General Discussion

Originally posted by Teiman

The modability argument:

MMORPG don't need much customization anyway.  Hell... Vanguard used to nuke your changes on config.ini

But today consoles seems to support a limited mod ability, trough downloable content.  Is really a pain in the ass for the authors, because need to be checked by the console owner, but once is allowed, I bet is posible to able a simple interface to download and install mods. Something like Firefox extensions.

Of course, these mods will be developed on a PC.  The PC has better graphic editors and text editors. Your target architecture could be different than your dev architecture.

You could make a game for Windows in Linux, compiling for windows.  John Carmack created Quake in a type of UNIX  OS, then compiled it for MS-DOS.

Modders could create mods and test then on the console, in a offline test mode, or something.

ALWAYS will be faster and easier to mod for the PC, but is posible to mod for the console.

Let's look at good old Anarchy Online as an example this time. Due to moddability, we were able to reskin and alter the UI to suit our tastes, insert custom map packs with marked locations, zone borders, etc.

And although not really a "mod", let's not forget Helpbot, Itemsnet, Recibebot, etc. I don't see anyone being able to script a bot on a console.

Once again, I pick ONE example. many other MMOs have been modded with important, "how would we ever live without it" features.

Of course, yes, it would be possible to develop mods on a PC and then download them to a console. After all, the games themselves are developed on PCs.

However, you then lose the community dynamic. Not everyone will want to download an SDK for EVERY game they play, when on a PC all you need is a few common tools, I.E. photoshop, 3dmax, etc.

How fast will your little consoles run out of HDD space, once you start adding 1.6gb texture mods, 300mb Facial mesh mods, etc? Will it have enough memory to hold high resolution large textures, with a decent visibility distance?

Ok, off the modability rant....to the "instant gratification" trend of console gamers.

MMOs require that you spend time developing a character, spend time making a place for yourself in the community, questing for items, raiding....etc. All very time consuming activities, as we all know.

I don't see many  "plug and play, I want it now, instant gratification" console users spending that time, really. And I don't see them playing any console MMO for very long.

So what we would end up with is a MMO with a subscriber base that wanders off after a month to play the new Guitar Hero, or what-not.

Console gamers are, simply because of their need for simplicity, instant gratification, and low attention span, not a good target audience for an MMO.

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

 

Originally posted by Teiman

The modability argument:

MMORPG don't need much customization anyway.  Hell... Vanguard used to nuke your changes on config.ini

But today consoles seems to support a limited mod ability, trough downloable content.  Is really a pain in the ass for the authors, because need to be checked by the console owner, but once is allowed, I bet is posible to able a simple interface to download and install mods. Something like Firefox extensions.

Of course, these mods will be developed on a PC.  The PC has better graphic editors and text editors. Your target architecture could be different than your dev architecture.

You could make a game for Windows in Linux, compiling for windows.  John Carmack created Quake in a type of UNIX  OS, then compiled it for MS-DOS.

Modders could create mods and test then on the console, in a offline test mode, or something.

ALWAYS will be faster and easier to mod for the PC, but is posible to mod for the console.

I beg to differ.

 

Let's look at good old Anarchy Online as an example this time. Due to moddability, we were able to reskin and alter the UI to suit our tastes, insert custom map packs with marked locations, zone borders, etc.

And although not really a "mod", let's not forget Helpbot, Itemsnet, Recibebot, etc. I don't see anyone being able to script a bot on a console.

Once again, I pick ONE example. many other MMOs have been modded with important, "how would we ever live without it" features.

Of course, yes, it would be possible to develop mods on a PC and then download them to a console. After all, the games themselves are developed on PCs.

However, you then lose the community dynamic. Not everyone will want to download an SDK for EVERY game they play, when on a PC all you need is a few common tools, I.E. photoshop, 3dmax, etc.

How fast will your little consoles run out of HDD space, once you start adding 1.6gb texture mods, 300mb Facial mesh mods, etc? Will it have enough memory to hold high resolution large textures, with a decent visibility distance?

