "Man, nothing's going to displace WoW until they launch WoW2." I dunno, we've been wrong about that at least twice before. (Or more than twice if we're talking about sequel surpassing their original. AC2 bombed so badly that it was shut down, for example. Essentially that sequel moved the AC franchise from being the second most successful MMO to being nobody.)
Before anyone accuses me of wishing that WoW fails or anything, note that I'm not against any of the games I've mentioned here. I actually liked WoW, though nowadays I'm playing COH yet again. I can see why WoW was successful. In this highly subjective taste matter, they sure managed to give the larger market segment, the casual gamers and off-line Oblivion-type gamers, more of what they wanted in a game. They "deserve" their current position. I'm just saying that noone, Blizzard included, has a certificate of ownership of the market. They all "rent" the #1 spot for a while. They can fall like everyone else, eventually.
In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.
But eventually it's bound to happen.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The only "analysis" of WoW that needs to be done was done by South Park.
I dunno, it seems like a rather circular statement about the "emerging" field of games studies: "I don't think it is healthy for the field of games studies, which is still emerging, to be so fixated on a single game franchise -- no matter what the franchise. A few years ago, it might have been The Sims or GTA, now it's WoW"
Doesn't 'emerging' seem to suggest that there is going to be a rather narrow sample size, to begin with? And I don't really fault researchers focusing on WoW; I mean yes, they could grab whatever game is on the shelf, but you have no idea if it's going to be another WoW or if it's going to be Vangers (look it up). I would imagine that anyone in this 'emerging' field would want their results to be reasonably relevant, interesting, and applicable to as broad a field as possible.
Right now, there's really only one game that hits that mark, and that's WoW.
For those researchers who are looking for other interesting fields of study in this area, I would make some other suggestions.
Look at http://www.mmogchart.com/:
- The Matrix Online, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online all have very interesting player number curves. Why?
- WW2OL has fewer subscribers than most of the 'big name' games and quite a few of the middling ones, yet it seems to be surviving where others are shutting down. Why?
- Runescape - real MMOG or webgame? Is the distinction important?
- These various games have a host of pay/play models, what's working, what isn't?
- MMOGs are in a way the descendants of online mass flight sims - Warbirds, etc. How do flight sim pay/play models compare? User numbers and retention?
-Styopa
Actually, given the $120 million dollars WoW is pulling in each month, and the number of competitors out there trying to create the next great game, hiring a person who has made it their goal of understanding the psychological, social, and economic drives inside the game, and the same factors outside the game, should be a very high priority.
I was following a game a few months ago. Solid looking graphics and network engine, decent sounding game engine. It looked like it had some great potential and they had a multi-million dollar budget. But they had absolutely no knowledge about handling their community or managing a MMO, and the whole thing crashed and burned a horrible death. They hired a fan from the forums to become their community rep. Nothing like taking a kid with nothing more than a high school degree and put him in charge of distributing knowledge to packs of rabid fans.
Had they brought in people with experience in managing MMOs, and people with an understanding of the underlying factors, they would have likely done much better.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
WoW: Afterlife
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The reason wow is so popular is not because people see a friend joining a game and they rush out to join too. It's simply because wow is a pretty good mmorpg as far as mmorpgs go. Mmorpgs themselves are fairly addictive for some reason.
I hated WOW just cause it was WOW and everyone played it for a very long time. Then I got bored and said hey I'll give wow a chance. It's a more polished and more enjoyable grind fest to me than any of the other mmorpgs I've played.
The next big thing will simply be the game that's better. It may be made by blizzard or sony or a completely new company.
Blizzard is not a definite lock, look at what sony did with eq2. They were number one for so long but they managed to ruin their attempt to follow it up.
...my eyes saw "MIT's Henry Jenkins", but my mind read "MIT's Leroy Jenkins".
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
If I see one more franchise going "MMO" to try to get a bite of the WoW pie, I think I'm going to puke.
...
...
So, I take it you're not buying Animal Crossing II: Rise Of The Tiger then?
It works with My Sims: Third Life as well
wonders why he ran off screaming
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just pointing out that Blizzard software has been around for some time - the Diablo (I and II), and the original "Warcraft" games (I, II, and III) illustrate the fact that "content" has always been "king"
...lol - cheating was rampant, but it was done
...lol
WoW is simply Diablo and Warcraft combined and distributed over the Internet (but remember that "simple" doesn't mean easy or uncomplicated). Anyone else remember playing "Diablo" or "Warcraft III" online
I don't know anyone associated with Blizzard, but it seems that they "get" the "gamer" and understand the marketplace
That being said, is it really that much of a surprise that people on the internet, protected by the shield of semi-anonymity, become more impulsive and return to more primal forms of society?
