f13.net

According to this (http://www.homelanfed.com/index.php?id=23542) article at HomeLan Fed, Mythic's lawsuit against Microsoft is over.  Is this the real reason Mythica was cancelled?  I can understand dropping the name, but to dump an entire game because of a name seems extreme.

No.

You are suffering from faulty cause and effect.

The lawsuit was settled because the game was cancelled.

Plenty of reasons for Mythic to want to pick up the name. Most have been mentioned already, but I personally agree with them wanting to protect their name. It could also have been, as Mi_Tes put it (http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=607&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0) over at Corpnews:

Microsoft dumping Mythica is a separate issue but I do think it was related. The game looked really fun when they showed it at E3 (though they weren't letting folks play it), and I was excited for it. But with their announcement that they'd work with Sigil Games (Brad McQuaid et al), I felt the writing was on the wall for Mythica. Why spend time struggling to learn an entire genre when you can just buy your way into it? The lawsuit was probably just the straw upon the back of the proverbial camel. It's not like Microsoft was really legally worried about a company they could buy and sell 100 times, over breakfast.

Mythica had promise. They were using instancing in a way Tabula Rasa is promising along with the fantastic Havoc physics engine to connote a sense of heroic power even CoH only barely touches upon.

But alas, another loss.

I think that Mythica was cancelled because someone at Microsoft realized how fucking stupid instancing is in a massively multi-player game. It's only a matter of time before everyone else figures it out. Good call Bill.

Yep, so stupid it works.  That how logic goes in the MMOG universe.

If NC Soft, Cryptic Studios, NetDevil, Dimension Games, Sigil Games and SOE all fold, then you'll be right.

For the foreseeable future though, you are in the vocal minority. Instancing works because people don't like other people getting in the way unless they're friends. Right or wrong, it's the way it is.

Uhhh, yeah. Sure. Talk to me in about 10 years when no MMOG is without some form of instancing.

The reasons to use instancing are so much more convincing than the reasons NOT to use instancing. If you want to see how not-instancing is going to fuck up a game, go play Wish when it comes out.

Instancing: Taking the slot machine to a higher level.

Everquest... putting a purty skin on Progressquest.

I'll take instancing, kthxverymuch.

I didn't say that instancing sucked, I said that it's fucking stupid to put it into a MMOG. I love the "instancing" of games like Quake, Counter-Strike and Diablo... but they aren't MMOGs. Changing how players interact changes the game. Period.

How will publishers justify charging $15 a month to play a game that is no more massively multi-player than Internet Hearts? I thought the old bleeding heart line of bullshit was bandwidth and expensive servers. What kind of server do you need to run a game of "instanced" Diablo? And now Guild Wars is coming out with no monthly fee (they do not claim to be a MMOG).

Instancing may produce better gameplay but only by proving that MMOGs are, were and have always been a bad idea. If you're the kind of person who gets excited about instancing then you probably never really liked MMOGs. You don't want a better MMOG, you want a better Diablo.

I'm not saying that liking instancing is bad, just that instancing is the anti-MMOG and so instancing in a MMOG is fucking stupid.

I went ahead and fixed that for ya.

I love the potential to interact with thousands, I just don't want to interact with thousands EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN MINUTE I'm playing the game. Like when I zone into the ULTRA-DANGEROUS DUNGEON and there are fifty people in a line in front of me, waiting to kill the dragon. If istancing can cure that, it can make MMOG's better.

I like the concept of MMOG's, the implementation has been piss poor. The idea that throwing more and more people together into the same environment makes the environment better is flawed. I think MMOG's with LESS population is a good thing.

Slyfeind's sig on Grimwell.com:

That sounds like the people who argue that every game should have an open-PvP server.

The fee is justified if you are playing on their servers that have to support hundreds of thousands of players.  Diablo didn't have that.  They had a modified IRC server and then you went off into peer to peer battles with no server.  Welcome cheating.  And not really much of anything you can do to stop it.  EVERYTHING is in the hands of the wannabe cheater.  You can't really fix it.  You can try, but it won't be very successful.  Punkbuster fucks up connections and people can STILL cheat through it.

People can also find ways of cheating in mmog games.  The difference in my mind is that an MMOG company that runs the server CAN stop cheating.  They may or may not choose to, but a company just giving out software that runs peer to peer really has no way to stop cheating.  If the mmog company does nothing at all to stop cheating then I don't really see much difference to the end user other than a generally more stable platform for gaming.  I had HORDES of disconnects from D2 when I used to try and play it.  It probably got better eventually.

The REAL answer is that they do not have to justify the cost at all.  Just charge what people will pay.

I personally like the instancing in CoH, which is VERY heavily instanced.  In the end all MMOG games are instanced if you want to be practical.  You can't have thousands interacting at once.  Once you move those thousands to the same area at once the server will crash or it won't display any more than the nearest X players (which might as well be instancing).  I would rather the game run stable and instance when necessary than not instance and just blow up in flames when too many players gather.

Instancing is not at all MMOG. The genre is still being classified. Ask 10 people what an MMOG is and you'll get five answers (the other five are medding).

People have wanted instancing since even well before the first time they went to visit the Ancient Lich and found someone there ahead of them. And please don't bother with any niave conservative bullshit about how players should be patient or seek another option.

The future will be defined by how much instantiated content appears in these games. It's about playgrounds, penned in areas where uber jobless can spend 15 hours a day on their thing while folks-with-lives go off somewhere else.

It's just another mini-game with the larger whole. The next two years will be about games finding that balance between "this is a cool way to spend some time with my insular core group" versus "there's no reason to pay for this game since everyone solos it."

Neither of those is at all unlike what goes on now. Instancing just formalizes it.

Since when is hating or liking camping a political issue?  I don't think I have ever seen a politician with Camping or No Camping on their political platforms.

Although Lieberman would probably say no camping because that would mean killing something and video game violence is bad, mmmmkay?  Although camping a lumber respawn in ATITD could muddy up things abit.  Then again that is destroying natural habitats and also bad...

Of course you haven't. It's unpatriotic!

Pika?

Instanced massively multi-player game is an oxymoron. Let's stop kidding ourselves and just drop the massive from the description. These new games are merely instanced multi-player games. For better or worse, playing an IMP is not the same as playing MMOG.

The difference between instancing and zoning is not just semantics. You never have more than one copy of a zone per world with zoning but you often have multiple copies of a single area with instancing.

My vision of the perfect MMOG is a world where players battle for control of areas. There is actually interaction between massive amounts of players in the impact that player organizations have on the world as they gain and lose control of game areas. Having multiple copies of separate worlds is fine but having multiple copies of each area in a single loosely connected world is not.

PvE MMOGs were bound to die anyway. It's good knowing that PvE IMPs will put them out of their misery. The sooner the better. Fucking stupid creations.

PvP MMOGs have just began to develope and will be the future of the MMOG genre.

Ok. Thanks for sharing.

Let me correct that, instancing is just adding more slot machines to the casino so you don't have to stand in line before you can use the slot machine.

The analogy between MMOG's and casinos works rather well I think. There is the casino with it's staff that watchs to make sure no one is cheating (GM's). If you aren't spending money they usually want you to leave the casino (monthly fee). Where MMOG's usually fall down is that they only have one game and that is the slot machine. Instancing usually just adds more slot machines not more game variety like adding blackjack, poker, roulette, craps, pachinko, etc.


UO started as a sandbox (where anyone could steal your shovel?)

EQ started as a bunch of single use slot machines.

CoH has a bunch of cloned pachinko machines anyone can use any time.

Savage has cloned pachinko machines with a single seat blackjack table for every 32 slot machines.

Guild Wars has cloned slot machines, cloned games of team blackjack, and cloned 8 seat poker tables.

Diablo has cloned craps on the street corner in a bad part of town and when the wrong character comes by you get mugged.

SWG has cloned slot machines and they want to add cloned pachinko with their Jump to Lightspeed expansion.

---

YMMV

Fifteen years from now. Maybe. If someone can come up with a scheme that actually is able to inject hardcore player accountability into the game.

PVP as a playstyle is NOT EVER going to be massively marketable, because the vast majority of people cannot resist being a cockmuncher to someone else. Instancing helps cut down the grief factor, as well as insulating the PVP from people who don't want to go do that, or don't want to do it every day.

Pug, by your logic I should sue mmog games because I can't play with thousands of people around me because the game server will crash.  No current mmog that I know of is really that massive.  Maybe 150 or so people in line of sight before they start to vomit.

Instancing as an acceptable mechanic is being put through trial by fire in the next two years as nearly every MMOG is trying it out to some degree. Sigil Games Online is anti-instancing, the rest are running with it, but it hasn't really been used enough to prove whether it's beneficial to the over all subscription base and player retention of an MMOG or negative.

The only games we've really seen instancing in are, Anarchy Online, which was crippled as everybody knows from other idiotic problems. And now City of Heroes, which rules, but then, it's like playing a single player game. Does City of Heroes have the depth to stand the test of time? Who knows.

