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Throwing Out the Rulebook For MMOs
MMORPG.com's Dana Massey asks about the possibility of throwing out the rulebook for MMOs, suggesting that the next blockbuster title in the genre will be one that ignores many of the features and conventions that have come to be standards over the years. Quoting:
"Who said that MMOs require hot bars? Who proclaimed that it's not a proper MMO unless you have quests? Blizzard took a formula that almost all MMOs had been using for years and distilled it down to addictive perfection. Love or hate WoW, it's a polished, polished title. It's no coincidence that on hardcore MMO sites, like this one, WoW is not the most hyped or trafficked game around. It's not that it's bad, but veteran MMO players don't have the same love for it, simply because we've all seen some variation of it before. The WoW community has always been a bit apart from the larger MMO community. Based purely on the number of subscribers, WoW articles should statistically annihilate every other game on this site, but they don't. A huge percentage of people who truly love WoW, I've always believed, do not know or particularly care about this whole world of MMOs out there. They're WoW players and that's it."
"They're WoW players and that's it"?
That's a laugh. I don't know anyone of the 20 or 30 people that play or have played WoW for thousands of hours that haven't tried out other MMORPGs - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EVE, a slew of free or freemium ones, etc. Some of them drifted away from WoW when it became clear blizzard really had no idea what it was doing with some of the classes (Spellcasting pushback wasn't balanced properly until about *three years* after WoW came out, for example), others drifted back when it became clear the problems with AoC and WAR were even worse than WoW's problems.
Essentially, it's the "mostly harmless" MMORPG. No love for WoW, but it's there, it's a relatively okay method for wasting some time online, and it's relatively well polished.
Look, there's literally thousands of MMOs now. 100% of them suck.. 1% of them suck less than the others.
Most all of them start with the "let's be different" mindset.. they quickly discover that there's a *reason* why things are the way they are.. much of that is technical, some of it is psychological (read: addictive) and the remainder is simply "what people are used to" and woe be to the man who tries to sell a product that people don't understand.
How we know is more important than what we know.
- they have females, real ones.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The WoW community has always been a bit apart from the larger MMO community
I don't think that word means what you think it means...
I just want an MMO FPS. Free for all on a larger scale. Is that so hard..
Hotbars came about for a reason.
Have any of you played Ultima Online that didn't specifically stress using a hotbar? It was difficult. There was a lot of macroing, a lot of memorization of keys, etc. Really took away from the immersion.
With hotbars, you know where your favorite skills are. You can pretty much set the keyboard up as you like, in terms of your skills.
Can we do better? Yes, but not with conventional keyboard/mouse/monitor devices.
What about some of the other typical things found in most MMORPGs?
Levels? Ultima Online did just fine without them. All it had was stats and skills, and you just needed to practice what you wanted to get better at. This was a good system, I think. Not for everyone though.
Health/Mana/Etc? Warhammer Online did an excellent job with these. They all regenerated very quickly. In essence, you could technically fight forever as long as your health held out. Your mana with which to cast spells came back quickly enough to cast over and over, but not quickly enough to cast the best things over and over.
Quests? Not everyone likes to grind enemies for a long time. However, not everyone likes to quest. Rappelz had a good idea. Lots and lots of traditional quests, and lots and lots of kill quests. This satisfied both types of player.
One-player control? Sword of the New World, I believe, let you control multiple characters that you had created.
Real-time play? Actually, a turn-based combat MMORPG would be nice. Think something along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics during battle.
Point is, there's lots of things you COULD change. But most of the things are there for reasons. World of Warcraft is the best at the moment because it learned from everyone elses' mistakes. It also learned from their successes. World of Warcraft is the MMORPG analogue to the Borg from Star Trek.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
"A huge percentage of people who truly love WoW, I've always believed, do not know or particularly care about this whole world of MMOs out there. They're WoW players and that's it."
Yes, well most people don't have money to burn. They can't justify playing several different MMOs. For most people, even WoW is a big waste of money - for the price you could buy a new game every couple of months.
The problem is that everytime a game is made with the first three letters above, the last three always seem to be RPG and this is always the problem. I am a gamer who spends a lot of time and money on gaming. I have a young family so going out socialising isnt a real possibility like it was 10 or even 5 years ago. I've tried WoW and i've tried Eve, whilst both seem initially interesting they fall foul (to me) in one key area - gameplay. In short there isnt really that much.
All of these MMO(rpg's) seem to make their money and selling point around what's round the corner. You might have a Thorax or a +5 shield now, but in one more month you could have a Deimos and a +9 shield AND a new hammer! Its also this point that raises my next.
Skill
Alot of these MMO's have painted themselves into a corner with regard to creating a level playing field between established players and new players. You could have two players of equal skill squaring off but because one has been feeding his habit for a few months or even years longer they win in the random number generator fight that occurs.
I am hoping that the new jumpgate game chages this a bit with its reliance on player piloting skill for combat if the read-ups are to be believed but in the meantime I rely on games like Left4Dead to provide my social gaming fix. The number of hours I have got in on it are absurd. Its a class based game, with a social setting - especially if you play vs mode and best of all you dont get your ass handed to you by someone Jonesing bad for a fix from a 3 year habit, getting the kill simply because the developer is giving them an I win button for their money.
