Discuss: The future of MMORPGs

Cafe Society
21

AI is a software problem, not a hardware problem. Most AI tasks can be done better on a well-programmed Trash-80 than on a Pentium IV with mediocre programming. The one exception I know of is pathfinding, and even there, the solution is to precompute paths and incorporate them into the map, which only costs development time (and not much of that, since the developers have as much computing power as they need), not runtime processing power.

What I’d like to see is for most of the NPC-type characters and quests to be controlled by live humans. So you might have a player playing the Grand Duke (chosen by game experience, or real-world money, or however), and when some band of player outlaws starts getting out of control, the player controlling the Duke offers a reward for their capture. Presto, there’s a quest for you.

22

Strongly disagree. True AI is both memory and processor intensive, no matter how well you write your algorithms.

23

Until, that is, the players find out that they’ve destroyed a real planet.

Daniel

24

Oh really? I hadn’t looked into EQ2 at all (it’s really not my thing) but I guess it shows that I’m on the right track. :slight_smile:

25

EQ2 has instance SERVERS or instance DUNGEONS? The latter was my understanding. They have a similar set up to WoW in fact, where there are several instanced areas or dungeons. But if they have entire instance SERVERS (i.e. the entire world is an instance that you and 40 of your closest friends can adventure in ALONE) then its news to me. Could you go into more detail perhaps, since you seem to be an EQ2, er, fan? :slight_smile:

Great responses! I definitely agree that better AI will make things more emersive. It would be cool to come up with a way to have real players play the roles of NPC’s, but I’m unsure how that would work out in the long run. I still think real persistant deformable/changable worlds would be cool…and persistant and changable NPC’s and quests also. Kill an NPC and its dead, or at least effected…so you don’t have the situation where the same NPC spawns every few min. for a line of adventurers to wack for some kill quest.

I think many of the online games out today are moving in the direction several here have expressed. I know WoW has many of the early features desired, and I’ve heard EQ2 and CoH also have them. The biggest single thing I’d like to see (besides rock solid stability of course…my server on WoW was down about 16 hours yesterday. Yuck!) would be single worlds where everyone playing a given game are essentially in the same world, without being over crowded and without serious lag issues. I’d also love to see more emersive technologies…virtual reality better AI, etc.

The next 20 odd years ought to be something to see if where we are today in relation to the last 20 is any indication. Good things are sure to come. :slight_smile:

-XT

26

xtisme - you may want to check out EVE Online. It has a single world model. It works because they have lots of zones (every solar system is a zone) and spread the players out pretty well. They regularly had 11 thousand people on at peak times when I stopped playing. The game is very slow paced, guild (or in this game - corporation) oriented and open PvP. Definitely not to everyone’s tastes.

Dark and Light will also have a single world. Not sure how many they’re shooting for simultaneously however.

27

One thing I’d like to see that isn’t in DAoC or WoW is collision-detection for everything and everybody.

You don’t know how bad I sometimes want to walk up to someone and just push them off the Orgrimmar to Undercity zeppelin :slight_smile:

I’d imagine that would require massive processor abililty on the end-user’s side of things, and very little to zero lag on everybody’s side. And it might create all kinds of in-game annoyances (blocking doorways, pushing people, lines at the Auction Houses, etc) but it certainly would be more realistic than what we have now.

I’d also like more realistic floral and fauna life patterns. If they could figure out a way to get rid of mob-spawning… If it’s dead, it’s dead, and you’re only gonna get more of them if they breed and grow up.

28

I can see MMORPGs going in several different directions. But the one that most interests me right now goes against the grain of most MMORPGs, Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO). From the discussion on the forums, its it vastly different from other MMORPGs in that there is no crafting, no housing, no traveling for hours to get to a location, no xp for killing mobs, all dungeons (adventurings areas) are instanced, and no PvP just for starters. Combat is dynamic and tactical. Instead of running up to a mob and sitting there hitting a few buttons over and over, in DDO you have to move around and make contact with the mobs. XP is coming from quest completion only. Quests all have multiple methods of success (it is possible to complete many by use of stealth, diplomacy, though combat is definitely not going to be entirely avoidable). The focus is more on roleplaying and exploring the world/storyline then leveling and becoming uber.

