A View From the Road: The Stool and the Chair
- Thread starter John Funk
- Start date
Hehe I was going to say when the back of the seat supports your back for you.
Seriously though MMOG is a strictly open definition of a game that is both massive and online. It is not necessarily an MMORPG although some MMOGs are MMORGPs. I'd be less inclined to call TF2 an MMOG simply because at any given point it is not Massive at all. It's quite small and will reset it's entire quantity every time a round ends instead of persisting despite the fact that an objective has been completed.
The most blurred line game in the pipes right now is probably Global Agenda [http://www.globalagendagame.com/]. GA is an extremely sharded and instanced game which features FPS/3RDPS style play in each zone resets quite like TF2 would after a "mission" with the exception that it will change (persistantly) depending on the things happening in other instanced zones.
Seriously though MMOG is a strictly open definition of a game that is both massive and online. It is not necessarily an MMORPG although some MMOGs are MMORGPs. I'd be less inclined to call TF2 an MMOG simply because at any given point it is not Massive at all. It's quite small and will reset it's entire quantity every time a round ends instead of persisting despite the fact that an objective has been completed.
The most blurred line game in the pipes right now is probably Global Agenda [http://www.globalagendagame.com/]. GA is an extremely sharded and instanced game which features FPS/3RDPS style play in each zone resets quite like TF2 would after a "mission" with the exception that it will change (persistantly) depending on the things happening in other instanced zones.
My level 99 jar of piss says that if TF2 isn't already an MMOG, it's going to become one eventually. That, or my sniper just has really high-level piss for some reason ...
I'm not sure why people are so terrified of clear definitions, but it certainly allows all sorts of folks to get teaching degrees these days.
A stool becomes a chair when it gets a fourth leg and a back that is high enough to support the person sitting in it if they should lean back.
Putting a 1" or 2" high back on a stool doesn't make it a chair, since the definition is a practical, not a philosophical one.
In that light, Champions Online may not really be an MMOG, but that is not its primary failing.
Champions Online, like its predecessor City of Heroes/Villains, is supposed to be a superhero game (MMO or not). Despite its really quite beautiful costume elements and occasionally whiz-bang "pew-pew" graphics, it is really no more than World of Warcraft in spandex. In fact, it is demonstrably World of Warcraft in spandex, as the developer seems to have taken his cue from Lord of the Rings Online and done no more developing than was necessary to put spandex over chainmail and overlay a comic book environment onto the WoW combat engine, at least from the point of view of this player.
The failing referred to, then, is the inability of the developer - of both games, as it turns out - to understand that they are exploiting a genre that they simply don't know enough about to simulate, which genre is comic book superheroes. The specifics of how they failed to correctly model the genre are too numerous to list here, but to sum up, Champions Online, like City of Heroes/Villains before it, is once again selling stools as chairs.
While stools had their uses, they were only around until someone realized a chair was a better idea. Maybe someone will publish a superhero MMOG developed by people who, I don't know, actually READ comic books. Then, if they fail in how they simulate the world, at least they will get the heroes right and, who knows, maybe the fourth time will be the charm.
We can dream; that's what gaming is all about.
A stool becomes a chair when it gets a fourth leg and a back that is high enough to support the person sitting in it if they should lean back.
Putting a 1" or 2" high back on a stool doesn't make it a chair, since the definition is a practical, not a philosophical one.
In that light, Champions Online may not really be an MMOG, but that is not its primary failing.
Champions Online, like its predecessor City of Heroes/Villains, is supposed to be a superhero game (MMO or not). Despite its really quite beautiful costume elements and occasionally whiz-bang "pew-pew" graphics, it is really no more than World of Warcraft in spandex. In fact, it is demonstrably World of Warcraft in spandex, as the developer seems to have taken his cue from Lord of the Rings Online and done no more developing than was necessary to put spandex over chainmail and overlay a comic book environment onto the WoW combat engine, at least from the point of view of this player.