World of Warcraft uses it, apparently, but then, I'm level 20 and haven't run across it yet. Which is unfortunate to some degree because I want the B.Net community to burn en masse for the betterment of mankind.

Either way, instancing as a mechanic is a toss up. It hasn't been proven or disproven yet.

 If I want  "MMOG's with LESS population" I' ll go play Guild Wars and no way in hell I will pay 15$ for subscr fee. -Exactly reason I dont pay for planetside-  very fun combat ,nice graphics, nice options but  with absolutely meaningless combat - no thanks,  I have already bf1942 and UT2004 for that with less lag and prettier graphics.

 If I want "rpg"ish feel I will play NWN. Again no thanks.

 I am not saying instancing is not fun - heck I will buy GW for sure. But I am firm that I will not pay any fee for game like that either - its nothing new ,  -it is the same multiplayer component which games had since Doom. Fun but its not what for I pay subscr fee in mmorpgs.

I would settle for a mass sterilization, but your plan works too.

Did you type that while watching porn? Fucking hell.  (directed at MadMax)

I think I'll have agree with anyuzer and Darniaq and others on this.  Instancing is an unproven mechanic for a genre that is pretty much still defining itself. If anything, City of Heroes will prove or disprove somewhat if instancing can sustain a large subscriber base (although the game itself might not be a good control, being that it's somewhat atypical so far for the genre).

Haemish touches upon instancing freeing you somewhat from the more undesirable crowds that tend to play these games, but it's also one of the few ways the developers are trying to bridge the gap between the catass "play 4 hours a day or else" and those that want to just hop for a quick 30 minute play session.  Until a company can provide a quick, fun, engrossing experience in an hour or less, instancing will ALWAYS have a home in this field.

Anti-immersivness effect of instancing < anti-rpg factor of having a monster respawn in front of your eyes.

Also

Effect of designing a co-operative multiplayer game based around xp generation and levelling, then putting huge xp generation penalties on helping each other outside of size limited groups = all value in multiple groups being in the same dungeon neutralised.

Question about instancing:  is the loot of an instanced area randomly generated each time one enters, and then reset when one exits and re-enters?  

For instance the Borgle Caves in SWG: one enters and raids the "debris piles" for the skill tapes, then exits the Caves, then hits it again and again...at the end of the day one has a ber-jillion skill tapes.  

I ask because all I ever heard about when it came to SWG lewt (or lack thereof) was the precious "economy" that was always in danger of being tainted.

Uhmm, it depends on the implimentation..

I suppose it depends on the flavor of instancing you're talking about.

For example, in City of Heroes, all loot (per se) is randomly generated:

1. You locate and enter your mission.  
2. You fight mobs, get inspirations, exp, and enhancements.  
3. At any time you can exit the mission and switch to another mission, thus resetting the mission.  
4. Mission repopulates.  

Where this becomes exploitable is that certain boss mobs(arch villians) always drop good enhancements (ie Dr. Vahz) and killing that boss doesn't complete the mission. So, you could reset the mission and kill the boss again and get another piece of good randomly generated loot.

Most instancing deals with random loot because really, it's random content.  In Anarachy Online it's for a target piece of loot, but then again, it's not resettable and the loot within the mission is random.  

Does that help?

Thanks for sharing.


Zone = Content is shared in public areas with an entire servers' population

Instanced Area = Content is unique to the players playing in a private area

If knowing that makes you want to start yet another frivolous lawsuit then more power to you.

OHHHHHH BURN RIGHT BACK AT ME OMG USING MY WORDS AGAINST ME>LDKJFSDLKFJ DDFKD CANNOT CONTINUE.....

Hey, I thought your post was too moronic and opinionated to warrant any sort of logical response.  Out of respect to Gordon I didn't use "PSYCHO".

Sigh, wrong thread. PLZIGNOREKTHXBYE

The only thing better than burning someone is listening to them cry afterword.

Thanks for sharaing.

EQ: Lost Dungeons of Norrath. Diablo II, though nobody ever claimed that was massive :)

In terms of the future: WoW, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Guild Wars


Content is not unique. It's cloned. The big difference is that the rewards from that content ends up in the persistent spaces. Instancing is about how one gets those rewards. But what one does with them is based on the "massive" parts of the genre.

I couldn't care any less if you don't like instancing, but unless you've only been playing MMOGs for a few months, or only played L2, you know damned well why people want instancing. Even with that though, I'm gonna go out on a lark here and assume you know that no game out now nor coming is going fully instantiated. They all have public areas, for the very purposes that already compel people to congregate: socializing (meeting new potential groups) and commerce. The difference is that people aren't tripping all over each other to get that traded content. Fucking early EQ was more PvP than any game I've played since, except there you had to call DaddyGM or wrest control of the zone from the campers you wanted to kick out.

That was fun?

Ahh yeah, forgot LDoN. That's a big one. And no, I don't count Diablo II for anything... except being mind numbingly painful :)

Diablo? Mind-numbingly painful? You must think of it as a game and not a scavenger hunt.

It is painful either way.  So much damn clicking and more repetition than your average mmog, and that is saying a lot.

Mouse clicking never bothered me. I'm glad the BNorth people are allowing the WASD movement scheme. But it's all about the thrill of the hunt.

Yes. Content in an instanced area is cloned. So is the content in zones across multiple servers.

Maybe exclusive is a better word. The content in an instanced area is exclusive to the players in that area in that they are the only ones that can interact with their instanced area content even though the content is a clone of what other players are interacting with in other private instanced areas.

Players in a MMOG zone do not have exclusive access to content even though that content is cloned across multiple servers. MMOG players have to share the content with the other players who play on their server.

An instanced area is protected from outside influence and guarantees your mobs aren't camped. Instancing is good for avoiding kill-stealing camp camping people. Instancing works well in other games and I'm sure that it will expand the Diablo-like line of RPGs.

Instancing is bad for massively multi-player virtual worlds because it removes a great deal of PvE competition. Even though it's great to be able to jump into the game and go kill a dragon without ever worrying about what anybody else is doing, having to worry about what everyone else in the world is doing is part of what makes a virtual world feel like an inhabited world. Even though you may not directly interact with more than 20 of those other 1980 players they still matter. What the other 1980 players are doing does still have an impact on you and what you can do in the world, even in a PvE world. Once you effectively remove those other 1980 players by instancing content then people will begin to wonder why they are paying a subscription fee for a massively multi-player game rather than playing NWN or Diablo.

Instancing has other downsides as we've already seen in games like Diablo. Instancing increases the rate at which content is consumed. It's only a matter of time before killing an instanced dragon becomes just as common, repetitive and pointless as killing Drudge in AC or Rats in EQ.

Instanced PvP will likely boil down to little more than a ladder competition for bragging rights rather than being a means to a way of life in a player inhabited world. PvP encounters will be more like a quick Counter-Strike match than what you'd find in game like AC DT.

I'm not trying to say that all instancing is bad or that instanced games will not be fun, but I am saying that primarily instanced games do not belong in the same category as MMOGs. The only reason why these newer versions of Diablo are being called MMOGs is so that publishers can justify charging a monthly fee.

You baffle me schild.  But so does everyone who enjoyed Diablo 2 or even diablo 1 after one play through.  You don't even have a bunch of guildmates to chat with while your brain is being sucked out of your ear.  You dont HUNT anything in diablo2.  I charges at you mindlessly till you click on it a few times and then you get something totally random.

As far as instanced mmogs vs small group mmogs go, well, I have not played many small group online rpgs lately.  have you?  Am I missing them?  NWN has combat about as bad as your average mmog when online in realtime.  And when I played it we were CONSTANTLY plagued with disconnects and drops where everyone would disconnect at once and the savegame would get corrupted.  Playing NWN in a small group online was a fucking nightmare in my experience. Awful netcode at least initially. Maybe it is better now.

You are making an argument and using opinions in the place of facts.  Or to be more specific you state facts and then call the facts bad because of your personal preferences.  The same thing is being done on the other side.

To me, your statements above simply reinforce my belief in instancing as a positive factor in mmog games.  I don't personally give a flying fuck about PvE competition and personally find it about the stupidest concept to have ever come out of the mmog.  Let it rot in hell says I.  Your opinion is obviously different.  But is is just that, an opinion.  One that at this moment seems to be a minority in this thread.

I much prefer digging out my own niche of friends in the mmog of my choice than having to deal with all the fuckheads.  Every mmog I have been in I have made new friends in.  Some last, most fizzle as we move on to new games, but I would rather I choose who I associate with than having to engage in 'competitive pve' *shudder* with an asshole.

That is my choice when it is provided.

In the end I will generally play the better game, as I do not find instancing a REQUIREMENT of a good mmog.  But just something I like.

I played with Soulflame last night. 'twas fun. It's a brainless game. At least it's a well made brainless game.

It's fun because you are all right. Everyone.

Instancing is surely needed and valuable today but not because it's an evolution. The exact contrary.

