So graphics are what make MMORPGs interesting? Nonsense. MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs have been running for years with little more than the classic text adventure console style and are _still_ hugely popular. Of course, being for the most part free to play might have an additional acctraction.
While I agree with your point, being a former MUDer myself, I'd have to bow to the pure statistics. "Hugely popular" is a rather unfortunate turn of phrase when comparing the active user accounts in the current MUDlist to the subscriber numbers of a similar list of graphical MMOGs.
Sure, MUDs tend to have a lot more care put into them merely by virtue of having to communicate ideas to the player through text. However, if I'm going to spend hour after hour leveling up my character, I at least want to view some pretty pictures while I'm doing it.
Of all the MMORPGs I've played, (EQ, AC, AO, DAoC) AC had the most liquid world BY FAR.
Sure, as you know, AC has had the most content updates of any MMOG on the market today, or in history. They've had at least 48 distinct story/content updates to the game world.
However, that being said, I think the original poster was alluding to the fact that AC, like so many MMOGs, is not strictly a Persistant Online World (POW) in the sense that your actions don't have any lasting effect from login to login. You can't blast a hole in a mountain, because the world is not directly changeable.
Pre-paid playtime cards are actually the norm in places like Korea and Malaysia, where the predominant MMOG audience is based in Internet cafes. In a cafe situation, it's not really expected that people would commit to secure, credit card based transactions over a public terminal. Besides, apparently there is a large population of transients playing these games in the streets of many asian cities -- making it that harder for them to get online if they've got to have a credit card for the barrier of entry.
Riddled with bugs, a ridiculously bad interface implementation, and a lagging user-base, Project Entropia is otherwise the first MMOG where you can make money playing a game like this. Of course, I've yet to hear of anyone actually succeeding in that gambit -- as I'd imagine that they all quit playing in disgust long before then.
The first hurdle I see to this kind of setup is hardware. I think the guys at Butterfly.net are taking that battle to the streets by providing a game development platform on top of a massive Grid. This promotes seamless worlds that support hundreds of thousands of players.
The second hurdle is monetizing a world like this to provide impetus toward development. You could provide the world itslef as an open source playground, but the really nice artwork (textures, models, etc) and interactive elements (scripts, epic quests, etc) would be in packaged SDKs. You'd have to have some sort of monetizing here in order to support the bandwidth requirements.
The final hurdle is to manage adoption and pricing in such a manner that your pipe dream doesn't fold the minute the first player logs in.
On a small scale, I'm reminded of InterMUD and privatized mudlibs. You can download something like LimaMUD for free, stick it on top of MudOS and start developing. Support is nearly non-existant, and you have to develop 80% of the content yourself before you open the doors. However, you can license one of the old well-developed Mudlibs (like Nightmare, for example) and get yourself the majority of the way to the finish line.
The obvious differences between the above and your pipe dream are scale and graphical implementation.
At a company I worked for in 1997, we used an SGI box of comperable power (well, not _that_ much power) to do real-time rendering of geological resevoirs of data. Typical data points were about 40MB of data, directly measured from the field of study. The purpose was a "fly through" for geologists to tell where oil could be found.
Everyone on the team used SGIs (I used an Indigo 2, arguably the slowest box in the office) running IRIX. The Origin system sat two floors below us, with the 3D programmer only having the keyboard, mouse and monitor in his office. It made it difficult when we wanted to run a game of Quake, as everyone could easily sneak up on him.
Check out Shade, a MMORPG on a Cellphone/PDA that resembles old-world Ultima.
Re:that was MUD, this is Brendanland
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P2P Roaming Chat
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There was a version of the old LPMud library that did something similar to this. Ivory Tower ran it...it allowed you to finger and chat with folks on other MUDs running the same mudlib.
Back then (late 80s, early 90s), we were all talking about a nice standard to allow you to real-time migrate your character from one MUD to the other. The problems we encountered with setting up a system were obvious: The very things that made each MUD a unique and interesting environment were what impeded us from establishing a standard for transferrence.
Ah, the good old days of throwing darts in a bar and discussing MUD enhancements.
