Originally posted by goldenr1

The MMO you speak of would be a product in search of a market, and you should know what that means.

What Nintendo did worked, not because it reinvented games, but because it reinvented the way we played them. Take any game off the Wii and play it with a standard remote; the novelty is gone.

Hotbars work because a keyboard can hack it and a mouse can click it. UIs are the way they are because that's how the tools interact with the computer. Change those, and you will revolutionize gaming.

Mark my words, it's not what you play, it's how you play it.

I agree but the problem is Wii has been in my house since december and it hasn't been played in a month while I can name no less than 4 mmo's I've played for over a year.  I may be a bit different because to me video games are just to pass the time I don't need to be blown away everytime I play them I just want a world I feel a connection to and enjoy playing in which is not hard to achieve with the way games are designed.

I never tired of d&d so I don't see that anything designed the way it is would tire me out so in essence maybe I'm part of the problem for players who yearn for something different but ultimately I can only concern myself with my own happiness in these matters not anyone elses especially since I'm the only one who pays for my play time.

Originally posted by neonwire

Originally posted by Realbigdeal

 MO...  It will be the best for hardcore pkers like me.

Thanks for the gibberish but this makes absolutely no sense at all.

lol, given the game and the people who play it, makes perfect sense.

(MO = Mortal Online, another Darkfall / Shadowbane griefer clone)

nice atricle, and a good read.

I would say that Nintendo saw a gap in the gaming market and took it. Back when games came out they were simple, sometimes two tone.simple to play. The cap in the market is speaking to this audience, you see it in the press, tv ads. people aged 25 35+ playing games with the 'whole family' taking part, not just watching. They are simple to play, colourful and fun. And reminds some of how much fun they had when they were their kids' age... just a thought.

they have aimed and targeted their audience. and there is no substitute. = very popular. ..and reinforcing your thought, a new angle.

wow, is the game with the money. there will come a time not in the too distant future when the 'story' of wow comes to a close. it will run out of bosses to kill from stories past, it'l run out of lands to visit from stories past.... my thought is, what happens when wow's essence is 'done'. being a raider myself once all the beasties have been put down, there's nothing to do, except grinding gold and atcheivments. We are going to need something.....

From my perspective it's going to take one primary thing for MMOs to change. Development teams need to stick to the courage of their convictions.

I've seen it all before. I played SWG and there was a huge amount about that game that I liked. Then EQ2 came out and numbers dwindled a little bit, or maybe they never had the numbers that Lucas Arts wanted in the first place. the resultw as a radical change of face for the game. Out went the inpsired classes and the social structure, and in came the simplification and standard MMO classes. They did add FPS-style gameplay which isn't exactly the norm, but the truth is they didn't go with their convictions. They could have just fixed the small problems the game had (and not had so many Jedi) and things may well have been better.

Then along came a game called Vanguard. I followed Vanguard from near enough the minute it appeared on the radar. Okay, so maybe they were never going to do anything genre changing, but they were going to make a game to stand out in its own particular niche. The end result was it didn't. It was a buggy piece of same old, same old and it never got the subs it needed to be a huge sucess. It was fun but in this world MMOs need numbers to stand out.

Warhammer Online had similar problems. They had great ideas but they just didn't click. They had tried and tested RvR on DAoc but they threw that out to get something newer and it wasn't the same.

I only look at the dev teams though. Maybe they aren't entirely to blame. Maybe we are to blame. Some of us want something new but does the majority. If these dev teams didn't get harassed to make games a certain way (normally for the sake of ease - because gamers are scared of difficulty) would they then include the innovative instead of sticking with the rpeated formula to make money.

Then there's the backers. They put money into a title and they want more money back, so is it them telling the dev teams to go with the known and not risk the innovative?

I also have to ask myself how much new is needed? Do we need to get rid of quests of hotbars? Do we need to get rid of classes? I just want to see a title that emerges day one with a vision and maintains that vision. They'll get complaints chucked at them and people will ask for things to be removed or toned down, but they need to do what they think is right.

I also want to see dev teams and finance teams not come out of the starter blocks trying to be the next WoW. Part of the reason WAR failed is because everyone expected it to be the next WoW. They set their server requirements around that premise and the result was the game was never going to have the numbers of WoW because it was more intelligent than WoW. I believe WAR lost a lot of numbers in teh early days because of too many servers and too widely spread a population. It was why I left.

