"The last thing I want to do after working all day doing borning work is to come home and end up playing a borning game where I have to spend a 100+ hours to get a half way decent character that can do somewhat fun quests."
I think the part that you don't understand is that there are "somewhat fun quests" available right from the start, and more become available as you progress through the game. It's not fifty levels of beating up rats followed by a sudden transition to some mystical, enjoyable "end-game", no matter what the whiny kids on the forums say.
Surely you meant to say "Both Fallout games". Otherwise someone might think that there had been a third game made with that name, which of course there wasn't.
And yet one of the first things most people do when they play a new game is turn the video options way down and shut off the music. That says something about what really is required.
What matters is gameplay. Remember that this started with the argument that it was no longer possible to code an entire game in a week. I'm saying that it is and that the game could be playable anmd fun, not that it would be a best-seller.
"If you asked Carmack or anyone else to go home with a gameplay concept, and come back in a week with a fully-coded XBox game, you'd receive a blank stare in return."
Not necessarily. A good programmer who had the proper tools to develop on that platform could easily produce such a game, but what you received next week would have more in common with the simpler games of the 80s and 90s than with the overproduced "A-list" titles that line the shelves today.
There is nothing about modern platforms which actually require "legions of artists, programmers, musicians, sound designers, directors, producers, voice actors, motion actors, and craft services". It's just expected that the games will be that complex.
You could package up something like Nethack or M.U.L.E. for the 360 and it would play just fine, but don't expect EA to publish it for you.
In the Year of Darkness, 2029, the rulers of this planet devised the ultimate plan. They would reshape the Future by cleaning the Rug. The plan required something that felt no pity. No pain. No fear. Something with automatic carpet pile height adjustment. They created THE ROOMBA.
Maybe you should ask someone who knows a bit more about technology than you do. I think that Paris Hilton may be able to tell you a few things about how T-Mobile operates.
"And when did 'hitler' become a lower-case adjective?"
When he failed to defend his trademark and it became generic. "Escalator", "Yo-yo", "Shredded Wheat", and now "Hitler" are prime examples of trademarks which have fallen into the public domain through abandonment or poor defense.
Where Hitler went wrong was not through lack of defense (you should have seen his army of lawyers), but through misuse of the Hitler trademark. Where Third Reich productions threw around the name Hitler as though it were a noun they should have used it as an adjective from the start and emphasized it to set it apart from the surrounding text. Using phrases like "Hitler conquered half of Europe" is just asking for trouble. "Hitler® brand World Domination conquered half of Europe" makes it clear what the brand name is and that it is a registered trademark.
You have three thousand people playing the same game. How many of them are going to overthrow the Iron Throne? How many princesses are out there waiting to be kidnapped? Will each and every one of them get to start a war in the Seven Kingdoms?
The reason that online games tend to be filled with repeatable, low-impact content is because even after one group of players goes through it there will still 2,994 other people who want to keep playing the game. The reason that pen-and-paper games have more involved storylines than MMORPGs is not because there are computers involved and not because the developers are lazy, it's because there are so many more players.
Consider this. A GM runs a weekly p-n-p game session for five of her friends. To do this she will put in something like an hour or two of prep time laying out plot elements, NPCs, locations, and possible alternatives based on what direction the players decide to take the story in. All this for a four hour game night with five other people.
Now let's look at the same level of involvement on the MMORPG scale. You have a persistent world with somewhere around 3,000 people logged in during peak hours. Just to be nice, let's say that if you look at the entire week of play time there are an average of 1,500 people logged in at any given time. That's the equivalent of 1,200 groups of people taking their four hour play sessions every day, or 8,400 p-n-p sessions every week.
In order to provide the same amount of story development you would need a team of GMs to put in 8,400 hours preparing new adventures for all of those people, or 224 full time GMs working 37.5 hour weeks doing nothing but producing content. And that's not even considering that they are all working in the same shared world and will need to coordinate their work to avoid completely screwing one another over with conflicting storylines.
Even if their pay and benefits are rather modest their salary and supporting costs are still going to cost something like two million dollars annually just to run one server. With a total server population of roughly 5,000 people that's still an extra $40 a month, roughly triple the average MMORPG bill nowadays, for each player just to get something near the level of attention they expect from a smaller game.
The thing is that even if there are hard-core gamers who would pay that kind of money there are nowhere near enough of them to support it as a business model. It just doesn't make money, and that's why it isn't happening.
"MMORPGs will go into the next generation when they are able to reproduce what we have in Pencil/Paper."
And if you can produce a working game design that does that while still supporting thousands of players, I know a few people with a lot of money to spend who would be very interested in seeing it.
Slashdot Mirror
"The last thing I want to do after working all day doing borning work is to come home and end up playing a borning game where I have to spend a 100+ hours to get a half way decent character that can do somewhat fun quests."
I think the part that you don't understand is that there are "somewhat fun quests" available right from the start, and more become available as you progress through the game. It's not fifty levels of beating up rats followed by a sudden transition to some mystical, enjoyable "end-game", no matter what the whiny kids on the forums say.
Violating the rules of a game is often referred to as cheating without having to resort to finger-quotes. That's what cheating means.
"New York state is a great frozen wasteland."
I see you have been to Buffalo.
"From TFBlog: "the source code will be available under the GPL next month."
So I don't see the problem."