Instancing is now required because the genre collapsed on itself and noone has been able to create a world. Basically the genre has failed and it's going back to "just a game" that requires a better compromise to be fun.

Darniaq has pointed some of the reasons about why instancing is interesting and they are all true. My opinion is that instancing is a workaround because the design of these MMOGs hasn't been able to valorize the massive value.

The fact that these games are massive is becoming a problem. The design failed. So we go back to try to get the best from both worlds: the quick, tailored fun of the instances (cooperative play) and the social aspect of the hubs (like IRC or the message boards).

This is exactly what Richard Garriott anticipated in his interviews years ago. I find it quite depressing.

That's only bad if you like PvP shaded towards resource control. That's not been proven to have a very wide appeal, nor has it been attempted by serious developers with real money (me not thinking competing for mobs is fun is an aside). However, the values of rare/random spawning content is something I do think instancing will affect. Yes yes, we all have horror stories of 30+ hour camps in EQ. But the rewards in EQ are higher than all other games by a few orders of magntitude partly because of that (and the sadistic death penalties, and the horrendous grind, and the indirect PvP). Players remember everything they did to get their first Epic. Players have long since forgotten the first ten weapons they used in SWG.

That's why how instancing is used is more important than whether it's used at all. I definitely agree CoH feels like Diablo on steroids. However, CoH lacks an economy too, which games like Tabula Rasa and EQ2 will have and which is an important part of the success or failure of instancing (imho, if that needed to be said).

The 2,000 people I co-habit the game with at any given time (and the 15,000 accounts registered on that server) are all definitely part of why I pay a fee. SWG is a good example here, as is Eve. 99% of the people I knew I never saw. All customers and vendors with vendors, drop-off points, stories via email and second-hand accounts, and so on. That was compelling though. I'd hit Coronet every so often just to see what the latest hot advertised item was and run into some folks.

CoH has none of that. It can't. It lacks anything to do but personal power-advancement. Of course, that's perfectly fine as it's fun as hell. But I don't consider CoH an MMOG and am particularly glad they ain't charging a fee for Guild Wars. I suspect a bit of money will be leaving the genre somewhat soon (though for how long depends on how much they get done with GW from what I saw a few weeks ago).


It's late and I'm up early, so need to ask if you can link those Garriot interviews so I have something for my morning coffee (#1) :)

Virtual worlds haven't failed imho. Instancing now is just like PvP was back at Play2Crush and 3D rendered graphics before it: something new to sell. It's not that there's been some grand sociological reality check. It's that selling an RPG in a massive virtual landscape isn't alone a selling point. Either it's gotta be co-branded (EQ2, WoW, SWG) or needs an entirely new reason for existence (Instancing, no-fee-GW, Entropia). Nobody can sell EQ, as much as Ryzom is going to try (forgettable standard persistent world). Everyone who wanted EQ was here or slowly trickling in. Co-brands hopefully bring them in droves and new concepts bring in the previous naysayers.

MMOGs were just at a saturation point. And will be again.

No, sorry. It's really something a few years old.

I remember it was a pair of months after he left Origin and he was speaking of Tabula Rasa design. Basically he wanted to make a world with big hubs like cities where everyone could gather, then you could form a group and start your own adventure, exactly following the concept of Guild Wars.

What I remember that is missing from the current project is that he wanted to implement a REAL economy. Where players could earn real money by selling stuff. He made absurd examples like selling paintings inside the game and stuff not directly related to the loot. His idea was to be able to play the game like a work. Depending completely on it.

The other absurd idea was about a strange karma law. The setting was already a mix of fantasy and sci-fi but he also added a karma value about the player that should have depended on his actions. And then your aligment would have influenced your look. He made an example about the weather changing around you, producing mist, the equipment reflecting your corruption and so on...

Quite foolish.

If people don't shoot for the stars they'll never hit them.

I'm sure many people said Starfox wouldn't change anything. I'm also sure many people at Square didn't think Final Fantasy would save them (oh the irony of the the The Spirits Within).

If Mr. Garriot wants to put all of his whackass eggs into one nest, then I am interested in seeing what will come of it.

Will slaying monsters with power chords from my fancy guitar be fun?  I don't know.  But I agree, Tabula Rasa is different, and you gotta love a guy putting it all on the line to make a whacked out game.  
 
Take Peter Molyneux and Black and White -- sure it wound up a no-fun mess, but by God it was different.

I thought it was powerchords from a whacked out harp.

All that instancing right now does is protect the players from each other. But without good accountability that is direly needed.

So instancing will be an important part of most new MMORPGs until there is a good way to hold players to their actions. We all know what the anonymity of the internet does to people, don't we?

Probably a harp.  

I think "Tabula Rasa" is a terrible name, though.  Most people won't know what it means, and the rest will think they get to build things from scratch somehow.  

The marketer of Deer Hunter bragged that customers saw the box 20 feet away and instantly knew what Deer Hunter was and how you played it.  The Tabula Rasa marketers have their work cut out for them.

Nor will they have to deal with the inbred goatfuckers who buy Deer Hunter. Maybe he's aiming for the most intelligent group of players ever. Maybe not. Who cares, most k1dd135 will be playing World of Warcraft.

Exactly.

Games I can think of where the pve game is designed for the entire community to play together...

1) A Tale In The Desert.

That is all. This is the only pve game I can think of that is designed from the ground up for massively multiplayer gaming.

When the design of a game allows everyone in a dungeon/zone/encounter/project/event to work together without significant penalty to progression, and when content is designed around large loosely organised groups working to a common goal, and when both servers and clients can support 100s of players doing exactly that in the same location, and when all the above is *fun*; then, and only then, can we get rid of instancing.

Current pve non-instanced MMOG design brings with it OOC crap like camp ownership; kill stealing; 'lists' to get into groups at the key spawns; group size limits that are less than the expected population of the dungeon; fears that > 5% of the population in one location will bring down the server; and a hunting model so ineffective that the best way to gain xp is to camp a spawn point. When any of this is happening it tells you that your design is blatantly inappropriate for massively multiplayer co-operative play. Solutions: fix the design or use instancing, either one can produce a fun game.

And the most fashionable non-instanced solution - locked encounters - is not a solution at all, it completely misses the fucking point.

How so? He did this with the "Air of (Insert)" back in Ultima IV, almost two decades ago. That was an NPC game, but your actions did affect your Air, and if your Air was bad enough, stuff happened. An Air of Cowardice meant nobody talked to you. An Air of Deceit meant the guards attacked on sight. And so on. The only thing he proposed (based on your description) is a way to graphically render it.

The Karma system is straight from UO (http://uo.stratics.com/content/reputation/famekarma.shtml). There it affected your character's title and access to some places.

Hehe, and you never mentioned why you thought MMOGs were a failure.

As to ways to fix the OOC problems, the only way is to ensure that there can't be any contested content. People don't want competition for their own goals. Given the option to socially insulate themselves or use "player accountability tools" (a paper tiger until an ungriefable system can be designed), players will choose insulation in quest-based PvE games and PvP in PvP games. Which side has way more money being collected?

Over-instantiation dilutes the staying power of an MMOG. CoH will be the first to expose this (AO woulda been if it ran perfectly). It allows small friendship groups to stick entirely to themselves. As we've all seen, when even 10-15% of a group quits, it can start a title wave of mass quitting, particularly since with little depth, CoH is a very easy game to simply shelve for a time. Good for gamers. Bad to compel a monthly fee.

It's about striking the balance. Instancing is here. Like PvP, it has its uses.

 I couldn't agree more.

Instancing is a step backword to Diablo style gaming that was necessary because nobody was able to design a functional virtual world. Developers got hung up on finding ways to prevent players from misbehaving rather than finding ways to entertain their players or making their worlds more believable.

Current MMOG worlds remind me of an old Twilight  Zone episode, "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", where people are forced to conform and everyone looks and thinks  alike. MMOGs are coded so that players have no choice but to conform.

I don't believe that instancing will be a solution more than a temporary distraction from the problem. Unfortunately instancing recreates the same repetitive and predictable PvE found in games like Diablo. I think that people will begin to hate instanced games once they have consumed all of the content... just like Diablo.

The evolution of MMOGs.

1997:  thousands of us can all play together!
1997:  all these people are assholes!
2004: get these assholes away from me!

I like to think of playing MMOGs as analogous to the moviegoing experience, or going to the ballpark, or any public event entertainment.

I am entertained at the same time in the same place as hundreds or thousands of others.  I can interact with them if I choose, and discuss the experience.  I can even go with a group of  friends and enjoy the experience together with them (groups).

But I can also CHOOSE to see the movie or the game by myself.  Even though I'm in a crowded theatre or ballpark.  And that's an enjoyable and different experience from watching the movie or game on TV by "myself".

The movie doesn't REQUIRE me to go with a group of friends to enjoy it, or to compete/cooperate with fellow movie-goers in a storyline.  I doesn't require forced grouping to enjoy it and neither should a MMOG.