29

The Register March 30, 2005A Shanghai man stabbed to death a fellow online gamer who sold a virtual sword they had jointly won while playing “Legend of Mir 3”, Reuters reports.

Qiu Chengwei, 41, repeatedly stabbed Zhu Caoyuan after discovering that Zhu had sold the “dragon sabre” for 7,200 yuan (£464). Qiu had lent his friend the cybersabre last February, later reporting it as “stolen” when he learned of the transaction. Police, however, told him that - as the disputed weapon was virtual property - he had no recourse to law.
I hope stories like the above don’t produce an anti-MMORG hysteria. I suppose as long as it doesn’t happen “here,” wherever here may be, politicians will not be motivated to jump on that bandwagon.

30

Therer are small money-making side ventures you can do, and in EQ 2 it’s not hard to make a little starting cash in combat and adventure before leaving
the Isle of Refuge starter area. I’ve seen people with gold hanging out there.

After that, all the adventurers will collect materials by the bucketload and sell them off-hours. You can just hang around, but the materials, and craft them. It’s also possible to make a small amount of money by buying merchant’s materials. There’s no balance problem with making high-end stuff, since people can’t use items too powerful for them.

A bit of both. They instance many dungeons regularly, and every area can be when it gets too crowded.

But an instanced server would be foolish. Why have a server at all then? If it’s someone’s private world, let them run it. How would you get people into the game in the first place? The only plausible set-up here would be to have a huge central area where everyone comes in,

31

Well, I’m hoping that people learn the right lessons from World of Warcraft and, to a lesser degree, City of Heroes. I think those two are the most successful (in terms of quality, not numbers) MM games I’ve ever played, and the reason is that they’re games first, virtual worlds second.

City of Heroes is just Diablo with superheroes, more or less. And at least when I played, they put the focus on your hero’s experience, not on the idea of some virtual world. Having extra players around just fed into that, not the other way around.

World of Warcraft is deeper, but it’s still (as far as I’m concerned anyway, maybe my bias is showing) a single-player game that you happen to play simultaneously with hundreds of other people. They realized up-front that infinite content, world-changing events, enemies that die and stay dead, intelligent NPCs, and unlimited object creation, are all unfeasible. So they took the play mechanic and character classes of Diablo 2, polished the hell out of it, and set it in a virtual world.

There’ve been plenty of attempts to mimic a real world/galaxy/whatever by trying to give players to do whatever they want. And they all end up unsatisfying, because players need more structure than that. Games that have tried to have real-world economies have faltered because they overestimated people’s desire to log into a game and just be a baker or a dressmaker. Games that tried to force people to group together have faltered because of griefers and just plain annoying players. Games that have tried to offer both the crafting-only route and the combat-only route have faltered because neither one is completely fun and satisfying. And games that have tried to let players significantly change the environment have faltered because of jerks who power-level or camp or build wherever they want.

My ideal MM game would be predominantly instanced areas – not just dungeons, but entire zones – and the only areas where you’re grouped with everyone else is in the big cities or towns, which act as lobby areas. The instances could be tailored so that it’s a unique and interesting experience for you and your party, none of the waiting in line to kill the same infinitely-respawning NPC. You don’t need fancy AI unless you’re trying to provide infinite content, and you don’t need infinite content if each person or party gets his own version of the world.

The biggest problem to massively multiplayer games, apart from having too many people fighting over the same space and basically getting in each other’s way, is that there’s no persistence. Nothing you do makes a real difference, because you can’t permanently destroy or take over a town, you can’t kill anything without it respawning minutes later, and you can never really “win.” Having instanced areas doesn’t really address that – you could have a complete storyline within the instance, where you kill monsters and they stay dead, but once you got out of the instance, it would all go away.

I still can’t think of a way to set up an environment where what you do makes a permanent impact on the world, but still doesn’t have cases where months of development are ruined by the first power-leveler who hits level 60 in two days and goes and permanently kills the boss dragon. (I guess if I could think of a way, I’d be a pretty rich man.)