f13.net

I present eldeac's expert review of the mmog landscape, good at any time since TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING FOUR.

WoW : The mindless shiny diku mmog.
EVE : The serious business mmog.
CoH & Planetside : 2 weeks vacation twice a year.

Everything else : Shit.


Developers: it has been almost exactly FOUR FUCKING YEARS since this picture changed. Please be providing a game now. This is almost as long as we've been waiting for a wing commander clone.

Everyone else: what the fuck is going to change this picture and when? There is almost nothing with even half a chance in development, just wtf is the population of Austin doing? I know its hot down there but fuck, this is getting beyond a joke.

Predictions please, name a future mmog you are even slightly interested in.

I would disagree with you with COH and Planetside first of all.  I wish I could have the character customization for free.  Thats fun for an hour or two.

As far as future MMO's I know stuff about I'm looking forward to Jumpgate since I've been waiting for a PEW PEW MMOG and I was also interested in AION though that interest is waning fast.

My interest in Aion was stunted strongly as I saw the control scheme and the game play in action. It looks good, but it doesn't look good enough to stand up and shout "LOOK AT ME. I AM BORN IN 2008. FUCK YOU 2004 GAMES."

In short, it looks like a good game, but it doesnt look like something that people will go out of their way for, and thats a real shame.

I really have no idea when a new MMO will come out that really pulls me to it. It doesnt seem like one is coming any time soon.

I've heard differently.  A few people I've talked too said that the AION controls scheme is just a good as any other MMO as far as responsiveness.

That's hardly what I'd consider praise.

Looking forward to SWTOR. For realz. I'm hoping they can prove a story-based hero's journey MMO is worthwhile so we can get another part of the genre instead of just the two we have now (economic sims and character optimization engines).

We're going to need something mass multiplayer with God of War-like combat, minimum, to pull people away from WoW. More diku shit is HOIST THE FAILURE SAILS, WE'RE GOING HOME. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqDMWC4gKs)

The question is, how do you Blizzard a genre that's been completely Blizzardized?

::shakes magic 8-ball::

All signs point towards WoW2

GODDAMMIT

Resistance is futile

Looking forward to SWTOR, despite early reservations wherein I realized I was being a twat about it.  But it's probably 2-3 years away?  It's so far off that I may as well not think about it.

Also looking forward to The Secret World from Funcom.  Something different as far as the landscape in which it will be built.  Again, it's probably 2 years away, so there's that...

Everything else I was looking forward to has crashed, burned, and imploded upon itself.  Nothing in the immediate 2 years looks appealling.

Well they did compare it to WOW.

Anyway here's a live stream of AION:
http://www.mogulus.com/hellbound

Edit:
I don't think you can look forward to game that has no released details yet!  Doesn't count.

Starcraft MMO first.

Looking at the non graveyard forums for games.

EQ -> WoW
UO -> EvE
AC1 -> nothing

There's a gap in the market for a bell curve/skill based advancement system, combined with a randomised loot system based on different elemental damage types.  Part twitch (yeah I said it) would be nice too, though I won't cry if they lose the constant need to rebuff.

I agree with Draegan. 

CoH is the vacation MMO of choice.  GW may be second in line due to the lack of a sub fee.

Actually one doesn't need to buff much in AC1 anymore.  Level 7's last one hour, (2 hours if you get the Augmentation).  Aside from that, with quest items + random drops, you can pretty much wear all the Life / Creature spells so you don't have to buff, except to gap-fill.  Mostly just 1-cast Item armor everything so your underclothes have armor, and add some banes.

Buffs should last until you die.

I hate buffs nowadays. You either have them on or you don't. There's very few that require careful thought. And in no way to do I want a return to the old days of "buff classes". That's even worse, something absolutely relegated eventually to bot-status (ie, as soon as you're trying to figure out how to macro the thing to follow you around, the design has failed).

I'd rather just have them moved to innate status, either to the character as an unlock or how most other stat adjustments work: by gear.

But I'm welcome to be proven wrong.

The only thing coming along is going to be something we don't know about. For some reason, investors still think they can get part of Blizzard's pie... by out Blizzarding Blizzard. Seriously, fuck that. You cannot do it. Stop. Quit. And the new Star Wars thing won't do it because they'll go right down the same primrose path everyone else did, like lambs to the slaughter. This is the year the MMO died or, as Darniaq clarified when I said it earlier, this is the year when games started between 2003 and 2008 died.

The only one I may check out (besides a brief dalliance here and there in LotRO) is the WoD MMO. Because even though EVE isn't my cup of tea it's different. It's on their own terms and they're smart.

Nothing. Not as long as the same idiots are given money to make the same mistakes all over again and again.

I hope White Wolf can do a better job transitioning from RPG's to MMO's than they did trying out Board Games.  Some of the worst board game designs ever.

I’m enjoying the WoW expansion, with the fun new quests an all. But it won’t last long, I realize MMOGs aren't ever grab me again like they used to.

I’m thinking, back when EQ and the like were new, MMOGs were a frontier land. Nobody knew quite what to expect next, and the social conventions weren’t set. Now its settled territory.  Settlers come looking for a regular job, running dungeons, grinding faction etc. Places to shop and things to buy. They want to do things the familiar way. Even niche games like ATiTD have brought in levels and fast running to be like everyone else.

If you are looking for change, MMOGs are the wrong place. Its too late. They are a settled land. Out on the Net somewhere, change is brewing. I’m still trying to figure out where. Not here though.

MMOGs can still be fun. But novel? I don’t think so.

Business competition is all about doing what some else is doing.  It will happen.  Look at Microsoft, IBM, Apple.  Look at phones.  Look at internet service providers. The pie has gotten bigger and all have had their ups and downs.  Someone will get Blizzard's pie and make good money.  It may take a decade but with the rate of change in hardware and software that process is get shorter and shorter cycles.  It is still a problem gate by technology and so it is still "hard".

This is what it's like when a genre has reached it's peak. While some here (including myself) prefer to think of MMOs as a medium (and for which "persistent state world" is a more appropriate name) the types of people deciding how to enter this place have two, maybe three points of reference. And it's "maybe" because a lot of people who hold the purse strings don't see a difference between Club Penguin and Webkinz.

But this only shows that not only have we not evolved since 2004, we've actually de-volved, to 2002. Replace WoW with EQ1. Replace Club Penguin with Runescape.

Worse, and the part from which I derive the most disappointment, the #1 subscription-based MMO is making exactly the same evolutionary missteps that EQ1 did. And they're able to do so for the same reason (relative position to #2).

This is the downside of the peak: stagnation. When there's no real competition, there's no need to deviate from plan.

There's no one to blame really. Nobody can look at the numbers and see anything but supply and demand in action. And given the activity even in this place of battle-hardened veterans, I can't say we're worse off than we were when it was SOE running the show. Many of us have just become conditioned to expecting the next big thing to replace the current big thing. That this hasn't happened since WoW is more a testament to us finally getting what we wanted all along than the sort of resigned acceptance we had for EQ1 pending the launch of DAoC then CoH then every other money grab until 2004.

We're the market. We've been served.

They got bought by CCP. There's no transition to make. They're good to go and they are hiring en masse in Atlanta.

I sent mine back to the kitchen.  It wasn't what I ordered.

Is anyone else watching this? The game looks surprising solid and appears to run well. Combat looks fairly satisfying and animations/art that I've seen so far is well done. I don't know how you're going to break my heart Aion... but I'm watching you....

I thought sub numbers for a single game peaked at 500k with EQ1? 

I don't understand what you mean here? Which mistakes is WoW making that are the same as EQ1?

I think he means the expansions are coming out too fast and their quality is obviously falling as well.

It seems to me that the stagnation is less of a problem OF WoW and more that the problem IS WoW. They're making the game that their audience wants. That is evident in their subscription numbers.

In doing so, however, they create a smaller-but-growing audience of those who once wanted what WoW is- but now want something that WoW is not. The actual difference between WoW and the next thing could be trivial and just a matter of perception, but once A) that audience grows big enough [it's already fairly large now, based on box sales of AoC and WAR] and B) a company delivers, the market deadlock will end.

I think the people who don't like WOW or think the genre sucks now or the people think it's stagnating really don't know what they want.

If you pay attention to WOW from release to now it has evolved a lot, and for the better.

It's easier to get together with people and play the game.
There is plenty to do at the end game for casual to hardcore.
They've gone away from the poopsock endgame to less time commitment for the end game. (Read: Less farming and grinding).
40 man to 25 man to 10 man.
10 man progression along the same story as 25 man.
Daily quests.
Arenas.
Class structure. Gear and stat attributes.  Slowly destroying class stigmas.
Quest layout and progression.  Map Design and Dungeon Design*

You can go on.

*Dungeon design took a turn for the worse in TBC if you ask me but has improved tremendously in WOTLK.


You can list many more details includi

Of course this is all within the lines of a Diku game.  A lot of people bitch about dikus about how they suck etc.  But they're fun to the people who enjoy them and that's a lot of people.

What would you want in your next MMO?  I challenge anyone to give me something completely different that what we have right now?

A correct response is not:
"sandbox"
"PVP MMOG"
"Hardcore full loot PVP MMOG"
Anything with the words "done right"

If you can come up with a type of MMOG that you want to play that isn't WOW I'll be pleasantly surprised.  I think most people want a different flavor of WOW/EQ1/SojournMUD/DIKU.

Open source has not hit gaming yet.  Gaming is currently tied to hardware, be it a console or video cards.  Music is also currently tied to hardware as Steve Jobs determines how much music costs but there are many efforts to change that.  Once games are free of hardware MMOs will be the wild west again.  Tools are starting to slowly change in for games but they still have a long long way to go.  Once the access and ease of use to tools is available then games will spread just like types of music the last few decades.

Fallout 3.  Not the mechanics, though I like skill based systems, but the emphasis on story and exploring and less on leveling.  Dress-up and homemaking.  Achievements are about decorations, a neat weapon or fancy looking armor, and not how overpowered they make you.  Pie-in-the-sky is the world reacts to the pressure put on by the players in different areas.

It is not, most assuredly, DIKU.

I have to ask about this.
My personal feeling is that a MMOG sequel is a automatic shark jump of sorts.
I feel like WoW2 would be a terribly huge risk on Blizzards part.

And for that matter the type of MMOG I would like to play would be more along the lines of Oblivion or Fallout 3 in nature. Your PVE experience comes to you as a result of exploring and just being in a large world. I say a MMOG that gives the same feeling as games like Oblivion or Fallout 3 when playing would be a game I drop all other MMOGs for.

Also next up in line I believe that we have a bunch of first person shooter MMOGS coming out soon.
Its possible one of those might branch off a new sub genre at the very least.

Otherwise I don't have much else to say.

Draegan nailed it. The market for anything not called WoW is fragmented. Some want FFA PVP, some want sandbox, some just want to play something that 11 million people aren't playing.

The problem is that Blizzard has created huge barriers of entry into the market. New MMO's don't have much of a grace period for them to work out wonky servers, bugs, and balance issues. You put out an MMO today you aren't competing with WoW of 2004, you're competing with WOTLK, Ozzy Osbourne, and invaluable years of trial-and-error experience backed by literally billions of dollars of revenue.

What developers are finding out is that in order to take that share they will indeed have to outblizzard Blizzard. The attention to detail and amount of iteration required will demand a budget in the 100 million dollar range coupled with an almost unlimited time window. The tragic thing is that as those budgets rise the companies funding them will become more risk averse, so you can forget seeing anything other than a tried-and-true DIKU for that sort of money.

Long story short is that gamers dissatisfied with WoW want their preferred style of game with Blizzardesque quality. It's not going to happen anytime soon.

I could really go for a Harry Potter world, where achievements are based on social interactions rather than kill count. Exploration would play heavily into it, too. Another IP that would work well with this is Zelazny's "Amber" series.

Other than that, I really want a UO2/SWG2 sandbox. :P

We haven't done this for a while, so to rehash what I usually say:

Total War : The MMOG

You manage a handful of units. You team up with other players to fight pve battles to defend Imperial territory (where pvp is discouraged by extremely tough imperial guards), or join player nations/alliances to control contested pvp lands with better resources, better local recruits, and superior wenches. Alternatively it could be designed on an rvr basis with fixed teams fighting overthe contested lands, and individual guilds claiming regions for their realm (thereby getting preferential access to local resources).

For most battles you choose a selection of units from your entire retinue (you probably have some skill based limit on how many 'points' you can control on the field at once), this allows you to rest troops, and also means you have room in your retinue for non-combat units, healers, recruiters, miners, manufacturers etc.

Character development means training yourself to be able to control a greater variety and number of units, and being able to specialise by gaining access to bonuses triggered whenever you specialise the units you take into the field (all units having trained specific skills, or all being artillery, or whatever). Your soldiers develop skills if they survive battles, or are trained using some combination of gold and access to training facilities, heroes develop randomly within units, granting special abilities. New players will generally run fewer units, but they can still play with vets, they are  more likely to be supplying the infantry than the specialised troops. Combat mechanics are designed (much like total war) to generally favour combined arms, but not the exclusion of specialist strategies.

Dead and wounded soldiers are replaced, slowly and in real time over a number of days (unless you spend gold to buy replacements) by your healer units or recruitment units, dead soldiers are being replaced by new ones, so they lose all their personal xp. Owning contested territory gives access to more interesting pools of recruits

Equipment is generally player crafted, hold territory and set up mining camps (run by a mining unit), smelt the ore, design weapons/armour, then manufacture same, equip your troops or sell for profit. Units and heroes can also be sold to other players.




Pistol Damage will stack with Rifle Damage (or daggers stack with bows, whatever).
Anyone who mentions the words 'corpse' and 'run' or 'xp' and 'loss' in the same sentence is immediately subject to Imperial bounty.
In the unlikely event of any designer feeling the need to gate content by time subscribed, players automatically sidekick all group members through any such gates.
There will be no ward gear.
There will be no requirement to kill 20,000 pirate trees to play pvp.


Completely different? meh. It'll do me.

Blizzard: Diablo 3
SOE: DC Online, The Agency, Freerealms
NCsoft: Aion, Guild Wars 2
CCP: World of Darkness
Cryptic: Champions, Star Trek
Netdevil: Lego Universe, Jumpgate 2
THQ/Vigil: Warhammer 40K
Indys: Darkfall, Fallen Earth
Unannounced: Blizzard, Zenimax (Bethesda), Carbine (NCsoft Orange County), every MMO company not on this list already, many others

Most of these aren't in Austin, btw (DC Online and Warhammer 40K are the only ones on the list). MMO development in Austin in general has taken a nosedive into the ground. There are some unannounced projects starting up but a lot of developers have left town for greener pastures.

What does Austin have to do with Diablo 3?

Edit: Zing.

Actually, I'd forgotten about Jumpgate 2. They get props for conceivably being positioned to carve out a niche.


I'm *amazed* that we don't yet have Planetside, but dumbed down for consoles.

Planetside has been holding ground as the only fps vacation mmog for five and half years with no challenger anywhere. How does that happen?


People keep talking about diku-but-on-a-console, such people are over thinking things. I know fps's suck on consoles, but people buy the damn things.

>What would you want in your next MMO?  I challenge anyone to give me something completely different that what we have right now?
Having an armchair game design throwdown is not relevant because the rut MMO are in is from risk aversion not for a lack ideas.

It's called Call of Duty 4.

If everyone else is allowed to piss and moan when I point out that Diablo 2 feels like a MMOG, there's no way I'm letting CoD4 past.

Counterstrike + unlockable shit != mmog.

I want 200 person PS battles.

And mosquitoes.

Isn't this always going to be somewhat true though?
Even in a time when we have all kinds of new ideas being worked on people tend to complain about stagnation just because of the nature of the internet.

Nah, thinking about it now, I was being unnecessarily harsh. Draegan's got it. I'm biased by the general sameness of it all, but that's more to do with my playstyle and general interest than in anything WoW has wrong in it.

I'm not sure about this. I lump this into the same statement as "user generated content will solve all"... something I've heard for 16 years, at least. In an age when Line Rider and Tower Defense have spawned genres unto themselves, nobody can tell me that the tools for making compelling games don't already exist.

I don't think it's the tools as much as it's the ability to make games that look as good as $40mil+ productions. And here again, no amount of UnrealEd is going to solve that. First you gotta be able to have the talent and persistence to make a game people want to play. Then you need the time and interest to make fully realized 3D worlds. Most times that's a required group of people. Heck, look at the credit rolls for some of the independent games showcased at GDC every year.

Game design is easy to do, though hard to be successful at. Game development is hard, and very hard to be successful at.

I made a level for the PC version that could probably hold about 100 people :awesome_for_real:

edit: added probably realizing that both teams only have about 25-30 spawn points on either side... :ye_gods:

Users *as* content is different though.

Even in WoW, the other players are a small amount of content in themselves, because the nature of your group varies your experience. CoH does this much better.

Obviously Daoc, EVE, and other pvp games take this further.


Personally I suspect there is much more low hanging fruit on the tree of Users As Content, before anyone has to worry about Users Generating Content. One thing that would help enormously is if developers would stop being retarded about stopping friends playing together by refusing to support sidekicking, and possibly develop it further to actively encourage vets to communicate with noobs.

How do you fit that into an MMOG design?  Story line and exploring are finite to design.  I don't think a dev house has enough resource to create a continual storyline to keep most people interested and keep the quality up, at least, the quality at a point where people stay interested.

You're also talking about dynamic content.  I don't know much about coding, but can you create that yet in a system cheap enough to put in a game or at all?  I'm not talking about making 30 scripts and put them into situations, but a truly dynamic system?  This will truly be a great game if it's ever created.

Also skill vs. levels or whatever are systems within a DIKU type game.  If you have a game where your character is designed to shoot and beat stuff with magic/bullets/fists etc. you are going to fall into the DIKU trap of better armor, better bullets and better numbers.  The main difference here would be a MMOFPS or a MMORPG.  I would agree with you that a decently crafted MMOFPS would be a welcome game.

