Open Sourcing MMOs

The Stropp's World blog has an interesting editorial of the pros and cons for open sourcing MMOs, especially those that have "died." Stropp examines both sides of the issue and makes some compelling arguments. "So, there are some good reasons for a company to open source the game that it is soon to retire, and there are a couple of good reasons against. What to do? If opening up the client is not an option, open up the server code. This would allow the open source community to take the software, install it on a community server and open it up to the fans. Other players might want to grab the source and create their own private servers, perhaps with different rule sets for PvP and the like. The life of the game could be extended for years, supporting a thriving community."

Comments

What's the point?

[Keruo]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work.
Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Re:What's the point?

[oahazmatt]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work. Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Wouldn't it be less of a hassle to read the Player's Guide, if such was your goal?

Re:What's the point?

[spyrochaete]

I agree completely with this. Not impressed by WoW and its artificially slow leveling system, my wife and I tried an unofficial shard server that tendered 10x experience and gold. The game was still too plodding for us to play for long, but it was neat to see some higher level areas with only a marginal investment in time. We each bought a $2 official trial game client at the local games store so Blizzard still got a few bucks for their trouble.

I really wish I could go out and buy the Auto Assault client (pretty despicable that stores still sell a worthless client to a long dead MMO) and play on a private server somewhere, or better yet, host my own. What could possibly benefit the publisher more than continuing to profit from game a game after the official service has been cancelled? What do they have to lose?

Re:What's the point?

[ericrost]

If their "SUPAR SECRET" network encryption algorithm needs to be "SUPAR SECRET" to be secure, then its not. Security through obscurity != Security.

Re:What's the point?

[vux984]

It's already possible to look at the game databases and learn how the quests work. It's really simple most of the time. Go to X, kill Y, Z times. P.P.S. This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...

Everquest I, in particular would be a great counter example. Sure nearly all the quests were documented on the various sites, but the information was often sketchy or even outright wrong. Often it would say 'go to an area and kill everything that moves for a while and eventually the named will pop', but in reality the spawn was triggered elsewhere. Other times, the spawn you were interested in only popped from one particular place, or lots of mobs named X spawned in the area, but only the ones that spawned at (x,y) dropped z. So if you needed 5 z's you could spend hours killing all the mobs named X, until you had 5 z's... or you kill them until you get 1 z, then rush over to (x,y) and kill everything that respawns from that point, and get your 5 z's MUCH MUCH quicker.

A few quests -were- documented to this degree by people who had done the quest dozens of times, and -really- understood it. But far more quests exist where the sort of information you could get from the source code just isn't available.

Hell, in everquest, even some of the most basic mechanics weren't well understood for years. For example, whether the mobs spawned with loot, or whether it was generated on their death -- for -YEARS- people swore up and down that they had better drop rates of x if they had y equipped when they killed it.

This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...

Another feature EQ1 didn't have. (To its detriment really)

But there were elements of EQ1 quests that were really quite brilliant -- Its one of the few games that actually required the community come together and solve quests as a group. For one quest you needed two coins -- one on a high stump in a dark forest that was only somewhat safe to enter when the quest was level appropriate... and even then only during the day, the other in at the bottom of a frozen river, where you had to enter a hole in the ice.

The quest giver gave almost no direction to finding these coins, and a player playing 'solo' really had no chance in hell of ever completing the quest before he had levelled FAR beyond it... unless he communicated/collaborated with other players -- one of whom might have discovered the first coin while levitating through the forest, and another who discovered the 2nd coin exploring under the ice.

It was truly brilliant when playing it 'back in the day' when those quests were still being solved; sure after it was solved the locations and screenshots of where to go were up on the web, but many of the quests even today are only partially documented. People have reported you can get an X here or a Y there... but often there are much better places to get X's and Y's.

And any longtime player has lots of insights into the game that simply aren't documented.

New MMO's have really 'dumbed it down'. In WoW you just run from question mark to question mark on your map.

OSS MMO = Free Leet Gear!

[gblackwo]

The sword of 1000 truths is mine!

Why on earth would they do that?

[kellyb9]

Why would they want to extend the life of their game? They want you to buy the new one!

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[moderatorrater]

Who's more likely to buy Doom 4, someone who hasn't played any doom game in decades or someone who still plays doom 1 & 2 regularly using different mods? Communities build up, buzz is generated through the grassroots, if the community's any good it may even grow and spread, which would make your next game even bigger.

UO?

[Rinisari]

Didn't they do this with UO?

Oh, wait, they reverse engineered the protocol, made a ton of implementations of the server, and the game is still played. There was even a new official client version in 2007, according to the Wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online

I'd love to play Galaxies or Matrix Online, but I'd never pay for them, just like I never paid for UO, yet played it religiously for three years.

Re:UO?

[RingDev]

The question that pops into my mind after reading your post is:

Would you shop at "Ye Ole' Nike Blacksmith"? Would you venture forth to save Prince Sony? Would you have the intestinal fortitude to sit at an inn with architectural features and iconography identical to that of a Pizza Hut?

If there were integrated marketing merged into these free games, would you still be willing to play them (for free of course). Knowing that your viewing of integrated advertisement would be offsetting the server side costs?

-Rick

Hit the nail on the head

[Shivetya]

The simple fact is, its volunteer work and as such it is not a priority for those doing it.

