Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Suraknar

 

Because adding multiplayer function to KOTOR does not make it an MMORPG.

It is posts like this that always confuses me.

Why do you think your personal definition of 'what an MMORPG is' is the only one?

Absolutely agreed. 

As far a I am concerned a mmo is any game you're playing with a ton of other players, and that doesn't mean forced grouping either. There is absolutely nothing wrong playing primarily solo in a mmo if you so choose. There's nothing wrong with a preference for 5-10 man groups, and heck there's nothing wrong with raids either. It's when one of those groups make the others suffer that there's a problem, ala raiding and gear gating.

Even though D2 (and soon to be D3) is technically not a mmo, I've always considered it more "massive" in terms of players than any mmo.  D3 is going to be even more massive as there are very few servers to support a larger market for the RMAH.  Compared to a mmo that shards people up into roughly 30k groups (or shards of shards like SWTOR or STO), a Diablo game feels like I'm playing in a much more robust mutliplayer environment despite the fact that it does not have an open world.

Bottom line, if a person thinks they absolutely know what a mmo is, odds are they don't know much about mmos.  Because anyone who actually does know a lot about mmos knows that they can be very different, and that is not a bad thing.

Originally posted by zaxxon23

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Suraknar

 

Because adding multiplayer function to KOTOR does not make it an MMORPG.

It is posts like this that always confuses me.

Why do you think your personal definition of 'what an MMORPG is' is the only one?

Absolutely agreed. 

As far a I am concerned a mmo is any game you're playing with a ton of other players, and that doesn't mean forced grouping either. There is absolutely nothing wrong playing primarily solo in a mmo if you so choose. There's nothing wrong with a preference for 5-10 man groups, and heck there's nothing wrong with raids either. It's when one of those groups make the others suffer that there's a problem, ala raiding and gear gating.

Even though D2 (and soon to be D3) is technically not a mmo, I've always considered it more "massive" in terms of players than any mmo.  D3 is going to be even more massive as there are very few servers to support a larger market for the RMAH.  Compared to a mmo that shards people up into roughly 30k groups (or shards of shards like SWTOR or STO), a Diablo game feels like I'm playing in a much more robust mutliplayer environment despite the fact that it does not have an open world.

Bottom line, if a person thinks they absolutely know what a mmo is, odds are they don't know much about mmos.  Because anyone who actually does know a lot about mmos knows that they can be very different, and that is not a bad thing.

In this case we just would need new term for seamless, persistant game worlds.

Cause Diablo is not more of an MMO than for example Call of Duty is.

Originally posted by fenistil

Cause Diablo is not more of an MMO than for example Call of Duty is.

Don't know how anyone could say this with a straight face, but I'm not going to try and convince you.  That's a waste of our time.

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Suraknar

 

Because adding multiplayer function to KOTOR does not make it an MMORPG.

It is posts like this that always confuses me.

Why do you think your personal definition of 'what an MMORPG is' is the only one?

Confusing you is not my intent, but if I start explaining where I come from with that you will probably find my post too long and not even read it which would be a waste of my time too. So these days, I content myself to post mainly one liners, up to you to find out the meanings since you want to re-invent the wheel. All I can say is that i been around for a long time playing these games, and I think that does intiotle me to have a very good grasp of what an MMORPG's definition is.

Originally posted by Lidane

Originally posted by bunnyhopper

Maybe the problem is they do survey people. Can you imagine if they did market research on this site, christ almighty the resultant game would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

What? You don't want a huge sandbox with high res graphics that only 1000 people could easily run on their machine, and which is totally dynamic, which means that the only people who will ever see the game as the developers intended are the first people to ever play the game?

 Heh, there is not enough time in the day to tell you how awesome you are.

Between the 100 regular posters on this board voicing that gaming companies are not doing it right, there are 99 different ideas of the perfect MMO. Yet people, people still refer the crew as 'we,' when you actually have less in common than you realize.  It makes you wonder why developers should even listen to MMORPG pros.