I remember them saying the same thing about Ever Quest, that the only thing that could displace it was Ever Quest 2. That didn't turn out to be too accurate. I think WOW will run it's course and then most people will move on.
"hiring a person who has made it their goal of understanding the psychological, social, and economic drives inside the game, and the same factors outside the game, should be a very high priority."
True, but if that person exists today, they're probably not going to be willing to work for a professor's salary; they'll earn the money themselves. More to the point, somebody taking a few years of classes on the psychology of the online gamer is not going to be an expert in the field. That kind of knowledge and experience has probably got to be learned in the field, doing.
I agree with the original poster; this seems more of an attempt to get people to pay money to study an area that is very hot at the moment without consider that nobody knows what the right skills are.
--Tom
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I quit WoW after getting all the gladiator gear and being ranked in the top 10% of the first arena season. Basically, once you get to a certain point there is nothing left to accomplish. The only gear upgrades you can get after a certain point are marginal at best, and require a totally disproportionate amount of time to achieve.
The next big game will come up with a way to reduce the effect of gradual leveling, then very difficult end-game, then nothing left to accomplish. WoW will be easy to dethrone because the game itself isn't any fun. All the enjoyment comes from the sense of accomplishment.
PvP battlegrounds were a step in the right direction, but with three tiny maps it gets extremely tedious. If they made up 10-20 more maps with different themes and corresponding objectives, WoW would be an ideal game.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
It's pretty clear to me that the MMORPG has not finished running its course as the leading game genre.
The single niggest complaint I usually hear about MMORPGs is that what your character does has no real effect on the game world, at best you can get player triggered events that lasts half and hour. If WoW2 or some other well made MMORPG incorporated lasting world changes based on player achievements (ie: a slow replacement of Horde flora and fauna with Alliance flora and fauna) then it would be set to become then next big thing. Set up warring player factions competing over control of the many key places that would trigger those world changes and you would have real player driven conflict. Don't instance the competition, make it the core of the game. Make HomeCity based player made/moved supplies crucial to the task so the non-PvP player can contribute meaningfully. Why do I think this would work? It would feed off of "the group effort" instincts in the same way raids do, and it would have a story line that the hardcore player would be a real part of, thus building a strong community. EVE has bits of this, in that the best events to ever happen in the game where entirely player driven, but it's too fragmented and geared for the long term for the general populace to really have fun and make any kind of difference in 0.0 space, and the rewards are not flashy enough (building a spacestation is a HUGE accomplishment in EVE for a player group, but has very little effect on the game for anyone outside of that player group) Haveing NPC Orcs tear down a Dwarven town and build a Orcish town if the Orc players can hold the ground long enough would be a much bigger player motivator. People love these game because it gives them a different way to feel a sense of importance and accomplishment than they get in the real world. Making bigger, more visible, more community oriented rewards will serve that much better than a flashy sword or fancy cape.
We are all just people.
Although the focus of whoever wrote the article is on the Next Big Thing, this isn't necessarily the top priority for scholars. The study of games is more about people than it is about games themselves. Here's Florence Chee from the article:
The connection between the game and the rest of a player's life is important. Are game players better problem solvers? Do they connect more or less with people outside their "tribe"? Do they work well with others? Do they cluster according to social class? Does this have an impact on their participation in the wider society? Are they more likely to be left wing, right wing, extreme, moderate, (un)critical thinkers, politically active or inactive? Does the game reflect their values, or does it influence what they believe and how they see their place in society?
Think of the old question of whether television viewing encourages violence. You probably wouldn't research that by focusing on the most popular show.
Regardless of whether you're interested in one game in particular, other games can provide important evidence. Florence Chee gives a good example in the article when she cites players who refuse to leave City of Heroes for World of Warcraft because they don't want to leave their friends behind. The strength of this attachment in a game less popular than WoW can help explain phenomena within WoW itself.
Well, wrong, actually. EQ2 peaked a lot lower than what EQ still had, never mind its former peak. It _still_ has less players than the old Everquest. (Not saying it's necessarily a bad game, as that's something highly subjective, just that subscription-wise it failed to be the block-buster everyone expected.)
:). I had high hopes for Vanguard, but it didn't pan out.
This, I think, is key. Why do people play MMO's? To quote Sony, 'Live in your world, play in ours.' People are looking for an online world they can enjoy in their free time. So my thought is, why should there be an 800lb gorilla (formerly EQ, now WoW) and a few other MMO's scrapping along for dear life? Why not have a nice collection of MMO's with diverse ecosystems and healthy populations. People focus so hard on being #1, I think it is important instead to do things well. I'm hopeful that more game studios will come out with different MMO's in the future and try new things, not breaking the bank making a remake of EQ or WoW for millions of players but just trying new setting, even if it means a smaller budget.
