The Frontier of the MMO Genre

Eurogamer is running a feature about what they call "frontier" MMOs, games that are on the fringe of a market flooded with attempts to replicate the success of Everquest and World of Warcraft. Many publishers already have more MMO projects than they know what to do with, and often leave the more unusual and unique games out in the cold, preferring to stick with familiar IP or a tried-and-true approach. "Like any gold-rush, the MMO market also attracts a different kind of adventurer: the fearless, inexperienced, determined and solitary dreamer, making a go of it on nothing but their own resources and pluck. The online distribution and direct revenue streams — be they subscriptions or micro-transactions — make it theoretically possible to make a mint in MMOs without any help from the gaming establishment at all." They take a brief look at several such games currently in development, including Earthrise, Gatheryn, and Global Agenda.

Comments

Time sink

[GordonCopestake]

Given how much of a time sink these games are the more that are on the market the more diluted the user base becomes. What we could REALLY do with is something like a generic engine where users can interact with subgames, something like second life but more... fun? That way people can go off and fight goblins in one subgame or go off and fly space craft in another sub game. The benefit being everyone is interacting in the same online "world". Although who controls this one "master" MMO i have no idea. It needs to be opensource and distributed somehow.

Re:Time sink

[ProppaT]

I fully agree. I usually get each new MMORPG just to give it a shot but, really, no one's touched EQ's dungeons. They were challenging, required strategy and planning for the worst (trains, etc), crowd control, a variety of skills, skilled players, and most importantly they were fun. Then you had the high level Planes and Raids that were all of that bumped to the next level. And then Lost Dungeons of Norrath was released and it once again reinvented itself.

It's a shame that people are in such a race to hit the finish line in these games that they don't want to stop and smell the roses on the way and enjoy them.

Re:Time sink

[Opportunist]

The key word is content. You need it. Your players want it. And it's hellish expensive.

What I'm really waiting for, and I'm really amazed it didn't surface yet, is some sort of "Web 2.0 MMO". I.e. an MMO following the Web 2.0 creed, "you make the content, we make the revenue".

It's amazing that MUDs, one of the key predecessors of MMORPGs, actually had that feature (i.e. "experienced" players getting the opportunity to add their own parts of the world to the game), that various FPS and RTC games have "map builders" and whatnot, yet no MMO so far dared to step into those chilly waters and try it.

Think of the opportunities. Thousands of players able and willing to be your content creators. For free. You'd just have to playtest and canonize it. Reward? Hell, name some super-epic crap that drops in there after them and a lot of your fanboys would already LEAP at the minuscle chance that their design gets accepted. Sure, of the 1000 entries you get, 900 outright reek, 90 are barely playable and 9 are just not good enough, but the last one is about that what your top paid content designers could have hacked out for a lot of dough.

And all it costed you was hiring a bunch of college kids and an experienced designer or two to test it and an entry in the database to name the new super-cool drop.

Why no takers?

Re:Time sink

[Opportunist]

You need more than that. You cannot simply switch from medieval fantasy to ultra high tech. Care to explain how my legendary sword of awesome should hold out against a simple laser blaster that melts it (and me) before I even come into reach?

At best you could create a basic ruleset (like some standard attributes and a few core skills), and you have to travel naked. That way, you could become the ultimate high tech hero but can't really fight well when you decide to go medieval instead (you couldn't fight with broadswords, but you might have a slight advantage because of higher attributes and maybe a laser sword skill).

Think GURPS meeting MMORPG.

Re:Time sink

[PotatoFarmer]

There is at least one taker that I know of - City of Heroes recently released the ability for players to create their own quest lines, via a tool called Mission Architect

I haven't played it myself, but from all accounts it appears to be a success.

Re:Time sink

[Gnaythan1]

Mission Architect is fun... really fun.

In about three hours I built a mission called "Dorothy is Dangerous", fleshed it out with a Wizard of Oz theme, had the wicked witch as a contact and had a team of supers taking on munchkins, flying monkeys, the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, and a massive boss battle to take down Dorothy. I've been tweaking it since to make it better. Other people send me input on my mission saying if they like it or not.

Since then I've played one story arc after another... most of them seem to be focussed on leveling the toon as fast as possible, but that's just one aspect. A LOT of them are simply fun little adventures to run people through.

Right now, I'm working on a Fairies vs Goblins battle where I expect to have a dozen flying fairies helping me defeat the goblin king at the end.(as you can tell, I have an eight year old daughter assisting me in my design choices).

I'm having a blast.

Re:Time sink

[lpp]

It's a shame that people are in such a race to hit the finish line in these games that they don't want to stop and smell the roses on the way and enjoy them.

