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Explaining the Dearth of Console MMOGs
spielermacher writes "Gamasutra is running an interesting analysis written by Flying Lab Software Producer Joe Ludwig explaining why there are not more successful Console MMOGs. Some reasons given: lack of keyboard, MMOG players like to play in pairs, business model doesn't always work out for the developer, larger installed base of game-quality PCs, and others."
I, for one, lament the dearth of teletype MMOGs, let alone those that can be navigated from my console. Count me in the minority...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Consoles don't have keyboards so it must be a pain the a** to login let alone set up your account.
JACEM
DOC Disinformation Obfuscation and Confusion
The carrot to FUD's stick
I certainly hope someone is able to explain what ever that means.
Or the most obvious answer... parents don't want their TV tied up for 16 hours at a time while their 26 year old son "Johnny" does back to back raids. =P
Another argument about his lack of job hunting skills and the small TV in the bedroom doesn't cut it. =D
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
...but no one is willing to take the risk. I've been playing WoW with a xbox360 controller for years and I love it. :p Joy To Key is one of the best pieces of software ever developed... ( http://www.electracode.com/4/joy2key/JoyToKey%20English%20Version.htm )
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There are other reasons to want a keyboard -- keyboards have far more buttons than controllers, meaning more actions, and MMOs can be complex. And there's the registration, login, etc. People sit pretty far back from their televisions, and even HD displays really aren't very high-res compared to PC screens. People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080. Raise your hand if you have a computer monitor that high. The biggest I have is 1600x1200, which is not widescreen, and is 153,600 pixels fewer than a 1080p screen. MMOs take four to five years to build. People keep trying to convince themselves that they can do it in three years, but they're wrong. So what? Good MMOs are continuously updated for five to ten years. No reason to think you couldn't port it to a different platform and give it a graphical update in that time. Many, many people play MMOs (and other games for that matter) in pairs. I've played 6 different MMOs with my wife. Lots of people play with their spouses, siblings, or kids. And many, many people play console games in pairs, trios, or quartets. We tolerated split-screen for Goldeneye on the N64, where each player might get, what, 180x140 worth of screen space? And now we're on HD displays. Console MMOs really need to support split-screen play on a single machine, which adds to the development complexity. And developing for a single platform, instead of the "PC platform" of whatever the fsck the user decided to buy, should reduce development complexity.
There were some good points here, and I'll stick with my PC platform as long as I can -- on Linux -- but I don't see anything compelling.
Here's one thing that does matter: MMOs are big, and getting bigger. Much of them must be download in patches. It's difficult to buy a computer with a hard drive less than 80 gigs these days. It's difficult to buy a console with a hard drive more than 60 gigs, unless something's changed.
Oh, and consoles very likely won't allow mods. Many people live by their WoW UI mods, custom voice chat, etc.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Actually, having played a lot of MMOs, IMHO the login is the least of your worries.
;)
In WoW a Shaman can easily run out of the 60 icon slots on the toolbars. On COH most of my characters had to keep some of the temporary powers off the 3 toolbars available (only _very_ recently they provided the option to open more).
You need _some_ way to activate them quickly. Be it keyboard or by clicking them with the mouse. Scrolling through lists of choices with a gamepad, in real time, would suck more ass than the vacuum toilets on the Soyuz
I mean, seriously, I can see the talks after a WoW-style raid:
Tank: "Dude, FFS, why didn't you heal???"
Priest: "Sorry, guys, I had to look for a mana potion in through my action list."
Mage: "Heh. Do what I do, just scroll to it in advance."
Priest: "STFU, noob. The only reason I wasn't at it, was that I looked for the bandages earlier when you over-nuked."
The best I've seen done with a gamepad was Sega's PSO, which was little more than a hack-and-slash with 6 actions maximum, assigned to 3 keys on the gamepad. Plus one "shift" key to select between the first and second set.
The sequel, PSU, reduced that even more. Yeah, so you can play it on a gamepad. Except with any given weapon you have exactly one special attack you can assign to a key. And you have to scroll through a list to even select your mana potion or put on some special glasses. (Which turn off your sword, since you don't have enough buttons to activate the glasses _and_ use the sword.) It gets (A) annoying fast, and (B) repetitive fast, since the number of actions is finite and small, and there are no clever combinations and strategies to use with them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...and its hard to chat with no keyboard.
