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The Future of MMOs
IGN has some interesting coverage of a panel at GDC 2008 that featured some of the top names in the MMO world who got together to discuss the future of the genre. "On hand were Jack Emmert of Cryptic Studios, Mark Miller of NCSoft, Min Kim of Nexon and Rob Pardo of Blizzard Entertainment. MMO newbie Ray Muzyka was also on hand to share his thoughts as BioWare moves into the MMO arena. [...] The conversation got a lot more heated when the subject of micro-transactions was introduced. This is a popular revenue model in Asia, where the games themselves are free to play but charge a premium for a variety of premium extras, from vanity items to additional content or abilities. It's a model that's working well for Korean developer Nexon but hasn't been adopted by many American developers."
Involves a lot more use of the phrase "Ememomorpuguh," and a lot more Yahtzee reviews.
Making your games so awesome that people pay for 5 days straight and die from exhaustion is also popular in Korea. Let's not import that, though.
Because I have a wife, and kids, and a job, and all these MMOs are just lurking around in local stores, threatening to take it all away from me. Fortunately, none have been good enough to get me to play, but someday... someday...
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Regionalization does work, and it has kept the bots out of regions where they've actually gotten on top the game versus just letting goldfarmers violate the rules endlessly.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Wasn't it Oblivion and their horse mod that drew everyone's ire?
I play the web-based MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing, and this has worked well for them for at least the past three years. They do a decent job of balancing it such that purchasing these extra items does give you a sense of being 1337, but doesn't necessarily give you a huge advantage over other players.
Plus, you can (in most cases) sell the premium items purchased with your hard-earned cash for in-game currency.
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Cross console, PC compatible, voice before text communication (controlled by radius and channels), and voice recognition for interacting with NPCs.
Otherwise it's just more of the same.
FFXI proves that the cross platform angle is entirely possible, other games prove that voice chat can be more enjoyable (and productive) than text chat, and voice recognition telephone systems have proven the technology is functional at the enterprise level.
Combine all of these techs with a portable Wii-mote and a 3" 3D display and you have an MMO that you can play anywhere. Picture having a Wii-mote in one hand, a programable button grip in the other hand and a small display on your wrist or reflected onto a pair of glasses. Certainly not a new concept, but at least now it is a plausible one.
Similarly staggering is his apparent inability to learn from his mistakes. Early in City of Heroes development and testing, it was discovered that tabletop-style 'choose your own powers' play simply wasn't going to work-- players gravitated toward game-raping character designs, and it was really easy to make something that was simply unworkable. According to the Cryptic website, he's gone back to that kind of design... and for reasons that are apparently borne of pure sentimentality, he's using the HERO System too. For those unfamiliar with HERO, it's a tabletop RPG ruleset with over two hundred pages devoted to character generation and filled with special cases. If he was miffed at players finding loopholes in the elegantly simple City Of... games, the sheer amount of rule rape that will occur once savvy players pop up will drive him into a straitjacket. That's assuming that anyone gets past statting a hero out.
Micro-transactions aren't as popular here because they tend to give an advantage to people with more money. Most American gamers prefer games that emphasize skill and reward players for that, and would tend to be put off if you could simply buy an uber-item and win every time. On the other hand those same individuals wouldn't want to shell out money for only a slight advantage, so you have almost a cache 22, where you need to make the items powerful to get people to buy them, but limit them so that skillful players would still have the advantage of those that merely have a lot of money to spend on the game.
Personally, my suggestion is to eliminate the grind by allowing players to buy levels. That preserves the skill because at high level they still need to be able to use the character, and there would still be items that must be collected, but eliminates the tedium of grinding and is compelling enough that many people would be willing to pay for it.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
The idea of offering an MMO for free and then charging for extras seems wrong to me. It's like a dealer getting people hooked with a free crack giveaway and then saying for 100 bucks you can give him some heroin that will make him stronger than all the other crackheads. Of course every crackhead is going to want the heroin, that's how drugs work. So by adding premium content to free games your just making it to in order to be competitive with people you have to keep spending more money. In a pay to play game like WoW you only have to invest more time in order to be better than others, which is another post all together, but I think is cheaper in the long run.