I think that, were WWII Online implemented in a user-friendly fashion (a la BF1942), it would serve as a shining example of what a non-Diku MMO could be.  Sadly, that ship has sailed.

I am hoping that Starcraft Universe comes out and is some sort of hybrid of WoW and Planetside.

What I have been longing for lately is a really good Virtual World. Some thing just chock full of stuff for explorers and with a good client. We haven't had a decent Virtual World released since EVE. Hell, give me EVE with twitchier combat and a ground game with ground combat and I would be happy as a clam.

Hey that gives me an idea. Make Starcraft Universe have a space game like EVE but with more twitch like combat, and then make the ground game a hybrid of WoW and Planetside.

 :Love_Letters:

This ^

A few other things:

Like Lantyssa said, I'd like to see a MMOG where the primary activity isn't killing people/places/things.  That's the one paradigm that's so pervasive it's almost invisible, yet it limits the genre to people who like killing things.  Maybe Metaplace is a step in the right direction, but no one's figured out how to make it super interesting yet.

I think Planetside really missed the boat on the "persistent" part of the equation.  Last I played there was hardly any character customization.  The level system was perfect in its (lack of) power gradient which also rewarded long term play.  However I would have liked to have seen it be possible to add some sort of visual differentiator to your character to show you were a newbie versus veteran.  To me that's what puts it firmly in the "vacation MMOG" camp and puts it in direct competition with free (to play) games.

Also, I'd like to see (surely someone's computed it) a graph showing how many subscribers a game has to attract over a time period to support a certain development budget + ongoing support.  We can complain that no one can compete with WOW's production values, but that's not exactly true - it's dependent on subscriber base.  By the same token we might be surprised how small a playerbase you need (i.e. how niche your game can be) if you keep your dev + support budget under a certain threshold.

edit:

Has it?  If someone can try to out-Blizzard Blizzard, how much easier would it be to out-CRS CRS  :drill:

Metaplace is a platform.

It would be impossible to do 5 years ago.
However I think that it is more about your mindset and how you create your systems intertwined with the game mechanics. I think it can be done with specific mindset. It would be slower paced and the land would be far more spread out so traveling will be a larger part of the game. You would have ditch the most hated part of both fallout3 and oblivion. The monsters leveling with you.

Creating new quests and events using a scripting system like what Bethesda has would be fairly straight forward. Problem would be QA more than anything... 5 year project easily... It is an interesting idea would take a hell of a lot of forethought to build its core system. would love to work on something like that hehe....

edit: I suppose the fundamental difference would be to step away from doing quests and more about every location having different states. So quests are not actually a part of the game anymore they are rather just actions you do to change the state of different locations in the world...

I want character creation that involves more than picking your race class and face, i want to assign stats, i want to pick origins that make a difference, i want to plan my character from level 1 to max and have it be completely different than any others.  I want shadowbanes character generation and progression on a good game basically.

No it doesn't. Please read something like Innovator's Dilema to understand why such a huge investment as you propose relative to the market leader in any business isn't a requirement.

Quests are static "states" in the game.  They give you scripts to interact with.  If you have dynamic world, i.e. things like static spawn points, drops etc, no longer exist so therefor the only "quests" you have are daily, weekly, monthly issues that come about like a new bad guy in the area, an environmental problem, war etc that are over arcing rather that specific.

Put your disruptive Game Development Innovation in one hand and I'll shit in the other. Let's see which fills up fastest.

Elf boobs as a race.  The rest of the elf is just wasted polys.

You would still have "quests" but they would never be the "kill X number of snow moose" kind. It would be a genre change in the same way that questing for XP was a step up from monster grinding. It would just be a known thing that killing wolves and selling the pelts helps the towns economy.

Think about it as a vehicle that provide quests that are given in a more logical manor. So if you are in a town that is in a state of poverty then crime becomes more prevalent. Fighting the local gangs or bringing food or helping the police will change that state.

Every city or major location has various states. from burned to the ground to flourishing. And every state entails various potential options from the killing everyone to bringing food and technology. Its all very canned basically just swapping out buildings and people depending on a simple global value. All quests are repeatable.

Also you could still do the occasional "kill sex snow moose" quests sometimes. But you run most of your content on a cyclic state system. I am oversimplifying.

Copy all of Eves systems but use Mechs / tanks / aircraft with 1st/3rd person aiming and actual projectiles so it's more of a twitch game than a "my 1 2 3 4 rotation is > than your 2 2 1 3 rotation" game.

Or have Jumpgate copy everything Eve does but let you actually fly your ship. Either one works.

Copying all of Eve's systems would be impossible. CCP doesn't even know how they work.

This would be part of my ideal.  Simplified of course, but towns can go from flourishing to craters as you say.

There should be tons of little 'moments' for passer-bys to find.  Just random things to provide some unexpected excitement.  They don't belong to any one location.

There can be a build-up of forces in an area.  Maybe some scouts at first, then larger forces with a military base, then an all out assault on neighboring territories.  It could be the bad guys, or even the good guys whom players have to help by doing some of the intel and protection.  There can be safeguards like other NPCs dealing with them if they get out of hand, but allow the players a chance to affect it first.

Storylines can be built around these things, too.  Some guy is looking for an ancient artifact, so he sends people out to look.  As more people join in, a small outpost springs up in support.  The story could move it in all kinds of directions.  If more than just turning in some_rock_01 counts as contribution, people can participate in whatever way they wish.  Hunting down information, selling resources, crafting supplies.

Will dynamic systems be easy?  No, but neither is DIKU if the intention is to make it good.  It's a matter of finding people who can make it work and getting them the proper support and funding.  Eventually someone will get it right, unfortunately it's a lot easier for a known successful quantity to get further funding no matter how bad most of the results have been than one with a few false starts.

The problem with 'dynamic systems' is the other players, who will fuck up your system.  Suppose some goblin dynamically stole the town butcher's family heirloom and is hiding in a dynamic cave and the butcher tells you and HEY!  DYNAMIC QUEST, except oops some lvl 70 just wandered into the dynamic cave and one-shotted the goblin and melted the heirloom down into a cockring.

I'm a complete utopian when it comes to things like dynamic goals.  I even wrote a toy language that treats game entities and goals as primitives and dynamically generates quests.  But to my knowledge nothing like this has been successfully tried in a single-player game.  Think back to the quests in all of the most enjoyable single player RPGs you've played.  Fallout, the Black Isle games, Diablo. . they're all static quests.  And if there's no good working history of dynamic quests in single player games, you're sure as shit not going to see them in environments where other players can make it 100x as complicated.

My short-term hope is a game that instances villages.  So each player is a hero and gets their own village to be the guardian/executioner/mayor whatever.  The village can dynamically generate quests, and you can bring other players into your village if you want, but essentially it's your own village to nurture.  With shared dungeons and NPC-owned cities as the MMO part.  Sort of Fable + Guild Wars + less sucking.

There's a PS3 game in development called something like Big Epic Battle (or something) that is meant to be up to 128 players a side.

But yeah, in development.

MAG.

Massive Action Game.

It's from Zipper, so it should be good (they did the well-received entries into the SOCOM franchise, not Confrontation). I've heard great things about their networking guys and such, but basically yea, game with great potential with the worst name ever.

The reason why Eve has any hope of actually running is because it forces point-to-point movement and does not track projectiles. Turning it into a space shooter (projectile tracking, on-the-fly movement) with the server population loads Eve has would cause the server to melt into glass. Even with the compromises Eve uses, CCP uses server architecture that is beyond bleeding edge and into poke-you-in-the-eye-edgy territory ("Hey, guys, let's load our entire SQL database into solid state disks, it'll be fun!")

Yes. Looking forward to MAG.


We've seen this explored before. That doesn't make them bad. It's just that when UO and SWG did them (and in a minor way: AO and CoX), two things happened:

1) They felt bland against the hand-created content of the normal DIKU variety
2) Other players screwed them up (as sidereal notes).

AO got around this problem by instantiating the mission terminals. SWG's mission terminals would work well with WoW/LoTRO's phasing. But see the same problem? Both avoid the player interruption problem by becoming small-group/solo experiences. Neither actually adjusts the world permanently as a result (though kudos to SWG and UO for adjusting the landscape for the lair).

I'm convinced that with a complete rethink in system development, you could make a game where every quest is dynamic off of every other quest and the state of the world all quests can change. The problem though is similar to a game fully reliant on procedurally generated geometry and textures: the industry isn't set up that way.

So what we have instead is the microsteps being taken towards world affecting decisions localized to one's own temporary interaction with that worldspace. This is a good thing because it leverages resources you have already (builds on success) while giving players something they say they want (impact and relevance) all without hiring a bunch of quantum physicists to work out that whole multiverse thing as your basis.

Remember, CCP didn't start the development of Eve with a doctorate in Economics.

This is the big problem - players metagame things down to the atomic level. The optimal path from lvl 1 to max lvl is broken down very quickly, as is the 'best' way to get equipment for your character. So either you have to make it so that everyone can activate the You Are A Hero Quest Part CXVII, thus making it distinctly generic to be that hero, or require 100 players to coordinate actions in order to get something off the ground, thus making individual contribution not particularly meaningful and players feel like a small cog in a big wheel.

CoH/V's dynamic quest arrangement - police band / newspaper missions - gives you an option of three missions that generally have alternating objectives, but are really just map + mobs combinations. For teams they work very well - all missions are in the same zone, so you can move through them pretty quickly - but they are decidedly lacking in soul for the single player (imo).

There is no easy fix. Now, it sounds interesting that for STO Cryptic is promising that the universe is infinite, that you can be the first player to explore a region and after that point the region is discovered and stays the same for other players, but I'm really going to need to see that title in practise before believing they can nail it.

Another possible issue with dynamic systems - the world changing according to what players do - is that it can all seem pretty random to the players. This was one of the issues Raph has talked about on his blog regarding early UO design. You can have a system where if the players kill all the sheep then the dragon that was eating the sheep comes and swoops on the town to eat people instead, but for most players it just looks like a bloody great dragon has appeared from nowhere.

But maybe there's a way round that. I'd like to think so because I'd like to see that sort of game, rather than yet another game where NPCs have exclamation marks or something over their heads.

In particular, I'd like to see a more open-ended game because I think it might encourage more of a sense of creativty and community among players. In UO, people would invent dumb stories for their characters and create websites around them. Lot's of people did that, not just roleplayers, because your guild could hang out in trinsic and become The Knights of Trinsic, or in Bucs Den and be pirates, rather than having to go where the level appropriate content is (or feeling that you have to do that).

Players would hold events ranging from fighting tournaments to poetry contests, open up butchers shops - all sorts of stuff, with the very limited tools available. UO Stratics would list events players were running (might still do actually, it's been a while since I read it). You'd get fashions for different clothing - silly hats came into fashion, different colours would come into fashion.

No DIKU game has come close, as you basically have a set goal of level, get and wear the gear with the best stats, and move on to the next area to do it again. If you tried to create a news website about what's going on in a WoW server, what could you say except perhaps which guilds were the first to conquer new or very difficult content? A game where stuff actually happened would be very cool. I know Eve is already there, but Eve's the exception.

It won't be different though. The next big MMO will probably just be a version of a game that we already have right now, with those magic 3 letters bolted in front of it. Some time after this is seen to be a profitable venture, all game genres will undergo a type of evolution to be a hybrid of what they are and MMO[what they are].

The future of racing games will be a mixture of Gran Turismo and Need 4 Speed: Underground, as players drive their custom fast & furious cars from event to event in a series of large player-capped instanced cities where they can participate in a variety street races persistently happening around you. Or perhaps bring their stock cars to virtual replications of their favorite tracks. PVE will take the form of AI drivers, as well as the personal-best runs of the whole gamut of driving legend. PVP will take the form of all races/challenges issued between drivers. The highest profile of which will demonstrate a form of corpse-looting as anything, including your car itself, can be bet on each race.

The future of sports games will be a mix of freelance players (who switch teams from game to game) and player (or AI) operated teams/clubs based out of every city, state, arena, parkground, and boathouse in the united states.

It goes on and on. Someone will just take a regular game and throw in the MMO element. For FPS we have games like Stalker, Fallout3, and CoD4. For RPGs, we've got such bases as Starwars, The Witcher, or (hell) Pokemon.

I think that the system I described is not actually dynamic.
I described a very basic layer of complexity over top a familiar questing system portrayed as a dynamic system.

A truly dynamic system would another ball of wax altogether..
I am not even sure where to start for a system like that.

sideNotes
I believe for a system like I described you would want to make it skill based and not based on leveling.
Actually scratch that. it would take a heck of a lot of thinking to nail down something like that.

Presentation is key.
There are countless ways to counter this problem.
Most likely when it comes to a famous dragon attacking the a player for killing sheep you can do countless things.
After killing a few sheep you get a message on the screen that says "I feel as though someone is watching me."

kill some more and the screen shakes and you hear a roar. "The dragon in the nearby cave has become angry at you!"
hehe I understand that is a lame example but yes there are many many ways to present just about any situation to the player so that they understand what is happening.

Also I would like to point out that I don't believe the system described above is actually dynamic either.
Its a pre-scripted event from what I can tell. Dynamic events are things that happen with out hand created scripts. As far as I can tell nothing I mentioned is a dynamic system.

Also: APB. GTA the MMO.

Yes, a rethink is necessary.

Say the game spawns this gobling with the amulet somewhere.  It already exists.  The lady, if someone talks to her, mentions it.  The goblin, if someone stumbles across it, drops the amulet.  With luck and effort, they are the same person.

Design is going to influence how exactly these things happen.  Does the lady scream and the goblin runs off while some players are near, making it easy for those in the area to track it down?  Do you track it in a quest journal?  If someone picks it up, do you delete it from their journal and/or give them some credit for participating?  Does the system rely on xp so a player can be 'penalized' for not completing a quest, or is it a more flat system where interactions with the world itself are interesting enough to be the reward?  Do you move to a more public quest system so everyone gets a little something if they contribute in some fashion?  Can you convince the goblin to hand it over, or can you steal it from his chest, instead of fighting him?

There are so many ways this could be tweaked.  As long as it's just a static (!) Kill Goblin, Return Amulet (?) Ding, nothing is going to change though.  Even a small change would be a freakin' step forward at this point.

None of this is to say dynamic content should be the only thing in existance.  Hand-crafted quests do have a sense of refinement and can help tell the story of the world.  If your dynamic system is so awesome it can handle this on its own then by all means skip it, however I doubt that is possible yet.  If it allows some permutations to enliven the world though, why not pursue it?

If it's a dynamic system you find a random necklace off a goblin.  You see no immediate value for it so you either throw it away or keep it.  Eventually you might find a person looking for it.  However how did the necklace get there?  The NPC who lost it wandered out one day collecting mushrooms and dropped it.

You need a system creating all these little scenarios on its own and I doubt that's even possible.  Basically you have to create a true AI.  That's a truly dynamic system. or at least that's what I believe one is.  You can't go in and design for dragons to hunt humans when sheep are no where to be found, but the computer needs to create the scenario.  If you could create tools that allowed you to macro manage your game world (i.e. sets wars off or large story arches with hard points to drive a story) and let the rest of the game work for you.

Yea it's a pipedream just short of a holodeck.  However that's where you're aiming for I guess and what you want to attempt to mimic the most.

Yes tech will solve it.  It is just decades away.  The talent is out there they just do not have the tools to leverage it yet.

Tool improvements have made all of the following possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Dynamite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Dynamite)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_(music) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_(music))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_comics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_comics)

Group of people is hard but that has been solved for centuries by governements, businesses, sports, military and recently the open source movement.

Yes, I'd really enjoy playing a game based off of Amber. :) The one difficulty you'd have to work around, at least at the start, is how do you deal with "the good guys" (or at least, the most interesting ones) being the royal family of Amber?  Unless you advance a number of generations, you're going to have way more people who want to be one of their children than is really reasonable...

The whole infinite realities to travel through concept is great though. :)

What?

I concur

Go browse through Raph's site - he explains it better than I could.

But basically, dragons seek out meat. Sheep have the quality "meat". If the sheep go, the dragon seeks out something else with the quality "meat", such as humans. It's not scripted in the way you describe.

All sorts of objects are tied into this system. Blacksmith wants "ore", etc. A section of mountains has the "ore" quality (which means it creates ore items in your backpack if you stand on it and use your pickaxe item). Maybe something else wants "ore" too, such as goblins.

You couldn't send a message to players as you suggest, as the players which have been cutting down on the sheep population for the past two months may not be around when the dragon attacks the town.

Trying to keep track of which players triggered which consequences would also turn the system from a fairly simple one to a hugely complex one. The server couldn't have known, when you killed a sheep, that you were contributing to a dragon attack a few weeks later. But I'm sure you're right - there's probably a way to make it work.

Raph etc seem to have done a fair bit of design work on this when developing UO, although the fact that it was abandoned probably says something. But it's worth checking out if you're interested in game design.

Most of the MUSHes that cropped up regarding Amber also open up Chaos and the Golden Circle as it frees up a ton of slots as opposed to simply those pesky Patternwalkers.

The only way it could be fun (and fair) is if everybody could be related to the royal family, and could walk through different dimensions and whatnot. I sure wouldn't want to play as a schmuck from the Reality of Schmucky Peons, heh.

I'd love to see a game system where your achievements are not only how many people are on your side, but also based on deception or honesty, intrigue and whatnot.

Going back far enough in time all, movies, music, and comics took large groups of people to make say +50.  Even if the reason for that large group (publishers) was to just control it and take a cut from the creators.  That is from creation to in the hands of customers.  Now individuals to small groups 5-10 people can do the same in that media.  Digitial distribution is here and it scales, but the tools have not keep up for content for games.  This is limiting all game development.  It is also interesting that music is going back to before technology was around to make their money with the live show.  Recorded music is just advertising and touring is the paycheck.