The difference, yes, is that MMOGs are an interactive experience.  But I enjoy interacting with it on my terms, while still enjoying that group experience.  Those who want something else want something like some modern audience participatory improv play where random people run up on stage and each try to add their own part to a story.  The resuly is usually crap, and there's always one or two loud-mouthed assholes who try to hog the whole show.  To me, this is not fun entertainment.

Bruce

Everything you said in your post is why instancing is a GOOD THING.

Competitive PVE is fucking stupid, and is what has made EQ such a shitty game for years. It isn't competitve AT ALL. It just means that the people with the most time to spend, or the least amount of morals will always win. Everyone else is sent to the back of the line.

Competition is about actually competing. "Casual" or "time-starved" gamers can never compete in games with what you call "competitive PVE." That means the "community" you praise is really nothing more than robber barons being leeched upon by wanna be robber barons, and then everyone else who are the grist in the mill of said robber barons ego machine.

EDIT: Wow, Bruce said something I agree with.

The "future" of MMOG's, at least for the next few years, is being able to choose your own experience, not having one thrust upon you. Choosing how you experience the virtual world is what instancing is all about. For years, no one had any real choice about how they would spend an evening in an MMOG. You did one or two things in a certain way and that was it. Now the games are swinging to letting you tailor your experience. That's only a good thing.

No shit?


I don't give a flying fuck whether or not you or anybody else thinks instancing is better. Competitive PvE in games such as EQ has been fucking stupid which is part of why I hate MMOGs. I think Guild Wars is the best game that I've played in years and it has... *gulp* INSTANCING! I LIKE INSTANCING BETTER THAN MMOGS! OMG!

All that I have been trying to convey is that instancing goes against the idea of a massively multiplayer virtual world. I don't care if the result is better or worse. I only care that people are able to see the fundamental difference between instancing and traditional MMOG worlds.

-> INSTANCING != MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER PERSISTANT VITRUAL WORLDS <-

Taking a small group of friends on an adventure in a private game space is not the same as taking a small group of friends on an adventure in a public MMOG zone. It's not just that one happens to be more fun than the other. They are completely different game experiences.

But... But... Instancing is more fun! So is sex yet sex is not the same as instancing.

I'd expect this kind of misplaced hostility from IGN members. Is it the Diablo comments? Is it hard to believe that a better Diablo might be more fun than a better MMOG? Does comparing instancing to playing Diablo hurt anyone's feelings?

You're defending an irrelevant position. You talk of misplaced hostility yet don't seem to get that we couldn't care any less whether it's "traditional" or not. The fucking genre isn't old enough for tradition. Shit, even the most experienced MMOGs here have been playing for maybe half a decade, and most were already adults when they started.

The only important part is whether a feature is likeable and liked, or not. Change is the only constant, so unless you're fed-exing yourself to Grizzled Old Hasbeen Gamer(tm), why the fuck do you care so much? You see some vast right-wing conspiracy to supplant MMOGs or something?

PvP MMOGs are not the future.  Quite simply put, playing a PvP MMOG is like competing with Thresh in Quake.  Boring in the long run for Thresh, and boring in the short run for everyone he runs over.  Players are not able to find a comfortable level where they can play competitively.

I'll hold up DAoC as a good example.  A well built group of eight players can decimate a disorganized army of two hundred.  That same group can take on four times the number of enemies, and not suffer one death.  There has been at least one instance of three players wiping out over seventy players in seconds.  This is a direct result of highly skilled players rolling over everyone else.  There's no reason for highly skilled players to group with lower skilled players, and so they don't.  Fortunately, Mythic has not implemented any of the moronic realm invasion ideas.  Only Shadowbane has had the misfortune of having entire servers all on the same side.

There is no model of accountability that cannot be worked around.  None.  The design can make it more difficult, but those who wish to avoid accountability will still do so.  With that in mind, it becomes impossible to create an open PvP game that will appeal to a wide audience.

PvP MMOGs were doomed once EQ opened.  PvP is the niche, and it's past time PvP fans recognized that.  Players, in general, do not enjoy fighting battles they cannot possibly win.  I never understood why the converse is not also true.

So do I.  Sadly, my theaters, ballparks, and public events are filled with jackasses with names like l33tgolas whose idea of fun is to killsteal, complain, launch poor attempts at scatological humor on /broadcast, and just basically act like cockmongers.  When the content of the game involves the tracking and destruction of mobs, its nice to have the ability to do so alone or just with your friends.

No, no it does not. It can help immersion, by taking stupid gamey things like having to wait in line behind other players to kill something away.

See, virtual WORLDS require that a player be immersed. Not one virtual world does that today, because players who are doing the exact same thing are bumping into each other. Over and over again. Essentially, the existant virtual worlds are too small. Way, way too small. Virtual worlds are trying to make you believe you are in Middle-Earth, when really, you are in Wal-Mart when it's really crowded. Virtual worlds require that travel be non-trivial, and that characters are allowed some uniqueness.

In other words, virtual worlds are years and years away. And even then, they may not be good games, because a lot of the things about worlds really aren't fun.

Instancing = Massively Multiplayer Online Games

MMOG's != Massively Multiplayer Persistant Worlds.

None, not one of the any of the things we've seen have been a MMPW. Shadowbane might have come closest, had their actually been an ecology outside of the players. That would have required an impressive AI which Wolfpack had no desire to create.

And even in MMPW, instancing may be a necessary evil, just to make the damn thing fun to play.

My favorite part of EQ was not getting my jboots for six months because the fuckers were always camped. God how I look back at all the fun that was, can't wait to tell the grandkids about standing around fruitlessly because of a bottleneck in the game that thousands of people were lined up for.

Instancing makes sense, and screw the purist viewpoint.

There's non-instanced games out there, play 'em and shut the piehole. Don't play instanced games, you don't have to worry about instancing. Bingo.

The difference is relevant when you are discussing game features on a message board.

Let me tell you about this great first person shooter called Internet Hearts. Internet Hearts is just like Quake or Counter-Strike. There are thousands of players that join a matchmaker program. Smaller groups of players then get together and duke it out. If you enjoy Quake or Counter-Strike then you will also enjoy Internet Hearts.


I agree except that I still wouldn't call games designed for groups of 2 to 8 players massively multiplayer.

It will take both genious and a miracle for anyone to design a fun game that is based on thousands of players playing in a single massive persistent virtual world. Single massive persistent virtual worlds are on their way out while instanced games like GW and TR are poised to capture a great deal of the RPG enthusiasts' business over the next few years.

It's almost sad to think that the implementation of 3D muds turned out the way they did. Oh well, live and learn.

Now if I can just convince more people that racing is not a sport...

How is a game with instancing not massively multiplayer? Because people aren't all up in your ass the entire time you play? A hub-based instanced solution keeps the good things about mmogs while losing a lot of the negatives. That's why everyone's jumping onboard.

It's called a compromise to make a better overall game experience for the most people possible. You try to keep the areas where the massive part works and lost the parts where it doesn't. That doesn't make it any less massive, just less of a massive pain in the nuts to play. Damn them!

Don't mind Pug, he's suffering from an ailment commonly referred to as "stupidity".

Hardly as long as you can team up with other players in supergroups and teams. And in real life you mostly interact with a few people at a time anyway - heck, relatively speaking I hardly know any of the half a million people living in the same city as me. And there is no need for me to interact with all of them in order to feel that I live in a city with half a million inhabitants.

Instancing isn't there to make it less multiplayer, but to make the GAMEPLAY better since we're ALL "single players" sharing one game world. The effect is less competition for what is in effect the only resourc in these games: the mobs you whack for exp. Meaning less camping, downtime and other shit that takes away from the part that should be entertainment.

Because it's hard and complex to explain this problem. If you read the post above yours you'll see listed some of the issues of current "massive" games.

Here (https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-general&T=38382&P=1)  you can find a long thread about WoW where I tried to discuss this issue just by looking at what happens in the current beta.

If you read my inaccurate (http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=484) ideas (http://www.cesspit.net/foolies/archives/2004-05/latest_design_f00leries.html) (two different links) where I'm starting to build my ideal mmorpg, you can see where I think the genre should aim.

On another thread (http://www.anyuzer.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=147) I discussed the two ideal paths to follow. One going toward the quick fun and a massive use of the instances to polish both the PvP and PvE experience. The other aimed to build a concrete world. Where the massive aspect is a strenght.

The basic idea about why I said that mmorpgs have failed is just because they simply don't take advantage of the massive aspect. This aspect is just a way to be included in a popular genre but it's obvious that even huge projects like WoW don't have A CLUE about why they should be massive instead of cooperative/instanced.

We have a bunch of mmorpgs that don't know why they are mmorpgs. Like a case of lost identity.

And by looking at the concete examples I just see how this fact of being "massive", in general, it's not a strenght. But a problem.

So I notice that the easy road is to go back to a model of gameplay that FITS better with these games. The fact is that noone is really developing a mmorpg and now these games are pushing to go back at their origin.