Okay, so maybe it's not your traditional MMORPG, but Kingdom of Loathing has been free to play and has offered special items in return for cash donations for quite a while, now.
Wouldn't it be good if the average intelligence in the world increases?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Some of the free one work like this
you can play for free but you may get kicked off at peek times / have to wait a long time to log on / you are caped a low level / locked out of some area and so.
To be able to play the full game you need to pay xx a month and this lets you do more then what the free people can do but does not give you a boost over others who are paying to play as well by paying even more.
"Depends greatly on how much your time is worth. It's one of the reasons that leveling services are able to stay in business, some people value their time much differently than others."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hellgate London is an example that is free to play but you get extra content if you subscribe. You do initially have to buy the box however. It is the *very first* MMORPG I've ever played and the fact that there were no subscription fees is actually what tipped the balance for me and I bought it and its great. It's nice to know that I don't have to run out and buy a time-card or charge-it to play again in a few months - so for infrequent players the free to play model is better than WoW's. Tabula Rasa is an example of the opposite: while reading it's box it said that a credit-card was required so I put it back on the shelf.
Shh.
Your face and my ass, sweetheart. The entirety of the World of Warcraft CCG is a microtransaction, with the addendum that you're not actually guaranteed to get a vanity item when you buy them. Just go look for an ebay auction of a Spectral Tiger to see how popular it is.
You've listed just a few of the current genres in MMOs. I predict in the future you'll take on the role of a denizen of a tough world. Initially you'll barely be able to do the simplest of things, but as you spend time, you'll level them up. Strange and arcane rules will be placed upon you, but as you level up you'll face less and less of the, until you hit the 2nd stage of the game where you rapidly level up abilities, but just as you're about to make use of them and rule the world, a new set of rules is placed upon you, and even tougher bosses appear, many of which you can't directly attack, unless you want agro from the mega boss force. Eventually after years of struggle, you'll slowly get promoted in whatever job you've chosen to level in - but the great thing is that you're almost unlimited in what 'jobs' you want to take, but various characters have aptitude for certain jobs based upon training and the options at character creation.
Of course they're already predicting that people will complain this is far too similar to 'life' and not want to play it, but that's expected to take a fair amount of time.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
I think we need to see more development towards other settings (not counting TabulaRasa, its basically the same as Orcs and Elves and all that mess). I always though Planetside was an interesting one that certainly could be improved upon for a decent MMO FPS experience.
Also now that the creator of FASA (Battletech/Shadowrun) has his IP back, maybe we can see a decent Battletech MMO, so long as its better than that one they tried several years ago that wasn't even really an MMO because you could only play 4v4.
The only other real potential coming up is the Bioware Star Wars MMO. Lets hope someone can do it right, I'm tired of swinging swords and fighting orcs!
They also have goodies that you can only get if you go to certain conventions, which also costs $, like the Murloc pet and suit.
And technically there is the whole buying gold issue, so we already have the premiums for money issue in MMOs. We just treat them differently than Korea.
Because under-18 players in games like WOW are technically limited to 4 hours of playing time after which they are progressively docked points, game developers have gone to a model where you simply buy the power-ups, and there are no points awarded for anything. The time restrictions are only spottily enforced, but work better than in the US because many Chinese gamers go to "net bars" to play, as home computers are not yet ubiquitous. They've got to show their IDs, and their online activity is monitored by the netbar owners, and supposedly / very occasionally by police.
The micropayment model seems to have a cultural appeal in China as well. I read a quote somewhere where Blizzard was getting calls from Chinese gamers, asking if they just couldn't buy levels or items. The guy said that they would just apologize and tell them no, but now they're kicking themselves for failing to see the market potential.
We go in phases, with complexities and add-ons, and complex rules piling on, and then a renaissance where people like Steve Jackson et al strip away all the chrome and get back to simplistic gaming.
MMO gaming has an ability to do this, but to add chrome in a way that it doesn't get in the way of play, by such things as a special sheen to armor (that you only get if you purchased the Platinum Knight expansion and paid an extra $5 a year for), or a special magic effect like Dragon Breath that really is the same as another attack but has prettier colors.
What bothers people is when only the ultra-rich can get the premium content, and there is no path to "skills" or "magic" or "items" that they can achieve through normal game play.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Internet funnyman David Wong wrote a very in-depth article about the future possibilities of MMO's awhile ago, which can be found here.