I would just use a meter that is associated with the area that fills up as you kill the sheep. Once full the meter begins to flash for all people in the area and the dragon indiscriminately agros anyone nearby... Maybe I should just go to his site and read it for myself I have a feeling I am missing something. Keep in mind that a dragon showing up and causing havoc in a isometric game is very different from a fully 3d game as well. There are many core system changes going on that would change how well a player can deal with a sudden dragon attack.

hmm I see..
I see the word dynamic being used a lot in this thread. The word Dynamic scares me personally.

For me I think a fully dynamic world as being 2 steps above the types of systems found in WoW.
The implications of a fully dynamic MMOG with 3d environments ect is pretty insane.

All NPCs being set up with behavioral AI, schedules are not dynamic so they would have to work merely on there own wants needs and urges..
You cant use static pathnodes either LOL.
Would have to be able to handle any situation a player or other NPC can throw at him/her/it..  :ye_gods:

Wait someone mentioned procedural geometry too? *head explodes*

We need whole new systems and tools designed to handle this concept or it would be impossible otherwise.

anyway I'm game anyone want to break down what kinds of core systems would be needed for a fully dynamic MMOG.
scratch procedural geometry idea though.. I like the world being somewhat the same at least as far as the shape of the continents haha...

They employed mob rotation even back in the Shadows of Luclin expansion for EQ1. With rules, it can work. But it is generally beat to localize it to specific regions rather than force try it across the globe. We just don't know the answer to the two critical questions:

1) Can it work in a persistent world with thousands of players banging on it; and,
2) Will those players find it fun? And I don't just mean the fringe that games it.

If this is ever to happen it will come from an indie-level game. Only upon the answer of #1 can we even begin to ascertain #2.

That's just a Public Quest. Although there is lots room to run with PQs
Sounds like funs.

Don't confuse distribution with creation. Independent and low-budget films have been around since Edison first founded the Motion Pictures Patent Company in 1908. Artists and filmmakers have often strived to create films outside the constraints imposed by the studio system. The London Film Society was set up in 1924 by H.G.Wells and George Bernard Shaw amongst others with the sole aim of highlighting artistic merit of films and championing what would later become the precursors to independent film. Dali and Bunuel's classic "Un Chien Andalou" was made in 1929 and shot on 16mm film (the same format as used for Blair Witch Project) as an independent film for relatively little money and little to no crew.

As I understand it (and I'm sure some comic geeks will confirm or correct me on this), comics were often created by not many people and the underground comics of the 60s were the labour of love of one or two people who did the writing and the graphics and then distributed them through specialised outlets.

Digital media is now cheaper and easier to create - especially in terms of films. Any fuckwit with access to a DV camera can make a short film, upload it to YouTube and call themselves a filmmaker.  It's the next step on from VHS but with far more accessible and cheap post production tools. What this does is saturate the market with crap in which it can be difficult to unearth the diamonds. However, creating a revenue stream from this is not clear cut.  Joss Whedon experimented with this earlier on this year with his Dr Horrible Sing Along Blog.  He had the money to input enough funds into the creation of it but still relied on the cast and crew deferring any compensation until later. He still had to deal with Apple and iTunes and now a DVD producer and distrbutor to generate any sort of income to actually pay the people involved.

Even internet hits like Felicia Day's The Guild has had to get into a deal with Microsoft in order to produce the second season of the show. Yes it's still internet based but no, you can't watch Season 2 on YouTube anymore. She, her producers and her willing cast (who were also professionals working for free/deferred payment) had to beg for donations to even get Season 1 finished.  There was a good chance at one point that they couldn't afford to shoot the last few episodes.  Now they've got into bed with a sponsor and production partner and got a cash injection, they're able to put out episodes of a far better quality and actually pay the people involved.

How I can relate all this back to games, I'm not sure but you started talking about films and that's a red fucking rag to this particular bull.  You mention that tool improvements made some films/comics/music possible (which is fallacious as it's always been possible just not as cheap and easy as now) but quite frankly the tools for creating an MMO are there for you to use already - find a database solution and a coding language to work in and voila. Now all you need to do is design it, build it, test it, release it, sell it, maintain it, provide support, upgrade it, expand it and Robert is your mother's brother.


tl;dr - you're wrong.

*now with out hitting enter after every sentence haha*

I was thinking about that but really it would only seem like a public quest to the naked eye. Your hud elements will usually break things down in such a way that they appear very simplistic. Under the hood though can be fairly a complex system. The only major difference I would think would maybe be that a simple meter would not actually be a 100% accurate indication of a pissed off dragon under a truly dynamic system. But rather you would have to understand that the more full it is the more likely it will come for you but you actually don't know for sure. Also the context would be different as well. The basic idea with PQs are that you are supposed to activate the dragon and beat it however in this case people would be afraid of filling up such a meter.

Its possible that the interesting HUD elements that we see in games today would be much less accurate in a dynamic game world offering only rough estimates of actual in game results.

That's very small minority you are even considering. It seems that what ever list you started with to come up with that they are only the mainstream big development house titles (AAA if you will). AKA: Only considered = SOE, Blizzard, Turbine, NCsoft and CCP or equivalents.

However there are many many MMO's out there that are quite diffrent, and still have the same level of production value applied. I guess my point is, your world perspective is quite narrowed, thats fine if that all you care about i guess, everyone has a handful of only "to be considered" games, but it should not be treated as an absolute, such as your thread title and point with in.

Its not really "The industry's" fault that your not paying attention to but only a small subset of the whole, is it?

/Devil's Advocate

Its the cheap and easy that to make MMO that has not occurred and is limiting the industry.

At least there are tools to build, test, release, and support software that were not around a decade ago.  Upgrade and expansion is just part of the design as everything should just be how easy it is to add onto the prototype map and UI.

Maybe when one person can make an MMO like one person can make a film/comic/music within a few year period we will know the tools have evolved enough.  There are not many choices in MMO to play, but there are lots of choices and for some to many choices (solved well enough by search\word of mouth) for film/comic/music to consume because of the tools reducing the cost to make them.

It is not a terribly alien concept to some newer games. Have you ever read about dynamic difficulty and thought about how that can be extrapolated to a dynamic story telling system of sorts? Really all it would require is more energy placed into a more advanced dynamic difficulty system. To be honest however, I think you can aim a lot lower than a fully dynamic world and still make a very ground breaking experience. However a dynamic difficulty or dynamic story telling system would play an integral roll in a fully dynamic MMOG. One really trippy thing that would be possible in a fully dynamic MMOG would actually be the ability to choose a difficulty setting.. You would actually be able to ask the world to go harder or easier on you depending on your personal preferences.

Its certainly not impossible but you would be really working out of the box. I think that you would make your over arching story be very large scale in nature where one person wont be able to make a really big difference however you use your dynamic story telling system to do smaller stuff where you give the player different smaller scale problems they can solve on their own. The basic inner workings of a dynamic story telling system is fairly simple. You keep track of everything the player does then depending on these actions add hooks that can potentially occur depending on his/her surroundings. So a story telling device would be one potentially important system for a game of this nature.

You're living in Cloudcuckooland if you think that one person will ever be able to make an MMO.

How many people were on the team when ATITD launched? I don't think a one person MMO would be very good, but I think it could be doable. Shit, some people were hoping NWN would provide the toolset to do just that.

2 people + they contracted out a bunch of art.

I have a question

In the case of a fully dynamic world would the AI really need to be sentient to be truly dynamic? My initial feelings on the matter are that the answer would be no. Simply because you can put together a simple weight based system into your AI and it would be passable. However for the course of this discussion we are discussing a fully dynamic structure. It would be a very basic concept but would it actually be dynamic? I think you would need to have a dynamic and fairly complex system on top of your weight system to actually properly give priorities with out the need for human intervention. How in the world would you break a system like that down in simple bite sized chunks?

edit: its possible I am over thinking about this and the answer is fairly simple.

I wrote and rewrote that previous post several times and ended up with something that was just to general to be constructive.  In terms of tools, there is already Multiverse which could, feasibly, allow one person to create a 3D world MMO.  But it's that "wouldn't be very good" thing.  As I said before - a DVCam and YouTube just means there's an awful lot of shit out there.  As for ATITD - well yeah, in terms of what an MMO is then browser based MMOs like Urban Dead or that Lovecraft inspired one that I can't recall the name of - sure, one person could create that. Just like one person could make a film - but it probably wouldn't be a marketable film.  One person = one actor and that's not going to be interesting.

I think it is. I think the lesson from UO's AI monsters is that the illusion of dynamic content is more appealing to players than the actual existance of true dynamic content.

Although that shouldn't discourage experimentation. Just keep in mind "Does this make fun for the players?"

There are a few places where all this dynamic content breaks down for me, sort of.

- Oblivion Conversation Syndrome. This gets annoying in a single player RPG; how much more annoying would it be in an open ended MMO?

- NPC Character Development. Non-dynamic games like WoW tend to have polished, entertaining characters with distinct personalities, voice acting, etc., even to an extent for throwaway mid-dungeon bosses like Mr. Smite in Deadmines. How can you make a totally dynamic game without sacrificing that? I will say right up front that for that reason alone I will pick a polished Diku over an Eve-style sandbox every time, and I suspect that a large segment of the market feels like I do. If Eve had any kind of soul at all it might be different, but it doesn't, and the lack of NPC personalities is a huge chunk of that.

- PVP/griefing. You can't really achieve a truly immersive world with PVP flags, but if you have open PVP, even with harsh social consequences, you are shutting out a huge chunk of your potential market. I won't play games like that anymore, not as my Single Main MMO of Choice anyway. Call it the "No Slayeriks Clause".

These are all things that have to be solved one way or another for a game like this to see success on a really large scale.

I think a mixture would work best.  Even though it's my ideal in an ideal world, I don't think leaving everything up to random number generators is the solution.

Having a mixture of handcrafted with the random to expand the possibilities would work to me though.  It's not as if every mob and quest placed by hand is fulfilling.  Some are great, some aren't.  Designing a system with content generation allows for more.

It's one reason the AI Director in Left 4 Dead interests me.  Some of it is random yet it does adjust itself based on player behavior to avoid whacky extremes happening too frequently.  It is a perfect early step in seeing how such a system can function.

Not sentient, but behavioral.  Does that make sense?

In WoW you've got like, I think 6 or 8 possible quest types. (Kill these mobs, get these drops, escort this NPC) Maybe 10 now with Wrath's vehicle type mechanics in place.

Think about the keel seex snow moose quest. You could write up a page of intro for every mob type in the zone, and then generate a RN from X to Y for the number of mobs to kill.

Looking at it from a single quest perspective, it's extra code and mechanics for one type of quest. But think about how many kill tasks exist in WoW. Any amount of automation frees up quest designers for other work. They could have had a quarter or half of the quests in Northrend done by automation, if they had laid the foundation for RN quests during original and BC.

I would like a Planetside type game with various skins. The player picks the skins he/she sees. The maps would change fequently (say every 3 months) and weapons would come and go. Vehicles in PS were a blast and I wish that could go to the next level. There would also be random NPC hostiles to throw combats into total chaos. There would be no monthly fee or expansion packs, but every content update would cost $19.99 and be mandatory. 

Sorry this post is huge ><.. I just got into trouble for making a huge post too ....

Absolutely! I think I found an answer for my own question as well and it coincides with this very statement. I can confer that sentient AI is not at all necessary for a dynamic environment. Behavioral AI is the key. At risk of making a giant block of text ill try my best to explain my idea.

You have a set list of weights for all sets of NPCs in the world. You use weight templates to determine the initial structure. In fact you would need a considerable number of initial templates. Initial templates because its possible the only alternative is literally creating a world and leaving it running for a simulated 800 years or so hoping that by then your npcs have decided what they want to do.. egads.. yeah... So lets just go with templates instead.. So your designers create these npcs and assign special templates to the npcs from personality to weights to ownership/belongings.

Depending on events that happen around the character you can either modify weights directly or by applying other templates as modifiers. For example you can have a blacksmith in a town. He is a blacksmith because designers have applied corresponding templates. If a player burns his house down the engine automatically applies a homeless template as a modifier to his already existing weights and personality. So the weighted system becomes dynamic simply because its controlled by dynamic events. Immediately his demeanor and priorities are modified.


At this point simply have no idea if it would be fun. If pre scripted events are designed to create the illusion of dynamic events it might be said dynamic events could be just as fun prescripted events. Its entirely possible that at this stage the one fun thing about the idea could have been left out because it seemed too crazy hehe.. Your guess is as good as mine!


I completely agree with this.
Especially in the case of placing hooks for a dynamic story telling it would be great to have the option to fall back on hand scripted events. However when it comes to a world comprised of dynamic events I might suggest a potential risk of conflicts between hand scripted events and a fully dynamic world. Where do you think this problem would appear most often if at all?



How would you be able to communicate with NPCs in a dynamic manor? maybe a mini game or voice recognition or advanced text to speech. Speaking through my character to NPCs and other players and having NPCs react as well. It seems to me as though you would barely even be able to predict all of the types of things that can happen if the game was completely text based let alone voice acted. This poses all kinds of crazy problems.. hmmm

I am not sure what would happen but I think that we would need a new way to communicate with npcs in a dynamic game. Do you agree?

Sorry about this large post I just had a lot of things to say in response.

I was actually talking about the NPCs in Oblivion talking to each other, not to the player, but yeah definitely NPC/player interaction is going to be a big, big technical hurdle.

I'm looking forward for Raph's project on Meatspace.   It might rides the fine line between indie innovation and professional production.

Also : Green Monster Games?

I thought Raph cancelled his MMO and instead focusing everything on the Meatspace user generated stuff?

Is there really any doubt as to what GMG is going to make?

EQ EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME

I appreciate your niave hope, but you're a bit uninformed. There's already Sherwood Dungeon, which is an MMO created by one person (done in Shockwave). Many of the current and upcoming MMOs are being done in Flash. There's MMOs in the form of NWN "quilts". And there's Raph's Metaplace which is attempting to give tools to everyone.

You'll see though. Just as in film/comic/music, there's going to be 99% crap and 1% good stuff. That lone is discouraging. Add to that the reality that drawing some pictures is on a very different (and lower) order of magnitude from making an FPS level, much less a game with dozens or hundreds of them.

You sound as though your a believer in tools. That's great, because that's how tools get made. But the more important part is the same it has been since people started doing something other than making stuff functional: how those tools are used.

Wasn't Minions of Mirth one guy who developed a pseudo MMO?

Also, probably the most one-man indie MMO in development (that I've heard of) is Love. But will it ever come out... and what will you do with it if it does?

MMOs are, and probably always will be, caught in a vicous circle.

Innovation is stiffled by fear until someone else does it first and is moderately successful with it (i.e. everyone else sees how it's done, and then improves it).  Futher, the same people making the same mistakes are getting hired on as design leads or project leads or whatever and they're effectively training the new hires below them to make the same mistakes that they will continue to make all the way up until the point they're (the new underling hires) are design leads and project leads etc etc etc.  Nepotism runs rampant.  Failures are given too many second third fourth chances infinite restarts (see Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton at BioWare, the head dude for the Stargate Worlds that was in charge of Earth and Beyond, McQualude, Garriott, the list goes on).  If someone fucks the pooch as badly as these guys have in my line of work, they'd never be handed a job again no matter how small or how big.  Yet these chuckfucks are given the keys to the castle time and time again.

WHY?

They claim they're too expensive.  They claim they take too long.  The reality is they all suffer from the same affliction:  Poor project management which makes them expensive and time consuming.

It's not MMOs. It's the industry. Everything you said applies to every other established genre too :-)

I think it is possible to have PVP/griefing and still be mainstream to a large degree.

According to CCP stats a larger amount of the active account population is located in Empire/Carebear space.

As long as there is an area where a significant amount activities for people to do without fear for their life.

The main problem is balancing risk vs reward.

There has to be a reason to enter the Slayerik zones without it being required for those who want to live their life in peace.

It shouldn't require supreme amounts of metagaming/zerging/minmaxing in order for someone to explore pvp areas unless they're complete retards though so that explorers and traders can find a niche.

I think Eve does this well? but it might be very hard for a more mainstream publisher not to bow under pressure to make pvp areas more accessible.

Disclaimer: This is from the viewpoint of someone who plays Eve and hangs with Slayerik  :pedobear:

A dreams can seem that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Novels_by_Stephen_King is alot of books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso just had to draw on a napkin to be of value.
http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Oeuvres/ListOpus.html is a lot of music.

Games start out being created and build by one person and are still being done that way.  They are getting bigger and no reason they cannot get MMO big.

Wow, UO, Eve, Planetside are about the only different choices that are currently available.  1% of 1000 or 10,000 is more choices then today.  As a consumer my time to look for that 1% is worth it with today existing search and word of mouth. 

While tools are a huge important difference they have yet to make that much of a difference yet. For example if I was asked to make a doom2 Iwad I would still need about 4-5 designers to get it done in a reasonable time frame. (3 to 6 months) And that would be using doom builder vs using DEU. And this would be DOOM not some new cutting edge game. So I can tell you that on the front of doing first person shooters the tools have grown quite rapidly however the demands for shippable games have also grown not just in the sense of technology but standards as well. Take a good look at the basic standards asked for when working with UE3. I swear to you some of the assets in gears of war took a single artist multiple weeks often times even longer.

Someone can write a novel and have it be very high quality and do it alone but for a game you would need a fucking rockstar to be able to code his own engine and create shippable art for a AAA tittle. Maybe down the road tools will do more auto-generation of assets. Things like being able to procedurally create geometry by feeding different geometry art style values could make what you are saying a potential reality.

What would be more likely to happen I think is for one guy to make the groundwork for his game then higher other more specialized dev houses to fill in the blanks. But games, even the simplest ones are a huge pain in the ass to make. I LOVE UE3 man, the engine is a fucking masterpiece but for fucks sake doing a game alone with that tech or any future derivative would be .....  :ye_gods:

Come on, this is a total non-sequitur.  You're really stretching to try and make a point here - you were closer to the mark with the comparison to film making. Writing, painting and composing music are not the same as developing an MMO.