Also, I agree completely with Haemish, even if he seems to explain something exactly at the opposite side of what I write here. But it's only because I have in my mind a different path to reach the exact same objective he points.

Pug's railroading of this thread into an argument about whether instancing is appropriate to MMOGs turned up a couple of good perpectives. I think that it is significant that MMOGs even if including MUDs, are a comparatively recent gaming genre, with a fairly long development cycle. If anything, early marketed MMOGs have been fairly successful. Now that we're seeing a larger number of them released, we'll see more failures, and should also expect more games that eclipse the current offerings.

Technically, we're still a long way from either virtual worlds or even online games that deserve the term massive applied to them in any meritorious manner. However, these are still early days - how many hideous platform games surrounded the occasional gem? The gems were not created in a vacuum - their development teams brought good ideas from former failures (both their own, and others) to the table when they went to their next project. The exact same thing is happening in the online games market, but because MMOGs are considerably more complex the lead times are... massive.

Perhaps, but it feels to me like a single player game. With every zone effectively instanced with a max of 120 people, you miss the super laggy hubs where people would travel through in other MMOGs. Better gaming experience? Yeah. Better community? From what I've seen of the City of Heroes community, no.

Everybody I know plays the game mainly like a single player game. The people I know only play with the people they know and nobody else. In 20 levels or so I've managed to avoid talking to anybody I didn't know, as well as avoided being annoyed by dumbasses. After all, why would I talk to anybody? I group with friends or I solo, I have absolutely no use for anybody, and with the instanced zones, I don't even run into the same people a lot of times.

Basically it comes down to this, I'm not making an argument against instancing, especially here. Personally I think it negatively affects community in a somewhat intangible way, and therefore I think it's bad and will negatively affect player subscription retention, which as we know, is what it's all about. That's my 'guess' and I have various reasons why I make that guess, but none I'd be willing to bet on until we see it fleshed out a bit more.

What's sad here is this. Pug has some decent points and I know what he's getting at, but it's too bad he sucks at communicating them (no offense, but it's true), which means he is promptly being bent over and broomhandle violated.

Regarding CoH city zone instancing - I think the real issue is lack of appropriate communication tools, rather than the instancing itself.

LFG tool needs to work across instances (and zones for matter).

Broadcast channels should probably work across instances.

Free form SWG/ATITD style chat groups wouldn't hurt either.

For what it's worth though, I've found running pick up groups in CoH to be *far* more effective than any other pve MMOG, simply because...

1) You can /invite people directly over any distance without /tell nonsense to get people into the same place.

2) CoH community etiquette says
  i) It's ok to just invite someone at random if they are on the lfg list.
  ii) Group leader picks the mission and people don't piss and moan about which order we do them in.

3) Mission structure and waypoint navigation means people can go sell/train/see contacts etc at sensible intervals without causing the group problems. Waypoints also mean no more 'how do I use /loc?' converssations.

So true.

I don't think instancing negatively affects community. I think some of the ways it's implemented does however. Perhaps it should only be used in ACTUAL quest missions. Or maybe it should only be used to defeat camping an arch villain (not just talking about City of Heroes here). But it's definately a necessary evil. It removes a lot of the problems in games today, particularly the most annoying one - lag due to overcrowding.

Not having instancing in your MMO is a stupid, stupid choice and your server had better be able to scale like a motherfucker.

That's exactly where I'm at as well.

As a function of game-driven goals, instantiated quest missions are perfect. They allow the quest for that player to be driven entirely by that player. None of this nonsense about contested spawn just to finish a quest started two years ago. That isn't fun, no matter how much spin is put on it.

Instancing should be use conservatively, to help achieve a key part of a single goal. The original EQ2 promised use was the best one I've read: multiple instances of Lady Vox et al. Bards need White Scales and a few dozen other things for their Epic. I didn't like being held back because I was number 25 on the list for spawn rotation. Instancing can solve that while not diminishing the fact that I still need the other dozens of things from the static world-wide content.

But making all content, or even just the "best" stuff, is wrong. That guts communities, particularly if it is part of the launch of a game.

It's not the tool that should be rated. It's the use. It takes talent to use it right.

how do you NOT cancel a product whose name you know longer own, and whose internet website you no longer own? Before you answer, remember that at this stage of development, Mythica was little more than a name and a website.

My understanding is that they

1) announced the game
2) went to court with Mythic
3) decided that the market wouldn't sustain Mythica
4) cancelled the project
5) said "fuck it" and gave the suit to Mythic.

Not really.  A friend of mine at MS actually had played it in a sort of inhouse alpha testing.  He said the combat engine was functional and fun (he compares it now to "Like CoH, but more active"), the grouping worked, missions worked, but most of the 'hub' stuff was still being added in.  That is a LOT more than a website and a name.

MS either decided to drop it's mmog budget, or didn't want two competing projects in the same genre (mmog fantasy).  They went with the team that had more 'experience'.  Or possibly the one they had a signed contract with.  I don't know any of the decision making details.  It came as a big surprise to my friend though, who admittedly was not working on the mythica team.

They picked the wrong one I think.

Erm, they had this thing very playable last E3. The suit followed months later.

In discussing the relevance of instancing in MMOGs, we all pretty much realize we're living an example now through CoH. While the game is fun as hell, I actually do have some big issues with it, mostly with the compartmentalized playerbase, the lack of anything else to do but combat and the fact they're charging a monthly fee for it at all.

What started as a reply to Pug and Hrose though turned into a a critique of CoH (http://www.grimwell.com/index.php?action=fullnews&id=124). But this is my distillation of the major issue with instancing:

In effect, I agree that it may not work for all MMOGs, but maintain, as do many, that it can work, if done right and exemplify the very purpose of this genre at the same time.

Again though, the problem is the compartmentalised design present in EQ, DAoC, CoH and any other game based on killing mobs in co-operation with exactly 5 or 7 other people, the problem isn't instancing itself.

In single-instance MMOGs if you do not co-operate with the rest of your realm, and you only compete with them in OOC and unfun ways (spawn competition and so on), your gaming experience is just as compartmentalised as it is in CoH. Is is not instancing that introduces that compartmentalisation, instancing just removes some of the negative impact of it.

In effect instancing solves some of the problems that occur when you write a massively multiplayer co-operative game, but then don't design it around massively multiplayer co-operation.

I'd love to see a combat based MMOG that did find a way to set massively mutiplayer co-operative pve tasks that are also fun. I've never seen such a thing happen though, and I have no idea how you could design such a thing.

_________

Interesting thought experiment.

If, in CoH...

- all buildings were enterable with fixed single instance interior maps.

- the server tracked which buildings contained missions, and only populated a building when a hero was assigned a mission in it.

- there were enough buildings to assume the chance of a passer by finding missions by entering buildings at random could be considered reasonably small.

Would you still consider CoH design to be unnacceptable as a MMOG for the anti-instancing reasons people have stated above?

Technically this would have no instancing, but it would play exactly as it does today. It would still feel compartmentalised. But it would have no multi-instance zones.

Compared with this alternative design, the only thing visible to the player that instancing is doing is helping to balance encounters and reduce griefing/kill-stealing potential.

If the mechanics of character growth and goals say you must work in small groups without being influenced by other groups, you will always be playing a compartmentalised game. If you can design a fun MMOG around some alternative method of advancement where interaction matters on a server community level, rather than a 6-8 person group level, then perhaps the subject of instancing becomes worth revisiting.

SWG attempted some things on this level (economic/resource systems, and the future light side jedi system come to mind), mid-high level ATITD operates very much on the server scale. But nothing I've seen ever managed to do so in the mainstream pve combat arena.

Instancing solves the problems associated with massively multi-player games by removing the other players.


The only good of MMOG worlds that I can think of was the promise of creating persistent virtual worlds that were to be shared with hundreds of other players who could interact and role-play their characters' lives.

Massively multi-player games were not designed to be huge RPG combat arenas and quest launching areas; those are just the activities that players tend to focus on. We already had combat and questing games before massively multi-player games became a reality. The only thing that massively multi-player games brought to RPGs were the massive number of players that could interact in a single instance of a persistent world.

Hub based instanced games do not attempt to create a shared persistent world. The hubs are little more than a gathering area. The game's content is then accessed through instanced areas that are designed to be played with very few players.

CoH may be fun as hell to play but does it feel like you are an actual super hero who is protecting other players? Does playing CoH feel like you are role-playing a super hero in a player inhabited virtual world or does it feel more like an action based multi-player video game?

Only if you choose to. You don't HAVE to distance yourself from other players in CoH. They are still there. But if you as the player WISH to remove yourself from most of them, that's your choice. I find that a much more "realistic" world simulation than other multiplayer persistant worlds where not only can I NOT remove myself from interaction with players I don't want, they can intrude upon my most private places in the game. I have no recourse to stop them other than /ignore, which doesn't do the job.