MMORPGs owe their origins to the world of MUSHes and MUDs, which were essentially chat interfaces oriented around playing a game as a common activity.
Much of my time in any MMORPG is spent talking with my group, whether determining tactics for the next fight, discussing game issues and features, or just finding out how things are going in their lives. All of that requires a convenient means to communicate, and while some people use voice communications for much of this, most still use typed chat. A console is simply not chat-friendly in the same manner that any PC is. Voice chat is less useful in many cases because you are not provided with any visual tag as to who is speaking as you are with in game typed chat (and when the female elf you have been playing with turns out to have a deep male voice, its harder to associate the spoken voice with the character at least at first). Its fine when you *know* the people from regular contact or in real life, but when playing in a pickup group (PUG), thats not the case.
Now if a console system were to integrate a decent keyboard with the game instead of various controllers then this might change, but consoles appeal to a different style of gameplay (one I fail to appreciate) and often a different type of player. While standard games may be steadily moving to the console format in many cases, MMORPGs will remain PC oriented until new technology arises (some new form of voice recognition chat that puts what you say on screen as speech balloons say, rather than hearing it as voice, or more than likely in addition to doing so) that makes playing them possible and convenient. Personally speaking I know I could never use the substandard control available from a controller more effectively than the control gained from keyboard+mouse, although I am trying to adapt to using a Nostromo in some games at the moment. Even then its not as effective for me.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Even with voice chat you aren't going to produce a very social game (which is what MMOGs really are about) without a keyboard. A joystick and four buttons won't cut it...which is why I still consider a standard PC of any flavor to be far superior to any console they can come up with.
People do sit pretty far back. But HD is 1920x1080.
Or 1280x720, or 1280x1020, with chroma subsampling further reducing the effective resolution. But more to the point, as you say, "People do sit pretty far back." so you DO need bigger text to be legible regardless of the resolution.
From an interview on gamasutra that was linked here a while back that this article pricked to life out of my memory:
I think this is more and more becoming a reality. Even in the nailed-down online component of Mario-Kart Wii, there's the world-wide Time Trial leaderboard where you can download the ghost of the best recorded time on the planet and see if you can beat it, and if you do, upload that score and have worldwide bragging rights.
...and its hard to chat with no keyboard.Exactly, expecially because many people don't like voice chat, for example when they can't speak in their native language. In my case I can read English well and write a pretty understandable one (well, hopefully - you judge it) but sometimes I miss words on TV and things get worse when I have to speak and understand quickly lots of different people.
Finally, even native speakers may find the tone of their voice inadequate or do not want to give away their age or gender by speaking. I heard stories about charismatic MMOGs team leaders that lost all their credibility when somebody discovered them to be 12 year old boys or so. Actually, this proves that the adult team members were some fools caring more about their pride than about the skills of the leader, but also that the pre-teen leader had good reasons to hide himself behind a textual chat.
MMORPGs are constantly evolving games (or at least they should be) because people find exploits and the interactions must be kept fair. Consoles have more difficulties delivering these patches although with more widespread internet access among current generation consoles this is less of a problem.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Finally, even native speakers may find the tone of their voice inadequate or do not want to give away their age or gender by speaking. I heard stories about charismatic MMOGs team leaders that lost all their credibility when somebody discovered them to be 12 year old boys or so. Actually, this proves that the adult team members were some fools caring more about their pride than about the skills of the leader, but also that the pre-teen leader had good reasons to hide himself behind a textual chat.
Ah good point, text-based chat also provides anonymity for people who want to preserve it. A lot of female players get hassled endlessly in many MMORPGs, primarily because no one can reach out and "instruct" them on why that is not appreciated. I know my wife got a lot of sexual harassment in DAOC for a while there (people moving their toons behind hers and simulating sex acts (using physical /emote commands) for instance as well as a lot of verbal abuse, requests for cyber etc). I can understand a strong desire to avoid that on many people's part, and using voice chat will make that rather difficult to say the least.
Now it would be handy if some developer built in speech recognition that rendered your spoken words as chat text and thus let you operate keyboard free as I suggested above, but given lag and other problems endemic to MMORPGs, I can't see that working all that much better than the current system.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I think the lack of a keyboard for command shortcuts is one of the major reasons. that said, i can see a decent mmorpg being developed for the Wii, using wiimote gestures with button press modifiers. That would be really fun to play. the issue of communication would still be tricky though.
