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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."
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.
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.
Yes, but there's a difference. The value of decorating your horse on a single-player only game is different than the value of decorating your horse in a multi-player-only game. Oblivion then came out with more mods that added value to the game and the community's received them much better.
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.
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.
A game is supposed to be fun. If you don't have time for the game, do something else with your time. If you use a lvling service you're literally paying somebody else to play your game. "Here's 250 bucks, go play WoW and tell me how much fun it is" Then when you get your account back in a few days you'll have no idea how to do anything and other high lvl players will know you bought your account and you won't be able to play again because everybody hates you.
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
For the record, I do not, and never have used a leveling service, but if the MMOs I played offered the option to pay for levels I probably would (at least for some levels, the ones towards the end just get ridiculous).
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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).
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.
You need to do the grind to get to the fun.
Why?
No, seriously. The only answer I can think of is "So the developers have sufficient time to leech money from you."
Rob
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?"
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 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.
Voice chat is a reason to not play a game.
There's nothing worse than having some 12-year-old dipshit sharing his musical tastes for your gaming group, or finding out that Princess Fairyglen has a voice like Harvey Firestein. Or being the only keyboarder on a team that can't be bothered to share their Ventrillo server. Or being kicked from a team for not having a Mic.
If there's one thing I learned from DDO it's that I'm done gaming when I have to listen to all the other shitbags argue about rappers and NASCAR in the game I'm playing to escape the world of rappers and NASCAR.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K