To me games are about skill with a little bit of luck and that is what alot of these MMO's with their endless levelling seem to forget, I have money and am willing to give it to a developer who can figure that out.
Thank goodness Darkfall has 'launched', and proves that a game doesn't have to follow the 'rules' to be 'successful'.
That's what I wondered about too. Every time there was some [NEXT GAME] coming out soon, be it LOTRO, WAR, AOC, or even duds like D&D Online or Tabula Rasa or Vanguard, the guild chat was _full_ of disgruntled WoW players talking non-stop about how they're gonna move to it as soon as it launches and never look back. Then somehow they come back anyway.
Even the idea that WoW should annihilate the other games otherwise, is stupid. WoW may well be what keeps those other duds alive in the first place.
Last I've heard a statistic, the average player stayed on an MMO for 6 months. Sure, some stay for ever, but they're few. Some leave when the "free" month is over. But on the average, it was 6 months. Then they get bored and bugger off.
I'm betting that a lot of the customers of those other games are recycled ex-WoW players. People spend their months on WoW, get bored of doing the same raid again, get ideas like "meh, I wonder if WAR/LOTRO/EQ2/Whatever is any better."
Plus, look at the MMOG charts. Before WoW the western MMOs recycled the same pool of IIRC about a million players total. Each newcomer getting another 100,000 was visible in the others losing a total of 100,000. WoW increased that 10 times over night. And again, their players fall off and try other games too. (But actually keeping them, that's another problem.) In effect it increased the pool for a lot of "me too" MMOS from "whoever of those 500,000 EQ1 players gets bored and wanst to try something else" to "whoever of WoW's 10,000,000+ players gets bored and wants to try something else."
For a lot of the incompetent designers and incompetent publishers (I'm looking at you, Sony), WoW has been a windfall, not their doom.
At any rate, what I see there is the usual fanboy rationalization, except this time it's called an article.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
At least if you want to "beat" WoW.
Let's be sensible: You cannot create an MMO at the same "polished" level as WoW. No MMO, ever, will have the polished feel of an MMO that has been in existance for about 5 years. You can't afford that. To do that, basically what you'd have to do is create a MMO (insane dev costs), then have people play it for free for five years (even more insane dev costs), support those people at release level, and so on, all without a dime of revenue.
Remember the release of WoW? Yes, it was a lot more finished than many MMOs at release (Blizzard actually does finish their games, most of the time), it still was the usual disaster. Servers not available for days. Quests broken and requiring GM intervention to complete. Balance off. The same you will encounter in any MMO, and usually they're even worse than at WoW release.
Now you try to compete with WoW. If you use the same eazy-bake cookie mix that WoW used, why the heck should people go to your game? They already get that with WoW. Just better. More finished, more balanced, more polished and more reliably.
If you want to compete, if you want to make a "WoW killer", you have to offer something different. You will have a very hard time to convince a die-hard WoW player to come to your game, to do that basically you have to offer them something WoW lacks. You can't just offer the same and think people will switch. Why should they? They'd have to start over at zero again while they already went through the treadmill of leveling in WoW and are now at the "juicy" part of endgame.
You have to offer something different. Just making the next WoW isn't going to convince anyone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fantasy stories with quests and dragons are already popular for centuries, they're just very appealing. If so many MMORPGs have this concept, maybe it's because this concept is good. I don't know what "hardcore" RPG fans want, do they want weird extraterrestial storylines instead, or "no quests" so what are they going to do instead?
The only reason WoW got popular is because it is so rudimentary and simple it doesn't require any effort to grind your way to a higher level...I could spend two years killing boards in the forest too to get to a certain level, but I at least want to be challenged doing it and not worrying about some kids running around ganking my ass when I least expected it.
... Richard Bartles book Designing Virtual Worlds. Its really very good.
I don't think getting rid of things like quests or levels are a goal in itself. Replacing levels with skill systems would be interesting in that it makes for more customization, but is difficult to balance. Magic the Gathering has a fairly well-balanced PvP system with endless customization, so difficult != impossible.
Quests are essentially scripted tutorials or interactive movies. They do have their place and are fairly easy to implement. Activities other than quests that people just do in current games regardless of systems include socializing, trading, roleplaying etc. Looking at some of the things people do with the tools available on Facebook or in Second Life could give ideas for what could be built into major timesinks. Customization and crafting are great for giving more life to a world and letting users generate content for each other without breaking game balance.
I've read Tolkien 20 years ago, as a teenager. I've played many (live) D&D and several RPGs on a lot of computers. Some online, some offline. Some graphical, some textual.
I used to play D2 from Blizzard, in hardcore move, having level 90+ chars. Don't know why D2 was such a an appeal to me: it's more of a shoot-em up than a RPG but at least the hardcore mode made it wild.
I can remember my heart beating at some very precise spots in the game, where I nearly lost (or lost) big characters that I had been playing for months.
When WoW came out, I tried it. It didn't have "permadeath" (no "hardcore mode"). I immediately lost interest.