Heh. Yeah, I bought a Dreamcast keyboard just to chat in that game. Not as cool as the combination in your link, though, I must admit.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm going to go with the Font Size as being the big reason behind most "MMOs" for consoles being glorified shooters.
Final Fantasy XI, which was made for both the PC and the PS2, annoyed me to no end with their Ginormous unified chat box/action box. With combat events, private messages, chats, and system announcements all appearing in the same space, it was tremendously annoying to try to do more than one thing at a time.
Voice chat should help this a bit, but text still dominates most of the MMO UI now and would result in a dumbed-down "Consolized" version that will turn most MMO fans off. Higher resolutions making fonts smaller has only gone on to irritate players (see: Dead Rising).
Perhaps a controller-mounted secondary display system a-la the Dreamcast VMU or the Gamecube's ability to output to a GBA would be a decent solution. AFAIK, the PS3 can "talk" to the PSP and the Wii can send data to a DS, both wirelessly, so maybe it's only a matter of time before some genius figures out how to mate the handheld device as a vital HUD component for a real console MMO.
... between a console with a keyboard, console controller, optional mouse, the internet and a high-res TV, and a computer with a keyboard, console controller, optional mouse, the internet and a monitor?
Why all the drama trying to figure out WHY these games disappear, when the fact that these were BORING from the beginning is patently obvious.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
In fact, ANY usb keyboard will work on your 360 or PS3.
Console gamers don't like treadmilling.
We simply have better taste.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
To me, consoles will always be a... blow in the cartridge, put game in, mash buttons type of activity. Quick and dirty.
If I want to play WOW on a console I would need a keyboard, mouse, headset, comfy chair, all my tunes, etc. In effect, I have just built the same thing I have in my computer room. Its called a PC.
Consoles stick with the quick and dirty please.
But the system runs on the PowerPC core.
The XBox is the only to feature 3 main cores. * No keyboard for socializing! The 360 has a headset. I'm not sure about the PS3. The Wii is screwed on this front. All 3 consoles (and even previous generation consoles) feature USB port. All console can use USB keyboards. (Out of the box for Playstations and XBoxes ; the Wii needs a firmware update which is automatic as soon as the Wii has internet access).
Previous generation consoles (DreamCast and GameCube) supported keyboard, either by using a console-specific keyboard or by using a PS/2-to-console adapter with whatever keyboard you have lying around.
And even if this required some hardware purchase (both hardware for the keyboard and a broadband modem if either you had a GC or didn't like the built-in analog of the DC), that didn't prevent hack'n'slashes like Phatansy Star Online to be produced and achieve success on those consoles.
The keyboard was even supported on the DC version of Quake 3 to offer classic keyboard and mouse gameplay style.
In addition the keyboard it self is a pretty lame excuse. Radial menus have already been proved to be efficient (Silver is an example of PC+DC game which used radial menus for quick accesses) and consoles gamepads have pretty much enough axes to allow radial menus. So it's possible to put enough short-cuts even if there's no keyboard.
My opinion is that the current crop of top MMORPG that are both successful and well marketed happen to run on PCs.
In short : almost everybody is on WoW currently, and WoW runs only on Windows PCs. It's hard to compete with it and be successful by introducing yet another MMOG in a saturated market where PC games already have a monopoly.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You sir, are clueless. Why? Because you haven't been paying attention. Why do you think the PS2 has USB ports? To allow different kinds of input for different games, thats why. People have been plugging USB keyboards into the PS2's since 2001! Any console gamer who buys an MMORPG "knows" that they are going to want to hook up a keyboard for in-game chat.
It truly is a non-issue.
There are lots of reasons why MMOs don't work well on consoles, but the bottom line problem is how people play MMOs.
I always run WoW in windowed mode, and I have friends who do the same. The game is designed and paced so that you don't have to concentrate 100% of the time. In fact, it's more like 50% of the time.
That makes WoW more like a board game than a traditional video game. It's a social thing, in addition to a competitive thing.
Voice chat sucks in MMOs. Yeah, most guilds use it for raids, and I use it (Vent) for arena, where quick communication is a necessity.
