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."

Comments

Emmert? Oh, no.

[Bieeanda]

The man is this generation's Brad McQuaid. Gameplay changes made merely to punish player ingenuity and enforce his 'vision', and pointless choices and grinds simply for their own sake. The number of quality-of-life changes that have been made to City Of... since NCSoft bought it (and hired most of its devs) is simply staggering.

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.

Re:Emmert? Oh, no.

[geekoid]

Most the rules from the books can be automated.

For example, you don't need a pages an creating a energy blast.

Assuming the game will enforce a speicif point range during creation that limits the number of rules as well.

However, you will still have people who can optimize a character more then someone else.

For 100 point's I could pretty much make an unstoppable character. Fortunatly, I put role playing first.

Micro-Transactions and game balance

[orclevegam]

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.

Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance

[Orne]

It's interesting that you put it that way, since I think it kind of exposes the difference in values between our two cultures.

In the USA, there is a strong belief that, with all things being equal at the beginning, the amount of labor that an individual is willing to perform should determine the advancement of the individual. This is especially prevelent in the modern racial/sexual/*-equality work ethic, and is a common conservative/libertarian political plank that the only thing that holds people back is themselves.

Overseas, in South Korea, they have embraced capitalism to a level beyond the USA; it should come as no surprise then that the amount of money that an invidual is willing to invest should determine the advancement of the individual.

-- Scott

Pay to win, not play

[achosler]

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.

Re:I Hope MMOs All Die

[Wandering Wombat]

Me and the 'little woman' play Civ 3 and 4 when the kids go to bed, just because it's really easy to play for however much time we have to spare. We started with Civ II, but I kept kicking her ass. Then we moved to Civ III, and she started kicking MY ass. Fortunately, we're pretty matched at 4, and it keeps us humble.

But all these MMOs... I played WoW for a little bit, and City Of Cookie Cutters, and some other ones, and all I could remember of the experience was "Man, Diablo II was more fun than this..." and I never played again. But someday, someday, an MMO will appear that will appeal to me. I'm scared.

Some of the free one work like this

[Joe The Dragon]

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.

Re:I Hope MMOs All Die

[Joe the Lesser]

It's not the theme, it's the gameplay.

I want something that will shake to the core. Something that doesn't feel scripted.

No more quests from NPCs, no more boring and predictable leveling (ding, new skill!), no designed 'tanks' and 'healers'. I'm not sure exactly what I want, but I'm bored of the gameplay. I want more chaos, combats that require realtime strategizing and role changes during the flow.

I would also like improved customization. It's impossible to be unique in these games. Sad that they work so hard on graphics and then you choose from faces 1-8, and all wear the same armor. Make me feel special. I want to design my own emotes, and design my own abilities.

Just some crazy ramblings though...I ain't expecting anything.

Re:The "future" should read:

[VGPowerlord]

For cross-platform, FFXI on PS2 and XBox 360 has probably done rather well. However, FFXI is a failure as a PC game.

Square Enix has programmed the game to shut down if you try to change to another window. This is particularly nasty with IM clients that automatically pop up, such as, well, all of them. There is an addon to stop that, but it's in violation of SE's terms of service.

The game is also heavily reliant on a gamepad control scheme. Its keyboard/mouse scheme is just horrid.

Re:I Hope MMOs All Die

[Korin43]

The game you're describing sounds like an FPS based on the Sims.

Re:why?

[Loke the Dog]

I think it would be better if the average wisdom increased, and that requires everyone reaching the highest possible age.

Re:Fantasy MMORPGs are getting stale

[esper]

So, then, what I'm getting from this is that your issue is not in fact with the "settings", "Orcs and Elves and all that mess", or "swinging swords and fighting orcs", but rather with the grind-based mechanics of typical MMOs?

I'd have to agree with you, although my bigger complaint with MMOs is the inability of players to affect the world in any meaningful way. If you make 10 characters, you'll end up going through the exact same world 10 times, doing pretty much the same missions/quests 10 times, without any real variation other than the order that you do them and the number of times you run off to help someone else with their "slay the uber-beastie before it destroys the world in 5 minutes" mission even though a) you just got back from killing it and b) they spent more than 5 minutes trying to recruit people to help them with it.