WoW isn't anywhere near what a good RPG should be. There's a lot of room for improvement, for hardcore gamers, ex- (live) D&D players and random Joe as well.
I'm pretty sure in a few years something will come out that I'll want to play a lot again.
Hardcore players is nice speak for "assholes who complain if things don't go their way". Really, I have played about every "mmorpg" since bbs days, to include early graphical ones like Yserbius (if you could call that a mmorpg). Every game gets its "hardcore" people who are nothing more than those self righteous bastards in politics and the like who tell us how what we should enjoy and what we should do which of course none of which applies to them.
They are hardcore players because they can never be satisfied. Change something in game, even if it does not affect them directly it becomes a major issue. If it makes the game easier for someone suddenly the whole game becomes carebear. If it reduces the ability of their current class to gank/be overpowered they scream nerf. That is the key, real hardcore players would not care about nerfs - it makes the game more challenging. Hence everytime I see them complain its because someone else might get a shiny that they think they only deserve.
Why does WOW have so many hardcore naysayers? Simple, because these people can't all be number one when there is a sizable pool of great gaming talent to compete against. Hence the "hardcore" people crop up with every excuse and exception to explain why other people aren't as good as them and how its the games fault for not letting "the hardcore" people demonstrate their superiority.
As for the article, I read "We cannot compete with WOW so here is our list of chosen excuses : read feature changes"
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Who said that MMOs require hot bars?
Because salad bars are wimpy?
The hotbar (if I understand it) is just a UI feature. It's kept around because it's a useful piece of UI design.
Quests are another matter. They seem to be designed to turn an MMO into a 1-4 player game. I'm sure you can play WoW and only ever interact with at most 3 people.
Now, this is fine. A lot of people like quests and there's a game that provides them, but it's not the only way to do this. It's a result of designers being stuck in a single player game mindset. It would be possible to base an entire game on actual roleplay, and encourage players to actually compete with each other, form alliances, betrsy each other. Compete for influence. Pay the game the way they feel it should be played. There are games that do this. They have a following. They tend to be low budget affairs but there's certainly a niche.
You can't dismiss an arguement (with any credibility) just because the statistically insignificant group of people
wait a second, we are slash doters I thing we also fit into the same category of a group "statistically insignificant group of people"
my point, of everyone I know I am the only person who reads and posts here
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
Dude. You miss the point totally. Please try to read and understand first.
Just buying all campaigns doesn't mean you get all the skills _unlocked_. YOU CANNOT UNLOCKED SKILLS!
You would still need to _grind_ to get the skills and items unlocked.
Yes, you don't mind an HOUR of grinding using a less desirable skill bar in less desirable battle (you might not want to play Jade Quarry) to unlock some skills. You are clearly NOT the sort of player I'm talking about.
Go try telling a counterstrike player that he has to waste 1 hour in a cybercafe with an MP5 doing "escort the VIP" just to unlock the weapons he needs before he can get down to serious playing against other players in dust2.
You don't get it. They want to fight other players. Not fight the frigging game.
Worse - a PvP player might want to switch to different skill bars or classes too. So that means extra hours grinding. What works for Aspenwood can be rather different from Jade Quarry, and very different from Team Arena, HA.
Don't forget you might also need to heroes for a particular team build. Whoopee more hours of "enjoyable Jade Quarry Play", when you actually wanted to play Hero Battles.
While that is perfectly fine for the PvE player mentality (hours = insignificant - they grind months for stuff all the time). It just doesn't work for someone like the OP, who plays left4dead etc.
EVE is what I play as I wait for the cost of human space travel to go down. It's a little bit of salve for my soul, knowing full well I'll never see jump drives, modulated strip miners or 1400mm howitzers and their battleship ilk piloted by incompetent Minmatarian asshats. Besides, if you're ANYTHING of a space warfare / space "tech" person and you haven't witnessed an EVE carrier, mothership or Titan up close and "personal" in-game... you're missing out. EVE is fun... and then there are capital ships. Capital ships are proof that some of the right people took the right lessons away from the Star Wars universe and applied them elsewhere.
One of the 187.
You can play WoW and get to maxlevel without ever interacting with a single other person directly (you might want to buy stuff in an auction from time to time). And if you're sociophobic enough to never group for a raid, you can eventually get that gear other ways too. Why one would pay 15 bucks a month to play a single player game is beyond me, but it's certainly possible.
And it's not designers. Earlier games were designed around early level grouping, and the quests were likewise geared for that too. It's not what the devs want, it's appearantly what the players want. Today's gamers don't want to "LFG!" for 15 minutes before they can start playing, they want to log in and play right away.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pure and simple - the class and type of player it attracts is the same too. The high-end/hard-core doesn't exist the same way it did in previous MMOs. It's MMOs-for-dummies and that is EXACTLY why it is so successful.
Naturally you're going to get a lot of people who like quests since they have mostly come from a gaming background. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The main problem with appealing to this groups is that WoW already does so and it's hard to do so better than WoW. The market for this type of game is completely saturated.
I do however feel that the social aspect could be improved, and an MMO could appeal to a different overlapping set of gamers. Rather than coming from the direction of an RPG and adding multiplayer, what would happen if you started with Second Life and added some game elements?