I want awesome games, and I am quite capable of balancing my own life so I don't die playing them.
I don't wan't someone deliberately making their game suck, and thus ruining my experience of it, just because some other idiot might play it to much.
That is nuts.
If we were talking about a chemical addiction I would have a different opinion. But a game doesn't come with any mind-altering drugs. Its just light, sound, and interaction. If you get addicted to that, you have no one to blame but yourself. Therefore I have no sympathy for you, and will insist that the world not cater to your character flaws.
Import the awesomeness, encourage personal responsibility among the addicts.
I currently have my WoW account terminated. Instead, I've been spending my gaming time playing a heavily-modded (read: boobies) version of Oblivion. As I've said before, I would kill for a multiplayer version of Oblivion. Multiplayer, not MMO. Having spent nearly three years of my life playing various NWN RP servers, I think such a setup would be ideal for the game.
MMOs stopped being fun for me once I realized how shallow the gameplay felt compared to my other, non-MMO games.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
I hate how no one is even bringing to the table the concept of REALLY changing what MMOs are. When MMOs first came out (UO and a few others), they were MMORPGs. Now, we have taken the RPG out of it, and not just to save letters. The games are un-dynamic, un-immersive and just not built for roleplaying. Since no one is even TALKING about this I guess it's a dream that will have to wait a long time.
That market is thriving. And they're often doing crazy new things that the big boys (like Blizzard) aren't doing. Not to mention they're free, and often are designed such that you don't spend 20 hours of your day playing them (usually only 30 minutes or so).
Consider something like Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN.
Can we *PLEASE* have an MMORPG in which character development is more than just acquiring new gear?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Actually, there's a ton of evidence that you can make a mint off purely cosmetic items.
I'd imagine if you had a game where a couple pieces of clothing were purely cosmetic and not 'gear', you could do quite well with for-pay cosmetic stuff. Blizzard has basically done it themselves with tabards and non-combat pets alone. Though they're currently using that demand to drive people to Blizzcon and their CCG.
Imagine what they could pull off with housing, decorations or even just 'exclusive' guild logos for tabards and arena flags.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
my experience (SWG, WoW, Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, et al) leads me to believe that the deck is stacked against "micro-transaction" games for a number of reasons
the big drawback is the lack of guaranteed cash flow. if you have a game that people are willing to pay $x a month to play, then that is the better option. if they are willing to shell out $50 to buy a box in order to install the game, that is even better!
therefore, the only games that will choose to use a "micro-transaction" revenue stream are ones cannot compete in the "monthly fee" market space (for any number of reasons).
then the catch-22 happens - programmers, artists, and I.T. folks tend to like to get paid for their work and will naturally gravitate towards the companies with the steady income stream (and probably better salaries/benefits/tech - which are the monthly fee games) - and of course the companies with the best programmers, artists, and I.T. folks will have the best games
the U.S. (being a wealthy nation, with a sophisticated "gamer" market with plenty of discretionary income) obviously shows a preference for the higher quality products (i.e. monthly fee games).
of course, this doesn't mean that a "micro transaction" game couldn't be profitable in the U.S. - just that they will never be the dominant choice (the "drug" analogy = in general, rich people snort cocaine, poor people smoke crack - same product different markets)
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
I don't care about what financial model their undertake; all MMOrpgs are based on stat pumping or grind. They focus on things
that are not FUN to play at all (more "realistic" just ruins games).
Sounds more like he was describing APB, a new MMO being developed by Realtime Worlds.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Just want to correct a minor error: It's Matt "Positron" Miller of City of Heroes fame.
Also see http://www.massively.com/2008/02/21/gdc08/
This isn't really fair. The devs did underestimate the extent to which people would minmax and the extent to which it would break the game. However, despite that, the game is CLEARLY a better game post-ED and post-GDN, where each AT can actually contribute something. While it did make you feel slightly less superheroic by comparison to your starting newb self, good builds can still be monstrously good. (ie, good builds can still solo archvillains or 8-man spawns)
Also, there have been only 2 real patches since NCSoft bought them out - the first was purely I11 bugfixes. It took them until February to even fix most of the I11 bugs - for example, Purple IOs were still broken when exemplaring until the most recent patch. And Jack Emmert was still creative director when they implemented the invention system, which was an unmitigated success.
