The MMOG landscape - unchanging and eternal (since 2004)

[eldaec]

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

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.

[Lum]

just wtf is the population of Austin doing?

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.

[schild]

What does Austin have to do with Diablo 3?

Edit: Zing.

[eldaec]

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

Also next up in line I believe that we have a bunch of first person shooter MMOGS coming out soon.

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.

[tazelbain]

>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.

[Lum]

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

It's called Call of Duty 4.

[eldaec]

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

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.

[TheCastle]

>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.

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.

[Venkman]

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

[TheCastle]

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

It's called Call of Duty 4.

I want 200 person PS battles.

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

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

[eldaec]

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.

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.

[Draegan]

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

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.

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.

[Nebu]

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.

[Morfiend]

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.

 

[Jayce]

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.

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:

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.

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

[tazelbain]

Metaplace is a platform.

[TheCastle]

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

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.

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.

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...

[Threash]

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.

[mutantmagnet]

amount of iteration required will demand a budget in the 100 million dollar range coupled with an almost unlimited time window.

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.

[Draegan]

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...

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.

[Montague]

amount of iteration required will demand a budget in the 100 million dollar range coupled with an almost unlimited time window.

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.

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

[sidereal]

What would you want in your next MMO?

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

[TheCastle]

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...

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.

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.

[Nija]

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.

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.

[schild]

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

[Lantyssa]

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.

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.

[sidereal]

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.

[UnSub]

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

It's called Call of Duty 4.

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.

[schild]

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.

[Lum]

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.

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!")

[Venkman]

Yes. Looking forward to MAG.

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.

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.

[UnSub]

The problem with 'dynamic systems' is the other players, who will fuck up your system. 

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

[ashrik]

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

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.

[TheCastle]

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.