Other than the instanced part, how is that different from other MMOG's? I don't group with 600 people in EQ or DAoC, I group with 6. Or 8. Even if you add in raidgroup capability such as EQ did, you're still only with another 40 or 50 people, which quickly becomes unmanageable. Even leading raids in EQ or Shadowbane, I still rarely interacted with everyone there. Hell, most of them could be NPC's for all the effect they had on me. They were chess pieces I manuevered into place.



No, I'm not protecting other PLAYERS, unless they are in my group. But really, in persistant worlds, the PLAYERS themselves don't need my protection, because they are all meant to be EXTRAORDINARY people. That's the biggest problem with "virtual worlds" IMO, the players are meant to be special because no one (or very few people) want to be helpless sheep. You don't play pen-n-paper RPG's to be townsperson_006 who must watch screaming while his village is burned down by the marauders. If you do, you are very, very rare, so rare that the totality of people who like that sort of experience couldn't fill an NWN-sized server if a monthly fee was required.

The use of instancing is a tradeoff, depending completely on the implementation. It's a tradeoff between virtual world and multiplayer game. Again, I think instancing can be used in a virtual world situation to remove the very real problems that such virtual worlds have. You seem to believe any use of instancing destroys the massively multiplayer part.

I disagree with what you said.

More so than I feel I'm in a player inhabited world in EQ or DAOC. It also has far more scope to role play.

Why?

Because instancing is used to increase the amount of landscape to the extent that we can do what should be trivial things like make progress though buildings, follow a story arc, and actually put a context to all the killin' (save the hostage, defuse the bomb etc). Perhaps most importantly it means I will never see a dead guy rematerialise in front of me.

Witness all the hand-wringing when people realised there was a way to *shock* kill Dr. Vahz more than once. In single-instance games, the concept of camping a mob for multiple kills is standard practice, but the fact that a way had been found to do so in a CoH mission was considered worthy of note, and the general community feeling was that to use this loophole is poor form at best, actual cheating at worst.

Imagine someone telling you it is cheap to kill the same mob after it respawns in EQ.

I agree CoH isn't the dream MMORPG yet, just as EQ and DAOC etc weren't. But it isn't becuase of instancing - it's mostly because of shared limitations that both single-instance and multi-instance pve combat games currently have.



True, but on the other hand I could also say...

Static single-instanced games do not attempt to create a shared persistent world. The safe areas are little more than a gathering area. The game's content is then accessed through static dungeon areas that are designed to be played with very few players. Unfortunately, you will be forced to play through them with other people irrelvant to your gaming experience also wandering about getting in your way and not adding anything to your game.

Until the other people in a zone are interacting with you and having a positive effect on gameplay, whats the point of them being there?

Incidentally - the hub & instance based model doesn't stop you designing in ways for any random player to join or affect the workings of an instance, it just forces you to think of an actual reason to do it first (for example, the concept for CoV suggests that the opposing faction will be free to enter content instances you are in to disrupt your progress). All the hub and instance model does do is allow you to scale the size of the landscape dynamically to match demand; and put a hard cap on zerging.

Darniaq, what eldaec said. Instancing not "bad" because it's a wrong solution. Instancing is the OPTIMAL solution for a type of design. Instancing is the (best) consequence of that type of game.

I don't like what happened before instancing. I criticize the design that brought to instancing as an optimal solution. This is why I say that the genre has lost its identity.

There are other solutions. No, not in the market it seems. If you simply observe what we have now I agree that instancing is the way to go. But if you look toward a new model you could see how much instancing is the result of a flawed genre.

The fact that another example isn't present doesn't mean it is impossible. Or not.

Exactly what is this fascination with determining what's massively multiplayer and what's not anyway and then lambasting something that's not absolutely massively multiplayer?

Here's a clue for you: True massively multiplayer sucks.   There, I said it.

Here's why it sucks:

Are you, personally, capable of interacting productively with more than a dozen people at once?   For most of us, the answer is no.    Why then, do I need to have several hundred people on the same map with me?   Some of which are competing for/stealing my kills.   Some of which have no other way to enjoy the game than finding a way to PK and/or grief my ass.   A few of which who are annoying l33t d00ds who appear to type solely by masterbating on their keyboard.  

Lets face it, any player outside of group is serving no useful purpose for me other than to spam my chat channels, lower my frame rate, and generally be a pain in the ass to anything resembling an enjoyable game experience.  

Maybe once in awhile somebody'll dive to my rescue, but that's a gross exception to the norm.    Maybe once in awhile I want to trade something with them, but out in the field where combat takes place is not the place for it.

One of the things that impressed me about Guild Wars is they realized this and so use instancing to a massive degree.   Want to fight alone PvE?  No problem, you have your own map for that.   Want to fight in a group PvE?  Great, they have specially built scenarios for that with their own maps, just group up at the grouping points and head on in.  Want to fight PvP?   Choose your poison, there's multiple types available and they're all instanced in such a way as to assure a relatively fair fight.  Want to trade?  Great, you can do that in one of several city zones that each have about a hundred or so players on them you can meet and haggle with.

But is Guild Wars truly massively multiplayer?   Here's where people tell me "NO! It's not any more massively multiplayer than Phantasy Star Online!".   They're mostly right, the games are organized in a similar fashion, except some events have a few more players on them.   The game won't even have a monthy subscription cost.   But the thing is, I would say that Guild Wars is Massively Multiplayer where it counts, and not massively multiplayer where it shouldn't be.

So I say it's time to move on.   True massively multiplayer just can't be done right.    It'd be nice if it could, but it can't be because you can either have it a disorganized mess or a compartmentalized game.   If playing a disorganized mess is more exciting for you, be my guest.    I think the best comprimise on the market right now would be City of Heroes having both truly massively multiplayer maps and instanced maps.    That's a comprimise I think most of us can enjoy.

More or less we agree again. You observe the situation and you draw a conclusion. I share this conclusion.

Where I have a different opinion is about the design level. I think that true massive world are possible and with what we have now, not fancy resources. I agree that what is available now doesn't show any good sign toward this direction but it's here that I accuse the clueless design and the lack of ideas.

Sometimes innovation happens in little steps.  Sometimes it happens in big steps.   Technology in general has either happen often.   In particular, I have observed this many times in the Computer Game field.    

Big steps of innovation often result in what appears to be cloning.  For example, Dune II implemented a nice GUI to execute real time strategy that has become a standard for real time strategy games now.

Little steps in innovation are far more common, and I think that's what we are seeing in terms of instancing in MMORPGs today.    The instancing technology is old - I've seen it used way back in The Realm (http://www.realmserver.com/) with the dungeons and player housing.   This should not be surprising because the very way computer programs are built is very instancing friendly.   However, game developers are not entirely sure what the best way to use it is yet, so they are experimenting.   That's what these small steps are.   The Realm, Anarchy Online, City of Heroes, Guild Wars - all are merely experiments built in previous experiments.    Sooner or later they'll figure out the right way to go about building MMORPGs based on this, if such a thing truly exists.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton

"In computing, we mostly stand on each other's feet." - Attributed to Richard Wesley Hamming, Brian K. Reid, Dan Ingalls and Larry Tesler?.  (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ShouldersOfGiants)

I'd disagree with the notion that genuine massively multiplayer automatically sucks.

I'd even go as far as to say it has been done well outside of the pve combat world.

ATITD, SWG and EVE all have genuinely massively multiplayer economic/crafting components, and they do fill a niche for people determined to find a way to play MMMULE.

Other people are trying to make it work in pvp.

The DAoC 1.70 patch is bringing a metric asstonne of changes deisgned to make people RvR 'massively'; for instance you'll be able to gain a quarter of the xp for every level by capturing the level-appropriate battleground keep (which will now be available at levels 1-44), and 'grown-up' rvr is being redesigned around encouraging set piece battles over gank group roaming. Keeps are even getting PS style RP rewards for their capture.

PS is also already a genuinely massively multiplayer pvp title, and fun, if a little repetitive.

I find it hard to believe someone can't think of some way to do a genuinely massively co-operative combat experience (and not in the sense of uber mobs that take 600 ppl on autoattack to kill them).

No Geldon, it's not about a technologic innovation, it's about a dry design. The genre has hit a wall and now it's going back to rediscover old technology. Instanced is everything cooperative you already play, from Doom to Counterstrike.

This is Diablo with NOTHING different aside that you have a graphical chat instead of a textual chat.

I don't see an innovation, nor progress. I see a natural collapse of a situation that hasn't found an effective way to develop. We are going back because the technology ALREADY supports massive worlds. But the *ideas* still don't support them.

We are underdeveloped on the ideas, not the technology. We are taking the easy path to dumb down everything and this strategy doesn't apply just to the gaming industry but pretty much everywhere.

Yes.

Consider the source: super-hero comic books. Now, let's take one instance: A recent issue of Ultimate Spiderman. Spiderman fights Dr. Octopus. There's Spiderman, and there's Doc Ock, and they're dishing it out. Where are the other Marvel heroes and villains? Shouldn't e.g. Daredevil come to his aid?

