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In Space Explosions Are Silent

MMOG Nation is going to be a platform for my opinions and experiences playing Massively Multiplayer Online Games. I have to point fingers, though. Raph Koster and Foton were my instigators. Their writing over the last few months has been inspirationa…

I would say it does give a bigger sense of “massive” since so many more people are willing to call Guild Wars an MMO than were willing to call Diablo one

Makes me wonder how much GW’s status as an MMO is based on marketing, versus how much of D2′s was based on timing.

There are quite a number of folks who don’t think GW is an MMO really, due to how it compartmentalizes players. But it was heavily marketed as a “free MMO”, published by an emerging MMO publisher in NC Soft (“emerging” at least to Westeners) and “free” carries quite a bit of weight with those on the fringe of interest in the genre.

Meanwhile, D2 came out at a time when MMOs were still very niche, the term itself was not well known, and it was specifically billed a an RPG sequel rather than a new way of playing.

Granted, I don’t think it’d be called an MMO today, lacking as it does any form of persistent world. But as part of the genre “matures” into games more evocative of D2 than of truly persistent worlds, I wonder just how much further the “massive” can be diminished until we’ve come full circle to where we’ve been. At least in terms of AAA titles.

Blizzard came to RPGs and RTSes and sort of delivered the best iterations of what those were for the day. By being victorious, they forced a rethink in those genres that we’re still seeing the repurcussions from today. I wonder if this is what will happen in MMORPGs. Will the EQ-style game continue to be so well-iterated in WoW that only games that toss the rules can even compete?

Man I hope so. I want games like Eve and SL and anything that emulates UO to be successful, to capture their niche and grow it. Devolving MMORPGs to just narrative RPGs does not move humanity forward

This is a limitation of the current generation of tools, more so than anything else. There’s certainly room for creativity-driven worlds in the future — look how many people in the real world knit, woodwork, etc. The tools need to get vastly better first, though, before virtual self-expression can be a mainstream reality. (Though look at what people are doing at CokeStudios, say.)

I’d agree that Xbox Live meets the requirements for a virtual world if, in addition to the criteria Raph listed, avatar identity is consistent across all games within the service.

Q, I use “MMO” because of its brevity and because it encompasses “MMORPG” and “MMOFPS” and “MMORTS” and all thos eother horrible acronyms. I’ve given up on getting them all called “muds” so usually I use online worlds if I can.

To me, it’s half a question of whether this aligns with definitions and half whether it’s what people want. Guild Wars is a good example of Diablo 2 with a persistent world replacing the chat interface. Does this give people more of a sense of “massive”?

Maybe. But I’ve been wondering since beginning in MMOs just how much massive people want

But the article raises very good points. The features and quality of a single MMO by a single developer can never truly suffice. Thus, we get into player-created content, and we see games like Second Life, where all players are free to code any addition to the world that they want. But, firstly, such an approach isn’t casual-friendly at all. You have to know how to program, model, and the rest to enjoy a game? Get real. Rather than resembling a self-contained microcosm of the world such as an amusement park, the game will resemble a boardroom where roller-coaster engineers come to show off their ideas to each other. That’s nice too, but not quite the world that we’re looking for. Sure, you can play Second Life simply to witness the creations of other players, but people who aren’t ‘creators’ themselves won’t be likely to do that. Thus, as a world, it fails.

Xbox Live, however, as the article says, is definitely a casual service, but also one with no clear boundaries on potential creativity. Why, people who just want to play Halo deathmatches can play. But, those interested in, say, machinima can meet people to make movies with online. The movies they create will also appear to all of the deathmatch folks, which is a huge group, as well as people who don’t even play on Xbox Live. Contrary to this, anything of the sort done in a game like Second Life would only appeal to the limited playerbase of that game. No world there because anything that tries too hard to be a world only appeals to people who want to see a true world-game realized, a very narrow group of people who are not varied enough or large enough in numbers to ever create a true world-like virtual community among themselves.

And, again, on the subject of developer-created content: As the article says, with an unlimited number of independent developers working on Xbox live’s “content,” there’s no limit to what can be seen, while even the most ambitious individual MMOs generally reach a limit. Plus, the quality of each individual component (racing, shooting, fishing, role-playing, sports, etc.) will also be of far greater quality than the products of a single MMO dev-team trying to create every single activity that players want to do in their game. The dev-created content will be of the absolute highest quality among all of gaming. There is also no problem with Xbox Live being overloaded with sub-par player-created content, such as the case often is in Second Life. Although a “persistent (

The other side to the XBox Live lobby system is the intent to be accessible. They’re surely fooling themselves if they think mom is going to log in and load up Bedazzled My wife can’t even figure out how to watch TV after a power outage let alone get it set up to play 360. However that does seem to be their goal and building it into a world could be a another barrier to entry. A choice between visual interpretations of the service would probably be best though. Either way they need to streamline because finding anything now can be frustrating and time consuming.

For my own part I would blow money out the broadband pipe if they made it a world. I buy preorders and Betas and digital downloads just to have the virtual crap I get along with it. It’s a sickness. I don’t feel any need for that on Live. Not yet anyway. I might pay an extra $20 for an online game’s Special Edition to get a Purple Cloak of Uselessness but I’m not paying 80 points for a new icon. Make it a world and make the icon a new avatar face and I’ll spend $5, $10, or more to get the one I want.