Now, granted, I don't have any practical ideas for ways to have 1,000 people running around all making their own changes to the world without it devolving into a complete mess as soon as you open the doors, but there's got to be something better possible than the current standard of every action being undone as soon as it's completed (perhaps immediately, perhaps after a brief respawn timer).

Re:I Hope MMOs All Die

[PietjeJantje]

Try some SciFi MMORPG for a change. Seriously, I saw this exact discussion way back in the dark ages, in 1990, when people discussed which MUD to play.
SciFi is just the same with different names for stuff.

The problem is the target audience is the same: mainly spotty teenagers en young men. Nerds (hi!). And they all have the same target audience. Second Life does best, but that's not a game.

A problem they will encounter is that for 90% or more, it is an addiction that blows over after some years. It did for me and I have found nothing that appealed to me since. Not that I think that's a problem considering my, uhm, time-management skills.

Character Development!

[myowntrueself]

Can we *PLEASE* have an MMORPG in which character development is more than just acquiring new gear?

Re:Character Development!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Play Eve. Take two characters with the exact same gear, but one has 2 million skill points, the other has 10, and the 10 million point char should slaughter the other without breaking a sweat.

Provided they're both training combat skills that is. If that 10m SP char is an industrial character, they don't stand a chance.

After skill points, or in some cases before, it's all about your skills. Take someone who doesn't know how to put together a good ship, or how to fly one well, and then your 2m SP char is ruining the 10m SP char's day.

Plus scamming is part of the game. Makes for a very paranoid, careful feel. Get out into 0.0 security (no law enforcement at all) and suddenly you're in the wild west. In spaceships.

Re:I Hope MMOs All Die

[jollyreaper]

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... Don't worry, the very game model requires they end up being crap. That being said, reality is catching up to scifi. Back when Trek and Red Dwarf featured VR games that left people as zoned out pixel junkies, I thought the drug metaphor was a little hard to reach because gaming required a computer or a console and television. That implied a house. You lose your job and can't pay the electric bill, that breaks the cycle of addiction. But with wifi technology and portable computing getting so powerful, it really is plausible to imagine homeless bums sitting under overpasses, logged into the game world. With a game like EVE Online, you can pay your monthly access fee by buying time cards from other players with in-game gold. When the panhandler comes up to you at the traffic light, he'll be wanting to know if he can bum a charge off of you instead of a smoke or spare change.

It's all kind of trippy when you think about it. Lovecraft's dreamers were among the literary firsts, people who were unassuming and mundane in real life but fantastically respected and powerful in a separate world. That could be seen as an extension of the literary world where some authors were hugely famous and respected but only within very small circles of admirers. Cyberpunk liked to take that idea further with the idea that online personas were as famous and powerful as super-heroes and yet could be stuck working as pizza deliverators and living out of converted storage units.

If one pushes the whole idea of cyberspace to a semi-plausible future, say 50 years out, so much human interaction would be virtual, and not just via telephone or using what's basically a chat client with a game attached like Warcraft. Falling back into fiction tropes, you could have someone as powerful as any mob figure or revolutionary or super-criminal conducting all his business as a digital avatar. When it comes to mobsters, the best way to make certain competition is dealt with properly is a hit. But how do you assassinate someone you've never even seen? Faerie tales like to talk about knowing someone's true name as being power, there's also the idea of the magic talisman that is the key to a monster or wizard's power and thus his ruin. Well, you'll end up having a real world comparison of that here: knowing who that person really is will be true power, knowing where they live means you can also kill them.

That sort of thought just has me thinking of the sort of cat and mouse game you'd have when bad people with guns try to personally remove one of these metaverse important people. I'm imagining this great online force of nature and information broker being a paraplegic in a nursing home who is living out his life online because the real world is unbearable. The guys with guns hit the nursing home and blow away the guy two rooms down from him, falling for the misdirection. The guy they killed was just playing Warcraft but the one they meant to kill was fucking with the Russian Mob's phishing operation. That would be an awful kind of situation, motionless in a bed and knowing that the bad guys are coming. Let that be a lesson for you, don't play MMO's or the Russians might kill you by mistake.

Not really fair

[MattW]

Gameplay changes made merely to punish player ingenuity and enforce his 'vision', and pointless choices and grinds simply for their own sake. The number of quality-of-life changes that have been made to City Of... since NCSoft bought it (and hired most of its devs) is simply staggering.

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).)