No, because superhero comics in general deal with a SUBSET of the universe in which the heroes exist. The "supergroup" X-Men rarely teams up with the "supergroup" Fantastic Four, though both exist in the Marvel universe. I think it's this separation into "sub-universes" that best can be used to defend instancing in CoH.

Making CoH truly multiplayer with no instancing would mean reducing relevant superhero comic books to Secret Wars and the like. And how fun was that?

HRose, geldon was refering to innovation in design.  Not technology.  I think both he and I would agree that the problem is a lack of design innovation.  The real problem, tho, is that design innovation has been squelched for several years by the need for money from big execs who want to see another game as popular as EQ.
I'd much rather see more smaller, innovative projects than the handfull of clones we've mostly had up until recently.  CoH is different, PS is different, so we're starting to get some different ideas out there.  Hopefully this trend will continue.

--
Alkiera

This is another point where I disagree. It seems that popularity is always a sign of mediocrity. For me it's not. If EQ is popular is because, somewhere, it holds a value. Other minor projects can surely be valuable as well but striving for popularity isn't against the (possible) quality of a game.

And imho CoH and even WoW aren't innovative from this perspective. They are the good result of a company that was able to learn from the mistakes of others. It's about "polishing". In this case CoH offers PvE. PvE has nothing to share in a massive world and in fact they use instances.

As I said above the result is better and funnier because they brought the game where it belongs: in a cooperative experience. But CoH isn't a mmorpg from this point of view. Take Ultima Online and CoH and you see that, aside the setting, one strives to be a word, the other strives to be an arcade.

Now I don't say CoH isn't a good game because it is an arcade. I don't think that building a good game like that isn't noteworthy, but it's simply not what a mmorpg should be. Or where the true potential to discover is.

What does a dry design mean to you, and why do you think all games suffer from it?    I think it's because the big innovations are hard and little leaps of innovation are very hard to see unless you are watching for them.  

Little things like the Guards in Thief: Deadly Shadows who will often announce in vivid detail where they are going to search (i.e. near the bookcase, near the barrel).   Not terribly realistic, but the applications of that kind of design are limitless - imagine games where the NPCs know every object in their environment, how to talk about it, and how to interact with it?   More noticable things include the Havok Physics which, while not entirely balanced yet, are beginning to allow us to see virtual objects interacting in a virtual 3D world in a more realistic manner.   There is levels of artistic innovation such as you'll see in Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker or Resident Evil for the gamecube.

You can look at all these examples and say, "Bah! Same old dry design.  Mere new features and better technology use do not make for true progress."

And to that, my only reply is: Exactly how else are you expecting to people to rectify a dry design?  Magic?  Coming up with innovative new ideas is the process in which it is done.   Those new ideas end up being new features and better use of technology.   Slowly but steadily, things are improving.  

The only problem is, not quite fast enough for the hardcore gamers.   There really should be a better way.   Alkiera touches on part of the problem: investors investing only in popular ideas.

Yes, I too will point out that in order for a game to be popular, there really must be some kind of gameplay there that is worthwhile enough to enjoy.   Starcraft would never have taken off if it was genuinely painful to play.   Everquest's subscriber retention indicates that there is some worthwhile gameplay there for some.   (Of course, most of us are not playing Everquest because we've already played it out.  Besides, EQ is dated.  You want a good modern EQ, play FFXI, which has recently beat EQ's subscription numbers.   Innovation can be merciless.)

But that's not what Alkiera was saying.  Alkiera was saying that it is hard to find somebody willing to fund the development of your game if it is not based on a design that is already quite popular.  

If you announce to your investors, "I'm going to create a fascinating new game that is nothing like any game anyone has every seen before!!" what happens is the investor says, "Not interested, too risky."   This is actually a justified stance because several new concept games simply flop for no reason (http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/914208.asp).

On the other hand, if you announce to your investors, "I'm going to make a better Real Time Strategy game!" the investors look at their records and say, "Hmm, real time strategy games are selling reasonably well.  Okay, that's a reasonable risk, you've got our investment: now make a good Real Time Strategy game that can compete on the market!"

In this way, innovation is stifled by the big execs.   It sucks for the gamer who wants something new and interesting because without some investors out there who are willing to take a chance, the market just fills up with clones.

This is a great example of what is wrong with MMOG world design. I'm sure that a lot of MMOG developers share your view that MMOG worlds should be little more than a collection of safe areas that act as launching points into shared PvE areas. MMOG worlds are not conducive to this style of play because all that the other players can do is get in your way.

The original release of UO was an attempt at creating a game world, not an attempt at creating a collection of safe areas to launch PvE adventures. Unfortunately the original UO world was plagued with difficult design problems that have largely been answered by changing the focus from attempting to creat a world to just creating shared PvE adventures.

Pretty much what happened is a few guys tried to create a workable virtual world, it didn't work as planned, nobody could think of a way to fix it that has worked well, and now instead of trying to fix it they have given up and returned to an easier multi-player game design that doesn't attempt to create a virtual world. Instancing is perfect for cooperative PvE on a small scale which happens to be what MMOGs were/are devolving into.

Well, here the discussion isn't anymore about ideas, but about points of view. I rant about MMOGs and say they have failed because I'd like to be in the industry. I cannot and so I envy and criticize when I see potential that isn't used. I think I could do a better work but I'm not in the condition and so I keep criticizing. These communities are more or less that. You see a problem, point a problem and then rant when noone seems to fix it.

Dry design for me is a situation (a software house, a designer, a publisher or whatever) that doesn't react the best possible to a situation. So, in this case, I rant about "instances" because they killed the purpose of building on the strenght of the genre (the idea of a world).

But then you mess again the technology level with the level of the "ideas".



Even here, I rant about the way the current possibilities are used. I don't fight for a completely absurd game. Even an EverQuest redone could improve a lot by developing a better and cohesive structure. Even the bland PvE could be improved and, again, with just the better use of ideas, with nothing about technology involved.

My point of view is distorted becuase I always see things from the perspective that I have something to say that I believe could be valuable. If I criticize the ideas it's because I have a different opinion about those ideas.

About this whole issue I just think that it could be easy to develop a successful game by exploiting the *strenghts* of a massive world and not just "reacting" passively to a situation that is the result of the design hitting a wall with no ideas about how to go further.

 While I agree that  new features and better tehcnologies are often prerequsites for new design I would say we alredy have everything in place for a perfect persistnet world for thousands of player engaged in competetive interaction.

 - Database and server structure for massvie persistent worlds are  already well developped

 - We already have technology(both server and client side)  to have large amounts of people in the same palce at the same time  

 - UI design ,player tools , AI are nothing hard or new to implement  ( in the same amoutnas in needed for perfect mmorpg). -Those elements in fact are alredy implmented balanced and polished  multiple of times in other genres.

 What we don't have though is single well thought out design document , professional team and publisher investing their money . - When there is money and professional team design document sucks balls    ( SWG, WoW , EQ2 ,Eve, CoH,Lineage) .  Sometimes there is no money , nor conscious desing ,nor team ( Shadowbane, RoT) .

 And sometimes it looks like there is good design document ( Darkfall) but there is a feel that they are missing professional developers  and money -e.g vaporware.

Can you give your typing a little more effort? Please?

If you're foreign, I can understand.

Just to be clear, the first bit I quoted above is not my view on what is preferable, it's my observation of what has actually happened in every pve combat MMOG evar. Even UO.

And it's also my observation that instancing doesn't reinforce or weaken the effect, all instancing does is dynamically scale the size of the landscape. If you wanted to, you could let any player enter any instance without limit - though obviously you wouldn't choose to do so until you have worked out how the extra players can enhance gameplay; equally there is nothing to stop events in one instance having some impact on events on other instances, both current and future.

If you aren't choosing to let players alter the landscape directly (often a valid choice even in truly massively multiplayer experiences such as PS), you might as well have that facility to scale the landscape for the sake of playability.

As I said above, people have created massively cooperative experiences, both in pvp combat (PS) and in economic games (SWG, ATITD, EVE). My point was that nobody has ever even tried to do this in the pve combat space, and that instancing is irrelevant, you could use the hub & instance model no matter what scale of interaction and influence you intend to give your players.

EQ's 10th ring war would probably be a good example. Unfortunately, at least for EQ programmers, it seems to be too difficult for them to make other events like this. In fact, for quite a while they managed to bug the existing one about every second patch.

No, no and no.

Just to prove the point, I'll use Star Wars Galaxies as an example. They used one of the most (according to them and the manufacturer) advanced databases (Oracle). It fucked up royally and I think is still giving players problems. It used some of the most advanced AI routines for mob behaviour. None of these things are set in stone technologies, and the progress on these areas for MMOG's is actually at a quite nascent state. For single-player games, AI is quite advanced, but can't be for MMOG's because they haven't figured out ways to make AI that good work on such a grand scale. Similarly, even advanced MMOG clients like SWG with all its graphics horsepower can't properly render too many players on screen without bringing server and client to their knees.

