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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..."
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
He's the 7 foot asthmatic guy in black leather, and the samurai kabuto.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...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 )
In future you may be able to use such a device all by yourself without posting inane comments on /.
Actually, the Logitech ProBoard was sold for about $20 and was fully compliant for the PS2 and Final Fantasy XI. I've recently discovered it works on both the X-Box 360 and the Wii.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Because chatting via typing is difficult when you don't have a keyboard. The other option is to use voice communication and it's hard enough dealing with text chat much less several dozen people all talking at once... seriously, could you imagine Barrens chat if it were voice? or the chat inside Ironforge? How about all the gold/isk sellers spamming voice chat? Many people use most MMOs as a fancy graphical chatroom. When you can't chat... well, there you go.
Voice works great for guilds/corps/groups/raids but that is selective admission into the channel(s) already.
And then you get into needing lots of buttons for game play. You need how many for your spell icons in WoW? How about adding attack and all the other commands as well? (crafting/harvesting/etc).
There just aren't enough buttons on a gamepad for them all, and if you did have them, it'd turn into a keyboard of some kind (maybe a chorded one).
Where's the +1 burn mod when you need it.
English is not this
Both xbox and ps3 can use a keyboard, and the xbox has a "chatpad" which dock into the normal controller and works incredibly well. Also, the bulk of chat would most likely be audio, something consoles have working quite well.
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
* The modern consoles ALL have built-in networking.
* The modern consoles (Wii exempt) both have multiple CPU cores. Anyhow, a) why do MMOs need multi-threading more than traditional games, and b) why do you think the multithreading support is lacking in consoles?
* The same developers who make MMOs for PCs (Sony, Square Enix), make non-MMO console games. These guys already know how to run the business end of it.
* The console market is huge, so games can target the young, the mature, or everyone. There are also parental controls on all 3 modern consoles.
Not to flame you, but I don't think any of your answers are "erm, obvious", or even "erm, likely". There is tons of online gaming on XBOX, just not massively multiplayer.
My guesses:
* No keyboard for socializing! The 360 has a headset. I'm not sure about the PS3. The Wii is screwed on this front.
* Hard drive space is limited on the 360, and these games have HUGE update requirements.
* XBOX Live users are accustomed to a single XBOX live charge for online pay, and might balk at additional per-game charges. Sony plugs their "free online play". These games make their money off recurring charges.
Jeremy
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.
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
That doesn't really matter. computers ALL have keyboards, it's a given. As long as you have to buy the keyboard extra for the console the PC will always have that advantage to it. you can't design a MMO around keyboard usage on the console and expect it to do anything but flounder and as long as you only have a controller then it will continue to be inadequate.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
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.
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 ]