The failing referred to, then, is the inability of the developer - of both games, as it turns out - to understand that they are exploiting a genre that they simply don't know enough about to simulate, which genre is comic book superheroes. The specifics of how they failed to correctly model the genre are too numerous to list here, but to sum up, Champions Online, like City of Heroes/Villains before it, is once again selling stools as chairs.
While stools had their uses, they were only around until someone realized a chair was a better idea. Maybe someone will publish a superhero MMOG developed by people who, I don't know, actually READ comic books. Then, if they fail in how they simulate the world, at least they will get the heroes right and, who knows, maybe the fourth time will be the charm.
We can dream; that's what gaming is all about.
I agree that the whole labeling kraze just helps us associate certain games with certain aspects of that gaming. However, I was a little confused, but if i am correct than what you said was in Champions online, you make a character and throw him into a "realm" depending on how your feeling at the time. Assuming that thats correct than by traditional definition it isnt a MMO at all. Which means that there is finally a game out there better than WoW!!!
Also I think a stool becomes a chair when the back is made so high as to support the person resting in the chairs humble graces. So yeah a foot high backing on a stool, by my definition counts as a chair.
Also I think a stool becomes a chair when the back is made so high as to support the person resting in the chairs humble graces. So yeah a foot high backing on a stool, by my definition counts as a chair.
An interesting read, raising some intruiging questions.
What do we consider a standard multiplayer game? Four people sat around a console? Six people hooking up computers over LAN?
Nowadays its not uncommon for games to incorperate some form of multiplayer in which a couple dozen people can play together. Heck, that might even be considered a small player base in this day and age.
As for the stool question, I would go with the posters before me; it becomes a chair when the back is high enough to support your back
What do we consider a standard multiplayer game? Four people sat around a console? Six people hooking up computers over LAN?
Nowadays its not uncommon for games to incorperate some form of multiplayer in which a couple dozen people can play together. Heck, that might even be considered a small player base in this day and age.
As for the stool question, I would go with the posters before me; it becomes a chair when the back is high enough to support your back
Out of curiosity, how do you think Champions' combat is like WoW's? It's a ton more mobile, you can fight while flying, you can actively block, and you can charge attacks. I mean yeah, you have instant casts, cast time abilities, and you press hotkeys on your keyboard to use them, but that's like saying that TF2 and Wolfenstein are the same combat system because you press LMB to shoot.Dasher said:
Well, an MOG in my opinion, is "a game" in which multiple people play. There is a game in TF2, which is a set of parameters - "complete certain objectives in order to make your team win". Into this game you can put however many players you want, and not change anything fundamental about the way that the game inherently operates.
An MMOG on the other hand, uses multiple people to create "a game" in the first place. It is only possible for a game to be an MMO if it requires actually harnessing the people that are playing it in order to become a game. So for instance, unless you are on a private server and can make a super human hero with ridiculous stats, you will never be able to beat the lich king solo. There isn't even a really hard game involved, it's just not a game.. the experience is just you running up, and then resurrecting. There is no game involved until you acquire a 30/40 strong group of people. That is when the game actually starts. MMOs rely on that pre-condition to be filled first in order to explain the rules to even begin!
Take the auction house - one of the most common features in an MMOG. The reason this feature is a massively multi player one is because it only begins to operate when you have different players using it. It isn't the case that there is an auction going on, and into this auction you can just inject various numbers of players to participate, quite the reverse. In order to make the auction happen in the first place, you need people there to even start. This is like an MMOG in general - it isn't that there is a game in progress into which players can be added, it's something which needs players in order to actually become the game it is. WoW wouldn't function without at least a raid's worth of people present on each side in a server.
So in conclusion, there is a difference between a game with people in it, and people actually making a game/ game experience.