I'm a huge gamer. Been one for 21 years now (I'm 33) and love just about every style out there. Played a lot of fee based MMOs and none of them captured me like WoW did. CoH, WAR, AoC, LOTRO, heck, Auto Assault, Lineage...cancelled all of 'em after 3 months of extensive gameplay. 3 months was my window to be able to have a relative opinion on the game. EVE was the one that lasted a bit more (~ 6 months).
Fed up of WoW after 3.5 years and I'd give anything to find something as captivating. Waiting for that KOTOR MMO. I want sci-fi!
That or bring back Zak McKracken.
This being my one and only game for about 4 years now....I have found the true formula to happiness, is 2 months on, 2 months off....this way i play until my hearts content for the 2 months, and then catch up on everything else for the 2 months afterwards.
The important thing to remember is yes, this is not just another MMO, this is WoW, it actually has its own economy within the game. You have auction software that you can use to peruse through the AH, and resell what is undervalued, and not play any of the game, but make 1000s of gold just sitting at the AH.
Then you have continuous updates that enhances the game itself, and slowly, blizzard is warming up to the fact that the game is aging, and will eventually need to turn itself into a more obtainable
schema for quests, and achievements, so they raise the damage you do, or raise the healing you take, little by little,....except for the new, new stuff, that they still make hard as crap to finish.
My one pet pieve, is that I already have a lvl 80 character, you want me to try others and "waste" my time even more playing your game, make it interesting, make it half as difficult for me to level another character....based on the no of alts i have i can level a new character that much faster.
This way i "want" to try something new...cuz' it still costs me 15$ per month to play....ya know!
You would have a crappy mmorpg.
That's very dismissive. What makes you so sure?
"Procedural Content Generation" is the future of MMOs. Like Diablo's random dungeon generation on steroids entire shards can be generated, each one unique. Allowing no cost transfer to other shards along with a fixed lifespan for a shard makes exploring the world and what weirdness emerges from the generation would make much of the grumbling in contemporary MMOs irrelivant.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Well, yes of course.
When you have a 500 lbs gorilla in the room, you don't wrestle with it. Anyone who's trying to do the same thing as WoW does, "just better" will have that experience - as so many already had. WoW is too big to be unlodged by something that does the same thing slightly better, or even considerably better. I dare to say, even a whole lot better.
That's because you have a playerbase that has real-value investments in WoW. Playtime they paid for, and most of them lots of lots of it. To convince them to give that up and start again is not something you do with the same formula and a couple gradual improvements.
A "WoW killer" can only be obviously different in many aspects. The answer to the question "why not just stay with WoW?" has to be blatantly obvious.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I was surprised to see players have written WoW servers. Ultima Online player servers have been around for a long long time though, check out this great one: http://www.game-master.net
UO lets you do a lot more than WoW does and you can run it on older hardware since it's 2D and 10+ years old now. But still so fun!
Alot of these MMO's have painted themselves into a corner with regard to creating a level playing field between established players and new players. You could have two players of equal skill squaring off but because one has been feeding his habit for a few months or even years longer they win in the random number generator fight that occurs.
Sounds like you want to play Darkfall Online
I've been reading this blog and it seems that the game isn't like any other one I have seen so far.
They say its based on player skill and there are no levels much like Ultima Online and you can build cities like Shadowbane.
That said... I haven't played it so you'll have to take the blogs word for it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
In almost every MMO out there today, it starts with the core concepts from Dungeons and Dragons. You have hit points, which go up with levels, and are boosted by equipment. You have various stats and skills that will help kill things as well. This is really all derived from Dungeons and Dragons.
Now, MUDflation is the term where new games MUST be bigger and better, so, more hit points are needed. The difficulty in killing things may be the same, but just because the numbers are bigger doesn't mean much, except to excite those who are obsessed by the numbers, because it "is so cool to have 1000 hit points at level 5 in the new game when I had to be level 50 in another game to have 1000 hit points". So, the numbers increase, but it still ends up being generally the same difficulty. We saw the same thing in pinball machines, where 100,000 used to be a big score, until 1,000,000 points, and then into the tens of millions of points crept in. It is all inflation, and goes to the idea of comparing the new game to previous games. Bigger is always better, right?
So, the future will be where these old game design models start to fall away, and we get into new ways to judge your progress, and compare yourself to other players and characters. My own preference would be to make it so hit points reflect how much physical damage the character can take, but skips things like stamina(which should come into play, but shouldn't be a part of hit points). Adventuring may make a character able to go longer, or have more stamina in combat, and in time, even take more physical punishment before being killed, but that would be a slower process than we see in current games.
Then you have systems that really are different, like the White Wolf set of rules(Werewolf, Vampire, Mage, etc...). That is a very different rule system from the D&D derived systems, which helps the focus be on playing the game without it being based entirely on combat stats and such. Only time will tell if it will lend itself well to an MMO.
So, from this, EverQuest was big, and had many games that copied the design. Dark Age of Camelot was the first as I recall that really was a direct clone of EQ in most ways. There were differences which drew in some fans, but it was still an EQ clone with differences. WoW is the most popular, but it still took a look at the success of EQ, and duplicated what worked, and improved on the overall design. It still is and was an EQ clone though.