Slashdot Mirror
So graphics are what make MMORPGs interesting? Nonsense. MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs have been running for years with little more than the classic text adventure console style and are _still_ hugely popular. Of course, being for the most part free to play might have an additional acctraction.
While I agree with your point, being a former MUDer myself, I'd have to bow to the pure statistics. "Hugely popular" is a rather unfortunate turn of phrase when comparing the active user accounts in the current MUDlist to the subscriber numbers of a similar list of graphical MMOGs.
Sure, MUDs tend to have a lot more care put into them merely by virtue of having to communicate ideas to the player through text. However, if I'm going to spend hour after hour leveling up my character, I at least want to view some pretty pictures while I'm doing it.
Of all the MMORPGs I've played, (EQ, AC, AO, DAoC) AC had the most liquid world BY FAR.
Sure, as you know, AC has had the most content updates of any MMOG on the market today, or in history. They've had at least 48 distinct story/content updates to the game world.
However, that being said, I think the original poster was alluding to the fact that AC, like so many MMOGs, is not strictly a Persistant Online World (POW) in the sense that your actions don't have any lasting effect from login to login. You can't blast a hole in a mountain, because the world is not directly changeable.
Pre-paid playtime cards are actually the norm in places like Korea and Malaysia, where the predominant MMOG audience is based in Internet cafes. In a cafe situation, it's not really expected that people would commit to secure, credit card based transactions over a public terminal. Besides, apparently there is a large population of transients playing these games in the streets of many asian cities -- making it that harder for them to get online if they've got to have a credit card for the barrier of entry.
btw: am i the only one who had to put the captions on to understand what galadriel is saying during her temptation scene?
Even with captions on, I find it hard to pay attention to anything else when she's outfitted in that steel breastplate.
Riddled with bugs, a ridiculously bad interface implementation, and a lagging user-base, Project Entropia is otherwise the first MMOG where you can make money playing a game like this. Of course, I've yet to hear of anyone actually succeeding in that gambit -- as I'd imagine that they all quit playing in disgust long before then.
The first hurdle I see to this kind of setup is hardware. I think the guys at Butterfly.net are taking that battle to the streets by providing a game development platform on top of a massive Grid. This promotes seamless worlds that support hundreds of thousands of players.
The second hurdle is monetizing a world like this to provide impetus toward development. You could provide the world itslef as an open source playground, but the really nice artwork (textures, models, etc) and interactive elements (scripts, epic quests, etc) would be in packaged SDKs. You'd have to have some sort of monetizing here in order to support the bandwidth requirements.
The final hurdle is to manage adoption and pricing in such a manner that your pipe dream doesn't fold the minute the first player logs in.
On a small scale, I'm reminded of InterMUD and privatized mudlibs. You can download something like LimaMUD for free, stick it on top of MudOS and start developing. Support is nearly non-existant, and you have to develop 80% of the content yourself before you open the doors. However, you can license one of the old well-developed Mudlibs (like Nightmare, for example) and get yourself the majority of the way to the finish line.
The obvious differences between the above and your pipe dream are scale and graphical implementation.
At a company I worked for in 1997, we used an SGI box of comperable power (well, not _that_ much power) to do real-time rendering of geological resevoirs of data. Typical data points were about 40MB of data, directly measured from the field of study. The purpose was a "fly through" for geologists to tell where oil could be found.
Everyone on the team used SGIs (I used an Indigo 2, arguably the slowest box in the office) running IRIX. The Origin system sat two floors below us, with the 3D programmer only having the keyboard, mouse and monitor in his office. It made it difficult when we wanted to run a game of Quake, as everyone could easily sneak up on him.
Check out Shade, a MMORPG on a Cellphone/PDA that resembles old-world Ultima.
There was a version of the old LPMud library that did something similar to this. Ivory Tower ran it...it allowed you to finger and chat with folks on other MUDs running the same mudlib.
Back then (late 80s, early 90s), we were all talking about a nice standard to allow you to real-time migrate your character from one MUD to the other. The problems we encountered with setting up a system were obvious: The very things that made each MUD a unique and interesting environment were what impeded us from establishing a standard for transferrence.
Ah, the good old days of throwing darts in a bar and discussing MUD enhancements.
Way to go, Geir!