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

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: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:why?

[Loke the Dog]

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

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.