I do expect great things from NCSoft and what we've seen so far is a good sign.
(And hey, people who have not - try City of Heroes! Best character creation EVER, you feel heroic right out of the gate (no kill 10 rats).)
I have said this before I will say it again. Give me a premium age verified (18+) US only server, or US/EURO/ or EURO server etc... and I will pay 2x per month for it. Gladly. I somehow doubt I am alone. I am really not even picky about the game.) Hell I would even play WoW again if I could be guaranteed not to get killed by your 8 year old who is allowed to play but "don't talk to people" etc... (M$ please note the same goes for XBOX live and the little bastages screaming racial epithet's)
http://hellokittyonline.com/
Flyff has an interesting model, Its one of the many asian style play for free buy for money. But the way its setup a lot of what you can buy only benefits you in certain ways, no pay for items increase your stats permanently, some things like a reskill are very helpful for rebalancing how you distributed your points but theres basically no real benefit in using the cash shop at all once all is said and done...you cant buy levels, and you can only get access to new areas while they are still in beta...
Crom! I have never prayed to you before, I have no tongue for it...
--- Do you believe in the day?
All the comments so far have either been complaining about the gameplay (grinding and repetitive quests, no big change to the gameworld etc).
I think it all boils down to immersiveness. It's easy to achieve this with a good single player game, be it System Shock 2 or Halflife or Deus Ex. There, you are the only human playing against a scripted game, and there are no other random variables being inserted to mar the experience. How credible does a WoW type world look with a bunch of characters talking in scriptkiddese?
I started playing a Korean MMO called Project A3, that was licensed for use in India. It was in open beta for a year, then went subscription based. The gameplay only focused on grinding, and the notorious ability to PK (player kill) wantonly by ctrl-clicking on them. This led to lots of rivalry and abuse (no censor filters). After a while, one got sick of it, as the point was repeatedly driven home- You(or anyone else for that matter) are not a pretty elf in a skimpy costume, or a muscular warrior waving his...battleax. At the end of the day, the people behind the characters are just a bunch of pimply teenage boys who love using foul language at the drop of a hat.
And finally, as someone else also said, the swords and magic fantasy genre has been done to death.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
I wouldn't really call Hellgate an MMORPG, even though its developers sometimes do. It fits the literal definition, but doesn't really hold up the connotations/baggage that go with the MMORPG term. It's more two parts Battle.net-style Diablo and one part FPS.
(Note: I really like the game; I just wouldn't call it an MMORPG in the traditional sense.)
I think one of the fundamental problems with MMORPGs is that the world never changes. Cities are never overrun and burned to the ground, quest givers never die (or if they do, they respawn quickly), trees never grow, the seasons never change, even things like weather and time of day are mostly cosmetic and don't impact gameplay much if at all. Monsters always spawn in the same places and if you kill them all, they'll be back in ten minutes. The modern MMORPG, it would seem, was designed with Sisyphus as the target audience.
A related problem is that too much is abstracted away; players and NPCs don't need to eat, they don't need shelter, items spawn magically in the vendor's shop and money spent disappears into a black hole. Animals spawn, they aren't born in the natural way. Species can't become extinct by killing the last breeding pair. A town does not trade with the outside world, it does not suffer if it is besieged, and there are no famines if the year's harvest is poor. The terrain can't be altered.
Designing a mmorpg around a realistic world would be much harder than the current crop; it may be too much to ask for a MMORPG to be able to support any of the events of the preceding paragraph, but couldn't the world be at least slightly interactive? Like, maybe we could plant a tree every once in awhile and watch it grow, or maybe the grass could be worn down by the passage of many feet? I've played WOW and I'm currently playing Lord of the Rings Online, and I just don't feel like I'm part of the world. It feels more like an amusement park.
The questing/leveling/grinding rut is a big problem too, I'm not disagreeing with you there, but it would take a book for me to say what I want to say about that.
Excuse me son, Special Agent Friday, FBI. Are you the owner of a level 70 rogue on the Blackrock PvP server that was in STV around 14:24pm today?