Your Smell does 448 physical damage to Rose.
Rose dies.
You gain 1022 experience (425 rested).

If what you described went down like this, I'm sure a LOT of people would stop and smell the roses.

Re:Time sink

[Asklepius M.D.]

Ryzom is a great illustration of the difficulty of launching "new" games. I started playing it recently (now that it's working again) and found it took a while for me to get out of the "WoW mindset" of powerleveling and instance running. It felt a little weird playing a game that is neither quest driven nor aimed at a neverending chain of instanced play. (And yes, I've done the EVE thing. I found it strategically interesting but tactically as much fun as watching paint dry.) Quite simply, games more complex to master than WoW have a nasty habit of failing the "Massive" part of MMORPG. Most people don't want to think that hard. This is analogous to walking down the board-games aisle at the local toy store. How many strategy games do you see (chess, Risk, etc)? Now how many games don't require a whit of strategic or tactical ability to play and win? The majority of the market does not want complexity. They want to be virtual superhumans without having to work at it to play well. Those of us who enjoy depth and complexity will always try to find it (think of what you've done to "improve" Monopoly) by setting up artificially difficult group makeups, playing with one virtual arm tied behind our backs, or simply refusing to play with anyone below a certain caliber (so much for "massive"). But the games that have the potential to hold our interest rarely survive long due to a small playerbase and the pressure on the manufacturer to "improve" the game by catering to the masses. As for me? WoW has been deleted. EvE is waning. Here's hoping Ryzom gets some polish (and some players).

Re:Time sink

[dwye]

What I'm really waiting for, and I'm really amazed it didn't surface yet, is some sort of "Web 2.0 MMO". I.e. an MMO following the Web 2.0 creed, "you make the content, we make the revenue".

Minions Of Mirth lets any premium player design his/her own realm or realms, and even set up their world as its own server. There were a number of such, for a while. Gradually, they died off, because the main world was better (and professionally hosted). OTOH, the long promised upgrade was (is being?) worked upon by a group of player/volunteers, after the original two programmers decided they needed an actual income to live upon, after a few years of running the company.

The problem is that all the things needed to create an MMO are difficult to do, together. One needs to be an author able to link multiple sides together (like Tolkein except with an orc's view, as well) while being a CGI modeler, and avoid the tendency to just Monty Haul everything, since putting the game on steroids is more enjoyable for users, right up until they get sick of it (look at post-Strike Major League Baseball).

Blizzard can get it reasonably right because they have an actual company, with actual people paid actual money to get it right, and enough so that burned-outs can be replaced without killing the development team. Also, they have a decent business model and price point, especially vs. one-time-fee MMOs, so they can ride out new-player droughts.

The key part of MMOs is the "MM" part.

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of an MMO is to be, in fact, massively multiplayer. Playing an upstart game without any players isn't fun at all, which is why people flock to large games like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The more "MMOs" companies try to push out, the more the user base will be diluted, thinning out each game until they all starve to death due to lack of players.

Re:The key part of MMOs is the "MM" part.

[Another, completely]

You could say the same thing about real-world dance clubs. Lots of people think they know what a good one should look like, customers are only interested in coming if they can expect a nice sized crowd (not too crowded, but not too empty), and new ones open all the time. As an industry, dance clubs have survived this model for quite a while.

If MMOs starve to death, it will be because people got bored with them, not because mass entertainment only works with limited options available.

Re:The key part of MMOs is the "MM" part.

[Opportunist]

And that's why MMOs often shrink down to "least common denominator". Take a look around at some of the more interesting and envelop-pushing MMOs: Aside of EvE, they all eventually died.

Usually what's left are MMOs that are easy to learn, fairly easy to master, don't require a lot of "point distribution", or at least don't offer a lot of variety, one setup that's good (and can be looked up easily) and forget about being creative. Gameplay has to be easy (point and click interface, the easier the better), graphics have to be cute and colorful, crafting has to be pointlessly easy.

Re:The key part of MMOs is the "MM" part.

[Hythlodaeus]

Expected population should be addressed in the design of game areas. When you have a small userbase, you can provide lots of space for adventuring, but you need to concentrate players for socialization and trade. UO failed to realize this as it added new continents in every other expansion even while the player count was dwindling. WoW knew what it was doing when it kept auction houses out of the expansion continents.

2000lb gorilla

[acehole]

The problem with a lot of upcoming MMOs is that they try their best to best WoW in size, spouting about how many servers they have. How much content they're going to have, while saying "we're not interested in how WoW does things, we do it our way." Its a lie, they want to be wow and whether its conscious or not they fall into the 'trying to be wow' trap.

You can't beat wow by being a better wow. Beat wow by being a better game.