I'll play a great game that has just one server, if that one server has a population to make it work. I might have said that Vanguard didn't have the population it needed, but it would have if it had had less servers. It still has too many servers to this day. I've just started playing EQ2 again and I think that has too many servers still.

I'm looking very keenly at Earthrise. It's a small, new dev team making their first MMO and if they have the courage of their convictions then I think they can make it the game I want to play. Not the game I want to play to pass a few months but the game I want to play like I played EQ...for years.

It don't need to be a WoW beater though. That is one ideal we all need to get away from. Let WoW be WoW and move away from it.

Much of this article is stating the obvious.  Innovation is how you find or create a new market.  People do get stuck with assumptions simply because, usually, they work rather than trying to do something new.

The key really is that a group of people with a real dream has to be lucky enough to find each other.  No guy on his own, probably, can create a whole MMO. 

Finance and marketing has to be a secondary, or even tertiary, consideration if you're going to do "pure" design (like pure scientific research - it's always underwritten by a government or patron and, back in olden times, tended to be an eccentric hobby folks chased after for personal insights rather than profits).  

What I suspect will happen will be that, one day, this generation of designers and developers and digital artists (whether graphic or audio) will retire.  They'll have lots of free time on their hands.  Instead of taking up shortwave radio or model trains as a post-career interest they'll probably reach back into the file cabinet for all those cool ideas that didn't have room in a commercial product.  They'll talk to each other.  Fire up each other's imaginations.

When this tsunami of "pro" modders and indies comes out with games they'll be swinging for the bleachers and not worry about striking out.  No shareholders, few investors - mostly peers probably, and all the time and love in the world to lavish on their dream projects.

And they'll inspire others to look beyond big developers and publishers.  Maybe they'll go even further and create software that really allows people with less technical knowhow to design and develop their own MMOs from modular components.  My idream is that, one day, someone does design a standard for sharing modular elements of MMOs in a common framework.  A person fascinated by crafting could spend all his time developing the ultimate crafting system.  Someone else might tweak a default melee model with an animation package to include more dynamic moves and poses.  Who knows?

But I wouldn't count on money to be the motivation for innovation.   It has to be a love of the product and personal pride in one's craftsmanship.   Money may come after.   It won't be the carrot.  It shouldn't be the stick.

Really nice Saturday morning read, saved me the cost of buying a newspaper lol.

I think one answer, at least for the fantasy MMO genre, is a game that does NOT have quests. :)

Base experience on something closer to what experience really is. Eve is on the right track. Build an environment, an economy and a set of basic rules, then let the players interact through the economy. No stupid, useless npcs asking you to kill 20 boars, no quests at all. Just people being people, some of whom will be ambitious, some ruthless, some kind, some social and many stupid, so the heart of the game is that it is an MMO. Drop the idea of providing content for the players and let them sort it out.

Make the uncivilised world unforgiving, harsh and dark. Let players do whatever they want, within the set of rules that define the world, but make things like murder a serious crime with serious consequences such that killing either a player, or an npc, in front of witnesses earns you either execution or exile.

Take the focus away from combat, such that in the first days of play, you would need to invest yourself in a non-combat career of some sort. Also, remove the insane amount of fighting. The best thing about deeds in LOTRO, such as kill 350 trolls, is it often gets people to together to do something completely mindless, and they start talking and find themselves becoming friends!

Maybe I'm really just suggesting a fantasy genre equivalent of EVE. If it exists, please tell me about it. :)

On the one hand questioning the all to well trodden path of WOW clones is a good thing. But saying we should toss out everything we know is kinda like trying to re-invent the wheel. The tricky thing with allegories is, they never 100% fit. And that allegory with the David VS Goliath has an important logical loophole. Let's say we want to "beat WOW" in terms of subscribers. Unlike the battle of David VS Goliath or those basketball girls, when we make a MMO we do not really fight to defeat WOW. We compete to seem more attractive with is just a small but decisive difference. The result is: since we don't want to beat WOW, but take its customers, at least a part, since we cant assume to miraculously make another 11 million new MMO gamers, we have to create something that is still familiar.

And that is the trap in all this. People who play games tend to like what they are halfway familiar with. Many things in MMOs are the result of years of experiences of what works and what doesnt. For instance the ever returning whine about tank-DPS-healer triad. I so far have not see any better breakdown of combat functions, and every attempt to make classes differently has been artificial and lacking.