Lets throw in a few other issues.
1. Differences. It is very hard to have a leader over a project like this in an environment where a dissatisfied group can up and fork their own
2. Feature creep.
3. Boring crap. All the graphics needed for the client. This collides with issue #1. Designers want X but available artists deliver Y.
4. Time, time to deliver something playable isn't quick if they want a lasting product. Linux didn't spring up overnight.
5. Mindset. Too many would come at it with the mindset that "if only game X did this". Well see #1. Everyone can't agree and many lock into a pattern of wanting to do X because either they liked X or didn't.

Really I don't see any large scale MMORPG like those given. I can see a contribution based one where the approach is modular like Never ending nights yet that still would require a good deal of client and server work. Yet the base framework could be created to allow people to sub the art in and if the scripting language is good enough to build their own. I am sure there are many examples of this already but it probably comes down to #1 again. Differences.

Security trough obscurity

[jfclavette]

I'm willing to bet most MMOs trust the client to some extent, in order to reduce their load. Open Sourcing them might not be such a good idea.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Chris Mattern]

I'm willing to bet most MMOs trust the client to some extent, in order to reduce their load. Open Sourcing them might not be such a good idea.

You massively overestimate the power of security by obscurity and massively underestimate the power of reverse engineering. Just about every instance of server-client gaming where the server trusts the client has resulted in subverted clients to cheat using that trust. Modern MMOs (and any other server-client games) do *not* trust their clients.

The article shows the difference.

[Trojan35]

Because the reasons to play a FPS (most updated graphics, best new gameplay features) aren't the same reasons to play a MMO (building a character, seeing time invested result in virtual properties). The 5-year old MMO can compete very well with recently released MMO's (Warcraft vs AoC).

This is why MMO's aren't OS'd, and probably won't be.

MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[rotide]

MMO means it is a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Open sourcing would be decentralizing the servers. But that also means that each time you run a new instance, you split the player base. World of Warcraft already does this with Realms, but this is a hardware limitation issue. You can't squeeze 10 million players on one box, the CPU would simply die. But if 100 people want to "keep a game alive" by running their own servers, you now effictively split the populace 100 ways. Stops being Massively Multiplayer really quickly.

Games such as Quake, Counter-Strike, etc, work just fine because they are meant to be split into 8 or 16 or 32 player chunks. MMO's are meant to be played by literally thousands of players. How do you group for an instance if only 100 people even have accounts? You certainly can't raid. How do you do large scale PvP battles? You can't. How do you have an economy when only 1 person is selling something and the other 5 people don't want it?

My second point is this..

BANDWIDTH!

WoW takes about 2-4KBps per person of bandwidth. Multiply that by lets say a minimum of 100 people we're talking 200-400KBps dedicated and this doesn't allow for growth. Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps. I don't want to think about paying for a business class line to let people play a dying game for free.

There is a reason MMO's will stay corporate, it takes a lot of money to keep them running. Yes, you can have offshoots, just like people run private WoW servers, but those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join.

Same problem with opening ANY large project

[Drogo007]

They don't open source old games probably for the exact same reason any large legacy project isn't automatically open sourced - licensing issues. There are probably large swathes of code they don't have the right to release in such a manner. Game companies very rarely write all their own code from the ground up. Instead they take some basic building blocks (graphics engine, sound engine, network engine) and build around that.

In some cases, they simply take an existing game engine, license it and add their own content. Interestingly enough, one of the few game companies that has a reputation for opening the source on their old games is also one of the few game companies with a reputation for completely rewriting the engine from scratch every time (a.k.a. ID Software)

Even if you somehow wave your magic wand and make all the licensing issues in the engine code disappear, you're still left with the same issue for art assets: There are often a large number of licensed art assets (textures, music, etc etc) in a game as well.

Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project

[jfim]

Indeed, a lot of games use third party libraries/middleware, such as Bink, Miles Sound System, Renderware, Gamebryo etc.

It wouldn't be very useful to have the game without those libraries. The middleware systems are usually quite extensive and producing an open source version of those would be quite hard, especially since a lot of games depend on very specific versions and configurations of the actual middleware --- or even modifications to the actual library code! Since the middleware handles pretty much all the graphics/sound/etc. and leaves only the game logic to the game developer, it is quite unlikely that the game would ever get to a playable state without a significant effort from the OSS community.

Re:Tradewars 2000 (...Wow, I'm old)

[Reapman]

I actually BOUGHT Tradewars to run on a BBS I never started.. but a friend has a BBS he's running through Telnet, gave him the license.

However I'm pretty sure it has not been open sourced, although if it has I'd love to see the link. Last I remember there was a telnet version or something, and it cost $.

Ah the joys of colonizing planets, buying big ships, and having it all gone in a turn when you accidently go to an unknown sector with some dudes planetary defense cannon, or if you had the add on, the borg :P

I miss the BBS days :'(

Worldforge

[JSBiff]

There is an Open Source MMO project, launched over ten years ago (I remember it was announced on Slashdot) called WorldForge. It, so far, has failed to really go anywhere. Don't get me wrong, it has stayed alive, and they do have some tech they've built. But nothing that's really much of a game. They've had various things that I would describe as 'prototypes' or 'tech demos' - I check in on them every year or two to see what they have.

      WorldForge has it's developers, but for whatever reason, it never seemed to reach that critical mass where there were a lot of developers, artists, writers, etc who really jumped in and started building a true MMO with it, that I can tell. It's interesting, but for whatever reason, it seems like an MMO is just something that, at least so far, doesn't seem to work well as an Open Source project.

Err, forgot to link

[JSBiff]

WorldForge