In the last 8 years or so, how many major revoltuionary steps can you think of has the mmorpg design gone through … 3d graphics and instancing springs to mind but really after that nothing else. Sure network architecture has improved allowing improvements in the back end and the availability of high speed internet to the general unwashed masses, but really design of mmorpgs has remained stagnant …
Just look at single player games or online fps games, how many revolutionary steps have they gone through in the last 8 years … a darn sight more than mmorpgs. So what is the issue ?
Is it due to lack of design ingenuity ? or is money the issue ? or is it just the complacancy of the game players themselves not caring enough to effect revolution with there wallets ?
Where have the revoltuionary leaders gone, you know the ones the brought design innovation to the games they designed. Sid Meyer, Chris Roberts, Lord Brisitsh and Warren Spector for example …
One answer to what happened to these big-names is that most of them simply moved on. That they did their time in development and then took higher-paying jobs further up the job ladder. Another reason might be that design is harder to innovate in todays big dollar budget markets ..
I mean design isn’t especially difficult and innovative – revolutionary ideas aren’t hard to come by. Everyone has ideas, just look at the mmorpg blogs to see ideas and innovation that could bring about a revolution to mmorpg games. No, the difficulty is not in design in the least.
Nor is it in programming. again there are many talented artists, programmers, community managers etc out there that could easy implement the revolutionary ideas set out by the designers themselves. So what is the problem folks ?
I think the problem is in the development time required in producing a mmorpg and the impact that money has on investors and the pressure on developers to bring a polished game to the market within x amount of months. Essentailly the bigger the budget the more pressure to compleate deadlines, the more pressure to deliver what you promise, and the more pressure to build a game that the audience is going to buy into.
How does this effect design revolution ? quite simply money is the limiting factor, risk vs reward. Designers do not have the luxury to stretch there innovative design muscles due to design time and budget constraints.
Therefore personally I think we will not see a mmorpg design revolution, but more of a slow mmorpg evolution .
So who can we look to, to incite a revolution? Maybe, just maybe the revolution will come from the independently funded companies, the ones not constrained by budget and development cycles, maybe the way forward for revolution is through them. E.g. Chronicles of Spellborn, Fallen Earth
So welcome to the not so revolutionary revolution …. viva la evolution
Nicely put.
Like all things gaming, it’s going to take time. RPGs in general seem the least likely to evolve. What we play today in an RPG is the same type of game we’ve been playing since the PnP heyday.
Yet when one looks at a game like Zelda. That IP has been around since the 80s and it evolves with each iteration. The newest one, the DS Phantom Hourglass uses the DS screens to give the player an entirely new take on the classic zelda formula.
I’m not saying that the keyboard and mouse are what’s stopping the MMO from evolving faster, but it doesn’t help. Now we see many developer trying to blend PC game genres. Tabula Rasa (blech) and TCOS (maybe?) are looking to bring in FPS elements. I’m not sure that’s enough.
It’s not the way they are controlled that’s the problem. It’s the way they’re designed. With inherent timesinks that aren’t fun in order to keep people playing. Maybe engines like Multiverse will enable developers to free up all that time on background coding and instead focus on making the game fun without the grinds?
We can but hope bilbo, I think the UI is one thing that needs to be looked at. I always seem to spend to much time looking at skills and timers than the action on screen, a certain beta does address this issue, thankfully, but there is still a very long way to go before we see fun instead of grind …
There are already a few mmofpsrpgs around. One of the oldest is the cyberpunk themed neocron. It’s an mmo that is played like an fps. Unfortunately this is one of it’s biggest drawbacks. Time spent on playing it is not enough to be good in it. Besides the earned skills of your character you need fps skills too. Besides the fps idea, it had the concept of non combat development, meaning you could up your skills by working as a tradeskiller or as a support character. (so you can get levels without actually killing anything or anyone) The game also supports pvm, pvp and pvn (fight agains monster/player/npc). The idea was to allow the same freedom of movement, tactics and equipment for every creature in the game, be it a player a classic mob or a vendor npc.
However the game didn’t really attract the same number of players as wow, mainly because it required skills from the players and most players just want nice rewards for time spent and don’t want to think.
The most successfull mmorpg in the west (world of warcraft) is a game that has the least innovations, the most grind and has a rule system that prevents players from failing. You can only win, even if the game has to cheat for that.
Now you mention it Kvp I had forgotten neocron and you are right it is probably the first one to go fps, I played it for a while and enjoyed my time with it but never really go to far into the game.
Another game that was actually trying to do something, and again I forgot about it is the face of mankind. User created content …
So I guess, as I mentioned, that its the little games that are doing the innovation, although they are not the big subscriber games they should have been.