DDO suffers from MUDflation, but at least isn't a clone of the other games, where you kill bats and rats for 5-10 levels before you can go on your first adventure. DDO dropped out of the spotlight for many people after the first month or two, but over three years have passed, and the game has more than doubled in size, so is worth a look if WoW has started to bore you. Just keep in mind that as a mature game, the number of low-levels isn't high(though there are still a bunch running their first characters).
You want to make something totally novel? Throw out the rulebook? Sounds like a bold, compelling plan. Everyone loves innovation, right? The problem is, when you defy conventions, you also throw out standards, and people get lost trying to understand your game. The Wii succeeded, not because it *defied* convention, but because it *embraced* convention. Nintendo turned household objects -- a TV remote, a bathroom scale, a skateboard -- into game controllers. Immature artists and engineers love to imagine that their fresh ideas will change the world, but the truth is that there are many brilliant ideas already out there. Go find those. Integrate them in a fresh way. Then polish it to perfection. Just like WoW did.
The Ultima Online skill system and skill systems in general are another form of the class/level system. This idea did not spring Minerva-like from my mind, but I have forgotten where I first read the idea (perhaps Lum the Mad had something to say about it.)
Look at UO as an example. Distinct classes with small variations emerged from the skill and mechanics balancing at a particular time. There were three major classes that I recall: the "Dex Monkey," the "Tank Mage," and the Thief/Archer. A player effectively leveled by advancing their skills and stats towards their perfect build for their objective class.
However, the skill and stat system provided extreme flexibility. A player could take their "maxed out" character and completely change their stat and skill distributions. While initially it was huge chore to accomplish, the difficulty of this process was greatly reduced as the game matured.
In some ways, class and level systems can have a similar flexibility: talent resets, skill resets, etc. The key distinction between the two is that in any class/level system that I have played, you could not fundamentally change the class of a character, just the level of variation provided within that class.
Even in a game such as EVE Online, classes tend to emerge. They are perhaps the most nebulous classes out of any MMORPG that I have seen, yet characters tend to have skill concentrations associated with a particular purpose: hauler, carrier pilot, covert ops pilot, etc. The main distinction with EVE is that it lacks a zero-sum skill or leveling system. The only constraints on leveling are time and resources. However, the sheer complexity of the game lends itself to extremely blurred class distinctions (Would all the Marxists in the audience please sit down.)
I could go on and on about Ultima Online, EVE, and MMORPGs in general, but I will end my monologue with a few parting thoughts.
I think the two major things that drew me to EVE and Ultima Online were the consequence of death and something that I call the "grief economy." Basically in UO and EVE, death had very real consequences. In UO, anything you were carrying on your person was "lootable" after death. In EVE, you lost your ship and potentially some of your skill levels. Furthermore, in both games the victor of a player versus player confrontation stood to gain significant economic reward. A "grief economy" arises in both situations, and the balancing of that economy is paramount for the success of the game. Yet, it is precisely that economy and the incentives to do harm to others that prevents those games from gaining a large market share in todays MMORPG environment.
My comments are not meant to pigeon-hole either game. I am just discussing some relevant aspects of each.
I'm up for trying out a new game, convincing my friends to dump WoW is difficult.
A key failing for most MMOs is that the player generally has no ability to change the environment of the game. There's no contribution that you can make to WoW that will change the distribution of monsters, for example. No matter how many monsters you kill, there's always more of the same kind where that came from. I consider this much more serious a problem than the "level playing field", that is, the idea that new players should have access to all the content of a game and play it potentially just as well as a player that has been around for years. As I see it, the absence of a level playing field can often be a feature not a bug. I'll save that argument for some other time.
Also, most games occur on only one scale. You only interact with the game in certain ways. If you're a sword wielding warrior, you're not also a general in an army, directing your forces in a battle or a mayor of a small town managing the town's resources and its defenses.
Anyway, to illustrate my point, I'll kick in a game idea that I had bounced around some time ago. The epitome, as I see it, of a game that allows the player to change the game is Civilization. To summarize for those who haven't heard about it, you create and manage a growing civilization, having to deal with other computer or player controlled civilizations.
There's a derived open source game called "Freeciv" that started as a near clone of Civilization and has evolved to some degree since then. Freeciv is naturally multiplayer and I believe it is possible to have dozens of players playing at once. For various reasons, the game doesn't scale well past that point. So it can't be an MMO. It also has what I'd guess would be called a "map" interface (you are after all managing cities in an empire).
So I thought, what if we have a first person style game in a world governed by civilization rules on the large scale? That is, there are two games. The close up and personal, "micro" game of living and doing things in such a world, and the large scale "macro" game where players who have built up power direct the expansion of empires? Players could make things, explore, trade, fight, etc. They could assist in various ways with the building of empires or wars between empires including actually being a leader of such an empire. A "turn" on the macro scale might be once a week. That is, a year in game time might be a week in real time.