EQ2 is a good game, I agree. Played it for a year, and my wife and I go back from time to time (we play MMO's on a month to month basis). WoW is **ok** in my opinion, played it for about half of that. I just felt the WoW world wasn't deep enough. So I went back to my old 'habit' - EQ. Sure, the servers aren't nearly as populous as they once were but that doesn't matter. I like the environment and there are still enough warm bodies to group and raid
The hardest part of life after a WoW addiction is finding another game to play that can keep your attention like WoW did. $15 a month for unlimited entertainment on all levels (depending on where you are in the game) is amazing.
I've been searching for over a year. Haven't found anything. Metroid Prime 3 is great, but staring at a screen has become more of a chore. I'm OBLIGATED to play MP3 because of my history with the series, it's not really something i looked forward to aside from the hopes that the controls were better than Redsteel.
WoW certainly beats spending $200 a month on console games that can't keep your attention. But leaving the house and getting laid are way better ways to use your time.
oh marmalade.
For those of you who aren't in the know...
Henry Jenkins is one of the people mentioned in the article.
There is a famous video (google for "leroy jenkins") shot in the World of Warcraft game involving a person who uses his own name as a warcry before charging into a room all by himself.
He got blamed for making everyone die...though those even further in the know know that the plan they had been discussing was utterly ridiclous...every mistake you could make in that room (each of which could get you all killed) was exactly what they intended to do from the get-go.
So now you know!
And knowing is half the battle.
Your 2-line complaint is based on such a deep confusion, that I need to answer at length.
First, game studies is not the same thing as a major program in videogame studies. Most of the academics involved in game studies have other home disciplines, whether anthropology, film studies, communications, computer science, sociology, comparative literature, economics, or what have you. Talking about the over-focus on one game or another is a top-level discussion among researchers across disciplines, not a question of what to be teaching undergraduates. Research fields are not the same as undergrad programs.
Second, I can imagine at some point there actually being an undergrad program in game studies. I know that there are minor programs. Like English or other degrees that don't seem to have immediate relevance, they are usually made far more relevant when mixed with a different graduate degree. An undergrad in game studies who then goes to law school might work on game-related policy, censorship issues, game-dev labor disputes, etc. Another one who then goes to business school might work on game-dev management issues, etc. Another might get an MFA or a CS MS and working on design or programming issues at a high level.
Games are significant. We're now seeing in adulthood people who grew up with them as their primary entertainment activity. Digital games structure thought, attention and activity differently than any other media before them. They merit study.
You probably didn't have one before, you obviously didn't have one during it, so there's no reason to hope for a life after WoW.
"Warhammer might have a chance to top some of the other MMORPG's like EQ, Eve, AO, etc... But that is only because they copied a lot of the aspects of WoW and present a very similar style of game and universe. "
Oh dear.
I hope you like text...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/
EC: Rapid chaotic change, it'll be going smooth for awhile, with periods of stability, and then suddenly you'll see periods of bulky but large changes.
You mean: punctuated equilibria? Why invent a clunky neonym when you can just use a scientific term that already exists?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The reason WOW succeeded where DAoC failed is because WoW has cartoon like graphics that make it widely accessible. You don't have to take -anything- seriously in WoW unless you want to. It has a good story, with good characters, and it's a cartoon.
WoW wins for the same reason that the Wii wins, it has mass appeal (ie, it's not for Ren Faire tards.)
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
I think you're highly underestimating the number of us lazy fscks who would avoid hours of physical activity at any cost. But seriously, I play games to relax and unwind, not as exercise, and there's no way I would play that sort of game. Hacking and slashing? Waving your arms to cast a spell? Count me out.
Well, considering two-thirds of the total market is now estimated to be casual gamers, and they tend to like games that involve some exercise, I'm not sure you would be the target market for the next wave of MMORPGs for the next-gen consoles that come out in 2009 and 2010.
I remember when we had to code our own games - and fix the code for our less techy neighbors.
Things change.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is very little casual about World of Warcraft.
The next big tribal shift will happen in 2009.
WoW began in 2004, and millions of players will hit a wall where WoW won't be fun anymore around 5 years after they began. Yes, I'm proclaiming a 5 year rule on MMOs, and current WoW players won't believe it to be possible, that they'll want to play it forever. A few of the diehards will make it to 7 or more years, refusing to believe that everyone left for that other game.
One big reason for this is graduation. Either high school or college, take your pick. An MMO is a habit, and your habits change drastically when you graduate.
once warhammer comes out i see a shift coming.