But here's the thing: in MMOs, you're frequently conversing with people you don't know, sometimes with hundreds of people at a time. Frankly, I don't want to listen to people in the game, because many of them are assholes (it's an Internet rule, remember?).
But it's more fundamental than just the lack of a keyboard. PCs are communication devices. I can look up strategy or statistics on my PC. I can IM with friends.
In addition, I play WoW on the go quite a bit. Some guilds have regular raiding schedules. Mine doesn't, but I still have a regular time when I do arenas. I have a decent notebook, so I can play WoW when I'm away, which works great because game state is stored on the network.
All of this stuff can be done on a console. But all you're doing is turning the console into a glorified PC.
And, FYI, no console has 2560x1600 screen resolution (roughly double 1080p). And no console has a GPU that's even close to my Radeon HD 3850. This hardware isn't even "high end" anymore, it's definitively mainstream.
Consoles are temporary niche,where fixed hardware(the console) has to compete with evolving hardware(the PC).When the PCs become much cheaper(~few decades),the niche will disappear along with all the gadgets which use one of PCs functions.
Which brings up another interesting issue - customization. With WoW, you can have 60-odd buttons placed to your liking thanks to various add-ons - the game has a very rich scripting interface for that sort of thing. Console makers are not historically fond of scripting interfaces, lest the script writer find their way into parts of the system they shouldn't have access to.
A second issue is that every time I hear a console dev is going to make an MMO, they're going to make it "console-friendly"; the result is usually some kind of RPG-FPS hybrid. I'd be much happier with a straight RPG. Oblivion worked fine on a console (albeit with the lack of user customization noted above). The 360 and PS3 have more than enough horsepower to handle WoW or even LotRo (although you'd probably want to attach a keyboard).
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Star Wars Galaxy was supposed to be for the PS2 as well as for the PC. And there are some rumours that Age of Conan is to appear on the 360. If you know either game, you might realize the problem. Memory. The PS2 wasn't as powerful as PC's of that era, few game consoles ever are. The problem is simple, gamers get the latest intel/amd straight from the factory. But consoles need to be build around whatever tech has been developed. During the development Consoles always seem to be posses godlike powers but in the years they take to get to the market they just end up aging incredibly fast. Take for instance the game Mass Effect. Play it on a PC. Sure it looks great... does it? Does it really? Don't get me wrong, the art direction is top notch BUT what is with, for instance, the hair? 2000 called, they want their 8 styles of hair should be enough for an entire galaxy back. Why are the levels so insanely small? Surely my PC should be capable of loading all of the presidium in its memory? A simple look at the memory usage confirm it, total memory usage 1 gig, that is with highest textures. 3 gig sitting idle. And how is that my PC which on paper should be slower can actually play the game with higher rez, higher textures FASTER then the 360? Mine is only a dual core, surely the 360 super chip should be faster? Well no. It simply ain't. Not that pure speed matters that much, the memory is the simple killer. SWG back then was a game that ran best if you had 2 gigs of memory. The PS2 had 32 mb (if I remember right). I don't care how much you optomize and gain from not having to run a full OS in the background, that is simply NOT going to fit. And while console games like Mass Effect can get away with insanely small levels, current MMO's need to be huge. AoC is being critized for being to small already and yet it barely runs on a 2 gig machine ideally needing 4 gig. Imagine how much smaller areas have to be to fit in a consoles memory. Console games often pull tricks to get around their limitations. A racing game can layout the data in such a way that the next bit of the track is next on the CD/DVD so it can be loaded quickly. Levels contain 1 type of enemy but levels are small so you have low memory requirements but still get diversity. But MMO's can have 100 people in the same area all in different outfits. All those textures and models need to fit somewhere. It can be done, but you need to cut corners and be really thight in your design of the game and frankly MMO designers just ain't got what it takes. All the other stuff the article mentions can be worked around but the simple fact that not a single MMO out there would even fit in the memory of current consoles on lowest setting is the biggest killer. SOE and others just don't manage to keep the games small enough to run in the limited memory of consoles.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why don't they just make a keyboard controller for consoles? They can add a mouse while they are at it. a person can then choose his controller. These are cheap peripherals to begin with and would level the controller playing field. Everything could then port to consoles even if they are not creative at all about the controls in the porting.
yeah i play rogue mostly but it works with my priest, druid, hunter, and shaman...well i think it'll work with them all :p