The MMOG landscape - unchanging and eternal (since 2004)

[Goumindong]

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

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

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

[Slayerik]

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

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

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

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

[Goumindong]

Who says you would need to upgrade?

[Venkman]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[eldaec]

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

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

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

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

[Venkman]

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

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

[Jack9]

only because all of their friends did

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

[SnakeCharmer]

have room left over to see the game

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

[Fordel]

have room left over to see the game

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

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

[Arnold]

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

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

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

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

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

[FatuousTwat]

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

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

[Arnold]

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

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

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

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

[Arnold]

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

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

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

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

[ezrast]

have room left over to see the game

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

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

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

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

Titan Quest?

[Simond]

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

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

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

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

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

[Ratman_tf]

have room left over to see the game

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

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

DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE!

[FatuousTwat]

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

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

Titan Quest?

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

[Slyfeind]

I loved early AC1, but there are some real basic problems with that game.  Back in the day, spell research was EXPENSIVE and tedious....

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

[Fordel]

have room left over to see the game

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

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

DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE!

exactly!

The sad part is how many fail at that 

[Venkman]

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

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

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

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

[UnSub]

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

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

Titan Quest?

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

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

[Senses]

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

[Ubvman]

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

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

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

[FatuousTwat]

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

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

Titan Quest?

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

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

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

[Xilren's Twin]

I loved early AC1, but there are some real basic problems with that game.  Back in the day, spell research was EXPENSIVE and tedious....

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

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

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

[Merusk]

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

[Yoru]

I loved early AC1, but there are some real basic problems with that game.  Back in the day, spell research was EXPENSIVE and tedious....

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

Sadly, my guess would be no in any massive game.  Any system based on lack of player knowledge will get smoked out by the gestalt of the player base in short order, or would have to be so random as to hardly be a system at all which would make it not have the impact the "magic economy" was intended to have. 

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

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

[Ratman_tf]

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

[Simond]

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

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

It's time to slay the dragon!
 

[Slyfeind]

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

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

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

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

[UnSub]

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

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

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

EQOA appeared to get good reviews of its play, but a major factor limiting its audience was 1) it was set in prequel times to EQ, so was entirely separate to the PC version and 2) it cost about $250 to start up to cover the cost of network hardware and keyboard for text communication. I remember reading that during the SOE events the EQOA tables were empty where the EQ tables were full. However, it appears that EQOA is still going.

EDIT: because I didn't check my tags.

[Murgos]

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

[ajax34i]

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

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

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

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

[Slyfeind]

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

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

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

Yeah, like I said, that would rock.

[Lantyssa]

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

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