Its the big name games that are super budget heavy that seem to neglect innovation and go with the same model that was originally concieved 8 years ago with uo, eq.
Safe and dull, why then do we subscribe in droves to these type of games when the real intersting concepts are not being supported by us the players … complacancy or are we just to lazy to brake away from the norm, is it the lemming symdome … everyone else plays it so must I … who knows …
There is no shortage of great ideas out there but there are just so many mmo gamers who aren’t interested. People who say they don’t like PvP, people who watch stargate but aren’t interested in a sci-fi mmo. etc. Add to that how 1 man can’t really affect a game that much, it’s hard to get a team to adopt your creative vision without falling back on established concepts.
MMO’s are always make or break projects for a company so their jobs are at risk, time is against them and the suits are telling them to make another WoW. In my opinion when EvE and Planetside were released 4 years ago we had the most revolutionary MMO year in terms of game design and that hasn’t been surpassed even by WoW.
very nice points Johnny, totally agree
I’m really counting on PotBS to be a success along the lines of EVE so developers see that taking steps away from the classic mold is a good thing, if done right.
Everything I see about the game screams “We’re not afraid. You’re going to love this.”
potbs your are my only hope …
Pixie Styx, you can take off your Princess Leah cinnamon bun hairdo wig now.
It may seem like theres nothing new under the sun, but the industry is in its infancy. We do see new ideas appearing.
Guild Wars innovated with its free-to-play business model, and its skill-based game play (by removing levels and grinding from the central focus.)
The short-lived Seed innovated by creating a more social MMO without a combat focus that (unlike There or Second Life) was still a game.
Eve Online innovated by having a real-time element to skill training.
The Agency will have this real-time element to several aspects of their game (such as producing new equipment.) It is said that it will also interact with you via e-mail or text message.
EQ/EQ2 is innovating by tying their games with their new CCG (you can get booster packs for the card game by killing monsters in EQ/EQ2).
Saga of Ryzom allowed user-created content.
Final Fantasy XI innovated with its cut scenes, job system (which was innovative for MMOs at any rate, despite its appearance in FF III many years prior), and mission system.
POTBS has a number of new ideas: one that I particularly like is its Durability system is pretty clever (as I understand it, cheaper ships can be respawn after being sunk MORE often than the best ships in the game, which helps ensure the best ships are more expensive, rarer, and players think twice before using them.)
Granted, the new ideas are coming in a piecemeal fashion; just a little bit here and there. That’s simply how it has to be. If any single game is too different from what people are used to, it simply won’t sell (its sad but true.)
That is exactly my point Lars, we will never see a revolution in mmo design just small evolutionary steps. However I would say 90% of what is being deemed a step forward currently has already been done. For exampls you mention the Agency … check out the face of mankind, similar ideas in a persistant world. However I fully expect Agency to be more succesful than the face of mankind or neocron … but non the less the ideas are just being reworked and reintrodueced in a different way …
Well said! I happen to agree, and in fact I was just thinking about this topic the other day. MMOGs seem to have lost their sparkle for me recently, and everything the industry spews out is a lot of the same ol’ same–same game, different lore. The dynamics rarely seem to shift. And yet we keep buying this stuff hoping that the next game we pick up might be different.
But different how? I think that’s the $64K question, isn’t it? What sorts of innovations are we expecting? And in a world where WoW is king, is there much of an incentive for developers to stray far from that mold, at least for now? Likely not. And yet again and again I hear the same thing–it’s getting old.
I think you’re right that the MMO gaming community doesn’t seem to care enough to “effect a revolution with their wallets.” But I doubt we can force that to happen; it’s going to have to flow naturally. And we have to keep in mind how long the development cycle for a MMOG is, too. Eventually there will be a paradigm shift. Evolution is a near certainty. This particular evolution is just taking longer than I think any of us would have expected.
It’s taking a lot longer than I expected. After playing Enb and EVE I decided to imagine up a new MMO and bounced ideas off a friend. We wrote down all the concepts and many details that would form our game and after a couple of months of theory crafting I unsubscribe EVE because in comparison it was such an insultingly bland, slow and boring game. Almost two years later I am playing the Tabular Rasa beta and realising that I need to take a long break from MMO’s for them to catch up.
I don’t buy the “more pressure because of more money” argument. There will always be pressure from the people with the pocketbooks, and the amount of pressure isn’t proportionate to how much money’s being spent. The publishers who are spending more money have more money. Investing a million dollars isn’t a much bigger deal than investing a thousand dollars if your company is the size of EA or Ubisoft. If there’s increasing pressure in the industry on milestones and such, I doubt it has much to do with the increasing size of investments.