My brother, coworker, and I have been talking about a Mechwarrior MMO with very similar design ideas on our way home from work for the past few days. The nice thing about the IP, is it is an actual GAMER IP. Not a fuckin' board game or movie IP.

Similar loot drop/salvage options as Eve as well. You buy/build better (or different) mechs...but there is always a 'rookie ship' type one you can fall back on. Initially, the battlefield would be small mechs and occasional medium ones. Would eventually progress to Small/Medium with a touch of Heavy Mechs. Kinda exactly how it worked in Eve...when Battleships are like Carriers today.

Could have specialized mechs that use heat warfare or ECM, repair/logistic (healer) type Mechs. A similar loadout system to Eve as well, customizable Mechs but people can learn the basic strengths and weaknesses of each Mech type.

Setting would be pre-Clan...with Clan tech eventually being introduced when they show up.

Could run missions or fight in Border systems for cash. Guilds (for lack of better term) could claim a planet and build your own city/starport that would require defenses. These jobs could be avilable to other players.....or manufacture/research/trade. But, once again, these are just pipe dreams.



One thing this thread made me realize is how far we haven't come. Can I get housing back?

2 programmers. And its a full fledged MMO.

Have you ever played any of the two dozen other AAA download/install PC MMOs? Any of the browser ones? Any of the Eastern ones?

Your 1% of 1000 is a relevant statement. But I suspect you don't have enough experience with the games that exist now to understand a) the diversity out there; and, b) the complexity of making them. Your analogies to books, music and movies also indicates a lack of understanding of just how many people are involved with going from concept to distribution. Unless you're photocopying for your friends what you wrote in MS Word or sending MP3s of what you banged out in GarageBand, you're part of a total industry that is more than just "ooh, I have a cool idea, let's go publish it!"

If you haven't played more than these four, or six, or eight, then you're already not doing the kind of research you claim you'll do in the magically crowd-sourced word of cheap-o experiences.

Quantity does not inspire quality. It can help, but you also need to show up with a good idea, and the talent and skill to execute. This has been the case since MUD1 in 1980. The only thing that has changed is the tools.

Mechwarrior would be an awesome IP to make into a MMOG world, but who owns that IP now?  FASA is defunct, does hasbro own it?  or microsoft?  I miss my 2 LRM 15, 2 PPC, 2 med laser loadout.

Is this a trick question?
I want three games, and none of them resemble WoW even remotely:

1) A huge sandbox, similar to Ultima Online. Of course it needs FFA and nasty PVP. It could use permadeath on certain circumstances. You can call it Ultima Online 2.
2) A full PVP game based on territorial conquest from the ground up with a huge focus on guilds and subguilds. It has to be completely instance-free. You can call it Shadowbane 2.
3) EVE with just a bit more twitch and an even wider scope, as in battles on planets surface and, yeah, Mechs and tanks. The game Slayerik came up with, I'd play it.

So easy. Are you pleasantly surprised now?

To clarify: I don't think these games would succeed. You just asked what we want, and this is my dreamlist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechWarrior

Then it reads: Topps Shuts Down WizKids
The Topps Company announced on Monday, Nov. 10th 2008 that it would be closing down WizKids and discontinuing product lines including HeroClix. Topps CEO Scott Silverstein commented "This was an extremely difficult decision. But in light of the current economic conditions, we feel it is necessary to align our gaming initiatives more closely with Topps current sports and entertainment offerings which are already being developed within our New York office."

In the statement announcing the close of WizKids, Topps also indicated that it was pursuing alternatives to discontinuing brands so that brands such as HeroClix could continue on without any noticeable disruption in future product offerings.

EDIT: In March 2003, it was announced that Mechwarrior 5 had been canceled. There has yet to be any official word on future titles in the series. However in October 2007 the startup company Smith and Tinker, created by Weisman, acquired the right to the Mechwarrior series as well as other notable FASA franchises (namely Crimson Skies and Shadowrun). It is currently unknown what future plans the company has for these properties.




Nows the time to buy the IP BABY!

Who wants to back me about 20 million after that to get started?

Curt baby, holla atcha boy :)

Actually the MW2 community did something very similiar to this back in 1994 with our own "metagame" on top of MW 2. Basically everybody was a member of a House and the planets each House controlled generated "resource points" to buy equipment. Then each House leader would schedule matches based on which planets were being attacked and we'd duke it out.

We just need somebody to make a "modern" online MW game and the fans can do the rest.

One thing I would like to see in this idea would be the ability to step out of my mech from time to time and actually be able to do some small tasks or exploration in 3rd person while on foot if I feel like it. Even if its not the main focus in the game. Maybe it would help reduce how impersonal eve can seem sometimes.

If the diversity were out there I should have read about it on these forums alone.

Yes they are complex.  They are the OSs of yesterday. Some OS are free today even. They are complex like building a computer.  Network thousand of clients.  Do millions of transitions a day.  Serve millions of requests a day.    Worked on those in the past in both gaming (Casino\PC) and internet spaces.  Yes they are all large teams from dozens to hundreds.

It used to take someone with a lot of knowledge and ability to make and publish a web site.  Tools make it possible if one knows how to use a computer they can now make and publish a website, with a back end even.  My current environment has two dozen people doing what took a hundred or more to do in the past.  Yes it took 20 years to get to this point but the changes to management and the tools that are being used are what allow for this.  Once a few geniuses grow up surround by the medium and the tools it will happen.  At some point it is just make digital bits that talk to each other, the hard part, and copying them about, which is now easy.  That is the beauty of computers and software.

Our prayers are being answered (http://www.mechlivinglegends.net/)

Neat, but not exactly an MMO with 32 player maps. Still, thanks for the link ... I'll be checkin it out.

It'll get FOX'd once Jordan Weisman's new company gets further along on their games.

None reads my posts!!!  :cry:

I had the same complaint as well but keep in mind that is similar to the limitations to that original multiplayer effort Battletech3025. Players had to play from hubs representing their house and protected that hub on planets that could only support 32 players as well.

My gutt is telling me in this case however you might be missing on something though. In the case of game design when the tools get better the standards of what is expected also goes up so. So the best tools in the world could be at hand but the game will obviously have a noticeably higher production value when a team of 300 people worked on it. Games are also nothing like most other mediums in some very basic respects and somewhat invalidates your comparisons.

A play tester determining if your content is fun while looking for bugs is another beast altogether from a guy who is just looking for bugs to make sure this application is functioning properly. Movies and books are not interactive.. these are some fundamental differences here. Are you sure that doesn't matter? Because I am not sure those details are irrelevant at all.

It takes more knowledge and deeper understanding today to produce something that can pass as a "modern" homepage than it did before. Notepad and ftp.exe won't cut it - it did ten years ago, however.

You see, while tools let us produce faster, it's mainly used to produce -better- results. Nobody will enjoy an HTML 3.0 compliant homepage 2008. Just like nobody will care for what WoW is doing today in ten or twenty years.

Let's face it, I can build Space Invaders in a few hours thanks to modern tools, but nobody would play it.

What are you talking about?  When was this mythical time when it took someone "with a lot of knowledge and ability to make and publish a website"?  The tools have always been there since shortly after the World Wide Web was released. HTML was first formally defined in what? Mid '92? SoftQuad released HotMeTaL in '94. Hell, I started developing web pages in '95 on the back of a Philosophy degree. Any moron could do it - the megabytes of trash on ye olde GeoCities websites were a testament to that.

I will grant you that the tools and the software have made things more easily accessible to end-users: people can run database driven sites without even knowing what a database is. But being able to install WordPress, apply a theme and customize the functionality with plugins and addons does not make them a web developer.  What that means is that there are metric shit-ton of blogs out there - millions of the fuckers. The majority of them are not very good.  Here's a fun thing you can do - find a blogspot hosted website. See that bar on the top? Click on the "Next blog" button.  Do that a hundred times and take a look at all the blogs  you see.  Are they masterpieces of design and content? Unlikely.  We're back to the quantity does not equal quality.

I'm also bemused by what you mean when you talk about "copying them about which is now easy."  What's that got to do with anything?  I can set up and run a private WoW server which could have hundreds of people playing on it. Doing so might make me a criminal but it does not make me a game developer.  

Here's another thing - partly tied up to what I think TheCastle was saying above me. I've been developing applications in a particular software environment for the last 13 years (and oh gods does that make me feel old!)  I've seen 5 versions of the software been released. Far from making my life easier, it's made it more complicated by giving me far more options on what I'm able to do.  Newcomers to the software have so much more to learn compared to the incremental learning that I've been through over all that time. It's the difference between someone who's been playing WoW from the outset and knows his level 80 priest inside and out compared to someone who's never played WoW and just bought a level 80 off eBay. Is he going to know how to play it to it's fullest extent? Is he fuck?

Wait - you've got me coming up with ridiculous analagoies now. I'm getting out of here.

Well, I'm not really a Mech fan, other than being a fan of gigantic human driven robots. Also, I don't like using established IPs because then you get a bunch of lorebois along with fanbois, and both of those types of people are huge problems. The mechs in this instance would be created from scratch.

"Mechs" is just about the only thing I can think of to make a lot of the proven-to-work Eve systems work in something that isn't outer space.

In Eve, I like that when you blow up someone, some of their shit is blown up along with them. Some of it isn't. You can then take that stuff. In UO, I loved being able to loot everything the person had once I killed them, but I realize I'm a minority in that viewpoint so I don't think it's a good use of time to try to force it on others.

Eve is the middle ground between full looting and no looting. It's "logical looting" so to speak. It gives the person a chance to enhance their character (implants) and yet have a very good chance of keeping those indefinitely, UNLESS they get careless. It gives the winner of PVP battles some extra rewards, without rendering the victim itemless, lost and poor. I just can't figure out how one would incorporate this kind of game into a fantasy setting.

I mean maybe you could come up with some crazy gay elf shit where everyone is a SPRITE SPIRIT and you then just take control of creatures and use their bodies as mechs/spaceships, and then you have an EJECTION SEAT to eject your gay elf sprite spirit and possibly get away, leaving the mortal body that you inhabited to be looted. I'll stop at that because this train of thought is absurd.

Brilliant idea actually... Its not absurd at all tbh.
It would take a bit of evolution and pre-production to see where the idea can become a full fledged game but I can definitely see it being worthwhile venture in the end. Just thought I would point that out.

I think a lot of resistance to that came from people who didn't realize loot is cheap in UO. That, and the mere idea of someone taking all your stuff. I remember the first time I was looted. I was so damn pissed and upset and on fire and raging until I looked in my bank and found three sets of the same stuff I had lost.

If players can be reminded through gameplay that their stuff is cheap, if it can be made fun, it's something that can come back to MMOs. Consider the Mech example. One of your earlier missions could be "We need to test the resilience of our mechs. You've been given 10 mechs. Your job is to get the shit blown out of yourself as quickly as possible. You have ten seconds to be completely obliterated, at which point your ejector seat will magically launch you into your next mech. And...GO!!!"

Yay Steiner!

I think my old unit is all playing WoW now, though.

My main point was that Slayerik is able to do what he does *in Empire/carebear space.* Or at least was, I don't follow Eve that closely - work up a bunch of positive zone faction, blow away some poor sap with a hauler full of money, then work his way back up the faction tree to do it again, or whatever. That's the sort of thing I wouldn't want to be possible and I suspect is a turnoff for the general crowd of gamers, if not a deal-killer like it is for me. I don't mind there being unsafe space; I do mind there being no truly safe space for my PVE entertainments.

If that sort of thing is possible, people will do it no matter how harsh the consequences. I saw it happen all the time on a small MUD where the punishment went all the way up to deleting the character. People would just make another one, work their way up, and go out in a blaze of griefing glory.

But there's no doubt that NOT letting people have the capability to choose to behave in that way screws with realism/immersion/verisimilitude/whatever-you-prefer-to-call-it like crazy.

What league(s) did you guys play in?


I was mostly House Davion in the ADL (think revision 2 or 3 at that point) for Mech2: Mercs, but I had quite a bit of experience in the TKZ (I think it was TKZ) under the Wolf's Dragoons for Mech 2 (I actually played using only the netmech demo, since it was free and I was like... 12). I was also a random sub for the GC ladder, but I hardly played that one. I enjoyed the planetary leagues so much more.


Meeeemorriiiies  :oh_i_see:




If there ever was a IP/Game system that screamed this kind of MMO, it is BattleTech. The only thing that really held back the old leagues was the fact most of us were still on dial up (not even 56k  :ye_gods: ) and the web-tech those days was still animated gifs and blinking text. I remember filing out a spreadsheet form in excel that would make the Taxman proud and mailing it off to the ADL admin every month where he would manually verify it and every other house/clan/merc unit had what they said they had, and where. The forums we used...  :ye_gods:

Meh, Slayer was really only able to do that because people would go afk for long periods of time with vast amounts of resources in their under-fit ships.

I side with Slayer on this side of the PVP fence, CCP was/is very clear that no where in the game is expected to be safe, Slayer used the games mechanics as they exist, not as they were perceived to be.  Eve has anti-high sec gank mechanisms in place, they work extremely well, if you use them, his targets didn't use them.  Some people play Eve with, for lack of a better word, a carebear mentality, they certainly do this without having looked at what the mechanics of the game actually are.

There is a built in time before Concord shows up to an act of hostility.  This is intentional, they could easily be instantaneous.

Gate guns have to work their way through sheilds/armor.  This too is intentional, they could easily be instant death poppers.

The faction mini-game exists as it does precisely so it can be used to raise your faction when it gets too low.  That's its intended purpose.

Eve's mechanics are what they are and so who is playing the game wrong?  They guy playing the game?  Or the guy playing a game in his head that's not the one on his computer?

It isn't a question of playing 'right or wrong'.

What Ing is saying is he won't be playing EVE because of them. Nor any similar game. "Nope, not for me, more power to those who enjoy it."

Correct.

Which goes back to what I said earlier: how big is the market for hardcore (relevant or not) PvP anyway when far and away the most successful example of it barely ever scraped 250k at a time when the dominate title is 48x that.

And again that isn't to say it won't be tried again. Rather, it's to set the expectation of not expecting it from a big budget publisher. They don't put big budgets behind indie concepts.

I think we settled (!) on that other thread that the market for hardcore pvp is 100k at best. And we even settled that those 100k want different kinds of hardcore pvp  :awesome_for_real:

I don't think hardcore pvp is the right term, it's all about freedom, of both player interaction and character advancement.  The market has stagnated because it's rare for someone to come up with a better idea, the ideas that are used again and again have been accepted as the correct way of doing things.

Take UO and DAoC, in UO you could speak to anyone on screen, in DAoC you can speak to anyone in your realm.  If someone died in UO you couldn't have a two way conversation as one person was a ghost, that's a far smarter way of stopping smack talk than just blocking all cross realm communication.  The reason blocking cross faction communication caught on is because it works, duh, but you can stop nuisance phone calls by ripping your phone out too.  Nobody has improved it on it yet or even attempts to, so we appear to be stuck with it.  A recent positive change is unlocking custom titles for your character (LOTRO, WAR etc), it's only text and yet it's very popular.  Taking WAR as an example, they seem obsessed with making people grind for things, they could easily have put in custom cross realm taunts that could be unlocked, e.g kill 100 Humans to allow an Orc to moon the opposing side.

Bind on pickup is another example, fucking horrible idea, doesn't make an sense from a logical point of view either.  It's just a way to stop gold farmers and twinking characters, it completely ignores the fact that sometimes giving someone who isn't as advanced a magical sword can be fun.  Levels, we moved from UO (skill based, no forced classes), AC1 (soft levels, a level 40 could kill a level 80, no forced classes) and EQ (hard levels, forced classes) to mostly the EQ style, why did that happen?  Purely because EQ had 550k subs?  Levels work for PVE, balance is easy, why are non PVE centred games being marketed as pvp/rvr yet still using levels?

What about all the stuff that got left behind, UO treasure maps, remember those?  AC1 allegiance system, sure exp chains got out of hand but some form of incentive for a more advanced player to seek out and help new players is a good thing.

The one recent positive change is they stopped advertising these games as 2nd generation, thank god for that.  Because as far as I can see the original big three games were third generation and we've been moving backwards in terms of originality and focusing far more on trying to design out known problems rather than design in fun.

I honestly don't remember.  They grabbed me with MPBT and I just shot things when we moved over to whichever mech game was out at the time.  I didn't do much of the league stuff myself.

My company was the Blackhearts, which had some affiliation with the Disciples of Carnage.  We seemed almost independent to me, but there was some history there between the upper echelons and the unit.  I think I caught their eye by using DFAs in MPBT.  ;D

I have an idea for a game where the player characters would be unkillable spirits who could possess the bodies of normal people, effectively using them as meat shields and for any tactile situation (since spirits can't interact with the tangible world).

However, I don't think anyone is going to fund Gay Elf Sprite Spirit Online (GESSO) so it can remain a pipe dream.

QF fucking T

MMOGs only have value because of interaction between players. Any mechanics that enforce limitations on that interaction automatically count as idiotic.

I know there are certain devs who read these forums, and they'll read the sentence above and think I'm just being a dick when I say that. But I'm not saying this for impact. Any mechanics that enforce limitations on interaction automatically count as idiotic. In a MMOG the only meaningful content is other players and any decision that doesn't reflect that IS FLAT OUT WRONG.

This is a big part of why EVE and WoW (and maybe CoH, possibly PS) are the only current MMOGs I have real respect for.

It's not that easy. BoP was instituted not to limit the interactions of the masses but rather to prevent the dominance of a few exploiting that dominance either against other players or to play the game wrong (RMT, exploits, etc). This is because a few were able to screw up the game for many, and that resulted in a worse gaming experience for a large number of people who took their monthly fee and went elsewhere.