If you build it, subscribers will come. If you build it and try to be like wow, you'll be merging servers in under a month.

Re:2000lb gorilla

[acehole]

additional:

also, why not be satisfied with a niche market. Why aim for wow's 70-something percent of the market?

Re:2000lb gorilla

[Drakkenmensch]

If you build it, subscribers will come. If you build it and try to be like wow, you'll be merging servers in under a month.

Truth. Whenever I hear the latest up-and-comers claim how much better they're going to be and how the hype claims it will kill WoW, I smirk and expect that game to hit the liquidation discount bin within the next six months. History has yet to prove me wrong.

Re:2000lb gorilla

[elrous0]

For the same reason that no gold miner was ever content with making a modest living as a merchant...because everyone dreams of the BIG strike.

Re:2000lb gorilla

[wjousts]

Ultimately, I think WoW may actually be bad for the development of MMOs as a genre. So long as WoW controls so much of the market, it's going to be nearly impossible for new MMOs, especially from smaller companies or based on original IP, to get any traction.

When it comes to MMOs, they face a chicken and egg problem (or maybe chicken and chicken problem would be more accurate), players won't join if there are no (or very few) other players. You need players to get [more] players. And when most of your potential players are in WoW, what do you do to pry them away?

Re:2000lb gorilla

[Opportunist]

You try to impress a VC with "yeah, well, we don't wanna dethrone WoW, we just wanna make a good game that gets, hopefully, about 5% market share..."

Re:2000lb gorilla

[Opportunist]

WoW is certainly not beneficial for MMO development, but not because of its sub numbers, but because of VC expectations. 5 years ago, before WoW was launched, getting 200k subs in a year was already great. Today, it's a reason to fold.

The 70% market share of WoW don't hurt the other games too much. Sure, the big players of their time lost subs, but they were reaching their life expectance anyway. WoW hit the market right when the market needed something. But their often toutet 70% market share are to a sizable portion, and I'm wagering 80% here, subs that didn't exist before, not subs "stolen" from other games. 4 of 5 WoW players didn't play an MMO before.

What really hurts new games are expectations. The "must be like WoW" mantra that's chanted throughout the marketing halls. So every single game that comes out looks like a cheap (or rather, expensive) WoW knockoff. Sometimes so blatant that it outright hurts.

And as it has been stated before, you CANNOT make the new WoW. Do you remember what WoW was like when it was launched? 2 days per week almost assured downtime. A good 30% of quests that either didn't work, weren't finishable under certain conditions or were simply impossible unless you were a specific class. And let's not start about balancing. A game that was started like this today would meet the bargain bin 2 months after release (at the same time, their servers are merged down to 4-6), and a year later it's closing time.

In a nutshell, do not try to beat WoW on their own game. You cannot. You would have to sink YEARS of development into it, polish it to the point that WoW is today after almost a decade of development and millions of gametesters (who also pay to do the work). Make another game. And most of all, aim lower! If you cannot survive on 200k subs, don't do it at all. If it takes off like WoW, great. But don't hope for it or, worse, outright require it.

Re:2000lb gorilla

[VendettaMF]

Get involved with VC's and you're already screwed. Either you fail and they sue you, or you succeed and find they were the backers behind behind the law firm the assured you that the VC's contract was fair and legit, get turfed out on your ear and sued if you ever open your mouth about it or attempt to make a career in any related field again..

Re:Wow is still #1

[brkello]

That's just your opinion. I don't worship Blizzard. I was very resistant to even trying WoW since I was playing another MMO at the time. In any case, WoW being a grind makes me think that you haven't played other MMOs. Compared to EQ, FFXI, and the other MMOs from the time, it pretty much blew them away for reducing the grind. You could now level to max level in a reasonable amount of time without having to get a party to help you level.

As far as other MMOs, it is purely a matter of taste. I tried Eve. If you like PvE combat, that game is a total grind. You fly in to a mission, make your ship fly towards somewhere you can dock in case you get in trouble, and hit f1-f6. Then fly for a long time until things are dead. Then fly to a gate to do the next part. When you are done, get in to another ship and fly around a long time to pick up the loot. PvP would be great if you didn't have to find other people to group with to survive and then sit at gates for hours. Warhammer is fun, but the PvE is severely lacking compared to WoW. It was more like playing TF2 with a subscription fee. After running the same BGs over and over to level, it gets boring. World PvE is a little better but still wasn't exciting.

Obviously, these are my opinions. Other people might love these games. But I do think WoW is a better MMO than the rest because it has the best PvE which is what I enjoy. But just because you don't think WoW is better, doesn't mean that the 12 million playing don't have that opinion or haven't tried other games.