Developers do not have it wrong, they just know better that to target an already small audience who think they are 'One and united,' yet have very different ideas.

Sorry to be the the "only reads the OP" poster but...

CO and STO both suffer from from one major concept failure: Both games lack scale.

Let me explain. I'll use CO as an example. In this game we have a varied powerset that can be configured to interact with powers from different trees in many ways. We have a character creator that let's the imagination run wild. What we don't have is a world big enough and detailed enough to justify the complexity of the abilities we have. Both games need a space/mob/content increase by a factor of 4. This isn't a matter of intension but time. As another poster said, The games were developed according to Atari's busted ass McFactory schedule and clearly could have used an additional 18 months of developement. What folks here should find interesting is that SOE spent even more money on DCUO and that went F2P even faster than Champions Online. 

While the pen and paper adaptation that is CO is a pretty unknown body of lore, the same cannot be said for DCUO and STO. Both IPs are huge and both game developers were relying on their IP's momentum to carry the game. DCUO even had VO.  DCUO's failure was to call it an MMO at all when it was clearly a console game button mash extravaganza. It's different and there is nothing wrong with that but it won't work when the PC users expect a fully stocked MMO.

This brings us to nicely to Tor, another big IP game which I'll talk about since I'm playing it. ToR made the mistake of thinking that the SW IP was enough to make old MMO mechanics feel new. The story is new and as my first Bioware game, I'm truely impressed. Haven't we all been going on for ages about how much we wanted a story driven MMO? Bioware listened and delivered story with a capital "S". Unfortunately we were also expecting a new MMO and you cannot deny that if you peel back the assets and the copy, you have a pretty standard MMO underneath. More similar to CoH than WoW in my opinion but standard none the less (I only played WoW for my 14 day trial and CoH for 6 years).

Why do they keep getting it wrong? They just keep getting different parts of the whole wrong. For a genre that has only been around for as little time as it has, it's doing pretty well.  It's like assembling your hypothetical perfect mate. Some what more brains than body. Some want a pervert and a chef. Most want a combination of everything but hope that the good bits outweigh the bad ones and you can get on for a while. We're all digital divorcees of one variety or another and everytime we dip our feet into the single scene we come back with a slightly more hardened view of what will make us happy. That's why we sleep around. At CO's house I can get classless creativity. Over at ToR's place it's a sweet and tender story and over at Borderlands I know I can get it hard, fast, don't have to stay the night or call the next day.

^^^^^ /tearandtissue

Bravo

Originally posted by bunnyhopper

Maybe the problem is they do survey people. Can you imagine if they did market research on this site, christ almighty the resultant game would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

The fact that this thread made Spotlight makes me sad.

simple, designers are not really gamers for passion. they dont loev gaming they just love the possible " money " what comes out of it. companies are full people with useless certificates without any experience years back from gaming.

A publisher/dev that has the time and money also has investors. Investors do not care what you want. They want a profit. And if they can make a plan that will make a relatively safe return on box sales and a couple of months of subs, great. If the game has legs beyond that, wonderful, that's gravy. But to make a game that they think will have legs beyond that gets a risky and investors don't like risky.  So they go for the safe, market-analysis driven bet. We get IP-based, heavily marketed crap.

Originally posted by bossalinie

^^^^^ /tearandtissue

Bravo

I'll second that, very nice post by Leethe, has a poetic read to it ^^

/thumbsup

Originally posted by Suraknar

Originally posted by bossalinie

^^^^^ /tearandtissue

Bravo

I'll second that, very nice post by Leethe, has a poetic read to it ^^

/thumbsup

Thank you both.

Originally posted by Leethe

Haven't we all been going on for ages about how much we wanted a story driven MMO? 

No, a lot of us have been asking for a world in which we can make our own stories. We'd rather the majority of time, effort and huge amounts of cash be spent on content rather than movie cut scenes that ends up being spacebar-ed.

Originally posted by Zekiah

Originally posted by Leethe

Haven't we all been going on for ages about how much we wanted a story driven MMO? 