Same can be said of public adventure zones, twinking, powerleveling, kiting, and a bunch of other ideas tried again and again until the genre realized that growth comes from continuing to control the world in ways that protect players from each other. Because ultimately it always comes back to the most important fact of this space:

You've got a bunch of non-accountable random anonymous people seeking a good time until they're done who have no financially vested interest in ensuring the game is fun for everyone.

That's the first and most important rule when entering this space. The more control you put in their hands, the narrower the enjoyment is going to be. Yes there'll be a bunch of examples about guild and alliance leaders with social interest and the poor schlep who's RMTing to pay the rent or something. But neither of these directly impact the bottom line of a company better than the account fee they collect from the most people possible.

And all of that is fine. As long as you're not interested in playing a game that's on the tip of everyone's tongue, great! Seriously, this genre has dozens of titles players perpetually by people who couldn't give a rat's ass about any of the other games. But that's not the growth side. That's the core.

I don't see how anything you just said supports the sort of decisions that the likes of late-EQ or WAR, or even aTitD have consciously made to limit the amount of interaction between new players and veterans (even if they are friends).

That is what I'm criticising, and that is what the likes of EVE, PS, CoH actively avoid.

I blame the wrong insights being taken from the right experiences (kind of the problem with TV and movie sequels: hey, audiences rated are explosions highly so that means the next movie = more explosions!). You can have the best intentions and the skill to pull it off, but still be wrong.

This may not be the example you're thinking of so let me know if you got a better one. These are just the first two that occured to me:

Problem: Players want to advance their characters through PvP.

Wrong insight- Ok, let's let them level up via XP. Oh but wait, power curves are wonky in diku, so let's solve that problem by compartmentalizing players such that only players of certain levels can PvP. Oh but wait we want to ensure everyone has hte exact same opportunities all the time because that's how we're pushing the game. Ok, let's compartmentalize further to ensure only balanced brackets.

Result: Oops, a population that isn't reaching the critical mass we miscalculated as needing and therefore vast swaths of unused content.

Right insight- Ok, what does it mean to advance a character? Power and abilities. Oh, and power curves are wonky in diku. Ok, let's create a separate advancement track that doesn't interact with the diku XP PvE system and create a completely separate reward system that has just enough overlap with the PvE rewards that the vast majority of players can dabble in both. But let's ensure we focus first on the most important thing we know for sure the largest amount of our target markets want, and polish the hell out of that until it shines like no other.

Result: A game that blew through critical mass into ludicrous mass with so much money they've been able to since expand the game into the lateral realms desired, rather than trying to be too lateral right out of the gate.

Problem: RMT is driving the belief that the game economy is inflationary and that the value of traded goods are so high players need to turn to PlayerAuction.com, MySuperSale or eBay to buy the ingame currency because they cannot get enough of it fast enough through normal gameplay.

Wrong insight: Ok, let's remove coins altogether. Instead players will just trade goods for deconstruction. Oh, but wait, players figured out the common denominators anyway and created the same value chain anyway and well we screwed up a bunch of other things too including freakin chat so instead of a utopian panacea, we have a wasteland.

Right insight: BoP. The very best items need to be gained through normal game play. Oh, but let's also ensure that "normal" game play is not just the purview of those who play 30 hours a week because all that does is alienate the hundreds of thousands of other people that know their very lifestyle is between them and any sort of substantive character improvement.

lol
What is most odd about this is that for some reason I overlooked that the name of the game would be GESSO and just thought about it s core game play mechanic. I completely did not even realize the gay elf spirits part which would normally snickering like an idiot. "He said gay!"  :uhrr:

I wonder if you could make an IP based around the worst possible concept like this but do a solid game with it just to see how people react. The preview would show a bunch of gay elfs flying around taking over massive dinosaurs and huge robots so they can prepare for the most intense battle ever. Both sides stop for a moment and stare levelly at each other then the screen fades out and the words fade in.

"Don your tutu this December..."

Then you you know how after the preview should be over but they always throw in that last shocking moment for some reason. In this case you would see a gay elf with a chain gun firing while screaming as hes enveloped in a nuclear flames in a massive battlefield surrounded by his dead friends. Another nice touch would be that in the preview it can say something like "Choose your side!!" but when the game ships both sides are gay man elfs that look exactly the same.

Actually scratch that if I was going in guns blazing I would consider having the option to choose between races for character customization. You would have the option to play the game as a shark, aquaman, or a gay elf. You can give them tattoos and pick the color of the initial armor that gets replaced with some generic crap after the very first quest. This would also be cool because it would be the first MMOG where players can birth new characters by cybering. Gay Elfs can only have babies with sharks and sharks can only have babies with Aquaman. Id release it on consoles too.

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1hrRU0IQP80/R2k8S2FfKXI/AAAAAAAAASA/Zs0xq8pz4D8/s1600/ch931031.gif)

Hey shock value might get more sales!
Its a strategy nobody ever considers!

To me it's nothing more than a stopgap or bandaid fix for poor game design/mechanics that's just stuck around because 'that is the way it's been, that is the way it shall always be'.

It's the way it's been because a few hundred thousand people liked it before twelve more million people showed up to also like it  :awesome_for_real:

I don't want to harp on this one point, but really, anyone who's been around this genre long enough knows the why behind certain design decisions. These are not just fun cute little projects banged out in off-the-shelf tools. They're business enterprises first, play experiences second, games to be had within third. As such, everything is eventually a business decision of some type.

All that means is that an idea surviving contact with player's sense of enjoyment is more important, because it needs to do so for a much longer period of time, as a business model, than any other genre.

That's why I don't put value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games.

Sorry for the wall-o-quotes, but I wanted to respond to the 'Slayer griefing' derail. (no Slayerik clause....I got a laugh outta that , thx :)

In Eve, there is varying degrees of space security. 1.0 is instant help from Concord (town guards/police). In .9 the response is close to instant. In .5, the response is roughly 10 seconds now (I was nerfed!!!!). Once you enter 0.4 - 0.1  there are no Concord and only gate guns defend the innocents. As an additional penalty for doing what I do, the higher security you are in when you suicide gank them the more of a security status hit (once it gets too low I can't enter the highest security systems, starts at 1.0 and gets worse and worse until I am flashing red and attackable anywhere).
In 0.0 there are no penalties for 'piracy'

Yes, I use the perception that .5 safe is space, just because Concord is there and I kill idiots that carry 500 million isk in a 500,000 isk ship without taking any precautions in fitting their ship to defend itself (if only for 10 secs or warp core stabilizers so that I can't prevent them from warping). I kinda think of it as wearing around very expensive jewelry in a nightclub. Sure, there are bouncers and shit. But you still hear stories about athletes getting mugged for there cash and jewelry. If you have the money for diamond bling, get a bodyguard.

I understand people who might not want it in their game. Mostly, they are people that can't learn to play or bother learning game mechanics (not you Ingmar, just in general). I've heard suicide ganking talked about in noob corp channels quite a bit, so when you hear that do you not think 'hmmm I wonder what that is, maybe I should find out'. But they don't or they get careless or rushed. A little prevention or taking more time completely eliminates the risk of me. 100%.

For the record, I don't do it for the griefing...it is just very good money and something I can do at work. Scan ship....back to F13....Scan ship....Nile Online.....Scan Ship....talk on IM....Scan ship... OH NICE, he's got a billion ...he's gonna die!

Anyway, they have been nerfing it some but still allow it. If people had seen the sheer amount of shit I have had blown up in my kills and realized I am helping with inflation, they'd all thank me!  :drill: Or something.

It is that which makes Eve so great. You aren't safe, even if 99.9% of the time you are. There are 'evil' guys like me out there trying to scam you, gank you, bait you, and just plain kill you. There is a place for pirates in this world. And in the end we are all part of an incredible economy and some of us are involved in an even cooler massive political and social battleground in 0.0

Those are just rehashes of current games as you even said.  Nothing new.  Just different rule sets.

Who actually likes BoP ? I thought people just deal with it. Actually, its great for people that can catass so you can really show you earned your Tier 7 buttpiece. Other than that, why or how does it really help? Who gives a fuck about twinks? If you don't like them, don't make one. Gold farmers wouldn't be able to make any money off them, and it would also decrease the value of the old BoE shit (less money for goldfarmers).

Then again, I think loot should drop and you should have a massive bank where you can have a bunch of gear sets. Hey look, when I die I'm actually out of the fight for a minute. It mattered that I got owned. Throw in Mark and Recall and we got ourselves a game :) Whoops, I'm back to my UO pipedreams.

Bullshitt. (http://pixyland.org/)

I think the reality of it is that people want a single player game where they can play coop with friends or sometimes a random person from time to time.
Getting ganked is up there with forced grouping and other such basic taboos that prevent people from just being able to play the game.

One very strange comparison I recently made while talking about this topic was that if I had to have a subscription to play Oblivion and it had huge continents I can explore with tons of official patches, crafting, persistent auction house, updates, upgrades and expansions to the content with the ability to sometimes invite a friend or two to play with me I would be still playing that game right now.

I mean think about how much more attention MMOGs need from the developers themselves. When people buy a pay to play game they are buying the idea that if its not perfect right now it will be down the road. Or at the very least they will be adding all kinds of new stuff into the game overtime. While most single player RPGs such as fallout3 it very much has an inherent lack of depth you would need for the game to work as a MMOG and no real promise of constant updates or even just a willingness to patch and rebalance some things. Single player games completely lack very simple concepts MMOGs have yet MMOGs seem to be moving more toward being mostly single player games. I am willing to bet that a very large portion of all player bases just want a very in depth RPG and are not really as enamored by the idea that the world is persistent or even what that entails as you might think.

That's the second time I've seen you win the "thinks most like a developer" award.  The above post is also the reason this thread exists, it manages to be absolutely right while being totally wrong.  I'd be a lot more convinced that devs weren't try to bang square pegs into round holes if I didn't see bandaged hands everywhere.

EQ had 550k subs, WoW has what, twenty times that?  Why?  Because Blizzard did a better EQ.  If Blizzard picks AC1 or UO, does a similar makeover, removes the crap ideas, adds polish, they would get twenty times what those games had at peak, because there isn't a single piece of evidence to suggest otherwise.

Your post is a template to design the correct safe mmorpg, no wait they are called mmo's nowadays because having your character able to sit in a chair isn't deemed as important as it used to be.  "Don't reforge the shards of Narsil noob!  Andúril is BOP".

The flip side of not putting value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games is the unspoken fact that you will prejudge ideas that haven't so far been wildly successful.

I bet there are a lot of developers at SOE, Mythic, Blizzard etc who would totally love to buck the trend and make an awesome AC1 or the definitive take on 'EvE with swords'. Sadly the developers don't get to choose what kind of game they make. If it's going to be as good as WoW then you need to throw WoW scale cash around and the people who are in a position to set you up with that want to see precedent for success. No-one will help you innovate but they'll be lining up to bankroll your proven formula for success. At the moment the only proven formula for rampant success is 'Do what Blizzard did'.

and thus the stagnant pool we see today.

Exactly.

Even if you don't like the game, Eve is different than everything else out there.  Most people call Eve an internet spaceships pvp game, a griefer paradise, etc.  They're wrong.  Yes, non-consensual pvp is allowed in Eve, but that's only part of what you would expect to find in what Eve really is - a virtual universe.  In Eve, managing your risk, and finding the fun is up to you.

Setting your own goals and finding your own fun is something many gamers are simply incapable of doing.  A lot of people who try Eve are disappointed when they aren't led by the hand and told what they have to do to "level up" or how to become a success.  Most gamers want to be told what they have to do to "win the game".  In Eve you need to be capable of and willing to set your own goals and end game, and that's why I love the game, and also why it will probably never have a million+ subscribers.

Sure, there are constraints on what you can do, but Eve is by far and away the most open ended online gaming universe I know of.  You can take the obvious career pathes and mine, explore, pirate, run missions for the NPC's, trade, manufacture, conquer and claim space, etc, but beyond that a lot of very creative people have gone to the next level and created non-scam banks, mercenary services, for hire R&D services, trusted third party agent services, cemetery's  :-o, free trade zones, etc.  The trend of improving the playground by giving us the tools to make our own fun will continue next year with customizable ship building, and eventually with in station ambulation.

Yes, you can be a dick in Eve, and as you would expect there are consequences, risks, and ramifications for going down that road.  Slay suicide ganking afk haulers doesn't make him a dick in my eyes.  He preys on lazy people with more money than sense.  I applaud him for it.  The people afk hauling billions in cargo in high sec deserve the same thing that a drunk flashing thousands of dollars of bling and hundred dollar bills hanging out of his pockets gets - a life lesson.

Blizzard picked one of the big original three games and improved it.

This is going to sound more snarky than it really is...

But how does doing your job (as a coder, programmer, dev, whatever) correctly, acurately, and efficiently cost more money than writing a buggy piece of shit?  All the money in the world won't cover up sloppy work (a + where a - should be, typos in script, haphazardly placing NPCs in walls, lazyness(?), inattention to detail).  

Seems to me doing it right the first time costs less, not more.

Let's face it.  Nobody is innovating.  There's very few fresh faces.  You're all pretty much doing the same thing.

As someone whose livelyhood is essentially project management involved with multimillion dollar projects and logistics, throwing money at the issue is rarely the solution.  Effective, organized, and efficient work, however, is.

I hear you. More cash != more awesomeness. Assuming you have competent guys however as a baseline the more money you have the more of them you can hire so you can have better assets (as artists can spend more time on each one), more content (as you have more writers, level desigers etc). You can try more things for size as your dev team has wiggle room to shelve stuff that doesn't perform and come up with new stuff. You can have an awesome quality of staff with a small budget but you won't have a lot of them and they won't have as much time to do stuff with.

The more you have to spend the higher your chances are of finding awesomeness. It's still possible to encounter suck instead but you're giving your product a better shot at avoiding it if you assume all else is equal.

If money were the issue, Vanguard would be at 20 million subs by now.

Edit:  This comment really should be in my other post....

Unfortunately, it's only proven to work for one company.

And the suits are missing the important part of what Arthur said.  They can pick any successful title, and refine it til it glows.  It'll be a lot easier to win again UO or AC1 than WoW, because WoW is already EQ refined.  Trying to polish WoW gets a marginal gain at best, and since it already has its audience, the draw won't be as strong as giving players something different.  The sandboxers, the explorers, the people wanting stories though?  We're hungry.  Give us a EQ->WoW level of refinement and a whole new market is opened.

If the past couple years have shown us anything, it's that 'doing what Blizzard did' is a recipe for Epic Fail.

Only if you completely misunderstand what Blizzard did.  Which everyone does.

Most people copy ideas with out actually understanding why the ideas were successful in the first place. Its a very common phenomenon.

Um, they way I saw it was they took their rather large gaming audience and built and heavily tested a Diku MMO that was scalable for low end machines. They made up for the lack of cutting edge graphics with great artistic flavor and comedy. Did I mentioned they betaed the piss out of it? They improved most systems, and their big innovation was an "!"    So Blizzard had a large audience, a very solid infrastructure (from Battlenet), and a reputation for only putting out good games, when they were ready.

Then they started printing money.

Yeah and what happens when someone tries to compete.
They advertise to make it a DX10 or otherwise raise min specs

make a game that takes itself more seriously and refuses to dance
added combos and additional complexity to the core system to make it more competitive

But we already know this idea is so fun we don't need to do as much testing! WoW is our proof of concept so little details like RVR and  PVP change nothing about the successful formula! And look we improved on every other aspect about WoW. Higher system requirements, dance dance revolution combat system, and we offer much more hardcore PVP. Never mind all of the exaptations along the way. look not at the man behind the curtain!!

Money can hire talent and skill, but it can't guarantee it.

I was wondering about this. Who came up with that exclamation point as a quest marker? The earliest I remember was in Diablo 2, but I seem to recall seeing it earlier than that. Not counting the JRPGs that have mini-cinematics with a character going "!" and then running up to talk to you, like FF Mystic Quest.

What money does (or can do) is the ability to say "this isn't fun" and go back and fix it. I doubt that Blizzard's coders and artists are that much more skilled than Funcom's and Mythic's. Morhaime has said on more than one occasion that the secret to Blizzard's success is iteration. That costs money, and also requires the self-awareness to say that this beautiful system that I spent thousands of hours creating sucks donkey-balls. Requirement one is why most MMO's fail, and requirement two is why MMO's with "rockstar" developers are also destined to fail, no matter how much money they have.

Even Blizzard didn't forsee what they did. It was a surprise to everyone.

Only in the scope of their success. More below.


Err, except the evidence of the choice they made. Do you honestly thing Blizzard looked at EQ1 and said "we must make that because it hit 550k". Come on. They couldn't! At the time design decisions were being made (probably '99), there wasn't a preeminent model outside of maybe EQ1 and Lineage.

No. Instead they took what they FELT was right. And got it right. Oh, and they got China and some other Eastern countries right too, with the same premise. You think Vivendi just gave them a blank check to do whatever the hell they felt like. They made the most expensive MMO of all time on anything but a lark.
 
EQ1 just happened to get it right, at the time. Blizzard said to themselves then what everyone else has said since: certain shit just works, so don't screw with it if you want to have a better chance at a solid success.

Then polish it, market the hell out of it, get it into as many markets as possible, and to ensure we balance the retention/attrition right, make the game easier over time. Oh, and continue to market it, continue to polish it, continue to add shit that other developers wrongly prioritize as launch features, etc etc etc.

Glad I was transparent about saying exactly what I meant :-)

I'm not saying that is right or wrong or even how I personally think. What I was (and am) saying though is that this is why things happen the way they do. I can't remember the other thread in which I mentioned this exact same thing, but basically it all comes down to established marketplaces. These are the rules for MMOs now. That's it.