 

Ok, off the modability rant....to the "instant gratification" trend of console gamers.

MMOs require that you spend time developing a character, spend time making a place for yourself in the community, questing for items, raiding....etc. All very time consuming activities, as we all know.

I don't see many  "plug and play, I want it now, instant gratification" console users spending that time, really. And I don't see them playing any console MMO for very long.

So what we would end up with is a MMO with a subscriber base that wanders off after a month to play the new Guitar Hero, or what-not.

Console gamers are, simply because of their need for simplicity, instant gratification, and low attention span, not a good target audience for an MMO.

 

As for cross-platform releases, I'm going to go ahead and repeat my interface argument -again-. I've given it like three times, in-depth in this topic, flip back a page or two and find one.

The simple fact is a lot of the greatest games have been kept alive for nearly a decade or more through modders. I personally haven't looked much at console mods, but I'm willing to bet the vast majority if not all of them are made by the company that made the game to begin with. Any mod you make for a console today you -have- to get permission from probably both the game developer and the console manufacturer to even distribute it. Where as with PC's, you make a mod, you put it on fileplanet, anyone can download it and install it, end of story.

Oh and modding in MMOs is, if anything, a growing trend due largely to WoW. Go ahead and look up different wow add-ons from sites like fileplanet, fileshack, etc. Millions of people download mods for WoW simply because a lot of them have become pretty much standard. Not to mention, Blizzard has even made certain graphical mods (how damage is displayed, etc.) part of the standard game code due to how popular they were. I'd go so far to say that a large part of WoW's continued popularity is due to the player mod community.

Oh and back to the guy still arguing with me about the whole WoW and raiding thing. How old is that article? I didn't even bother looking. In WoW today the entry-level raid is a 10-person dungeon and if you go to wowjutsu.com roughly 80%+ of  guilds on just about every server have been in or cleared Karazhan, sooooooooooo, yeah.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

 

Originally posted by Lord_Ixigan

 

Originally posted by nariusseldon

 

Originally posted by Lord_Ixigan 

As far as that 70% of MMO gamers -leaning- (key word there, LEANING) towards the hardcore spectrum of gaming it's personal experience. They may not start out as hardcore gamers, but as I have stated, mmos exploit competativeness far more than any other genre currently does (again, my opinion). Let me put it to you this way; What happens when you see some character running about with some uber, really shiny piece of gear? A lot of the time most people go, "Man, I so freaking want that!" and thus level ever harder in order to obtain said item. In that instance a casual gamer might, for a time at least, be turned into what many would call "hardcore" out of the urge to compete.

 

I think WOW pretty much has shown that your statement is NOT true. In fact, the majority of WOW players have never seen the inside of a raid dungeon.

Furthermore, the need to "get stuff" does not necessarily equate the need to go hardcore. I can see casual players gravitate towards easier, grinding games like Maple stories. You can do something like Maple Story *easy* on a console.

So you're fact, have anything to support that? Because of the two different servers I have played on as alliance and horde respectively practically every person I ran into had at least one end game epic from either pvp (technically still a raid) or from one of the raids themselves. So, again, based on personal experience I'd say more people play into end game content than not.

 

And...wow you really went there. Maple Story? You really think Maple Story would attract ps3 or 360 owners in enough of a way to warrant porting it? You do realize that when any game developer pushes an mmo they promote the grander (end game) aspects of the game, right? Most Western gamers don't really care for mindless grinding, they want to do the fun stuff, the actual content and what not.

 

Of course. Here is ONE article talking about STATISTICS (as opposed to your anecdotal evidence which is drawn from a SMALL sample and cannot be accurate). This article is done BEFORE WOW hit 10M but close enough (when WOW has 9.3M subscribers).

http://random-battle.com/2007/11/30/how-raiding-hurts-wow-more-than-it-helps/

Some quotes:

"WoW has 9.3 million customers, 7.3 million of which have never even defeated a boss in any of these zones."

That is a whopping 78% of the players who are not raiding.

