immortalfrieza said:
I can't see what can't be directly transferred over to work in an MMO. Random events? High respawn rate. Wandering creatures? Again, high respawn rate. Random loot to run into? Yet again, high respawn rate. The only thing that needs to be altered for the mechanics in general is to rebalance so it can't be exploited so damned easily and become uber invincible guy.
Ahhh, the infamous power curve.
There's a reason all MMOs deliberately drag out their game with grind, it's to create deliberate disparity between those with way too much time (or money, as permitted) vs those who don't. Envy and power are strong motivators to make the slackers play more.
If the game is too resource intensive, then don't go for "THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!" or anything like that. Dial it back to something around Oblivion's level, most computers these days can handle that.
Graphics are -not- the central issue here, actually.
If you've ever worked with the Gamebryo engine, you would understand that MOST actor placement is initially static, and that all changes to actors the player interacts with are logged and added to the save file.
Bump that table and all the objects on it? Save change to file.
Steal that shiny silver sword off the imperial captain's desk? Save to change file.
Etc.
And since the player can possess, remove (sell) OR place any Unique ID'd object at any time, that change has to be logged too. (even worse: most placed items have an NPC owner and their own flags)
It was done that way because unlike most games that only associate object (actor) states with positioning (like Terraria or Minecraft) OR their current owner (like World of Warcraft), TES games are positively MASSIVE. It's not possible to load the entire game world state into memory and keep track of everything. So, the logical solution is to use an inverse model of that, where you only track the changes the player makes to the initial world state.
What this means: Every change is tallied and saved to your character's file, and as the game goes on, most of those tallies remain, so the file mostly grows larger as time goes on (there are timers that "reset" zones and objects, wiping the changes clean and shortening the save file, but they take a long time in in-game time to occur; much slower than the average player is likely to interact new objects).
If you played any TES game since Morrowind, you may have noticed how it takes incrementally longer to load the game or enter certain areas as you keep playing: That's due to the game having to load this growing save file.
To make a long story short, it's immersive but incredibly resource inefficient (specifically, active memory).
And that's just for ONE PLAYER. ONE. UNO. EIN.
In fact, it's so inefficient that the growing save file was reported as (eventually) rendering the PS3 version of Skyrim unplayable. The poor PS3 eventually runs out of available RAM and cannot load the entire save file because it's just too damn big.
Now, imagine taking this highly inefficient system and multiplying it for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER ON AN MMO SERVER.
There is no way it's feasible; even a Blade server would bank out well before the world population hit triple digits.
And that's why you CAN'T just tack multiplayer onto Skyrim and call it a day.
Yes, the SETTING is perfect for an MMO. The concept and massive scale of TES is perfect for an MMO. But the program model that Bethesda has built their reputation on is NOT. In fact, I'd call it the worst possible model to translate into an MMORPG.
An Elder Scrolls MMO absolutely required a new engine to even be possible, and for better or worse, some of the immersive elements had to go with it. There is no other way.
You'd think after the multitude of MMOs where this has proven to be anything but a "safe bet", they've have gotten the hint by now.
You'd be surprised at just how out of touch most AAA game companies are with gamers.
