History of MMORPGs

[Scadente]

Hai gais, could you plz answer this questionnaire?

No, I'm kidding.

Hello!

I am currently writing my dissertation about, you guessed it, MMORPGs. One part of it is to chronicle the history and evolution of the genre, the other deals with interaction between player and game (aka. combat). After many a google search I have found plenty of pieces and personal tales about all kinds of MMORPGs, but I'm trying to focus it a bit more and look at the effect of developer desicions on the biggest games (insert academic nonsense).

So I was wondering if anyone knew of any good websites or books which chronicle the history of our favourite genre. Also your personal insight on the matter would be of great use for me, should any of you want to share!

[UnSub]

I'm sure you checked all the wikis?

[Jade Falcon]

Developer choices and the effects it has? SWG and the NGE or when walking wallets strike back.

[Scadente]

There are so many of them, although I have found several good ones.

I'm in the process, and I'll report all my findings here should people be interested.

Getting release dates and other easy-to-get-info is... well easy. But finding old patch-notes and developer blogs/comments/threads/quotes is proving a bit tougher. Mapping the history isn't the problem, but finding plausible arguments for why things went down the way they did is proving a bit tougher. Stuff like the release of ToA for DaoC, or the remake of SWG is very interesting, since it's a clear developer-action - community-reaction situation. But seeing as I'm pretty new to the genre, while many of the frequent posters here have been playing almost since the genres inception and have far greater insight then me, I'm hoping they might prod me in the... right direction.

I'm not trying to cut down on my research (or make you guys do it for me), it's just that MMORPGs are so massive that getting a good overview of the events, other then pure facts, that have shaped the genre to what it is today is easier said then done.

[Nebu]

You might want to start at Terra Nova for links and the archives.  They love the theory crafting parts over there.

[Venkman]

Have you been through this topic (stickied) and this one (not stickied) yet?

[UnSub]

CoH/V has some good posts by devs about why they changed things in particular ways - is that what you are looking for?

[Rake]

Here's quite an epic thread that is in itself enough material for several books Big Thread

And I like this from a player's point of view featuring combat Darktide Story

I'd find it much easier to write about my own experiences, but I suppose the exercise in research and a readable result is what you're after.

[Scadente]

Thanks Darniaq, I have reaped some great stuff from the stickied thread, but the unstickied one flew by me like gastric gasses in a cheese-store, thanks for the heads-up!

Unsub: I just noticed their forums, and wow... good shizz. They even explain specifically why they fixed/changed something. CoH/V is also a very interesting study, since it's combat is a fresh alternative to some of the bigger and more traditional games (read fantasy yarn). Thanks!

Rake: I will draw on my own experiences, but I didn't play EQ or UO back in the day (And I haven't even tried some of the big games like SWG). So it's hard to gauge how much the genre has changed, and how new games have pushed it in new directions and dead-ends. That SWG:NGE thread is massive and the Darktide-story is interesting, cheers for the goodies!

Nebu: I was actually searching for the Terra Nova blog since I lost it once I installed mr. Google Chrome and forgot all about it. Cheers!

The dissertation will be two-folds of sorts, and it has to have the academic tail-end of doom. I'll be analyzing the combat systems using Phenomenology to get the "feel" of the combat across, and then run the numbers and games academia to back up the "feel"-analysis. Then compare two games; WOW and LotRO at the moment, subject to change since they feel very samey, but perfect since one is deliberatly slow and the other semi-fast paced. The other part is about MMORPG-history, and the evolution of combat in particular, hence dev, player, f13 and patch-note input will be much more valuable then my own. And since I only have about 10.000 words I'm not even mentioning MUDs.

I'll try to post some of my finds once I get back to London. And again, thanks for all the links.
(I think British politeness is getting to me)

[Khaldun]

A link on the methodological problems posed by the history of virtual worlds. http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/12/the_history_of_.html

[UnSub]

One excellent dev post from CoH/V I haven't seen the like of elsewhere is where Castle (the Powers Dev) wrote a lengthy explanation of how after some players complained that Taunt was acting funny, he and Ghost Widow (programmer) went through the code line by line to discover that the way Taunt worked in the code and the way it worked in the design documentation was completely different. Sadly it looks like that post has been deleted - I can find reference to it but not the post itself.

I don't play it, but an EQ2 dev did a long post on the change to hate mechanics in that title.

[Raph]

I am guessing that sites like Stratics probably have patch notes going back to the inception of MMORPGs.

FWIW, my site has plenty of material along these lines from UO and SWG.

Oh, and for early UO, you may need to look on the Usenet archives via Google groups.