But there are SURE some "rules" which must and can be broken. For instance: why must combat be this slow, pseudo-turnbased combat we have? Jump on one mob, grind on with 5 min with all your skills then move to the next mob. I so loathe this slow paced dull hypnotizing sort of combat now. As fan of Dynasty Warriors I have an idea how you could add way more action feeling. You just let the player fight not against ONE gnoll or orc but against dozens are the same time. Then spread the XP so the netto output of XP per min is the same, but let the player hack away many mobs fast. In that way you have a way more heroic feeling than this "pick on the badger for 10 min" yawnfest. I am so sick and tired of this kind of combat.

Or classes. Sure, the basic ideas are there. But why are such interesting classes like the Vanguard Disciple so rare? Why are so many classes cookie cutter and boring? Why does only AoC combat feels with impact, and all those WOW-EQ2-LOTRO combat feels like fighting with feathers?

And indeed those HIDIOUS "fetch me 20 bear paws" quests. ><

Throwing out the rulebook has been tried...SOE tried it with SWG:NGE and look what it did to their reputation and subscription numbers. 

Moral is if you throw out the rulebook make sure it is with a new MMO and not one already running with a core subscription base.

Anyone who tries to beat Blizzard at their own game will be crushed, because Blizzard's "game" is beating everyone else at their game -- and they were already the best at that BEFORE they got a billion dollars a year in cash flow!

And speaking of conventions, I HATE the button refresh mini game.  That annoys the Hell out of me.  Am I really the only one who feels that way?  Of all the things about WoW to copy, why do so many designers copy that?

So many paradigms about CRPGs in general need to be rethought.  For example why is there constant in-fight healing?  If all roleplaying gamers weren't so used to it; if we started with a clean slate,  stopped and thought it over starting from scratch, we'd see it was insane.  Nothing like that happens in real life, movies, fantasy books or ANY other venue except for computer games. 

So many things that Gary Gygax and Nintendo started thirty years ago haven't changed one tiny bit.  While computers have become a million times more powerful, only the graphics have changed.  The basic combat system remains untouched.

Why do characters stand three feet apart and trade blows like they're chopping down trees?  Why not give characters an easily regenerated "guard" that gets worn down before much more hard-to-fix bodily wounds start happening.  And instead of just watching that damned "health bar" go up and down, why not reflect the status of the fight graphically - with parries, feints, dodges, and associated sound effects for hard or soft blows, armor clunks and finally the sweet (or terrifying, depending on whether it's you or your opponent) sound of flesh wounds?

And here's something that would be a truly drastic change to CRPG combat strategy;  make it matter WHEN an attack takes place.  I don't mean twitch response; that's been done to death.  I mean an element of strategic timing in the decision to hang back or press the attack.  Instead of just making a dozen new "special attacks" that get repeated as often as the buttons refresh just have a very few options, but have the player pause until his opponent is weakened.  If it succeeds, you get a satisfying "killing blow" animation.  If it's too late, your opponent could strike first.  If it's too early, it could weaken you and leave you vulnerable to counter attack.

Originally posted by Valeran

Throwing out the rulebook has been tried...SOE tried it with SWG:NGE and look what it did to their reputation and subscription numbers. 

Moral is if you throw out the rulebook make sure it is with a new MMO and not one already running with a core subscription base.

IMHO... SOE threw out the rulebook when they launched SWG.  They brought in the rulebooks during the CU and NGE.  They essentially reversed the process.  They took a wide-open game and put it in cuff's... with a linear system with hard-core/cookie-cutter professions/classes.  They broke the game and the player-bases backs when they did that. 

Originally posted by Valeran

Throwing out the rulebook has been tried...SOE tried it with SWG:NGE and look what it did to their reputation and subscription numbers. 

Moral is if you throw out the rulebook make sure it is with a new MMO and not one already running with a core subscription base.

Yeah, I was talking about new games. I think everyone has learned their lesson from SWG.

I'd go a little further and say, SWG's original design was something new but it wasn't fully baked to start with.  The second big mistake was to use a known license as a platform, even an excuse for, experimental game designs that had nothing to do with the core themes of the license.  "It's got a Star Wars logo and theme music.  They'll buy it.  Now, let's get back to figuring out how many hairstyles to have."  It ended up being a terrible Star Wars game even if some of Koster's ideas were pretty good (though perhaps would have done better with an original setting and context) and do continue to hold folks even after being disemboweled by the NGE.