Sorry if there's a lot of repetition in this post.. but i think i eventually said what i wanted and hopefully meant
EDIT: Yea i just thought i'd quickly add an appendix to this I think many people would read this and highlight the fact that there are many parts of an MMOG which generally do not need more than one person to participate in. For instance, solo questing. In this instance however, i would point to the many other aspects of an MMOG, which will pervade a users experience, even if the quest they are on doesn't actually require multiple people to function. I would cite the world PvP element of the game - the chance that one might run across an enemy in their solo questing. And obversely, the fact that one might run into a friendly player. As well as chat and the afore mentioned auction house, the experience that one has in an MMOG, even whilst "on your own", is still markedly different to if the game were actually a single player one.. The world has still been based and designed around its population, rather than the population just being extras in the world (if ya see what i mean).
An MMOG on the other hand, uses multiple people to create "a game" in the first place. It is only possible for a game to be an MMO if it requires actually harnessing the people that are playing it in order to become a game. So for instance, unless you are on a private server and can make a super human hero with ridiculous stats, you will never be able to beat the lich king solo. There isn't even a really hard game involved, it's just not a game.. the experience is just you running up, and then resurrecting. There is no game involved until you acquire a 30/40 strong group of people. That is when the game actually starts. MMOs rely on that pre-condition to be filled first in order to explain the rules to even begin!
Take the auction house - one of the most common features in an MMOG. The reason this feature is a massively multi player one is because it only begins to operate when you have different players using it. It isn't the case that there is an auction going on, and into this auction you can just inject various numbers of players to participate, quite the reverse. In order to make the auction happen in the first place, you need people there to even start. This is like an MMOG in general - it isn't that there is a game in progress into which players can be added, it's something which needs players in order to actually become the game it is. WoW wouldn't function without at least a raid's worth of people present on each side in a server.
So in conclusion, there is a difference between a game with people in it, and people actually making a game/ game experience.
Sorry if there's a lot of repetition in this post.. but i think i eventually said what i wanted and hopefully meant
EDIT: Yea i just thought i'd quickly add an appendix to this
I think many people would read this and highlight the fact that there are many parts of an MMOG which generally do not need more than one person to participate in. For instance, solo questing. In this instance however, i would point to the many other aspects of an MMOG, which will pervade a users experience, even if the quest they are on doesn't actually require multiple people to function. I would cite the world PvP element of the game - the chance that one might run across an enemy in their solo questing. And obversely, the fact that one might run into a friendly player. As well as chat and the afore mentioned auction house, the experience that one has in an MMOG, even whilst "on your own", is still markedly different to if the game were actually a single player one.. The world has still been based and designed around its population, rather than the population just being extras in the world (if ya see what i mean).
As soon as it has a back and armrests, no matter what the size.CantFaketheFunk said:
And a similar line appears in MMO's.
Champions is a MORPG, WoW is a MMORPG, Team Fortress 2 is a MMOG, L4D is a MOG.
However, when Danny or Phoenix is involved, Team Fortress becomes an MORPG as well, mainly due to their becoming the character they play.
"Demoman?"
WoW's approach to server architecture greatly divides the playerbase, and while that may not be an issue for a game with purportedly 11 million subscribers, it poses substantial problems for smaller games. I take the view that arbitrarily - and permanently - dividing the playerbase is bad. I have to reroll, or spend $25 to move servers in WoW. From this standpoint, I can appreciate that in Champions, I move servers with the click of a button.
The sense of community of a server with consistently the same players is lost. However, the freedom to shift from server to server really adds a lot more than it takes away. Someone farming the mobs you need? Shift away. I don't feel limited by the 100 player "limit" either. I can't remember a time in WoW where I meaningfully interacted with 100 people at once. In fact, most often when you get too many people too close together, a mob mentality takes over and the chat channels turn bad.
I think that single server as far as playerbase interactivity is great, and sharding it a la guild wars is fine by me.
The sense of community of a server with consistently the same players is lost. However, the freedom to shift from server to server really adds a lot more than it takes away. Someone farming the mobs you need? Shift away. I don't feel limited by the 100 player "limit" either. I can't remember a time in WoW where I meaningfully interacted with 100 people at once. In fact, most often when you get too many people too close together, a mob mentality takes over and the chat channels turn bad.
