A View From the Road: Welcome to the Massive World

[Shealladh]

You make some good points, but maybe this is good and maybe it's bad.

I was so looking forward to The Settlers 7 and have been a fans since #2 yet they screwed it up with making the online option. Not that online was a bad thing they just got the model wrong.

Alot of new games could be made into MMO's, or have online components, yet I think there's alot of new styles that could be done and improve the choices. Because as of now you either have a Single Player game that beakons multiplay, a multiplay that is just so wrong thaat you wish it was single player only, or you have an outright MMO that has no PVE (single gamer) element to it or is just another Gank-fest in waiting or an item grinder.

For me, I've gone looking for Single player games with a LAN option, like Borderlands (and I hate FPS), or maybe I should be sending a partition to Blizzard for a LAN version of Starcraft of wait.....

 

[ccesarano]

Ever since I got hold of Planetside I've been waiting for more developers to tie MMO to other genres and see what could be done. I'm typically more of a single-player campaign guy, but Planetside's atmosphere was able to make up for its shoddy design and gameplay.

Unfortunately, since Planetside wasn't the cash-in WoW was, publishers just shrugged it off. One of these days a company will apply Blizzard's strategy into making a game and it'll be a success (that strategy being "How do we make our game awesome" and not "How do we beat current major competitor?". After all, WoW only beat Everquest because it did so much differently, not by trying to imitate and improve).

 

[Captain Pancake]

As long as I can fill up my sockets.

 

[craddoke]

If the single-player game-play doesn't suffer and as long as I can ignore the MMO (or social) aspects of a game, I don't care. When a game sacrifices its game-play/plot or crams multi-player down your throat (either as part of the core game-play mechanic or just because the single-player campaign is a poorly-designed afterthought) I become unhappy and begin to think that maybe this brave new world with its beautious avatars is not for me.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

After all, WoW only beat Everquest because it did so much differently, not by trying to imitate and improve).

Yeah, not so much there - WoW, at least when it originally debuted, was the poster child for refining pre-existing systems. It didn't do anything differently so much as it did those things better or more elegantly than the MMORPGs that came before. A bastion of originality in MMORPG design WoW is not.

 

[adderseal]

If all games eventually become MMOs I will give up gaming.

 

[Emergent System]

If all games eventually become MMOs I will give up gaming.

Good luck with that.

For good or for bad, eventually close to all games will become "online" games in one sense or another. Steam is a pretty good example, but as the article talks about, many games today are integrating online functions into themselves even ignoring something like steam or windows live. Settlers 7 and Command & Conquer 4 are two recent examples of games that I bought with this function (though in my opinion they both failed massively at their implementation). Warcraft and Starcraft are still alive today because of their online functions.

But, going online with a game should be an option, not a demand put there so that it becomes slightly more annoying for the pirates to pirate your games. Actually, now that I think about it, CNC4 is a good example of what TOGSolid was saying; "Kicking a bag of poop around is fun with friends" - and that's really what CNC4 is: A bag of poop only entertaining when played with friends. I hope that more designers won't be applying the same mentality to their games.

 

[Atmos Duality]

With every successful MMO will eventually comes two things:

1) Subscription based gaming. (or if we follow the Asian method, free player = useless, bribe player = playable)
2) Grind.

To me, those two are the death knell of gaming.
Gaming should never assume it will be a never ending experience.
Even Tetris in its seeming infinite gameplay has an inevitable end.

I truly hope that gaming never reaches the point where every game exists solely for online multiplayer. I don't want to put up with a virtual city of assholes. I play games to get away from the assholes I have to put up with in everyday life.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Anyone remember Ultima 5 and other old school games that didn't have any "kill 10 rats" quests?

There was an overarching story, a world to explore, and mysteries to uncover. You didn't need any adventurer journal nonsense to move you along, just the motivation to keep the story moving forward and discover more of the game. Sadly WoW has blinded modern gamer to that level of involvement in the process.

 

[adderseal]

If all games eventually become MMOs I will give up gaming.

Good luck with that.

For good or for bad, eventually close to all games will become "online" games in one sense or another. Steam is a pretty good example, but as the article talks about, many games today are integrating online functions into themselves even ignoring something like steam or windows live. Settlers 7 and Command & Conquer 4 are two recent examples of games that I bought with this function (though in my opinion they both failed massively at their implementation). Warcraft and Starcraft are still alive today because of their online functions.

But, going online with a game should be an option, not a demand put there so that it becomes slightly more annoying for the pirates to pirate your games. Actually, now that I think about it, CNC4 is a good example of what TOGSolid was saying; "Kicking a bag of poop around is fun with friends" - and that's really what CNC4 is: A bag of poop only entertaining when played with friends. I hope that more designers won't be applying the same mentality to their games.

I meant MMOs as the absolute quintessential thing it originally was, like WoW or Runescape or whatever: a grind-tacular grind-fest in a world populated by, in the main, whiny arseholes (I realize this is not true for every single player, but the majority are.)
For example, Pokemon Diamond is the most played game of the past 3 years, with over 200 hours. It has a lot of online functions, like wireless trading, battling and item swapping which I have used extensively (no other way to get all 3 starters from all the generations) It's also a grind getting Pokemon up to level 100. BUT BUT BUT the single-player mode stands up very well and you are the ONLY player-character in the world. There aren't 500,000 other pokemon trainers going on about pwning ur noobz pidgey in your personal copy of the game.
Er, so I suppose my point is this: if every game becomes like WoW then I'll give up gaming.

 

[ethan22122]

I prefer the campaign and story of game rather than multiplayer, like mass effect.

 

[Razer_uk]

I would say a game needs to tick three boxes to be classed as an MMO.

First you need to justify the first M. So to be Massive you would need upwards of hundreds of players on the same map at the same time. Even if they are not interacting with each other.

Second there must be a persistent world. Even when not online things need to be happening in the same world and upong logging you can see their effects. An example of this would be logging into WOW and seeing Onyxia's head displayed in Orgrimmar. Or logging into COH and seeing people fighting one of the world boss spawns.

Just about every online game will have people playing it when you are not online, but FPS and Racing games for example load a unique map for each group of players and as such are not persistent.

Third there must be a higher level of player interaction than is normal during online play. They would need to allow you to talk to other players, allow resource trading, grouping together and randomly encountering other people while travelling around.

A lot of games will incorporate one or two of the above but to truly be an MMO they need to include all three. The mobile game cited in the article where you get points for visiting locations would not count. It does have a persistent world (you can't get much more persistent than the real world. ) and you could argue that there can be thousands playing on the same server ("Life") at once. But there's no interaction. It is just an online scoreboard.