If there’s a difference related to today’s big budgets, it’s the size of projects — the human resources needed and the breadth of work that has to be held together. Twenty guys can experiment and change direction when necessary much more quickly and easily than a team of a hundred. And smaller teams can communicate internally much better; not just more clearly, but faster as well (ever had a meeting with more than 10 people?). Big teams can innovate, but there’s strong pressure to create a prototype early, and MMOs aren’t particularly conducive to prototyping.
I think innovation is related largely to finding believers in the right places (aside from the obvious need of skilled developers). Finding interested investors is easier than finding investors who really share your vision and can accept game design as a somewhat fluid process that requires a little backtracking (editing) at times. The most hope probably lies in approaching non-traditional investment avenues (rich gamers, for one — a lot of movie stars and rockstars are avid gamers…and the corporate world surely has its share), and shrinking budgets through good tools and focusing on non-tech gameplay.
[...] for this article primarily to Shut Up, We’re Talking #7 first, then to Pixie Styx’s article from earlier this month which prompted that segment of the SUWT [...]
bildo put this up regarding things learned from WOW, one topic included innovation … he he
“Regarding innovation, which Walton thinks is crucial — though he was understandably coy about his specific thoughts on where MMOs can or should go — he suggested that “the places to innovate are endless, but what do players want? Innovations have to be substantially better to be noticeable.” Small leaps? Forget it: “Their game has eight classes, my game has 16. Who cares about classes? Do something I’ve never done before. If nine out of 10 people can’t tell it’s an innovation, it’s not an innovation.”
Very well-put. MMOs cost over a million dollars to get on the shelves, from start to finish, and the simplest way to ensure getting your money back is to copy the game with 8 million people playing it.
I think there was a period of about two years, up to and including (and definitely stopping at) WoW’s release. DAoC was in it’s prime (r.i.p. best pvp mmo ever). Shadowbane came out and flopped hard, but had a ton of really great, innovative ideas which some other company should have copied and improved upon. Planetside was very innovative–personally I can’t stand playing it, but I think it’s a very good game even if it’s not my cup of tea. I think EVE (god, I wish this game was faster-paced, what a shame), CoH and GW came out during this time too, and while I thought GW was extremely lacking in depth, it was different. And then there was WoW, and the innovation stopped. WoW did a lot of things right–there’s a reason why it got so popular, but it killed innovation the market in the process.
There’s a major dearth in the market right now for a good pvp game and if some company had the balls to base a game around pvp and ignore (to an extent) what players SAY they want, because the fact is the customer is not always right–they don’t know what they want and will stay with things that are familiar (no matter how much they suck) until you give them something new and they realize how good it is.
No more instanced arena duels, no more battlegrounds with prearranged objectives, etc. DAoC, SB, and Planetside had the right idea: good pvp takes place out in the game’s world, and what’s more, affects/changes/drives the game’s world. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need the least incentive to kill people, but it’s much much more fun when killing has some meaning to it beyond points. It also, in turn, spawns better quality pvp. I mean really, what’s more fun? Cruising pve hotspots, killing people while they’re fighting a mob…or intercepting an enemy force heading to towards a keep/base/city to lay siege to it and smashing them?
very good points Melmoth. certainly is a lack of mmo’s with a good pvp component, war might be on the right track with there innovative system for pvp although I still see wow compnonets running rampant through that game as well.
I’m pretty sure WAR is going to suck. I want it to be good, but everything I read makes it seem like Mythic forgot the formula they made for quality rvr/pvp and is copying WoW. My only real hope is Darkfall, but I don’t believe it’s ever going to come out. For now I’m messing around in ugly, archaic Shadowbane having tried just about every mmo out there and being dissatisfied with them all.
One of the things that made daoc so great is that one person (on almost any class except pure support) could win 1 vs. 2 consistently and 1 vs. 3 quite often. Not that it was a normal scenario by any means, but I’ve won a few 1 vs. 8-9 fights. Similarly a balanced full group could sometimes destroy a huge zerg.
In games today, the damage is slow, the crowd control is weak (or in WoW, backwards, strong for locking down one person, but garbage when you’re being overwhelmed by superior odds when you actually need it), and numbers rule all. WAR looks to be no exception. So far, I don’t see ANY crowd control except some snares, which is lame as hell. It sounds like it’s just going to a big whack/nuke/dps vs. heal fest. Yawn!
Players gripe when they’re part of the 2-5 people getting destroyed by one person, or in the zerg being wrecked by one group, but they don’t realize you just have to allow for this possibility to happen or every time the shoe is on the other foot (read: you’re outnumbered) it’s a foregone conclusion and you might as well sit down.