The NGE was a desperate scramble back to a safe, conventional, design.   The Star Wars fans were long gone, no "starwarsiness", and the big PvP clans chased after WoW.  The content was so diluted because they were trying to cater to players that were both Imperial and Rebel that there was no Star Wars, in the sense of players reliving the kinds of adventures the heroes in the films enjoyed, PvE to be had.  Instead it was horrible grinding of pointless terminal missions or goofy quests against obscure third parties from the EU that both Imperials and Rebels could fight. 

It took them until 2008 to come up with Hoth.  The only place in the game that remotely looks or feels Starwarsy (aside from Space).  Restuss certainly don't.

My lesson learned is that if you have a licence do it right.  Otherwise you lose te only marketing edge you really have and the built in supporters that follow that license.

Well i didn't read the 91 comments so may be this has been already said but throwing the rulebook is what are doing all those independant developpers with the new wave of upcoming MMO. Look Darkfall was one of the most hyped game of this website, even if the release don't delivers, the concept was there, and now you can see Mortal Online (that seems to be very polished for an indy MMO) is #3 on fhe hype meter, there is also Earthrise, LOVE, Infinity, Tatsumaki. most of them are not really well known (LOVE is not even listed here) I think they all have a damn good potential to deliver something unique

Those indy developers though are not comparable with David vs Goliath, they don't seek to kick WoW out of his throne, they just want to be enjoyable by a certain kind of player that seek more depth in MMO which is laking terribly since the golden ages of both UO and SWG, and both of them has been spoiled by big companies seeking cash and to attract more and more people (and they failed to do that eventually).

I think the first rule we can throw about MMO is : "We have to kill WoW"

Originally posted by Dana

Originally posted by Valeran

Throwing out the rulebook has been tried...SOE tried it with SWG:NGE and look what it did to their reputation and subscription numbers. 

Moral is if you throw out the rulebook make sure it is with a new MMO and not one already running with a core subscription base.

Yeah, I was talking about new games. I think everyone has learned their lesson from SWG.

Except SOE. ;)

The big misconception is that it will take "new" to dethrone WOW, when nothing in WOW is new and the game's only standout point is "polish".  All the other MMO's that have come since have lacked the necessary "polish", but have tried "new" and failed.

"New" does not equal a receipe for success.  "New" is just rolling the dice and hoping.

"Polish" is a requirement for a successful game.  Give us a polished fantasy "MMO" and WOW will have a worthy competitor.

Veteran gamers are pining for games like they used to play, but ones updated with "polish."

Originally posted by pencilrick

The big misconception is that it will take "new" to dethrone WOW, when nothing in WOW is new and the game's only standout point is "polish".  All the other MMO's that have come since have lacked the necessary "polish", but have tried "new" and failed.

"New" does not equal a receipe for success.  "New" is just rolling the dice and hoping.

"Polish" is a requirement for a successful game.  Give us a polished fantasy "MMO" and WOW will have a worthy competitor.

Veteran gamers are pining for games like they used to play, but ones updated with "polish."

Excellent post. 

Originally posted by Dana

Originally posted by Valeran

Throwing out the rulebook has been tried...SOE tried it with SWG:NGE and look what it did to their reputation and subscription numbers. 

Moral is if you throw out the rulebook make sure it is with a new MMO and not one already running with a core subscription base.

Yeah, I was talking about new games. I think everyone has learned their lesson from SWG.

actually, in my opinion, soe threw out the rulebook when they built swg, because swg had many new and innovative ideas. it went off to a promising start, but failing to reach SOE's desired playerbase numbers (reasons being the hologrind, lack of polish, buggs, etc. etc.) they picked up the WoW's rulebook again to create the NGE - and failed miserably.

Too bad SWG when released was an utter pile of poop. The beta testers (myself included) were screaming on the boards to not release the game when they did. It was half baked, incomplete, and boring.

Sure, it was "sandbox". Because a game with no content is a giant sandbox.... with no content. Random "spawns" of random "monsters" does not a game make.

Plus it fell into the "template of the month syndrome right off the bat, so while it didn't have "classes", it had classes. And while it didn't have levels, it had "levels".

So much for throwing out the rulebook.

They forgot to make the game "fun".

Fair warning this is off topic, but it just hit me with all this "Throwing out the rulebook" thing.

If you really want to throw the rulebook out, the REAL rulebook, I humbly ask you to go here http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ and take a few hours off your time to watch both movies there.

If you feel like watching just one, please watch Addendum. Out of the two, it's the one that can potentially have the most impact imo, but both are very valid.

Then if you want to persevere on this path, I encourage you to go here http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ and help make a difference for the future.

Thx for your time! That will be all.

Sorry for the derailment... but is it really?