Instancing can get around lots of those issues just by not having to stress the servers out.

As a side note,

I disagree with what you said. I feel AI is largely an ignored portion of gaming and needs to become the new focus now that games are so shiny. I've been wanting a dedicated AI processor for years. AI processing and architecture is the field I'd go into if I wasn't such a lazy stupid bastard.

With the state of audio and graphics, I feel AI is far behind comparitively.

True, in reality, single-player AI really isn't all that advanced. But compared to MMOG AI, single-player is rocket engines to MMOG's neanderthals.

I have not seen much advance in AI since Halflife and Thief 2.  The AI in thief 2 was very buggy at times (same bugs seem to still live in thief 3) but it showed a potential to take into effect so many different variables to set it's current state.  The reaction to the data was not always that great, but it was definate a technological advancement.  As a comparison I don't see anything in Thief 3 AI that was not there in Thief 2.  Tweaked abit more, and maybe I am forgetting things about thief 2. It has been awhile and I never got anywhere near finishing it.

For cooperative groups I have not seen much advance past Halflife.  The pathing and group tactics in that game were pretty new for it's time, but nowadays I just keep seeing the same thing over and over.  Where is that next jump forward?  If some of the stuff they had in E3 2003 demos is true it COULD be halflife 2, but I have a hunch most of the stunning AI there was scripted.

I am thinking about the scene where there was a gunfight in a street, and then the guy ducked into a building.  The AI tried the door a few times but the player was standing in the way (door opened inward).  The AI then moved to a window and started shooting in.  The player ducked behind a desk and pushed it against the door.  It was JUST in time as the AI went to try the door again when the player stepped away.  With the door blocked the AI went back to firing through the window.  That is some pretty good AI, but my inner sceptic thinks scripting.

There is also the strider alien which is super tall with spindly legs and on the audio of the demo they were talking about how the AI was in three parts for the creature.  Each leg having separate pathing so that it could step forward and the head pathing behind the legs so that it could crouch below things or extend over other things.  Each part of the three communicated with each other so that if one part could not find a way through the other two would stop and look for alternate paths.

If that stuff actually works realtime it may be our next big AI jump.  I am skeptic though.  I have this suspiscion that the E3 demo in 2003 was heavily scripted and one of the reasons for delay was that they could not get the AI up to snuff anywhere near the original release date.

Yes, and here you confirm what I wrote. Instancing is a profitable workaround but isn't about addressing the real problem to move further.

Instead of surpassing the obstacle they are going backward.

 Well u using bad example.  I would state DaoC as an example of a game which handles massive scale battles  well enough .  Eve as a game which handles enourmous database and massive amount of people on same server. Planetside even handles massive twitch combat .

 Tools/UI... - any RTS ,new hybrid FPS ( savage)  has a very well developed , balanced ,playtested and proven UI / tools .




 Again thats according to swg devs .- Its just a marketing hype , imho SWG devs were pretty  incompetent in many areas despite  loads of cash the project had . Saying "advanced AI "and  showing it is 2 different things.

 Advanced AI is in Pod Bot (bot for CS) , in UT 2004 . There are tons of awesome scripted AI engines (practically every CRPG,RTS).  

 But again we dont need any advanced AI for mmorpg imho - primitive scripting is good enough . - EQ didnt have any half competent AI ,yet with scripts they managed to create pretty interesting and chalenging mob encounters. Point of mob AI is not to provide challenge - its to provide story and quest background . Real challenge should in competition with other players.

 SWG client isn't "advanced" -its pretty antiquated and poorly executed actually .  If you want see advanced engine check Dark and  Light -thats advanced .



  Even SB has no big problems by now handling 200-300 people at the same time  -and this is buggy ass  bastard engine which has inherent flaws.  

  What about planetside? -which not only manages to handle truely massive battles -its also manages to handle em with collision detection and twitch combat!  It even has integrated voice communication for gods sake! Now tell me  what technology we exactly missing?

Saying technology "is not good enough" is just a poor excuse for incompetent design.

Don't completely ruin your point with features that are not worth shit.  The integrated voice in planetside sucks ass.  Nobody uses it, everyone I ever played with ran teamspeak.

Planetside can do what it does only because everyone looks the same.  For a PVP game, blatent cloning is acceptable, but most won't want to all look the same in any even moderately pve game.  How well PS handles those battles is very dependent to what kind of connection you have on the other end as well.  I never have much problem with it, but others I know can't run planetside worth shit once battles get bigger than a few dozen.  It isn't their systems either, but lag.  Some bad connection between point A and point B.

SWG has huge problems with large groups because of the sheer amount of data that has to be transmitted for each player model.  All the minute facial detail, all the clothing options.  Once battle starts it gets even worse.  Now you have all different body hit locations with UNIQUE armor with different resistances to every single damage type.  Everyone is firing a gun that does WIDELY variable damage depending on the unique circumstances of it's crafting.  It is not the planetside calculation that you just got hit by a cycler while wearing your stock armor.  You just got hit by a unique gun while wearing unique armor and everyone else around you is also unique in the same way.

To many this is not worth the loss, but it is just the way the crafting in the game works.  The game was built from the ground up to specifically NOT allow large scale battles.  So while your arguments about SWG's problems are very valid, there are very logical and easy to understand reasons behind it.  For the record I don't think any of that overly complicated weapon and armor system has ANY place in a starwars game.

A spellchecker.

[quote="HaemishM
Just to prove the point, I'll use Star Wars Galaxies as an example. They used one of the most (according to them and the manufacturer) advanced databases (Oracle). It fucked up royally and I think is still giving players problems. [/quote]

Oracle is an industrial strength database, but it's also like trying to use a semi truck and trailer for drag racing, which means it doesn't really handle lots and lots of small transactions very well without lots of hackery to reduce the cost of setting up and tearing down sessions. Definately a case of picking the wrong tool for the job.

DAoC could NOT handle the battles well upon release, nor could it handle them well at the same point in its lifespan that SWG is at (about 1 year after release). It was better than SWG, but still not what you'd call smooth. As for Planetside, every anecdote I've ever heard says that without 1 GB of RAM, forget smooth large battles.



NOT if your game is a PVE-only or PVE-predominant game. Not all games are about competition between players. In games where you have to do a significant amount of PVE, you damn well better have some good AI.

EQ had pathing (bad), and it "cheated" to make encounters more difficult. Things like aggro that specifically targeted the way players played (i.e. healers generated more aggro than tanks, magic-users generated more aggro just from casting, people sitting in fights generated more aggro).



Did you hear that sound? It was the sound of your argument shooting its retarded self in the foot. Or the face, because either one is about as effective.

Dark and Light is not released. In other words, it isn't an advanced engine, it's an advanced IDEA. Until it's being hammered by thousands of cockgobblers with credit cards, it is nothing more than vapor.

And please, learn to type. Your posts hurt.

The daoc server I have characters on crashes whenever around 300 people are in the same place. Meaning every relic raid and occaisionally on keep raids.

This leads to an interesting forum whine stalemate. Certain realms insist the only way to take relics is at 6am, and then call the other realms lame for repeatedly bringing the the server down in prime time. Wheras other realms insist on always raiding (and failing due to server crash) at primetime, then whining at the other realms for lame out of hours raids. It's probably the solution that keeps everyone happiest - as this is the only way everyone can have something to whine about.

As for the 1Gb thing - well this appears to be about the limit for large smooth battles even in modern single player games these days. /shrug

Though why devs refuse to include *really* low detail settings for people with sub-Xbox level PC specs I'll never know.

I seem to remember Raph saying on the pre-launch SWG boards that he'd told the client graphics engine guys that in the case of large battles he didn't care if everyone turned into stick-men, just so long as in all cases the client runs at a sensible minimum frame rate. That's the right idea - shame it didn't seem to work out.

When all you have is a polished turd the last thing that you want to do is take away teh shineÿ.

Part of DAoC's problem is that you actually can fit 300 people into one spot. There's no collision detection or land features to prevent that many players from occupying a small area.

I'd rather play a fun game where everyone looks alike than a poor excuse for a game that has millions of unique ways to dress your Barbie doll. The technology to support massive numbers of players in a single online world has surpassed my expectations, now all I need is for someone to figure out how to make a game that has massive numbers of players sharing a single world fun to play.

Well, right now DAoC handles battles of 200 vs 200 without crashing on Merlin. On some situations it crashes due to other bugs when the numbers climb but the situation is already very good.

The wall you hit here is about the client. And with "New Frontier" the lag is multiplied for 10 (and more due to horrible memory leaks).

The client lag wall is in there too; which gets worse with every expansion.

But on certain servers the actual server crashes when too many people stand in one place. It typically means downtime of about 15 minutes for everyone located in a specific realm at the time (dungeons, toa, SI, and mainlands are all separate realms for server purposes). Not disasterous for normal play - but it stops any relic raids dead, since everyone logs in one at a time and gets killed by NPCs.