If you want to change them, you've got to create a new market, or find a market that is no longer being served by the current marketplace. Ah, now I remember, it was the PvP thread. You can create new opportunities in uncontested marketplaces such that eventually you can grow to take over the established one.

You just need to be right. And in all things from design to development to marketing to publishing.

Edit: clarity and temporal adjustment

I wish someone would take a chance on another AAA 2-D isometric MMO.  You can do so much more with games like that, in terms of customization, non-combat careers, etc.   

Would be a hard sell as AAA though, given the state of the industry- many people would balk at paying 15$ a month for a "flash game" or "another Runescape."

So charge $5.

The $15 price point drives me nuts.  I'm currently playing the ATiTD beta.  Love the game.  Played in the first beta and first telling.  Could spend 20 hours a week on it.  But I'm not going to pay $15 a month for a game that unpolished.  If it was $10, I'd think about it.

'We must make a better EQ' is *exactly* what they said.

Everything else in the 2004 generation took some level of risk and tried to innovate in some way beyond EQ (hell, there are MMOGs from before 2004 with more developed mechanics). WoW took a specific decision to spend the design and management effort making EQ shinier, funnier, and more accessible.

I have no clue why Blizzard picked EQ1, I also have no clue what subs EQ had when they made the decision, that's why I didn't say anything about Blizzard in terms of them being aware of 550k subs, reread what I wrote.  I said WoW is about twenty times more popular than EQ was at peak.  I then said if Blizzard made a new UO or AC1 they would get twenty times what those games had at peak, there's zero reason to think otherwise.

The reason I'm talking about Blizzard making a new UO or AC1 is to remove the whole, "nameless dev company won't do what Blizzard did" bit from the game making equation, as it's been talked to death.

As for your other comments, I'm just seeing a circular argument based on what's been successful so far.  That doesn't make you wrong, in fact the state of play since 2004 shows you are probably right.

Instead of talking about what Blizzard did right, it's maybe better to mention what they didn't do. 

They didn't enter the market with similar game-play to a game that had already crossed over into the mainstream, a game that holds fastest selling pc game titles for it's expansions.  A game that despite being 4 years old still quite often appears in the top ten, a game that's had it's own south park episode, a game with tv adverts by Ozzy.  A game that's as near perfect as can be at providing the game play it set to provide.  But mostly, they didn't enter the market with an inferior version of another game that had been made by possibly the most famous development house going.

I'm not so sure that Blizz copied EQ very much. They'd already put out two graphical roguelikes, and knew the dungeon stomping monster bashing thing by then.
One could say they copied AC or DAoC jsut as much. (Or as little) But the only thing they seem to have directly copied from EQ is the raiding paradigm.

Well there's the whole grouping online, tank healer dps thing.  DAoC I can see them copying from, battle grounds, realms etc, but DAoC was just a copy of EQ with added PVP.  I'm having a hard time thinking of anything you could consider a massive leap forward in DAoC compared to EQ.  The realms are just forced guilds giving you opponents for PVP.  Capturing forts, well it's a fantasy game, capturing castles isn't that unusual.  You could say cutting off cross realm communication, but I'm still not convinced that wasn't discovered by accident just by the natural desire to cut down on customer service support costs.  I must be missing it, but I don't see much copied from AC to WoW.

The monster bashing leveling up schtick. It wasn't exclusive to EQ.

Yeah, D&D.

D&D doesn't have tanks healers and dee pee ess.

But we can dare to dream right?

Absolutely not.

Eve is full looting. The only difference is that when you try and pick something up, you only get half of what was there. The difference between no loot and full loot is always based on what the killed player keeps.

And in Eve, the killed player keeps nothing.

Maybe if you related that to ship insurance you would have a point


Other way around. You are contributing to inflation. Less stuff with the same amount of money creates inflation. Less money with the same amount of stuff creates deflation.

So every time you blow someone up, you make stuff more expensive. Thanks a lot... jerk :awesome_for_real:

Segue 1: The Economy

The one thing that Eve got got right about the Economy in Eve is for it to be heavily managed. Hopefully their [strike]retard[/strike] economist figures this out before he suggest things that completely ruin the game, and the Eve devs, not having a clue what they are doing otherwise, follow along. I say this because while the Eve devs seem to understand that these are isk and item faucets and sinks, they don't seem to understand is that the reason it works to regulate prices is because there are isk sinks that are item faucets and item sinks are isk faucets.

The trick is to model the economy of your game as a domestic economy for players and foreign economies for NPCs. In EvE, the NPC's buy and sell things that can convert into the building blocks of items in eve. If this did not exist, Even would have hyper inflated or deflated ages ago. The reason for this is simple. There is an ever increasing amount of stuff and money coming into the system. Anyone who wants to make real money via RMT, will concentrate on producing the most amount of currency that they can then sell. This pushes prices up.

The number one defense against this is to have some automatic mechanism outside of the game that lets players trade their money for stuff and their stuff for money. This is your NPCs, your foreign economies. The brilliant thing about MMOs though is that you don't have to give a shit about what happens in foreign economies. In the real world, beggar thy neighbors policies have detrimental effects because those economic problems cascade across all economies. In the virtual world you can do whatever the hell you feel like because the developers hold supreme power over NPCs and no one cares how they feel. Another comparison would be as if NPCs were the federal reserve, except instead of trading treasury bonds for money and money for treasury bonds it can will stuff into existence and hand it out.

This holds prices stable and protects against inflation and deflation. It is a necessary component of any MMO that expects to have an economy and stable prices over its lifetime. If everything that players use is player created, then at some point, your economy is going to collapse.

Segue 2: Dynamic Content

Dynamic content Ala Oblivions AI style would be great in an MMO if it could handle it. I am not sure that any MMO could really handle it. It for instance would be a great addition to EvE, or any EvE similar MMO. The issue with having the NPC's interact with players can easily be solved by abstracting all their interactions. EvE would be a perfect setting for this and even has the market infrastructure already built to deal with it.

For a fantasy MMO you could have all these interactions take place "inside stores" and have players when they go to stores, get a store front rather than directly interacting with the NPCs. Otherwise you run into the canned responses which everyone had problems with. Which is pretty much how eve does it. The NPCs would spawn spaceships why fly to station to station/belts/do what they need to do/etc. And any interaction would occur via the standard methods of market/contract interaction within stations.


Toggles are the answer to that. "Buff others" can be solved by simply creating a toggle as soon as applied so that you can toggle it on another. You still have to balance activation costs and such turn them into a constant cost of some sort. But that is the way to do it. If it was fire and forget you would end up with a lot of problems.


It does, has always, and will always. Tanks, healers, and DPS are just conventions for the defining terms of combat. Even if you had something that didn't use hit points you would have the same conventions.

You should cut down on the crack.

 :headscratch:

D&D practically defined the holy trinity. A balanced party had at least one cleric (healer), one fighter (tank) and a mage (glass cannon).

Did they define the word Tank?  I'm pretty sure even in the MUDs I played, you had a warrior or a paladin in the group to "tank" but it was not refered to as a tank.  Didn't hear that term until I got into graphical MMOGs.

They didn't call it a tank in the TSR books but it was used in the PnP world well before CRPGs used it. I still remember a non-TSR book back in the late 70s early 80s (I really wish I remember which book it was) that had a pictorial representation of what the different levels of AC meant and -10 AC was a guy sitting in a tank.

I am pretty sure it doesn't matter. A tank, by any other name, would absorb as much damage. The distinction might be interesting as a matter of lexicology but not as a matter of game design.

A balanced party was one that could keep it's members up in fights, and deal with encounters in a variety of ways which included killing things, as well as solving problems through non-violent means. Fighters weren't known for their exceptional Bugbear aggro holding skills, mages could do alot of things besides nuking and rouges were flexible in their utility to the party. MMOs do not have any of this.

We're retconning the trinity into D&D these days. People look back and think, "Of course fighters were tanks and rogues were DPS!" But they weren't before WoW. If a fighter tried to draw aggro, they were penalized xp because they were acting like a retard, because nobody wants to get hit. And fighters did more damage in melee than thieves ever could. Thieves were skill monkeys, there to pick locks and disarm traps and steal crap from the rest of the party while pretending to be a priest or something.

Then WoW comes along, and Wizards of the Coast turns fighters into tanks, creates rogues to do melee damage, and removes thieves from the game. And we all pretend that's the way it's always been, for some weird reason.

Thank you.

I'm not really bothered, I commented on D&D with regard to monster bashing and levelling up.  But if you are thanking Slyfeind as if he's ended the discussion, I dunno I reckon we could get another two pages out of this.

Assassins, back stab and all that.  Also Rogue's weren't in 1st edition were they (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_class_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons))?

You know that I rewind my brain a bit, in SojournMUD and other games if you had -100 AC you would get the phrase "You have more armor than an M1A1 Tank!" or something similar to that, in your attribute sheet.

Which is irrelevant. "Aggro" is a mechanic that the game uses to simulate the rational response of a DM(well, kinda its actually a mechanic to direct enemy attacks, something a DM would typically do via the human decision making process). MMO's do not care about "utility" and if you're talking about status effects, then I am fairly sure that most fantasy MMO's have those in various fashions. What specific class performs the role is more or less irrelevant, what matters is that the role has existed and continues to exist.

Oh easily.


Backstab sucked. The DM could always find an excuse to not let it happen, and much complaining ensued. When thieves were replaced by rogues, WotC let rogues use the thief's backstab ability, but from anywhere at any time. It became the "sneak attack."

And you are retconning the trinity into WoW.

So WoW seems to have taken the lion's share of gameplay ideas from Diablo 2. Talent specs, quests, etc. The only thing I can point to in WoW that Blizz expicitly copied from EQ and no other source is raiding and agro management.

How is it irrelevant? It simulates what someone somewhere along the line interpreted as the 'rational response' and we've been stuck with it ever since. Not only that, but it simulates it badly. Furthermore, you're missing the crux of the argument; it's not about whether the mechanics of a fight in D&D translate (however poorly) into MMOs - it's about the fact that D&D plays completely differently to any MMO, and group mechanics in MMOs being based on what the group mechanics of D&D supposedly were, is complete and utter bullshit. This includes the roles of characters within any given party. The role of a fighter in one is different from another, and yet again the third. A Tank is a Tank in any MMO.

This is exactly right. In MMOs, you are the specific role you play in a group encounter. Later on you had additional abilities grafted on your template to be able to solo.

I used my example, and mentioned the timing, for a specific reason.

Blizzard didn't look at EQ1 then and say "this is the easiest thing to pull off so we'll just copy that". They looked at that game model (iterated in other forms too) and at AC1 and at UO and said that entire game system was superior to attract players. They basically used their expertise as gamers to see what model would work best for the genre.

Ya know, like with Diablo and Warcraft.

There is no arguing that lots of people like this kind of game, given the state of the genre until WoW launched. Blizzard just did best what most other developers kept trying to do.

I contend that the only way WoW would be any different from today is if the entire market for subscription-based AAA MMOs that existed before, then, and now preferred some very different type of game.

Yea. This drives right back to what you and others have been saying (and been saying before too). The success of WoW has not evolved the game play side of the genre. It's just defined the rules for playing the game the way Blizzard plays it. You want to fight them at their own game you need more than a good IP and a few million bucks. That's the very essence of established marketplace, like Windows in the 90s, IBM in the 70s, other big ass companies. You don't have what it takes? Changes the rules. Find out who's not being served and go after that audience.

But, be right. If you want a killer game, don't rely on uber hardcore PvPers for example. Competitive gamers have plenty of options. People who want to compete in time-based stat-adjustment skill-qualified persistent world ownership, well, that's just not considered a very big market.

lol wut?

How well it simulates it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it does. You cannot have an AI that is going to assess the situation like a DM would and so, instead of that, you have "aggro". The function exists in both DnD and in the MMO, even if the execution is different and imperfect.

In the end, you're missing the point entirely.

But first off, lets get some thing straight.

1. The "role of a fighter" is irrelevant. You could have 3 fighters and one could heal, one could dpr, and one could soak damage and you would still have the holy trinity.

2. In DnD, until 3e. Every single fighter was the same as every other fighter. The idea that "the role of a fighter in one is different from another, and yet again in the third" is fundamentally ignorant of the history of every edition of DnD that has ever been created.  Until 3e it was impossible to make a fighter different than another except by how strong they were and how many hit points they had. In 3e, their role across their many options did not really change, they had a lot of hit points and heavy armor, and sometimes they could do DPR, and that was it. Sometimes you called your fighters barbarians and gave them more hit points and some DR instead of AC.

3. A tank is a tank in any MMO and a tank is a tank in any edition of DnD. They all operate, fundamentally the same. They are the guy who it is intended to go in and get hurt instead of the other people in your party. How they operate is irrelevant, but they are always present. DnD has always been a tactical wargame based RPG, which is what the core of our fantasy MMOs are. You kill monsters, get XP and loot, then go to some other monsters, kill them, get their xp and loot. The game part of it is organizing the party to defeat the monsters and take their stuff. Any roleplaying you do is not a core part of the game.

Another possible way to say that is that the roleplaying is just the mechanic by which you get to the next set of monsters to kill in DnD and in an MMO is "/lfg i have a big internet penis".

The gameplay as a function of that holy trinity, has not changed. Now, i suppose you could argue that the holy trinity came from something else. Which is entirely possible. But i don't really know whether or not its true.

And now back to your regularly scheduled: Why you're missing the point

You're missing the point because all of that stuff that you're describing isn't the game. Games are, essentially, a series of choices which have a set payout[known or unknown]. You do better at the game by achieving a higher payout. The stuff that isn't fighting in DnD has no payout. Its neutral, its not a game. That isn't to say its not bad or its not fun, but its not actually part of the experience that we can call a game. "Game" has a very specific meaning here because the instances that fall into its description allow designers to cater and craft the choices and payoffs to produce very specific outcomes. Good or bad. WoW is giving us the same initial choices for the game as we had in DnD. You can play as the tank, the healer or the damage dealer. Its the first rung on the branching decision tree. It was the same first rung on your branching decision tree in DnD as well. And the optimal play choice between a number of different players has at least one of each. It was the same in DnD as well. That is what is relevant to the comment

Bollocks.  You were doing it wrong.  Your loss.

This conversation has been had before.  Search the pen and paper forum for 'D&D holy trinity'.  People who call the fighter a 'tank' pre-4E are mistaken.

I'm getting the sense (maybe wrongly) that you don't really believe it would be wise for Blizzard to make an improved UO or an improved AC1.  As it's very unlikely to happen anyway, I'm just going to let this go with one final comment.  If the model they picked for WoW was the right one (I'm by no means suggesting it wasn't), then if they pick the same model for their next mmorpg, they have two similar models in direction competition.  The only way they can avoid that, if they want to avoid it, is to pick a different model.

Wizardry.  Their manuals had all kinds of wonderfully silly pictures.

Was it? Hmm I could've sworn it was a PnP book but okay. I remember seeing it at a friend's house and he had a PET, not an Apple ][.

Edit: yup my memory is failing me, manual here:

http://www.geocities.com/wizardrygame/pages/w1.html

Regarding the Holy Trinity, I shall quote myself from a year ago:

Then the conclusion you came to was wrong regarding both the existence of tanks pre 4e and as the nature of roleplaying. Also, I am not "doing it wrong". That is the best way to describe roleplaying as a function of the game.

I suppose its important here to note that "a game" is different than "fun". Fun is a state of mind that occurs for any various reasons. "A game" is a set of choices with payoffs that the player attempts to maximize.(or beat the other guy)

Roleplaying is not a set of choices with payoffs that the player attempts to maximize. Such, it is not a game. And if its not a game, then it can't very well be "the game", since the game has to at least be a game. If you don't like that, well, too bad, you're wrong. Doesn't make it not fun or not integral to the experience. But it does mean its not a game.[Note: it can have an effect on the meta-game, but the meta-game is not the game and is pretty well defined as such]

And if its not a game, then using it disprove the similarities between two games is futile, as its irrelevant to the question.

Sorry for the slight tangent here, but I know what I want from an MMO:  the polish and structure of WoW, but applied to a different setting.  The quests, the (current) lack of bugs, and how accessible and easy WoW plays have become somewhat of a standard for me, but their storyline, lore, and universe have gotten somewhat stale.  I'd like some sci-fi (and not neccessarily Star Wars), for example.

A dictionary could be helpful here, and they are in long supply.

It's weird.  I'm instinctively compelled to argue with you as if your made-up definitions had any objective merit and as if there were some sort of payoff involved in trying to debate Yet Another Internet Autodidact.  And yet somehow along the long road of stupid Internet flamery I have learned wisdom.  So, I abstain and bless you.  Go forth and be wrong.

I am not using the layman's definition of game. The layman's definition is useless in defining the systems that people are interacting with and within.

Eve isn't full looting. Full looting means you lose 100% of your belongings to the person that killed you. Some of that shit gets blown up, so at least you didn't lose EVERYTHING to that asshole who killed you.

You may think that this is a semantics issue, but it really isn't. In UO I was killing you for a tricorn hat. If you were wearing it, it was a 100% drop. I got to see how you arranged you reagent bag. I got to see what clothing you were wearing under your armor and robe. I got to see how many trapped pouches you had. I got an item that would allow me to teleport to your house. It doesn't get any more personal. I think this personal and intimate relationship killed the idea of full looting for most people.

In Eve you're just table data. So am I. So is everyone else.

I was saying that is why I think Blizzard didn't make an improved UO or AC1. They looked at the type of game they thought the most players would enjoy the most. And really, it's not the fact that it was EQ1 but rather the provable diku/class/DnD model altogether (UO is not DnD). It drives input and output, provides some decision-making, is perfect to stroke the greed and narcissism all gamers have to a degree and is relatively easy to expand upon.