Now I don't count pvp or crafting epics because those are a LOT easier to get (just grinding pvp) than 25-man raids. Those are really not that hardcore. You just need to grind.

 

And just to add, you do realize that when you raid the bosses -do not- drop everything on their loot table, right? You end up grinding through the raids over and over again to get everything you want. It's not any different than grinding BG's; you aren't going to do one battleground and get all the pvp gear you want either. It's all basically still grinding, just different sides of the same coin.

Edit: Just looked at the article you posted which even proves the number of people that have gone into raids from wowjustsu.com itself. 99% Kara, 70% Gruuls (25-man), so thanks for proving my point and proving yourself wrong, genius.

And keep in mind wowjustu.com only keeps stats on wester servers, we have no idea what the raids are like in the asian market which comprises about 3/4 of WoW scrips anyway.

No matter what your opinion is about modding etc, an MMO can be successful and mostlikely will thrive on consoles. Raids will still happen, hardcore gamers will still exist.

I don't even get why you bothered to start the thread when all it really is is an "I am right, consoles MMOs will suck/never be successful" Nostrodomus?

Your posting opinions that harken back to the days when people claimed MMOs would never be successful and will always remain a niche genre.

Game developers now see the potential in both formats and will exploit the oppertunity for as much as they can. No one is saying you have to play on a console, but other people may choose to.

As I said, its all a matter of preference.

Originally posted by fyerwall

No matter what your opinion is about modding etc, an MMO can be successful and mostlikely will thrive on consoles. Raids will still happen, hardcore gamers will still exist.

I don't even get why you bothered to start the thread when all it really is is an "I am right, consoles MMOs will suck/never be successful" Nostrodomus?

Your posting opinions that harken back to the days when people claimed MMOs would never be successful and will always remain a niche genre.

Game developers now see the potential in both formats and will exploit the oppertunity for as much as they can. No one is saying you have to play on a console, but other people may choose to.

As I said, its all a matter of preference.

The fact is that, yes, I am predicting the move will fail miserably. However, in the process developers -will- alienate their original, core community that made mmorpgs what they are today.

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

 

I beg to differ.

 

Let's look at good old Anarchy Online as an example this time. Due to moddability, we were able to reskin and alter the UI to suit our tastes, insert custom map packs with marked locations, zone borders, etc.

And although not really a "mod", let's not forget Helpbot, Itemsnet, Recibebot, etc. I don't see anyone being able to script a bot on a console.

I doubt is a good idea to able a bot in a mmo. Hell.. I even see code to unable the botability of a mmo.

IF you want to able bots and macroing, you could able to load python files, and have a python api there. Maybe these could be downloaded as signed jar files from  modgames.xbox.microsoft.com

Imagine typing this in Halo MMO:

http://modgames.xbox.microsoft.com/mods/haloMMO/teiman.jar

[ Install this mod]  [Preview mod]

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

How fast will your little consoles run out of HDD space, once you start adding 1.6gb texture mods, 300mb Facial mesh mods, etc?

Thats a real problem. Even PC owners with 400 GB hard disk have this very problem. Imagine people with 40GB hard disks. ..

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

Will it have enough memory to hold high resolution large textures, with a decent visibility distance?

Short reply:

NO.

Long reply:

Most games will use the 100% of the available resources, or maybe the 99.99%. So doubling the texture size ( x4 the memory useage at minimal) is a nono... in theory.

In practice, I bet most games swap textures from HD/Disc in a dinamic way. If you enhance the textures, you will get more swapping, that is the HD will work more, the disc will read more. And some lag's here and there. Somewhat un-optimal, but will look like better than real life.

Modders *ALWAYS* get a way to mod whatever.  Hell.. the first mods where hacked executables. Because these executabled did have the HP of the monsters hardcoders, so some random guy figured out the offset, and edited that with a hexeditor.  So monsters with 40 HP become megamonsters with 65535 HP...and then, modding whas born.

SDK are wellcome, but modding don't really need it. If theres enough interest on games, there will be always a dude that will break the files encoding, and stuff..   mostly hacking stuff.