Quality pvp, like I said, is out in the game’s world (and affects it). For an environment where anything can be around the corner (1 person, 30 people, who knows!) to be truly fun, you have to let people at least have the CHANCE of going off on a killing spree. People whine though and games like that don’t exist anymore.
I mean really, don’t we all imagine ourselves as the hero of the movie, surrounded and overwhelmed, yet somehow making it through to the end, dead bodies scattered everywhere??? People just need to accept sometimes you’re going to be the hero, and sometimes you’re going to be random corpse #49858-39595-02! You can’t have one without the other!
Lol, sorry btw to be venting my spleen on your nice page. I’m just mildly pissed at the current trends in mmos!
im impressed by the accuracy of your writing. keep up that good work.
im impressed too
Having an idea is *not* enough. The abilities to execute an idea and understand the market you’re building the product for are as critical, if not more so.
Let’s take everybody’s favorite whipping boy for example; WoW. There are laws of supply and demand that *must* be broken in order for new players to have something to do. Basically if there were finite resources in the game world, those who played first would be the defacto rulers and demigods of the game… For them things would likely grow tiresome in a hurry. Likewise for the new recruits, they would effectively be doomed to the MMORPG equivalent of eternal serfdom. A less than pleasant gaming experience indeed. So the resources (I include quests, instance monsters …etc resources as they provide experience points…) reset regularly and on certain user invoked events. This allows everyone, apparently including one Leroy Jenkins, to have their form of fun…
Many call this “breaking the rules” or “cheating.” I call it “innovative incremental design.” None of these things alone, were new, nor does it take a lot of effort to implement a small scale version of those concepts on an FPS with network game play. To synchronize across enough servers to support thousands of people at a time takes a lot of code and infrastructure innovation… That’s nothing the end user will ever see as affecting their game play (when done right it’s seamless).
Huh? Basically the innovation in WoW had little to do with improved mechanics and everything to do with infrastructure, distribution. It was one of the first widely successful games updated via peer-to-peer networks! The incremental improvement came by way of giving their market what it had asked for all along, yet nobody was fully willing to give, a game requiring little skill and lots of reward that they can play with other people… Not just other people; MANY other people. Too many to count really…
Why? Basically if you looked at the MMORPG market before WoW failure was almost a guarantee during the first week or two for anyone who just started playing and was unfamiliar key assignments. The WoW folks (and a few predecessors) looked at their primary demographics, 12 year olds, and professionals in their late twenties to mid thirties. Both groups had one thing in common, a lack of willingness to learn too much new stuff. The twelve year olds have the time, but lack the discipline necessary. The professionals lack the time, and have the discipline. So the WoW folks borrowed and stole as much as they could from their, at the time, latest RTS Warcraft 3. They built the game mostly for that market. This was ultimately why I stopped playing. (Too many people acting like 12 year olds even if they weren’t…)
In any case, WoW had the vision, others mistakes to learn from, and the necessary backing to do what nobody prior else had done. Create a MMORPG that lets people win so long as they put in the time, and make it glitzy enough, and flexible enough to expand it ad-nauseum. And to support more people concurrently than many predecessors. That and the continuous new expansions keeps people renewing their subscriptions and buying more…
As a good friend says “The streets run red with the blood of good ideas…” In addition to the idea, It takes the likes of the folks who made WoW and others to make it happen, and the consumer to keep it happening…
– Capt’n Cornholio
BTW, Consumers are fickle… they’ll tell you they want the sun and moon, and then complain when it costs more than $5 or doesn’t fit in their VW Jettas Passenger seat.
As for the bloke who thinks he knows better than the customer, please consider all the previous PVP based MMO games that are no longer with us. There is a reason for their absence. The customers stopped buying. They’re still buying WoW despite the price tag. Despite it’s two-dimensionality, despite its utter predictability, they still buy it. Despite it being a brain-dead version of the Warcraft RTS series, people still buy it.
Oh… and for those who want PVP, WoW does offer PVP. It’s got to be agreed upon by both players though… that way those who don’t want to be 86′ed out of the blue don’t have to be… Well there were those servers where the foolish could try to login … but the 12 year olds waited by the spawn points and giggled like school girls when they killed a brand new person who never played the game before… I wouldn’t doubt if they had their pants around their ankles and were playing the game one handed… They were an emotionally perverse lot… I suspect from that blokes comments that WoW no longer has that sort of PvP… Again likely due to people voting with their wallets… Companies listen to the sound of money… So if someone can make a PvP game that has broad appeal, even to those who play one handed and those who don’t it will sell… If it will sell someone will fund it… Best of luck finding your funding…