I see... well I'm afraid your going to have to come with me to answer a few questions. That was my shaman you ganked and camped.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I wished MMOs had much more depth and story to them, perhaps through player created content somehow.. Why with playing the hero all the time? Sometimes I just want to be the evil wizard in the tower, controlling things.. There has to be a way to do that without:
a) Having to spend 100+ hours doing something else first before you can be privileged.
b) It being non-fun for everyone else.
I can see where Spore's massive multi-single player could really breath fresh air into this stagnant genre.
Almost everything you buy in second life is purely cosmetic, and that model seems to be working well.
You mean, emphasize time spent on the game. It ain't chess where you need skill and strategy, it ain't sport competition where you need some real athletic skills. The highiest skill most MMO ask you to understand is roughly equivalent to paper-scissor-stone : what the mob is vulnerable to, and what is his attack made of. MAYBE the FIRST person fighting the same mob display some skills understanding how to attack it effectively, but for the rest of the following camping people is then nearly automation and cook book recipe.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's a bit different from the Fantasy-based MMOs you've been playing, but you really might want to give EVE Online a try (free client download and 2 week trial, cross-platform). It's not perfect - there are a couple things not on your list that are minor irritations to me as well - but it's damn good. Point-by-point:
"Cities are never overrun..." The equivalent to cities in EVE is probably the station where you dock your ships, or even the systems that given factions can have control over. While there are NPC-controlled "Empire" regions where players have very limited control, most of the galaxy is 0.0 security status (EVE-speak for you make your own rules, pretty much) and out there, players BUILD the "cities" and must fight to protect them from other players. If you lose, they will destroy your starbases, conquer your stations, and gain control of the system. My own (very young and small) alliance is currently trying to carve out our own piece of 0.0, and we're already needing to fight for it.
"Quest givers never die..." This is true enough of the NPC-given missions you can find in Empire, but out in 0.0 you find (scan down) your own "quests" (plexes). Of course, you can also choose not to run plexes - it takes time to find them (like a real-world quest might) and there's no guarantee of any decent reward for completion, or that your ship will survive. Plexes do spawn on their own - they would run out quickly otherwise - but they do so randomly.
There are also player-given contracts you can take on. Most are fairly trivial - move a lot of cargo (no instant transportation of goods in EVE) or similar - but almost anything (up to and including putting a price on another player's head) is possible.
"Trees never grow..." No trees in space. You can mine asteroids to exhaustion, but they re-spawn. Planets don't actually orbit their stars or anything though, so I'll have to give you this one (fixed terrain).
"Monsters always spawn in the same place..." NPC pirates (rats) do tend to spawn in asteroid belts, but when and where seems quite random - and they'll show up at other places like right outside stations, at stargates (fixed NPC structures used to move between systems), and in the (randomly appearing) plexes and missions I mentioned above.
"Players and NPCs don't need to eat..." This one isn't actually universal, though it's common enough. It partially applies to EVE - your ship's reactor will never stop making energy, and you can sit in deep space for a year if you want to, never docking at a station or even seeing another player (would be boring as hell though). However, starbases need constant resupply or they go offline, and some ship modules require supplies (ammo/missiles for weaponry is pretty common, but some advanced modules consume special materials each time they are used)
"Items magically spawn... Money spent disappears... A town doesn't trade..." In EVE, the market is player driven. Almost everything you see offered for sale is being sold by players to players (some NPCs will buy/sell certain items, generally very low-level stuff). Items are created by manufacturing (using the minerals that players mined from asteroids, which typically get sold to the manufacturers) and require blueprints (and sometimes rare materials); some blueprints (especially those for high-grade "tech 2" items) are very hard to acquire, and items produced using such blueprints often sell for vastly more than per-item production costs because demand is high and supply low. It's possible to buy out all of a certain item in an area, then sell them back while basically naming your own price (though somebody may then either import them from other regions or start producing that item, if either becomes economically feasible). CCP, the company that owns EVE, has a (real-world) economist on their staff who helps make sure the game's economy remains functional.
As for leveling, there's no standard level system in EVE; you train skills in real-time (even while offline). Starting a skill train
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The Death penitly might be a bit high.
The death penalty might be a bit high.