Moving on, in such a world, immortal characters don't make sense. To reflect that, it seems reasonable to have player characters with a definite lifespan, say a year or two (assuming they don't die of something else first). Instead, players would have dynasties, collections of characters. This would lead to interesting situations when a powerful, established character dies. Instead of just transitioning to another convenient character run by the same player, it could lead to all the fun and games of rebellion, intrigue, etc as rivals attempt to fill the power vacuum themselves.
There's also the opportunity for griefing on a scale to beggar the imagination. The world might well be taken over by a loathsome despot who is an in-game equivalent of a cross between Ghenghis Khan and Pol Pot. I consider this a feature not a bug. It means that the game is completely a product of the players. Will you defend your homes or will you let some dark lord ruin it for you?
Anyway to outline the features, there's two games at two different scales. The micro game can be quite WoW-like, doing day to day stuff that can help or hinder others. The macro game, played at the same time, slowly changes the world as the players in power direct it. It'd probably be a good idea for the developers to obsessively chronicle the game and events therein. So one could, years later, wander around and see some of the history that took place.
There's obviously many huge holes in this game idea. I really don't know what people would be doing in the micro game. While there are open source components to cover many parts of the game, there's no cohesive whole. And of course, I have no inclination at this time to actually make the game. But I give it as an example of how we could make a next generation of MMOs.
With WoW and a ton of also-rans, my prediction is that the next truly *HUGE* MMO (with millions of users) will break the rules in one very important (and henceforth largely unexplored way): it will be designed from the ground up to run on a CONSOLE. It truly amazes me that so many companies are out there right now designing yet-another-WoW-killer for the PC only (that's probably just going to fail epically and bankrupt their company) when they COULD be the first company to put a real modern MMO on a console (to date, only old and weak-ass efforts like Final Fantasy 7 and Phantasy Star Universe have even tried).
Why spend a fortune to compete against the WoW juggernaut and about a million other established MMO's on the PC when you could be the first and only game in town on the console?!? It's absolutely insane that no one has asked this question before.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Go ahead and trash the rulebook - why not come up with more games that are story-driven and collaborative, mix in more puzzle-solving, world-building? I play a lot of WoW but I would love to play something that gave my brain more of a workout and wasn't all about slaughtering whatever creature you're told to kill.
There are so many things that are fundamentally wrong with current MMORPGs that it would be fairly easy to come in the market and make the genre much better.
I don't even personally understand how so many people can like WoW. Out of all the MMORPGs I've played, it's one of the worse ones. It's just grinding, nothing else.
Since the market seems content with such a boring experience, you can't even predict popularity of a better game and thus set up a business model.
While there are a lot of single-player RPGs that are very good, and that do a lot of things right, MMORPGs still fail to do what those games do, for no good reason.
The things that need fixing isn't hot bars or quest logs, those are merely interface matters.
What needs fixing is the very mechanisms of the game.
One of the most important thing in a role-playing game is that your actions affect the world, giving sense to the role. Otherwise there is just no point.
In a MMORPG, the world is entirely static: not only the world geometry itself, but also its people, the players and the NPCs (which include mobs).
NPCs will just stay at the same place and ask all adventurers that go talk to them to do the same thing for them ("quests"). Evil monsters and even overlords will always stay at the same place, and respawn a few minutes after you've killed them.
It's like the game is stuck in time, endlessly rehearsing the same pre-chewed gaming experience for every one.
That completely misses the point of a virtual world on which entities can interact: the gaming experience should be entirely dynamic depending on what's happening in and to the world.
Just like in an actual tabletop or live action role playing game.
There is a very simple way to achieve this: make it so that all entities in the world, players and NPCs, are constrained by the same rules, making it thus a true virtual world.
This inherently leads to dynamic quest generation depending on the needs and desires of NPCs, since they will have finite resources like players, and thus will need to acquire some through jobs or trade etc.
Now it could be argued that the problem only exists with NPCs, and thus the game could just be based on player-player interaction.
And the best MMOs out there are actually the ones that are mostly player-driven, such as most space ones.
However players don't necessarily want to play all the roles necessary for a world, and for social reasons having a frame of NPCs is also important, since they will always be there and will never refuse to interact with you. They're also the obvious choice for law enforcement.
In short, smarter AI to give NPCs real roles is what MMORPGs need.
Other things such as permanent in-game presence, possibility of permanent death, non-optional PvP and dynamic NPC population growth then come naturally.
Making the world entirely destructible and constructible would be a great plus also, but that is not really required for a good game.
Now, another way to also improve MMORPGs would be to give a real goal to people, not just being adventurers, with the killing feature of single-player RPGs: a plot.
This could be achieved by giving a limited lifetime to the virtual world, enabling certain story events as time goes closer to the end.
The easiest plot would be that the prison of the big evil is getting looser and looser, and that eventually the forces of good will have to fight the forces of bad, and the chances of one side winning the final battle will depend on what the players have achieved in the play-through.
Game developers, you know what to do.
WoW didn't copy other MMOs. WoW copied Dungeons and Dragons, the same as every other role playing game, ever. They followed a trend twenty years in the making and nailed it so thoroughly that everything that follows will be derivative of WoW instead of DnD.
What I hate about WoW is how no one stops to enjoy the scenery. Once you're in the Skinner box, all anyone cares about is pushing the button and getting the loot.