This is the problem. We've talked about this before too, right around the 5mil subscriber mark in fact, because even then it was going to be a problem for them :-) I've since said that the only people who might be able to dethrone WoW are Blizzard themselves with SC MMO or Diablo MMO (or both eventually). They themselves may need to create that uncontested marketplace with blue ocean thinking because of their own success. Or they may do what SOE thought EQ2 was going to do to EQ1: Create such a compelling new experience you can have an orderly transition from the first to the second.

My personal hope is a MMOFPS with the three distrinct SC factions having actual different playstyles (not like the huge difference between playing a Tauren Druid and a Night Elf Druid). but I suspect it'll be something different yet again. Unless SC2 does huge business in the U.S. to reignite the franchise and b.net activity here, a SC MMO could be something very specific for the hugely success Korean market in which the first SC1 is still so popular.

Ok, i get it. You don't know what roleplaying games are. Gotcha.

Naw, dude.

You just didn't realize that he's not using the LAYMAN's definition.

He's totally right because he's using a different definition of the word!!

Because regular definitions are useless and and and...where's that damn green button?

I think the most likely thing to happen is that they just switch to a Station Pass type program, where your $15 monthy gives you access to all of their MMO's.

Two men get into a conversation about basketball, one of them doesn't know much, and so asks for a brief history of how the game evolved. The other man replies "We'll first they wore no uniforms, then they wore singlets, then they wore short shorts and now they were baggy shorts" and the other guy says "What that doesn't tell me anything about how the game has changed!"

You're the guy talking about what kind of shorts people wear as if it makes a difference to the underlying design. I might just as well say that DnD didn't start the holy trinity because it didn't have minotaurs as player characters and you can totally play a Minotaur in WoW. Its irrelevant to the mechanical operation of the game. The operation of the game, is the game.

I love semantic arguments. Was a tank character who tanked before they were called tanks actually a tank?  :why_so_serious:

Seriously, fighter / cleric / mage has been the core trinity for a long time, even if we now call them tank / healer / DPS. That MMO players call them something different from p'n'pers doesn't take away from the fact that the roles are functionally the same.

The trinity enforced socialisation and community.  It served a purpose other than enabling go to a, kill b, and loot c as part of an achievement grind.

Market demographics (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21430) has to have had an impact in determining the current crop of fails.  Maybe it's because grumpy old men bitch more, or maybe its because they have less time to spend, and don't like to see it pissed away paying for finished product but receiving theory.

If Chewbacca is a wookie that lives on Endor then it must be a game.

It compelled socialization and community because it enabled people to go to a, kill b and loot c, whether because the GM told them to or because some NPC said so.

This thread is heading in a dangerous direction.   :drill:

Yeah, straight into a poopsock.

Should I bring my tank or my healer?

How is the quality of WOTLK falling, in your opinion?

When text is in green, it is meant to be taken as sarcasm.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v77/m0shm4n/sarchasm.jpg)

It compelled socialization and community because it enabled people to go to a, kill b and loot c, whether because Hitler them to or because some Jews said so?

Sorry about the miscommunication.  I was curious because it just seems exactly the same so far and I haven't been able to really form an opinion on it.

WoW doesn't make sweeping changes as much as a million micro ones that in aggregate feel huge (or huge to those whose class was affected). WotLK does have some notably new features though including phasing and more cutscenes (Wrathgate specifically and the preceding and succeeding quests and narrative). YMMV on whether those are quantum leaps or babysteps. Most WoW feature-level discussions happen in the WoW sub-forum (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?board=26.0).

D&D had a "trinity" of sorts, but I think the argument is that fighters were never designed to take damage and taunt and, well, TANK. Just as thieves were never designed to do Melee Dippiyes. Fighters were designed to fight, thieves were designed to steal shit, and now everybody thinks that fighters always had the Taunt ability and there were agro meters that DMs kept track of on a chart, and thieves had Slice-n-Dice, Garrotte, and levelled up their poisoning skills.

Someone show me the Taunt ability and agro meters and Slice-n-Dice in the old boxed set of D&D and I will eat crow. I will admit right now that I haven't looked at the old D&D rules in years. Those just might be in there, and my memory may be failing me in my old age. But somehow, I doubt it.

Fighters put themselves on the front line and tried to protect squishies because their low AC meant they almost never got hit and their 10 sided hit die meant they could take it on the chin when they did. While the fighter was meleeing and getting in the monster's face, the mage would try and keep some range so that the monster couldn't casually reach out and tear them in half.

No taunt skill, no aggro table just positioning and playing to your strengths. A party that let the bad guys get to the mage routinely was a party that had a standing order with the jewellers for 5k GP of diamonds on a regular basis. I'd still say that fighters were tanks even though they could lay down melee DPS (which was still way less than a wizard was throwing out) and the system didn't have a taunt mechanic.

Nope.  pre-4th D&D did not subscribe to the notion that everyone had to be equally good in combat.  Fighters (and fighteresques - Paladins, Rangers, and Barbarians) were the best at combat, until Magenuking levels.  That means they were the best at doing damage and the best at taking damage.  Even up in the mage's Power Word: Kill levels, fighters were generally one-shotting everything and getting multiple attacks per round.  Pre-3rd, very few players used graph paper and tactical positioning was mostly handwaving.  Mages did not stay alive because the figher 'tanked'.  They stayed alive because they had Sleep, Mirror Image, and eventually a whole host of 'you die' spells.  It was possible and perfectly normal to run parties of 6 Mages, or 5 Fighters, or 2 Barbarians and a Halfling Illusionist.  There was no Holy Trinity.

Edit:  I should add, it was perfectly normal to run all kinds of party configurations PLUS A CLERIC.  The D&D Holy Trinity was Cure Light Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds, and Heal.

1st edition D&D did have a Taunt ability... of course, that was a level 1 Magic-User spell from Unearthed Arcana  :why_so_serious:

If you're old school, you know that there wasn't really a holy trinity. You had:

The guy who was as boring in real life as he was in game, so always played a Fighter.
The guy who wanted to be Gandalf, so always played a Magic-User.
The guy who wanted to steal everything with impunity, so always played a Thief.
The guy who always wanted to play something weird, who constantly changed his character to the latest overpowered character class in Dragon Magazine.

So almost always the DM would shower healing potions, resurrection scrolls, and other magic items so the party could heal themselves. Before 3.0 I think I saw 2 instances of where someone willingly played a Cleric.

that's the best thing I've read today and possibly the best synopsis of D&D I've ever read (and I spent years playing).  Well struck. 

That one made me laugh out loud.  I remember being like 14 when the first Paladin issue came out in Dragon magazine. 

Great stuff Montague.

"A Plethora of Paladins" was one that sticks out. This was the infamous article that had a paladin for every alignment. We had a guy that picked the Illrigger (lawful evil) and he ended up with an ancient blue dragon as a follower  :ye_gods:. Needless to say, the campaign became clownshoes shortly thereafter.

This pretty much sums it all up for me.  It is exactly the way I feel about WAR, and if I can use my magic pixie dust to apply it to games that pre-date WoW I would apply it to Shadowbane as well.

I am not sure why these things need to exist [note: Backstab] for there to be an apt comparison. The system was set up so that the same choices needed to be made for the same reason. That WoW had different mechanics is like saying that their mezzers(is that the right term now?) aren't messers because DnD wizards had web and fireball and WoW mezzers don't have web and fireball.

The trinity isn't about how exactly you got there its the fact that they were set up so that player would, ideally, make those same choices. You wanted the healer, the tank, and the damage dealer in 1e from the start. I can't think of anything else where this came together before hand. That is the trinity. It doesn't matter what the class names are, it doesn't matter the exact mechanics used to get there.


1. This is untrue. Pre-4th edition was just less balanced. The PHBs and DMG's of all these editions specifically make reference to balancing your party.

2. The idea that "fighters were the best at combat until Magenuking levels" is just silly. At low levels they were only slightly less prone to the random die roll death and they had much fewer abilities to protect themselves. I am not sure about 1e and 2e anymore, but in 3e around level 3-5 wizards, sorcerers, clerics, and druids take over and never look back. The ability to deal RAW damage in that edition was more or less unneeded when you had access to save or lose abilities. IIRC, this was much different in 3e rather than 2e or 1e where the trinity was more enforced and alpha classes existed less. But we are making the argument that the trinity came from DnD rather than 3e.


This would be a choice not factored into the game, since 1e has always had its roots in wargaming and tokens and tactical positioning was always suggested, even if you did not play your game in that manner.

E.G. Gary Gygax would disagree with your assesment

http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/setpages/chainmail.html


DnD pretty much started out as a fantasy wargame with levels and roleplaying tacked on.

I'm not sure why everyone is piling on Goumindong when what he is saying is essentially correct.  The bit "Someone show me the Taunt ability and agro meters and Slice-n-Dice in the old boxed set of D&D and I will eat crow." is especially silly. 

Are we to deny that Fighters in D&D were meant to engage in melee combat and had better armor and hit points in order to absorb the higher amounts of damage?   Or that healing was NOT the property delegated to a limited set of classes?   

Seriously, trying to argue that D&D was more about roleplaying and less about combat?
 

Well, that depended entirely on your group and your DM. That's the joy and pain of PNP.

I'm sure some of us did it quite differently. Yeah, D&D pretty much always encouraged you to have a neat little 4-person party with a fighter, a cleric, a mage, a rogue. But lots of us didn't do that. Now, you didn't usually see a level one mage soloing because 1d4 doesn't really support that. But you could if you wanted to and your DM agreed. Your party could be anything. I can't be the only one who ran with a bizarro group even back in 2nd ed. Even back then we had people turning the Monstrous Manual into the Player's Handbook when it came to race and ability selection.

tldr: A detached clinical look at the basic tenets of D&D would support the origin of tank, healer, dps. But that sure as fuck isn't how I played it.

Origin, sure. But it wasn't until 3rd edition that skill-monkey crappy-damage thieves were replaced by DippyYessing rogues, and fighters started wanting to be hurt. 1st and 2nd ed D&D led to MUDs where tanks and DPS started. Tanks and DPS led to 3rd and 4th ed D&D.

A balanced party helped cover all the possible situations they might encounter.  It was never required, and almost no group I ran with had one.  Usually we had a band of misfits and we always managed.  The game was, ideally about having fun playing in a fantasy realm and not about making sure you dotted every 't' and crossed every 'i' in balancing your party.

That was EQ, and that was the origin of the term, "Holy Trinity".  Why?  Because it wasn't needed until then.

That's the argument y'all are dancing around.  Of course having one of everything makes the most balanced party.  Duh.  Riddle me this, Batman:  When was it required, and at the expense of fun?

It was, of course, only required once a computer had to make the fucking call instead of a human. (GOOD) DMs adjust the campaign to the players. MMOs make the players adjust to the campaign. For the computer, we have to fit in neatly balanced categories. The DM doesn't care if I want to be a Thri-Kreen Diviner. The MMO can't even begin to allow that kind of stuff, or it turns into Vanguard.

It's the same reason why we don't get any of the fun utility spells. Or truly nifty wondrous items. Because while it can handle the number-crunching a lot better, the fucking MMOcomputer can't respond on the fly to your party's decision to join the BBEG instead of fighting her.

Yes, I know, Holy Rhetorical Answer. But I'm grumpy and bored, and venting is fun. Now for a cigarette ^^

Did clerics even have ranged healing?  If I recall it was all touch, and generally it wasn't a good idea to get in touching distance of the guy swinging his sword about (or the guy who was trying to kill him, who would love to swing at you too).

Healing was mostly done after the fact.  The only threat meter was  the whim of the DM.  (Oh sure, he had a logic on his side, but you knew he really just felt like it.)  Balanced parties rarely happened.  This is why you had a DM screen, so the DM could lie about the die rolls so the party didn't die 30 minutes into the session.  And generally, there was no running back to your corpse to rez.

You guys really glamorize D&D.  THIS (http://www.hoodyhoo.com/2008/03/24/knights-of-the-dinner-table-episode-1/) is a lot more like the way I remember it.  Lots of nerd fights, control freaks, and backstabbing.

No problem.  If it takes a clue-by-four +5 for someone to get it, I don't mind rhetorical answers emphasizing the point.

Clerics did not have ranged healing until 3rd edition, correct. (Discounting any splat book voodoo that I dont remember). Clerics also wore plate armor and shields, "tanked" almost as well as a fighter and could bring the heat if they felt like it and prayed for the right spells.

Lantyssa has it right. Tanking, healing, and dealing damage were otherwise known as common sense when playing D&D. The notion that you needed "A TANK", "A HEALER" and "DAMAGE DEALERS" is a MUD/Everquest invention.

I'm pretty sure you needed reasonably balanced parties in most DnD single player games, Pools of Radiance, Baldurs Gate etc.  There was always the concept that you needed a variety of roles. 

The taunting mechanic really is just to compensate for the fact that there isn't any collision detection in most MMO's whereas party placement/formation was a big tactical component of old party based computer games and DnD combat.  Fights are also larger on a scale of the numbers, you generally wouldn't have too many fights that were too healing intensive in a tabletop campaign (At least I don't remember planning too many that way) recovery was an after fight thing, if someone got near death it was a 'oh shit' moment and heals weren't just spammed out of hand.

It is mainly that because the numbers are larger they exagerate the roles of Tank Healer and DPS, and whilst there is some special tactics especially for boss fights, its the numbers which are the main way of making creatures 'harder' rather than all the theatrical elements you could use in a tabletop battle, as well as the fact that fights were long enought simply because of all the time people took to decide what they wanted to do, roll iniative and all that stuff which isn't present in MMO's.  You also fight less in tabletop DnD, a whole session might only have a few well done battles rather than the constant pulling and respawning MMO environment.  So when you increase the amount of combat (even though DnD and most roleplaying rulesets are combat simulators, you don't really need a lot of rules for the rest of the roleplaying aspects), increase the scale and focus of the numbers you make much more visible the roles that where always there.

This.

I think most people know tabletopping is only ever good with close friends that follow the 'don't be a douche' homerules and respect each other.  I played for years with a close group and it was almost always just fun.  When I went to Uni and and joined some groups there yeah, I saw the other side.  It was less the fights and more them using the game as an outlet for all their pent-up nerd sexual frustrations that made me really hate the idea of ever playing with strangers again.

From all that I can gather, DnD laid the obvious framework for the so-called "holy trinity", without necessating (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS303US304&q=necessating&btnG=Search) it. Similar to the way in which the musical slave traditions led to Jazz, so too did the notions of "I'm in the monster's face and you shouldn't be" led to the archtypes of tank, ranged etc. The earlier roots clearly inspired it, and are obviously very similar to it- but they are not the same.

Whether you thought of it that way while playing on the tabletop or Baldur's Gate was really entirely up to you and your group wasn't it? Let's put it to rest, eh?

That pretty much describes this whole thread.

Amirite? High-five!

I would, but my rogue is currently pickpocketing your paladin's magical items.

We're on page 8. I'm still waiting for someone to name a mmog that might displace WoW, EVE, CoH, or PS. Just saying.

You're the only person that plays PlanetSide.  PlanetSide was displaced by Battlefield 1942, which is impressive given that Battlefield came out a year earlier.

As far as displacing WoW, about eleventy hundred billion dollars have been wasted trying to climb that mountain in the last 5 years.  Anyone who could confidently and correctly name a game that could displace it is instantly eligible for 50 million in startup cash.

Halo Online. As in massivley multiplayer FPS with co-op and versus. Well, I don't think it would displace WoW, but I bet it could break the multi-million sub barrier.
I'll bet fake money that they haven't abandoned the concept.

Said before, saying again: Starcraft MMO.

Second place chance: Halo MMO, but only if it's on the Xbox 360 as well as PC.

Third place chance: Call of Duty MMO. But only because in 2007 I thought COD5 was going to be MMO. They were so damned close.

• 2004-2008 rules: Gamer-centric IP, gamer-respective autonomous developer, hands-off publisher, $75mil minimum, global launch (not just U.S. and some random EU country).
• 2008 rules addendum: wait until 2010 when the economy rebounds before pitching to VC. You guys though 2008 was a dead year for MMOs...
  
• 2012 rules future-dendum: browser based, even if it's thinclient full screen but lightweight graphics. Because the rest of us will be married off or parents so they need to hit the Gen Net Web 3.0 attention-deficit mtx crowd.

Maybe.

No and no. You only have to look at the concurrency numbers for the most popular online shooters to realize that audience is much much MUCH smaller than the one for MMORPGs. E.g. if you add up the peak concurrency numbers for Counter-Strike (both versions) that's still more than an order of magnitude smaller than the PCU for WoW.

Bet if you looked at the concurrency whatevers back in 2004 for RTS games and Warcraft in particular, they would have given absolutely no indication of the subscription numbers WoW would/has got.

Doesn't matter, unless Darniaq was actually talking about doing a non-FPS Halo/CoD MMORPG.

Nah, I was talking about an MMOFPS for Halo or Call of Duty. Only ever just for the  :popcorn: effect would I recommend a Halo MMORPG ;-) So you're right to point out the concurrency numbers.

But then I need to wonder about what those numbers were for Warcraft III when WoW was concepted. And yes, while even Blizzard was surprised by their success, they did still launched with more servers than EQ1 had at its peak, and that just in the U.S. I assume they took a measure of their entire Battle.net server instead of just the Warcraft crowd, but without the numbers to go by I don't know how much they padded it or were taking a shot in the dark.

At the same time, the reason I think Halo and CoD is because those brands have a higher awareness and greater respect with gamers than so many others. "Done right this could work!!1/1" Where "done right" means not making a generic and bland world for an RPG with twitch that ends up not appealing to either crowd.

Halo 3 sold about 8 million units. I don't have the numbers for how many people are online playing Halo multiplayer right now versus those who prefer the single player experience, but if you consider that a lot of people play MMORPGs as single player online games, then one might think that putting a PvE solo and co-op experience into a Halo MMOG may bring those players online.

The ones who are playing Halo3 PvP online are a shoe-in.

I definitley think a Halo MMOG would have much better sub numbers than AoC or WAR. It just makes more sense, considering the fans and the size of the audience.

