In our latest Independency column, we take a look at a game that simply wants its players to be, well, a cat. Called Cat Life: ChatChat, the game is "achingly adorable" according to Cassandra. Find out why and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.

There are no classes, no levels, no professions, no pets, no way to exhultantly inform someone else that your metaphorical genitalia is bigger than theirs. ChatChat is just you (and whomever else is present within your server) attempting to be a pixelated cat. Though ChatChat has, like so many other novelties before it, lost its player population, the game evokes an interesting question: how important is scale?

Read more of Cassandra Khaw's Independency: Cat Life - ChatChat.

We've already seen mmos experimenting with how many people can be in the same zone at the same time.  People tend not to like being limited to small numbers in a zone as it removes the whole 'massive' multiplayer feeling.  And those graphics are atrocious.  I was around in the 80's playing arcade and I see no reason to return to 30 year old crap graphics which were that way for a reason....computer hardware limitations. 

My wife on the other hand would disagree because there are kittens (sigh).

Hell yes!

Err... wiat... you're talking about games? OOOKay... there too. XD

I want tons of content and GIANT worlds. I loved the SWG planets because there was so much "nothing". It gave me a much more realistic and cool feeling to be in a REAL world rather than those crammed pseudo-worlds where every 2 meter another bear spawns. Thats just ridiculous.

Solid column as usual Cassandra.

I think one of the GW2 programmers, Cameron Dunn said it v well: comparing the difficulty of making mmorpgs with "In-Gen, the company running Jurassic Park" he concluded making mmorpgs is probably harder! From the other end of the scale, "A Virus Named Tom" dev mentioned they ran out of funds to add network support for 4-player co-op, even, so shipped only with local.

So I think it's fair to say mmos are another level up.

But actually having '000's of players running around may add some atmosphere but after a certain point not that much. ArenaNet's server size was based on part of that consideration of balancing number of players and being lost in the crowd.And I think with Star Citizen that is taking a promising approach of splitting up different scales from single-player to instances, multiplayer instances of a type you are interested and a more mmo-world also.

I'd love to see a MMO capable of truly massive and I mean thousands of players together in the same play space that didn't have extreme technical issues...

But generally speaking it's more about the size of the world and how much there is to do and see and of course whether or not those things are fun and continue to be fun over a long enough period of time.

I like solo content, small group, large group, public massive scale, server wide, etc.

I think a great MMO needs options for all of the above, not type-cast itself into a specific nitch.

It's really all about reaching critical mass.

Want to know why WoW is so successful and is still so popular? There is always something more to do and people to do it with.

Originally posted by Elikal

Hell yes!

Err... wiat... you're talking about games? OOOKay... there too. XD

I want tons of content and GIANT worlds. I loved the SWG planets because there was so much "nothing". It gave me a much more realistic and cool feeling to be in a REAL world rather than those crammed pseudo-worlds where every 2 meter another bear spawns. Thats just ridiculous.

 thank you.

if its not massive then dont call it mmo. Call it multiplayer online rpg or fps or whatever. For mmos size matters. Also both game quality and graphics matters. Unreal engine 4 graphics arent required but as long as it looks good then all we need is almost perfect game quality and insanely huge maps and player capacity. Otherwise, again, dont try to call it massively multiplayer.

Hell, after playing planetside 2 I wont be playing other shooters unless they are at least the size of battlefield 3. No more cod and generic shooters for me.

Size does matter.

Size doesn't matter, its what you do with what you got that counts.

In SWG, I could go in a direction on my speeder and 30 mins later still not reached the end of the zone. And what was going on in all that limitless space? Nothing.

I like to explore.  I liked Skyrim. A BIG zone full of things to do and see is great, but if its empy then its meaningless.

As long as most MMOs are not more massive than around 100-200 people at once, there is no reason to aim any higher.. like for a server with just 500 ppl, and not 10.000.

DayZ with just 50 ppl(the mod) felt sometimes more alive as many mmos with technically thousands of players at a server.. but almost all MMOs do everything to spread the people, and to avoid anything massivly. So why not make just a smaller world.

I dont see a huge problem with it.. and for indy companies it is in my mind the best way to go. To design(handcraft) a huge world is foremost what is expensive on mmos... ok, a lot of other stuff, too.

And with that size, they could go a similar way like DayZ with official servers and private servers, and the options for mods for some private servers... i think this would be a lot more interesting.. especially for indy companies. Lets go back to Neverwinter Nights.... I am all for it.