I hate that the story, what little there is, has become as arbitrary and convoluted as Lost.
I hate how player actions never actually effect the story. You only follow a script that forty, I mean, twenty-five other people have also followed in order to gain entry to the Skinner box.
I hate how the economy rewards wasting time on pointless diversions such as daily quests, and resource and loot farming before that.
I hate how the economy is based on inflation (daily quests) and sinks for inflation (tradeskill leveling, epic flying, trophy mounts), and not the production of actual value. The real economy is farming the Skinner box, now more than ever.
I hate how the constant whining by the PvP basement dwellers causes Blizzard to keep changing how character mechanics work for "balance".
I hate how Blizzard has removed nearly all forms of specialization, focusing on "the player not the class", thus commodifying players and putting an even greater focus on gear, macros, and meters.
Do you know what the next big MMO will have? None of the above. WoW has played it out. You don't trade crack for a harder drug, you either quit or you fry your brain, so you're done either way. There is nothing fun about a homogeneous treadmill, especially one with an extremely awkward and complex user interface that requires add-ons to render it effective.
The WoW-killer will have a simple user interface, with easy to learn but difficult to master player mechanics. The story and environment will change based on player actions, and player actions will not happen in an individual sandbox. Different "realms" will progress at different rates and in different directions, so there is incentive to progress the story and do so in the direction you want it to go. It will reward specialization, strategy, long term planning, and cooperation. It will punish ganking, out-of-band drama, and other behavior that attracts socially stunted basement dwellers, or, at least, give other players incentive to punish it. It will never have a quest to bring $npc $x $animal $organ.
If MYST Uru Live ever got the attention and financial backing it deserves it would be the one to break the MMO 'mold'. http://mystonline.com/en/ Until then I'll stick with my EVE Online, thankyouverymuch.
There were tons of SWG players who were completely content to play the game without ever becoming a Jedi. I know I was one of them, and throughout most of my time in the game I was a crafter of one sort or another.
I admit many players were shallow and only wanted to play the uber-combat class *because it was uber* so they could win duels all the time etc, but don't paint all of the rest of us with the same brush.
SWG was an incredible game design originally - IMHO far better and more ambitious than anything I have seen today - and it got steadily shittier with each iteration because the players and the new developers they brought in *didn't get it* I think. They kept chasing after getting Jedi implemented properly and they kept botching it, and all the time the game became steadily less sandboxy.
I can't say I ever had any real desire to become a Jedi, although shortly before the NGE I did start the process of grinding the exps for it.
I have played a lot of MMOs: EQ, DAOC, WOW, LOTRO, Shadowbane, SWG, COx, Vanguard, PoTBS (and probably more) and the most memorable features for me are:
* RvR in DAOC - never been beat by anything since, and WAR doesn't even come all that close.
* SWG - Player based economy and a fantastic crafting system, PoTBS came close but still had a long way to go.
* COx - Combat mechanics and enjoyable fights. City of Heroes has the best combat system ever I think. The game is niche but fantastic in its niche.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I've played WoW... and almost ever MMOG prior to WoW (except MUDs, didn't play ALL of those). Now? I just play WoW.
This guy gets all elitist about some magical MMO purity or whatever, but as far as the gameplay goes, 99.9999% of MMOGs aren't even on par with the single player games made in the 1980s.
So he can brag about how great and innovative and elitist he is, but MMOGs are not only NOT breaking new ground, for the most part... they aren't even very good GAMES.
WoW is the best at what it does. It's taken everything which makes the game type interesting, and dumped everything else. You get to spent your time playing a game, rather than running around trying to decipher what a poorly scripted MMOG wants you to do.
Remember the "quests" in EverQuest? Talk about crap.
There's a reason WoW's competitors can't compete. It's because their games just aren't anywhere near as good.
Think Fallout 3 but in a MMO format.
They should have made the player be jedi apprentice (level 1) going through learning to be a real jedi (end game). And make each jedi different class have some advantage inconvenient like in KotoR (Some more oriented to force power like magics, some more oriented toward fight melee etc...).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Darkfall Online
I loved a huge sandbox world where I was able to become a crafter, create items and dominate the economy. It took a lot of thought and planning and a lot of effort in game to gain a top notch reputation as a crafter and adjust to the changing needs of the economy. I had a fantastic time learning how the system worked and how I could rise to the top in it. Along the way I established 2 guilds, taught a lot of people how to play the game, and built 2 player-created cities.
It was such a shame they kept screwing with the mechanics in an attempt to improve it and a long the way killed off the economy. The original designer and developers were brilliant and ambitious, the replacement developers were dull and really didn't get the game.
Yes, they botched the IP with the most potential of all, and I am amazed that they did such an abysmal job of it. At every stage they showed they really didn't get it and it ruined the game.
You may see it as a game with nothing to do - and I agree it had a horrible combat system and they completely failed to inject any sense of the Galactic Civil War into the game which was their key mistake - but there were things to do, its just that they were player created rather than scripted events with zero imagination like every other MMO out there that relies on simplistic quests as their only means towards providing player content. Quests are for the stupid people who lack the imagination to see themselves as part of the world. Same thing with classes I think.