And yeah. Making it cross-platform is important. So it probably would be an RPG-Lite, like Planetside or PS Online in design.

I think they'd just have to market it not as an MMO, even though for all intents and purposes it would be.  Most people I know that play Halo on a regular basis would just be like, oh cool, more halo with my friends, I'm in, and I can go anywhere and shoot stuff all the time!    If it was marketed as an MMO, i think it would actually get less players than if it was marketed as Halo 4

Is there a console MMOG yet? I'd have ignored if there was because, meh, console, and I guess it would have been simple enough not to overexcite this forum, but have I missed one along the way? Or are there any console mmogs in the works that people are taking seriously?

Is EQOA still running?

People keep threatening the damn things, but they all seem to disappear along the way somewhere. I'm really shocked SOE aren't into this, because buying shiny things with RL transactions is the perfect model when the client machines aren't sophisticated enough to drive it through complex game play.

http://www.pso-world.com/

What's left of the Phantasy Star Online community. Private servers still exist, it seems.

Phatasy Star Zero is a DS title that has both an online and offline mode. I didn't look into it beyond that.

// always wanted to try PSO on the Dreamcast

(http://www.gameguru.in/images/final-fantasy-xi-1.jpg)

Ratman beat me to it.

FFXI is on the PC, PS2 and Xbox 360.

To be fair, FFXI played unlike any console RPG. It suffered from the opposite of consolization. Neckbeard syndrome or something. Playing it on a console is a laughable task.

If we're being technical, no there is not a console MMOG that actually plays like a console MMOG should play. Yet.

Upcoming is Blade & Soul, The Agency, Champions/STO (maybe, not likely) and a handful of other things that haven't been announced as being made for the console (or announced at all).

Haaaaaaalo Oooooooonline.

Halo Online from Ensemble was very obviously a PC game that was going to be shoehorned onto the 360, much like FFXI and that's probably why it was dumped. Also, Ensemble knew exactly fuckall about what they were doing and look where that got them. :(

Yea, FFXI always felt to me like PC MMO designed for a PS2 and then ported back (crappy UI and all) to the PC in some whack-a-do game of telephone.

Isn't it just possible, that the nature of MMORPGs is much like that of Highlander, in that there can be only one?  Unlike single player games where you play, are satisfied or dissatisfied, but reach some sort of conclusion to playtime one way or the other, the nature of these games is to keep you for as long as possible.  So you have a business model where players are retained, and even if a contender is good, if it is "considered" to be too empty, new players will never jump in.  Even when players become bored with the popular product they are reluctant to join the competitors for more than a month because once the arcade like instant gratification of the first few levels are over with, they simply don't feel invested enough in a secondary world to endure realistic grinds, level curves, or loot tables.

I think it is human nature to want to be in the most populated world, even if a better world exists, and while the users of this forum may disagree, they make up the small percentage of people that do in fact join secondary online worlds.  But even they know that its secondary, they simply rationalize it by playing for a month or two while scouting the horizon for the next *big* thing.  So, either this is an anomaly, and the death of WoW will bring about a great age of MMORPG production, or we will simply have to accept that our hobby can only generate one world per decade.  Whether or not its Blizzard that designs it is really unimportant.

Metcalfe's Law still applies? Shocked, I say. Shocked.

When your product is essentially undifferentiated from your competition, then yes, the tidal influence of social networks makes the job of attracting and retaining players from the same pool very difficult. What's being said now of WoW is precisely what we said at the beginning of the decade about EverQuest, and the same still applies. Differentiate your product on the basis of fundamental features in an attempt to capture a "blue ocean" market, or pour in effort, time and money (for development and marketing) an order of magnitude above the existing genre king.

Games are not special animals in many regards; this is but one of them.

But MMO's do have a positive network effect in excess of most typical multiplayer games and certainly over single player games.

I.E. the gain value as more people play them. The "King" simply has a lot of momentum going for them, since all those players translate into value for someone considering switching or starting a new game.

Wow for instance would gain a lot of mileage against new titles simply by updating its graphics engine ala CCP's premium client. Since it can continue to benefit from the 11.5 million players. Hell, WoW 2 could just be an expansion onto WoW with new classes, content and an entirely redone art package.

Why would you want to optimize the client at all (by optimize it I mean actually the opposite, stressing the machines)? Part of Wow's success formula was producing a game that could be played by non-premium boxes. They made the comedic and artsy shit work, never deviate from a proven method. Instead they can just spend a fraction of their billions on creating fun quests and working on the next expansion.

Who says you would need to upgrade?

This question has been asked since UO. Were you around for UO 3D  :awesome_for_real:

If you look at WotLK, you'll see that they have in fact upgraded the graphics (in some areas). But they can only go so far with it. Blizzard knows the array of PCs this game is played upon, from the quad-SLI rigs down to some hand-me-down Compaq before they were bought by HP. They are pacing the development of their graphics against the types of computers hitting their servers.

That they haven't gone all AoC is pretty indicative of what they know about the MMO market (since they are effectively the MMO market), and by extension, what AoC (and Sigil) don't.

WoW came from that great age of MMORPG production, the time span that started with DAoC. Also, WoW is not the only game. Sure it's something like 90% of all paying subscribers, but you need to look at the hard numbers too. Hundreds of thousands (of people) is still a freakin' lot of people. And they're in all of the other MMOs.

WoW has a lot of genre newbies. It has to. There weren't 5mil US and EU diku MMO players when it launched. But it also has a lot of diku MMO veteran players. They didn't go to WoW because it was the easiest thing to do or only because all of their friends did and they didn't want to be lonely. They went there because it is a superior diku MMO. It's got to be a good game to retain subscriptions after the first month.

And at the same time, if you look at AoC and WAR, you see early big box sales from lots of people who do want an alternative to WoW, and then precipitous subscription dropoffs when they realized neither was it. There's market opportunity here. It just needs to be approached the way noboday has since Blizzard (though I'd contend Turbine did a darned good job at it and SOE did get their act together).

So, how should a console MMOG play different to WoW et al to make it a real console MMOG?

Most obviously it won't be based on requiring the user have instant access to 70+ abilities, be able to discern 15+ buffs, read a text scroll, see the detailed tags for 6 people concurrently, and oh by the way have room left over to see the game :-)

Basically, the whole user experience would need to be done completely different, right down to the combat. We're not in unprecedented land here either.

All MMOs evidence this as THE major trend. This is how the newbies get involved (learn to enjoy the game through understanding and recognition), why people leave en-masse (WAR didn't become a pile, it always was a steaming pile), and why people join en-masse...there's hardly a person you run into in an MMORPG that simply says "I like CounterStrike so picked it up one day, filled out the credit card info and started figuring out what it was about" as opposed to "my friend was into it" or "my dad and I wanted to play something together". People engage in all kinds of painfully boring activities, because other people they know are there to make it more interesting, lowering the overall risk of spending the ungodly amount of time all MMOs are designed to take up, and mitigating the designers' shortcomings.

Not that it matters to the conversation, but...That in and of itself, is what I don't like about MMOs these days.  All it seems like I'm doing is watching health and stamina/mana bars, rotating cool down timers/icons, damage parsers/hate meters, and status icons.  I feel like I'm watching about 10 percent of the screen, playing stopwatch game.  WTB something better, plz.

I find I only have that issue healing. Tanking or DPSing, situational awareness wins the day almost every time. But healing, that might as well be a whack a mole carnival game.

I loved early AC1, but there are some real basic problems with that game.  Back in the day, spell research was EXPENSIVE and tedious.  Everyone did not have every single spell.  People tended to buff what they knew, but it didn't take too long because they didn't know much, AND you could count on your opponent not knowing all the vulns in the book too.  Kynn was an old friend of mine from UO and when I was a newbie, he told me that he just would bane/prot on the fly or use magic items via arcane lore.

Then came Splitpea.  Seemed great at first, but it totally changed the game.  Now you had to be ready for anything, and people buffed for everything.  You get to mid level and you are buffing for something like 5-8 minutes to run around for 15.  That sucked.  But then Turbine increased buff durations and I didn't like that either.  Now it's even easier to be buffed for everything, all the time.  Why even have buffs if everyone is always buffed?

One of my old ideas that I'd like to see implemented in an MMO is to have active spells reduce the total mana pool by their mana cost.  You want to buff yuourself and all your friends for as much as you can?  Great, now you have no more mana to work with, until those spells start expiring.  I'd make buffs/debuffs shorter in duration, and cancelable.  This would bring some tactical skill into play.

I swear I've played a game that did that... Maybe not an MMO.

Did you ever play AC1?  That world was HUGE!  I can remember getting guides for many things in things in the game.  It didn't have neat and tidy zones; it was a huge world that was randomly generated, with points of interest added onto the generated world.

I can remember the first time I went from Baishi through the Mayoi dires portal to the golem bunkers (and Fort Tethana).  It was a matter of remember a certain rock, or hill, or gulley, etc.  There was no pre-made path or anything - you just had to remember certain nuances of CG terrain.  It blew me away that I needed a guide, but one could get lost and run into dead ends or heavy spawns and such. 

AC1 was an explorers heaven.  And I didn't even mention all the history and lore, which could be found in books all over the world (they hired some dude with a masters in English Lit to write that stuff), or the old spell research system.  It was a badass game, but it broke down at the higher levels when min/maxing changed things.  I don't think the devs ever expected people to attain the levels they did.  I remember when players were predicting that the low 60s were the highest people would attain, due to the XP curve.

Ehh, WAY back before WoW came out, one of my old UO guildmates was a VP for Blizzard.  It was kept on the down low and I had known the guy for a couple years before he revealed that to me.  He told me they were working on an MMO that would overtake EQ and become the biggest of all time.

I thought he was dreaming about dominating EQ... then WoW happened!

This is one of the reasons I loved my old CoV dominator. That class was all about crowd control, so health bars and power timers were totally secondary to paying attention to what was on the screen - to be useful I had to be keeping track of all the mobs, all the time, assessing the biggest threats and locking things down accordingly. It makes me sad that nobody's figured out how to make this kind of play work in PvP, though Guild Wars' mesmer got it sort of right with all its spell interrupts and soft lockdowns.

Titan Quest?

Even so, there's a difference between "overtaking EQ" (600K subs would have been enough) and "We have more subscribers than Belgium has people"

DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE!

YES! Thanks. Also Sacred 2 had a similar mechanic where it took longer for spells to cool down if you had buffs on.

Magic economy was such an interesting idea that didn't take into account the players' tendency to figure things out. I wonder if such a thing can be done right, and still be fun to today's audience.

exactly!

The sad part is how many fail at that  :ye_gods:

Yea, but that's back at the UI problem. If you're focused on the floating dialogs that show aggro, DPS, health bars, casting bars and buff bars, you actually do quite easily lose contact with the game world hiding underneath all of that. Even if you play on a 24" monitor.

That's the dichotomy. Early WoW sans AddOns was a clean UI that rivaled the crap-laden UI elements everyone got used to having in EQ1. Four years later, WoW's default UI is fine, except that AddOns are such a pervasive part, a player's attention is all over the place.

This is one of the biggest things that would not survive transition to a console. It'd all be contextual on a TV screen, our of necessity (ala Fallout 3). That alone means the standard method of managing realtime statistical readouts doesn't work. And that there can't help but affect at least raid Boss encounters. I suppose other events could work well, as long as you reduced the number of activatable abilities to something your standard controller could use.

Ye gads, I just had a mental image of playing a WoW Warrior with a Wii waggle stick  :ye_gods:

The Witcher has a toxicology meter, with your potions 'poisoning' you as you buff yourself with them. If you misjudge, you can actually kill your character by consuming too many potions / buffs.  It's a nice way to cap your buffs and in forcing you to choose what effects you want.

Does anyone remember when EQ1 attempted to make the jump over to PS2 (maybe it was PS1, hard to remember)?  I was invited to the beta but never really got around to actually playing it because I found myself too busy in the PC version.  Obviously it failed, considering noone ever even seems to remember it, but I wonder if anyone tried it here?

Are you thinking of Everquest Online Adventures aka EQOA (http://everquestonlineadventures.station.sony.com/)? Thats a native PS2 online game. People seem to forget or dismiss this game, but this was a significant and serious effort to break into the console MMOG market. IIRC, when it was released back in 2003 - there was  big fanfare hype on release and a quick expansion in the same year. Since I know very little of it - I don't know if it (a) sucked, (b) SOE lost interest in it or both. If you're talking of a real EQ1 game port to PS2 - I heard rumours but never anything more than that - you know more than I do.

BTW, There is another EQ1 port. Everquest Macintosh still chugs along. Permanently stuck in Planes of Power deep freeze (since late 2002) - zero patches and SOE only providing power and network bandwidth (do they even have GMs in there anymore?). Last I heard, the Macintosh version of Planes of Power is permanently broken (as was the PC version back in 2002) as the devs never got around to actually finishing the PoP content for Mac - apparently no one even bothered to port the fixes over from the PC version.

Ah yeah, I had forgot about that... Fun game. I wonder if/when they are going to do a sequel.

Sadly, my guess would be no in any massive game.  Any system based on lack of player knowledge will get smoked out by the gestalt of the player base in short order, or would have to be so random as to hardly be a system at all which would make it not have the impact the "magic economy" was intended to have.  IIRC, Turbine was hoping to encourage spell diversity by making it both hard to figure out spells for your unique character, and for players to be secretive with high level spells to try and maximize their effectiveness (less drawn on the magic pool).  Once split pea hit all that was rendering meaningless, which was a shame.

Switching tracks, rather than trying to out do WoW, I still think gaming companies should focus on other play types instead of yet another diku in a different setting (hello WAR, AoC, etc).  Having tried the Battleforge beta (hybrid RTS and CCG), i am still waiting for a true MtG style MMO, with structured turn based gameplay and tactical design in a persistant world.  Wander the world and battle to win cards with pvp, pve, team based games, sealed, drafts, etc plus customizable avatars and the like, etc.  It would be moneyhats I just know it.  Stupid Wotc/Hasbo.

Pokemon online.  They should just goddamn do it, but Nintendo is online stupid.

Interestingly, ATITD did something similar to this with several systems (at least, back in Tale1 and Tale2). For example, there was a pigment-creation system that relied on a player's own experimentation, as the combinations of ingredients needed to produce a given pigment were systemic, but varied widely between players.

It's possible, but the process of experimentation also needs to be fun. ATITD's was more annoying since you basically just had to stick in expensive ingredients until you figured out what each type of ingredient did for you. People eventually developed guides as to how to figure these things out, but the spirit of experimentation remained.

WoW is kind of dipping their toes in with the research system for Glyphs. It's not a full bore discovery system, but it's something.

It's time to slay the dragon! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjrdSKzwQuk)
 :grin:

Screw experimentation. I'm talking about the idea that there's only one way to do things, and if you share that with others, you become weaker. In the paint example, let's say that Dark Blue paint always takes 10 blueflowers to make. If you share that formula with anyone, suddenly it takes 20 blueflowers to make, and it takes twice as long to make it. If you don't have the formula, you just can't make it at all, even if you have the 10 blueflowers. You have to walk up to someone with the formula, and convince them to give you a copy.

That would rock. I'll bet it would fail miserably, too.

First, The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf is coming out on consoles and is getting a new engine for it. CD Projekt is still in the middle of launching GoG.com too. So don't expect a sequel in a while.

EQOA appeared to get good reviews of its play (http://mikeshea.net/Everquest_Online_Adventur.html), but a major factor limiting its audience was 1) it was set in prequel times to EQ, so was entirely separate to the PC version and 2) it cost about $250 to start up to cover the cost of network hardware and keyboard for text communication. I remember reading that during the SOE events the EQOA tables were empty where the EQ tables were full. However, it appears that EQOA is still going (http://forums.station.sony.com/eqoa/posts/list.m?topic_id=115600010987).

EDIT: because I didn't check my tags.

EQOA sucked.  I had a roommate who picked it up, there was almost nothing redeeming about that game.  It was, if anything, graphically inferior to EQ ( :ye_gods: )and was simplified way down.

How do you introduce the first formula into the game?  Who gets it?  (thinking of EVE Online's T2 lottery / mining laser blueprint fiasco, where devs gave rare stuff to select players).

And, if you code your Dark Blue paint to be just perfectly balanced (duration, mats) when 1% of your 3000 per-server playerbase has it (30 people), that means that when the first guy on a new server finds that formula, his is 30x overpowered, until he shares it with the 29 others.  It takes 0.6 of a flower to make, and it's instacast.  So he goes out there and he makes a year's supply in about an hour, then he shares the formula with everyone, hahahaha.  Bye bye control over your game's balance.

Players have to waste thousands of resources and spend countless sleepless nights figuring it out. It sounds awful, but SWG taught us that if you introduce an impossible puzzle to an MMO playerbase, it'll be cracked in like 5-10 minutes. Then ATITD confirmed it.


Yeah, like I said, that would rock.

Not that quick.  It took me at least a couple of hours to crack and confirm the proper BE numbers once someone showed the displayed ones were wrong. ;D

Master of Magic Online!  An MMO grand strategy game!  Every player gets to design his own wizard, choose his race and then set about attempting to conquer a huge randomly generated world.  Periodically, if the situation stabilized, servers would reset to a brand new world.

Gameplay aspects would include exploration, resource monopolization, city building, spell-casting (including massive global enchantments like armageddon and death wish), strategic combat between player-controlled armies (with all of the races, units and summoned creatures from the old game) and diplomacy!  Alliances and wizard pacts between players with intrigue, espionage and back-stabbing.

Obviously, the whole turn-based mechanic would have to be tossed out in favour of a real-time one.  Mana, gold and food resources would be required to maintain populations and armies, cast and maintain spells and summon creatures, conduct spell research and perhaps most importantly of all: maintain the protective shield around your assets that only exists when you are offline.  Well, that's the best idea I can think of to prevent people from destroying your city at 4am.