No, a lot of us have been asking for a world in which we can make our own stories. We'd rather the majority of time, effort and huge amounts of cash be spent on content rather than movie cut scenes that ends up being spacebar-ed.

The movie cut scense and quests ARE content.

Did you mean to say systems?

Because in the first sentance you ask for a world to make your own story, but then you ask for spending money on content...

So which is it?

Developer made content or player made content?

Content based game play or systems based game play?

In before "is it too much to ask for both?" because the answer is probably "yes."

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by Zekiah

Originally posted by Leethe

Haven't we all been going on for ages about how much we wanted a story driven MMO? 

No, a lot of us have been asking for a world in which we can make our own stories. We'd rather the majority of time, effort and huge amounts of cash be spent on content rather than movie cut scenes that ends up being spacebar-ed.

The movie cut scense and quests ARE content.

Did you mean to say systems?

Because in the first sentance you ask for a world to make your own story, but then you ask for spending money on content...

So which is it?

Developer made content or player made content?

Content based game play or systems based game play?

In before "is it too much to ask for both?" because the answer is probably "yes."

How about content "other than movie cut scenes"?

If I want to see movie cut scenes everywhere, I'll go watch a movie. I expect DEEP and IMMERSIVE "systems" in a MMO, not one-time movie content that people tire of and spacebar through.

Does that help?

Some bits and pieces:

- patch x ruined the game: yeah, if you have a fanbase of a certain game, and you make CORE changes to that game half way through, chances are high it will turn out bad. Whether the developpers were to blaim, or the vocal minority on the forums, doesn't matter much.

- a good mmo is a mmo where everyone can do as he or she pleases: solo, group, raid, pvp: i tend to disagree. If a MMO caters to all those different play styles, chances are again very high that it will fail. Groups will not find enough members, raids will find too few raiders, etc. Why not have some balls to determine your audience early on, and stick to the plan. It might sell better and make more revenue (the main argument, as i read here, for doing it in the first place). I know i would have a lot more fun in a game that excells in a certain area that i choose to begin with.

- early games had more to do than fighting (grinding).....

- it was easier to be unique in early games....gear wise, skilll wise

- if making money is your main (only) goal, please try to hide that fact..it's such an emersion killer

To sum up my view:

* dare to make a game that caters to a very specific target audience. Dare to choose between pvp and pve, or solo/grouping

* give us more to do then fighting alone and make it an integrated part of your game design not some after thought

* stick to the core principals of your game through out it's life span

To the OP - I think my first thought (and forgive my bluntness...) is how do you know what players want?

I agree that Star Trek Online did not engage me personally - I found the idea of it glorious but I never got any momentum playing it.

However I'm not sure if that's more an issue of how the game mechanics are structured and less an issue of concious choices by the game decision makers.  Game mechanics are set quite early in the development process and a poor decision can ripple on down endlessly through the build of the game.

I will say however that gaming companies should require their upper management to level a character to cap in at least 2 mmo's before they're allowed to speak at meetings.  That might fix things...

I think a large problem is that developers don't plan mmos from a player's perspective. It amazes me how players can tell you what is wrong with the game but some developers still don't have a clue.

Originally posted by Manarix

- a good mmo is a mmo where everyone can do as he or she pleases: solo, group, raid, pvp: i tend to disagree. If a MMO caters to all those different play styles, chances are again very high that it will fail. Groups will not find enough members, raids will find too few raiders, etc. Why not have some balls to determine your audience early on, and stick to the plan. It might sell better and make more revenue (the main argument, as i read here, for doing it in the first place). I know i would have a lot more fun in a game that excells in a certain area that i choose to begin with.

 

Only with this i have problems.

If you focus too much you may find out that you are making a game that is not an MMO...

I think the problem is more of the sort that those things do not fit into the world, like instanced pvp, that offers gear only usable in instanced pvp, raids that give gear the has no real use in the outside world, soloing progression only for leveling...