I think that single server as far as playerbase interactivity is great, and sharding it a la guild wars is fine by me.
A stool becomes a chair the moment you stop calling it a stool and start calling it a chair.CantFaketheFunk said:
Everything that exists exists regardless of people being here however they only become something in the cognitive sense once we designate them as such.
A chair is a chair if you say it is a chair, a car is a car as long as you say it is a car, now the assumption is that whatever descriptor you use is commonly agreed upon. Herein lies the problem with defining something, it requires a consensus that is never acquired but is instead dictated. People didn't decide one day that chairs were called chairs, a small group of people did and started telling everyone one else that was what they were called until it finally became the norm.
So yeah.
Long story short, I just call games games. If it doesn't entertain me it is software. If it is entertaining in a non constructive sense I call it a game. So SPORE for instance would be called software to me, I would rank it next to photoshop. However Arkham Asylum or WoW would be a game. They give me great pleasure (as does photoshop) but unlike photoshop I don't really leave them with anything besides a cognitive erection.
That...might...have made sense.
Never played it, huh?Dasher said:
I think this is pretty close to what the new definition of MMO should be - Multiplayer is playing with other people to win, Massively Multiplayer is just playing with other people with player-set objectives. Even people who only play Team Fortress to have a laugh for a bit are still on a team whose objective is to win the round, while the most serious World of Warcraft or Champions Online player plays to do whatever they want.lewiswhitling said:
Mildly on topic - A guy in my Champions Supergroup ground a single group of enemies to get a super-weapon that will INEVITABLY be nerfed in a few patches. It finally transpired that he hadn't moved from a single spot in 5 hours - maybe MMORPG's new meaning could be "any game that causes people to obsessively do things that any sane person would consider painfully, painfully stupid in the name of a few axtra stats"?
I don't think I can necessarily agree with this. I mean, I see *why* they did it, and I think it definitely has its benefits, but the world ends up feeling very sterile to me, personally. I remember leveling up in WoW and meeting new people just by virtue of constantly running into them in groups, or learning to hate specific Horde, and I think Champions loses something when it has a persistent world but not a persistent playerbase. It has, at least as far as I've experienced, no real "community" visible in-game, since the players are always different.KaiusCormere said:
I fail to be impressed by this argument;
Guild Wars runs almost entirely instanced worlds that are only punctuated by towns where anyone can run around, those towns then are divided by "shards" (which are really just servers) in which you can then socialize and build a party. From that party you create you can then enter the instanced world together, ultimately limiting the amount of players who can interact together in a game, removing monster spawn camping, ganking and other bullshit like that early MMOs like Everquest were plagued with.
The author also argues that C:O is an MMOG, NOT an MMORPG, which is what Champions Online, WOW, Guild Wars and all other games are. The comparison of TF2 to C:O as MMOG's works perfectly because an MMOG can simply be defined as a game which has the capacity to network large amounts of players together. For TF2 the steam network manages to pull that off, in fact, Halo 3 might as well be called an MMOG, or COD4 could be an MMOG.
Champions Online boasts an RPG system that makes it obviously an MMORPG. The breaking down of the actual landscape into different servers serves the same purpose that Diablo 2 did back in the old days, except that Diablo did it to support Battlenet Servers. What will Diablo 3 be called? It certainly fullfills the idea of an MMOG, since you have a persistent character who can then log into a server and play in that large world with friends, much like TF2, if Tf2 is to be an MMOG as well, totally not just a game with multiplayer.
I think merely the definition of Multiplayer has evolved from its old, 16 man Quake server days to a much larger capacity, and eventually that capacity, as it has been argued right now, will rival that of a classical style MMORPG.