If history is any guide, you may start to see the problem in a month or two.
If only there had been some sort of definition of open source then maybe we wouldn't have to have to start this debate now.
"Hey, let's double our chances of data loss by distributing data over TWO drives instead of one.
Dumbass."
Thank you for your comment, Dumbass, but around here you don't need to sign your name to each comment. The system does that for you automatically.
...as bear is to taking a crap in the woods?
...as Pope is to being Catholic?
"So what makes a MMORPG mouse MMORPG?"
A lot of extra buttons, conveniently placed, and a good set of drivers that lets you map them to useful actions.
Exactly what I don't see in this review. This is not a mouse that will get you banned from WoW.
And did you ever hear of something called the American Revolution? Just curious.
"Chris Crawford seems like a person who contributes nothing, but complains a lot."
He has published over a dozen games and written five books on the subject to say nothing of founding the Computer Game Developers' Conference, an event which started in his living room.
When you have contributed as much nothing as he has, then you can complain all you like.
"The Fallout games"
Surely you meant to say "Both Fallout games". Otherwise someone might think that there had been a third game made with that name, which of course there wasn't.
And yet one of the first things most people do when they play a new game is turn the video options way down and shut off the music. That says something about what really is required.
What matters is gameplay. Remember that this started with the argument that it was no longer possible to code an entire game in a week. I'm saying that it is and that the game could be playable anmd fun, not that it would be a best-seller.
You're talking about what people expect. I'm talking about what a game requires. Those aren't always the same thing.
Not necessarily. A good programmer who had the proper tools to develop on that platform could easily produce such a game, but what you received next week would have more in common with the simpler games of the 80s and 90s than with the overproduced "A-list" titles that line the shelves today.
There is nothing about modern platforms which actually require "legions of artists, programmers, musicians, sound designers, directors, producers, voice actors, motion actors, and craft services". It's just expected that the games will be that complex.
You could package up something like Nethack or M.U.L.E. for the 360 and it would play just fine, but don't expect EA to publish it for you.
"Appropriate" means that white people are shooting brown people. Anything else is just sick and wrong.
In the Year of Darkness, 2029, the rulers of this planet devised the ultimate plan. They would reshape the Future by cleaning the Rug. The plan required something that felt no pity. No pain. No fear. Something with automatic carpet pile height adjustment. They created THE ROOMBA.
No, but there was a movie called I, Robot.
Speed Will Fuck You Up. Fucking will only get you pregnant.
Maybe you should ask someone who knows a bit more about technology than you do. I think that Paris Hilton may be able to tell you a few things about how T-Mobile operates.
"Is that Apache in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"
Damn Americans. I hate those bastards.
When he failed to defend his trademark and it became generic. "Escalator", "Yo-yo", "Shredded Wheat", and now "Hitler" are prime examples of trademarks which have fallen into the public domain through abandonment or poor defense.
Where Hitler went wrong was not through lack of defense (you should have seen his army of lawyers), but through misuse of the Hitler trademark. Where Third Reich productions threw around the name Hitler as though it were a noun they should have used it as an adjective from the start and emphasized it to set it apart from the surrounding text. Using phrases like "Hitler conquered half of Europe" is just asking for trouble. "Hitler® brand World Domination conquered half of Europe" makes it clear what the brand name is and that it is a registered trademark.
Well, that and the way that those guys destroy things is just plain fun.
You have three thousand people playing the same game. How many of them are going to overthrow the Iron Throne? How many princesses are out there waiting to be kidnapped? Will each and every one of them get to start a war in the Seven Kingdoms?
The reason that online games tend to be filled with repeatable, low-impact content is because even after one group of players goes through it there will still 2,994 other people who want to keep playing the game. The reason that pen-and-paper games have more involved storylines than MMORPGs is not because there are computers involved and not because the developers are lazy, it's because there are so many more players.
Consider this. A GM runs a weekly p-n-p game session for five of her friends. To do this she will put in something like an hour or two of prep time laying out plot elements, NPCs, locations, and possible alternatives based on what direction the players decide to take the story in. All this for a four hour game night with five other people.
Now let's look at the same level of involvement on the MMORPG scale. You have a persistent world with somewhere around 3,000 people logged in during peak hours. Just to be nice, let's say that if you look at the entire week of play time there are an average of 1,500 people logged in at any given time. That's the equivalent of 1,200 groups of people taking their four hour play sessions every day, or 8,400 p-n-p sessions every week.
In order to provide the same amount of story development you would need a team of GMs to put in 8,400 hours preparing new adventures for all of those people, or 224 full time GMs working 37.5 hour weeks doing nothing but producing content. And that's not even considering that they are all working in the same shared world and will need to coordinate their work to avoid completely screwing one another over with conflicting storylines.
Even if their pay and benefits are rather modest their salary and supporting costs are still going to cost something like two million dollars annually just to run one server. With a total server population of roughly 5,000 people that's still an extra $40 a month, roughly triple the average MMORPG bill nowadays, for each player just to get something near the level of attention they expect from a smaller game.
The thing is that even if there are hard-core gamers who would pay that kind of money there are nowhere near enough of them to support it as a business model. It just doesn't make money, and that's why it isn't happening.
And if you can produce a working game design that does that while still supporting thousands of players, I know a few people with a lot of money to spend who would be very interested in seeing it.