As the sibling poster observed, MMORPGs are not casual games. Secondly, when's the last time you saw someone over 10 actually standing up to play the Wii? I've done it, sure, but most people eventually end up playing (or trying to play) while seated. Most people that I've seen don't even (try to) do the "forms" in Wario. My point is, the interaction will generally degrade to the least amount of effort necessary, at which point people will be annoyed that they need to wave their arms when a simple button press would've sufficed.
I respect your opinion though, and agree to disagree, etc., etc..
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...academics play WoW?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
You are the same guy who, about 100 years ago, scoffed at the idea of a university program in "film studies".
As the sibling poster observed, MMORPGs are not casual games.
I think you meant to say "Up until now, MMORPGs have not been casual games".
Things change.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not really.
Think of the arc swing of a sword, or the block move of a shield.
As we translate the literal inputs from computing devices (the Wii-mote into the console), we only plot some of the translated arc points.
As my sword hits your shield, the game enhances it by your attributes (strength, agility (how much fine motor control do you really have), etc), your "level" (my level 22 paladin with 44 strength and 50 agility is going to hit really really hard from the viewpoint of your 21 strength 24 agility mage), and then we implement zones.
Zones - in the original RPG days we tried fine zones (god, some of that was overkill, with a body having 100 zones and strike points, and angle vectors) and settled on moderate zones (most moved to a simple Head, Back, Front, L Arm, R Arm, Legs, Feet, Hands zone structure, affected by the armor level of each).
Your arc swing still stops when your sword impacts my shield. IRL, you continue swinging, but I translate the total vector plus real speed plus attributes plus approx angle versus the shield gross dimensions, vector, armor level plus real speed and real angle.
What you will "see" on the screen will not be what you do IRL. If I have a glowing Dragon Skull shield of 5000 armor with repulsion spells and magical armor, your sword will bounce off even when you try to deftly reach around it with a complicated real life swing. The image on the screen will show your sword arc not quite what it is, with possibly a bit of delay due to lag (or jump as you say). The clang and bounce of your sword and noise from the Wiimote may not kick in for a while.
But it will still be super cool for casual gamers who love the fact they can DO that. And it will sell like hot cakes!
The market determines the survivors. I've seen many game systems that did a better job at simulating combat fail because they forgot it's all about the market. They had combat determinations that were more accurate but got in the way of game play. Game play depends on rough approximations of what you do - not exact simulations.
In the real world the sword weighs a lot more than you think, your arm is going to hurt, the sword hit against you will nick your shield, the impact will bruise you, some ribs might crack, your sword might shatter or chip (and now skid), the blade gets bloody and slick, you sweat and fall, and the arrow in the back of your neck makes you fall down. We're not talking real world - we're talking SF&F.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
One thing is a given: When a game implements that, people will preorder it at announcement. Hell, I will. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Exactly.
It's not that difficult to do.
But first you have to get the polygon vector jockeys to stop trying to drive game design with realistic rain splatter effects while the game POV camera sucks wind.
Half of true game design is understanding what works and how good it has to be.
Think of Lego Star Wars or other games with much lower res. People love them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My guess is that we'll first of all have to change the way FOV is implemented. People don't see just a 120 arc, we're more able to see up to and beyond 180 degrees. You can try that. Put a colorful patch to a wall (provided you're not color blind), then turn around looking straight ahead until you don't notice it anymore. You'll see that you're facing about 90 degree off.
Now, you don't see well in that area anymore, so maybe a blurring effect would have to be taken into account, too. And we need widescreen. VERY wide screen. An aspect of 1:5 sounds about right. Either that or 50" monitors. Or a way to put a 20" right in front of your nose. Because the area we now have as our viewport would be shrunken to about 1/2 the size, into the middle of the screen.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, we just need the POV to be placed a uniform distance from the set. People will get used to being in one approximate location.
This also restricts the arc of vision to a small patch in "front" of you.
Turns would be via key input, motion only affects your body, not your sight. If you choose autolock, it would target on the beast.
Naturally you would have mini-map screen and sideview panels - if you wear a helmet the sideview would be partially or fully obscured.
All of these aspects would make it fairly simple to implement.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What I'd envision was a three monitor system. What? Dual head is pretty much standard already, give it a year or two, which it'll take anyway 'til controllers are available for PC.
Who needs it? Go back 10 years and you hear people ask who needs surround sound for games. Today you have gamers (especially in the FPS fraction) who wouldn't even consider playing on a system that only has stereo to offer because they don't hear if it's behind or in front.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Three monitor won't happen until HDTV is in general use for about two years, so that means 2011 at the earliest.
Based on prior adoption rates of technology and markets.
Surround sound will become fairly common with large-scale HDTV usage. 2009.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
For World of Warcraft Cheats wow gold and World of Warcraft Hacks click here.