Guild Wars runs almost entirely instanced worlds that are only punctuated by towns where anyone can run around, those towns then are divided by "shards" (which are really just servers) in which you can then socialize and build a party. From that party you create you can then enter the instanced world together, ultimately limiting the amount of players who can interact together in a game, removing monster spawn camping, ganking and other bullshit like that early MMOs like Everquest were plagued with.
The author also argues that C:O is an MMOG, NOT an MMORPG, which is what Champions Online, WOW, Guild Wars and all other games are. The comparison of TF2 to C:O as MMOG's works perfectly because an MMOG can simply be defined as a game which has the capacity to network large amounts of players together. For TF2 the steam network manages to pull that off, in fact, Halo 3 might as well be called an MMOG, or COD4 could be an MMOG.
Champions Online boasts an RPG system that makes it obviously an MMORPG. The breaking down of the actual landscape into different servers serves the same purpose that Diablo 2 did back in the old days, except that Diablo did it to support Battlenet Servers. What will Diablo 3 be called? It certainly fullfills the idea of an MMOG, since you have a persistent character who can then log into a server and play in that large world with friends, much like TF2, if Tf2 is to be an MMOG as well, totally not just a game with multiplayer.
I think merely the definition of Multiplayer has evolved from its old, 16 man Quake server days to a much larger capacity, and eventually that capacity, as it has been argued right now, will rival that of a classical style MMORPG.
Even in the best of circumstances, "massively" can be a bit of an overstatement.
Much past the beginner areas of WoW, things start thinning out quick. I could go an hour without seeing another player in Desolace, or Swamp of Sorrows. Sometimes I'd zone-chat "Is anybody out there?" and a couple people would say "me" and "me too" and I'd /who desolace and sure enough there'd be maybe five. Even in places like Ashenvale or Tarren Mill, outside of the quest hubs, when you did see somebody they'd mostly just be running by.
So where is the "Massively" in that?
What MMOs do is provide the resources to build an in-game community. Then your guild has alliances with other guilds and there are good guilds and bad guild and hard core and easy going guilds and ones on the rise and others dying and some with no end to the drama. In my loneliest moments in Swamp of Sorrows or late night in Ungoro Crater there was still guild chat to keep me happy.
Guilds feel absent in Champions. I've seen plenty of people in guilds, though no recurring or dominating ones. I've seen a few PST me to join such-and-such guild on general chat--but by this many hours played in WoW or WAR I'd have had many guild invites by now, whereas in Champions I've had none.
Community is an issue Champions need to work on. Not that I think it is insurmountable, and the Champions system does have the aforementioned advantages. I mean if you are a hermit you CAN'T go off to a quiet region of a dead server even if you wanted to. But without community, Champions is more an RPG with other players around. Which is definately better than an RPG, but not an MMO.
Much past the beginner areas of WoW, things start thinning out quick. I could go an hour without seeing another player in Desolace, or Swamp of Sorrows. Sometimes I'd zone-chat "Is anybody out there?" and a couple people would say "me" and "me too" and I'd /who desolace and sure enough there'd be maybe five. Even in places like Ashenvale or Tarren Mill, outside of the quest hubs, when you did see somebody they'd mostly just be running by.
So where is the "Massively" in that?
What MMOs do is provide the resources to build an in-game community. Then your guild has alliances with other guilds and there are good guilds and bad guild and hard core and easy going guilds and ones on the rise and others dying and some with no end to the drama. In my loneliest moments in Swamp of Sorrows or late night in Ungoro Crater there was still guild chat to keep me happy.
Guilds feel absent in Champions. I've seen plenty of people in guilds, though no recurring or dominating ones. I've seen a few PST me to join such-and-such guild on general chat--but by this many hours played in WoW or WAR I'd have had many guild invites by now, whereas in Champions I've had none.
Community is an issue Champions need to work on. Not that I think it is insurmountable, and the Champions system does have the aforementioned advantages. I mean if you are a hermit you CAN'T go off to a quiet region of a dead server even if you wanted to. But without community, Champions is more an RPG with other players around. Which is definately better than an RPG, but not an MMO.