The original game was class-free, relatively quest free (they existed but you could easily ignore them and I did), and relied on the players to generate the interesting stuff, and it worked at least for me. What sucked was the poorly conceived combat system, the whole mysterious jedi unlocking system which turned out to be really stupid when it came to light, and the lack of the GCW in its entirety. The game had the best character design system hands down of any game before or since.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The graphics are awesome. The game play is good. Lots of stuff to do. Blah Blah. Personally. Without the ability to spend "stat" points on every level really made it boring for me. Along with the item system being pretty bland. I loved the way diablo 2 handled classes/skills/items. It's funny because blizzard made WoW somewhat geared towards more casual players, but those casual players became addicted because WoW is simple to grasp and play. WTB Diablo3.
Fair point, but as you probably remember they said the same about WoW. It was going to compete with the big elephant called EQ1, and EQ2 was announced soon too. Sony was _the_ name in MMOs, nobody had dethroned their game yet, and there was no reason to assume that the sequel will fare any worse. (Turns out that Sony fucked up anyway.) Blizzard was yet another company making a me-too MMO. They had yet to prove themselves in that arena. Surely they can't compete with Sony by just doing same old, right?
Turns out that there is some merit in polishing the same old turd after all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
WoW articles should statistically annihilate every other game on this site.....yeah so should microsoft articles compared to linux on the basis of computer usage.
slashdot user != computer user
TFA is a totally useless read. Basically some people say "We want something different" without providing any insight, clue or idea.
I had no idea the spoiled brat category extended to game designers/reviewers.
My problem is that I enjoy the large group activities in MMOs, but I want there to also be a purpose.
My first graphic MMO (as opposed to MUDs that I used to play obsessively) was A Tale in the Desert. It's an extremely niche game, and unfortunately just never quite got the population it needed to survive. If there was some way to inject 20k more regular players into the game, I'd be back there again. It had purpose, but quickly lost the numbers to form a real community.
Then I got into the WoW closed beta, and I knew I found my new MUD with pretty pictures attached. The first couple years were great, even with the bugs and server issues. I was in a 40-man raiding guild, which gave me the large group activities I enjoyed. We also had at least some purpose--server firsts. We weren't large enough to compete for game-wide firsts (though we were close a couple times), but we did have most firsts on our server.
Then the first expansion came out for WoW and Blizzard killed off 40-man raiding guilds. I got sick of dealing with the cliques and even more narrow-minded views of 'acceptable' classes and builds for the new smaller zones, so left.
Prior to leaving, I had already started playing EVE. I still play today, and was even in one of the largest capital ship battles in EVE history last weekend. The only thing I'm missing in EVE is that I really want all of EVE's features in a fantasy setting. Give me WoW with player-built and player-controlled territories, the industrial and financial side, the skill set side of EVE.
When Warhammer came out, I thought I may have found some glimmer of what I wanted in the PVP and zone progression systems. Unfortunately Mythic severely disappointed me in how the entire thing felt utterly without purpose. The promises to remove 'the grind' were also gone once we began to realize the grinding required to gain equipment sets and their progression. A slew of server transfers decimating my server's population balance was enough to slam the book shut on WAR.
Give me a WoW modeled after EVE.
"blizzard is warming up to the fact that the game is aging"
I'd like to see the characters age, ya know, peak and then decline. One of the reasons I won't play an MMORPG is that starting at the bottom and knowing you'll never catch the early/elite players is a drag. There are lots of WoWsers around the office and hearing them talk about leveling and which quests they've completed almost always makes me laugh a little. Where's the role playing if your character can never get old, never really die and has done the exact same things as every other character.
I think some of the early non-MMO RPGs had aging and real death as features. Sure, they weren't expecting people to shell out $$$ every month, but there are ways to make aging and death be kind of cool. Maybe have an heir system where you get to have your main character, who goes out questing and such, and if they die, you can create a new, lower level character that inherits what's left of their stuff.
If you had the right set of skills, you could have some of the skills peak at different times, so that agility plateaus before constitution and intellect plateaus last. This way, you wouldn't have young, level 80 mages. They would be old, like mages were back in the good old days before Harry Potter.
I've looked all over WoW, and I've yet to find a single bathroom, outhouse, toilet, shower, or even a reasonable way of putting on clean undies. Where does a level 50 Dwarf go to take a dump, anyway??? All those griffins flying overhead, and yet not a speck of griffin doo-doo falls anywhere??? Corpses that fade away in 60 seconds, leaving nothing but a patch of pristine snow??? What the heck!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
##Conventional Arguments Against Mortality
-no player will invest time to play when they can 'loose everything'
-no VC or Game Distributor is going to take a chance on an untried MMO dynamic
##Arguments Against Timeline (Mortality)
-adjusted NPC difficulties, steep and ongoing content creation costs
##Arguments For Character Mortality
-games about character, story rather than 'point collection, levels, loot, etc)
-introduction of real time lines, aging, inheritance, allegiance
##Arguments for Timeline (Mortality)
-one time content
-epic storylines, NPC,
-PC driven content creation
Uld 25 tonight baby wooo!