MMORPG , Ultima Online:

Shared virtual world. Where you can build houses. Own shops. Produce and harvest. Influence economy.Hunt and quest wherever you want. Explore and discover. Be criminal , killer or protector of innocent. Control and rule whole cities and areas.No classes or predetermined paths.... and all this happens between players. No instances. No separate servers, shards.

Real virtual world simulation

MMORPG today, APB:

Unparaleled cosmetic customisation. Make your own music. Own a character on a server that holds 10,000 persistant accounts - but only 100 can play together in virtual chat room waiting for dynamic matchmaking to put them in shared instance with up to 20 other players - at the same time! Influence the game world by having your high score displayed on web site and ingame bilboard. Dynamic PVP rooms that matchmake you with up to 10 other players of similar skill. And yes, the achivements!

This is your FPS shooter , with virtual chat room loby instead of server browser.

This my friends is where "MMORPG's" are heading.

So sad, but quite possibly so true.

reserved.

Great topic to discuss "for once and for all for the hundred thousand time" what Massive means:

First, MASSIVE is an adjective wich describes the scale of demographic density (its worlds we are talking about)

NUMBER OF PLAYERS IN THE SAME WORLD (each instance/room/shard/server/whatever means you use to separate players from each other IS a world by this concept, using instances/rooms to segregate players is an attempt to bypass the requisite of massive scale of number of players, this is through an theleologic and historic interpretation)

In short, the number of players in the same world HAS TO BE MASSIVE IN ITS SCALE. And it cant be considered massive if a server hubs xxx instances/rooms of a limited/capped number of players. It defeats the purpose of MASSIVE, this is cheating and we as an evolved community of players cant allow that to be kept pushed through our throats anymore.

Second, MASSIVE also describes the scale of time. WHAT?

Its massive in a sense of PERSISTANT WORLD, its lasts forever, its persistant, thats the sense of "persistant world". A world that exists regardless of your character presence.

Massive also describes the  (scale of time and therefore EFFORTbecause without effort spent nothing evolves from inercy, if there is evolution it has to be effort/action/energy whatever you wanna call it), spent by the PLAYERS in that PERSISTANT WORLD. It determines the need for character evolution over time, MASSIVELY (yeah, and the grind you all talk about is a by product, side effect of developers inability to provide an entertaining experience while the effort/time is being done to satisfy the massive requisite of providing evolution in that persistant world)

Third, since the number of players in the SAME world (not of the same game, neither in the same room/instance) has to be massive in scale, it also determines that the size of world has to be massive to allow that number of players.

From that we extract that MASSIVE also describe the scale of size of such persistant world.

So to have a MASSIVE game you have to satisfy the requisites of number of players, time and effort spent and size.

Those requisites were satisfied by the first MMORPGs, being derived from UO school or Everquest school of design decisions.

AND ARE NOWHERE TO BE SEEN IN TODAYS GAMES BUT THEY DO STILL USE THE SLOGAN "MMORPG", "MMOFPS", "MMO" for their games just because its a popular way of getting cheap advertising space in the thousands of gaming websites and communities, through the word of mouth they get people to test their product/service, but they only get that by false advertising a "massive" game that in reality is not.

This pisses me off and the ignorance of new players regarding what massive really means is recurrent every day in every board about "MMOs". Thanks Lobotomist for the opportunity to discuss this - again.

Originally posted by Lobotomist

This my friends is where "MMORPG's" are heading.

It's one of the many branches in the evolution of the platform, yes. The sole direction? No.

UO was amazing. It was so far ahead of its time that it will still be years before current developers can create anything that can remotely compare to it.

UO's eternal greatness and simply frikken awesome design aside, MMOs are branching in different directions. You have the GW and CrimeCraft like games, the Second Life and Entropia games, the grindfest, the sandboxes.... and there is plenty more to come.

There's going to be some variations of MMOs that you don't like and some that you do. Prophecizing doom when one comes out that you don't care for is kinda silly.

Only until some other company comes and stops WoW's "monopoly"....

Sandboxes (a.k.a Virtual World Simulations) started to fall out of favour 10 years ago when EQ launched.

The majority wants a game to play, not a new world to live in.

With the return of the story-driven immersive gameplay promised by TOR, I'm very happy with the direction the genre is heading in. I understand that not everyone feels the same, and that opinions don't get changed on forum posts but meh; your negative viewpoint demanded a positive rebuttal.

I guess you have a point.

I just hope that Blizzard's next MMO will be a sandbox :p It would be the logical choice imho, making another WoW style MMORPG with a different theme would be shooting themselves in the foot imho, at least as long as WoW is doing good, and when they started development on the new MMO, WoW was still doing good ( and atm still is ).

Furthermore, I do think that a game like SWG pre-cu-nge appealed more to women than lets say WoW ( percentage wise male/female representation ), so I wonder when Blizzard will tap into that :p

It would be SWG pre-CU-NGE, but polished, with more guided content ( that you can choose to ignore ), less bugs, player run cities with clear and software enforced rules, not the "build wherever you like even if it is infront of a dungeon" SWG type of rules, but more like you can build wherever you like except on place x,y,z, because there are dungeons or other public points of interest, ...

Ah a man can dream can't he? :p

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Originally posted by LynxJSA

 

It's one of the many branches in the evolution of the platform, yes. The sole direction? No.

UO was amazing. It was so far ahead of its time that it will still be years before current developers can create anything that can remotely compare to it.

UO's eternal greatness and simply frikken awesome design aside, MMOs are branching in different directions. You have the GW and CrimeCraft like games, the Second Life and Entropia games, the grindfest, the sandboxes.... and there is plenty more to come.

 

There's going to be some variations of MMOs that you don't like and some that you do. Prophecizing doom when one comes out that you don't care for is kinda silly.

 

To the history of MMORPG's UO  doesn't even exist. Just like you don't even know Ultima OFF line ever existed in the 80's.
 

Only Wow exists and only Wow decides what the future of MMORPG's will become.

Get over it.

 

It's this mentality that will do more harm to this genre of games than anything. There are a few games prior to WoW that are very much worth seeing a more current version of to provide more choice in MMO gaming. It's certainly clear there are many, many gamers out there for which the WoW mode/method just doesn't cut it.

35 and he has a l4d2 boycott sig. Says it all really. :)

That is an excellent post Zorndorf, it is exactly what I think too.

However, it doesn't really look like we will get something like that anytime soon. FFXIV devs said that they are trying to not make a WoW clone, which will be seen, but other than that I don't see any real competitors (I haven't looked at SW:TOR though), so it won't change in any direction in the very near future at least.

If even one of these 2 games (or some other MMO) becomes a big success we might see a change to a different direction, but not before.

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

Sandboxes (a.k.a Virtual World Simulations) started to fall out of favour 10 years ago when EQ launched.

The majority wants a game to play, not a new world to live in.

With the return of the story-driven immersive gameplay promised by TOR, I'm very happy with the direction the genre is heading in. I understand that not everyone feels the same, and that opinions don't get changed on forum posts but meh; your negative viewpoint demanded a positive rebuttal.

That must be why everyone is so happy with MMOs these days. Why so many WoW players are looking at new games and then going back to WoW because they don't want to go through the level grind all over again. "Story" alone won't change that. WoW had story, and was "story driven". Don't kid yourself. TOR is only trying to sell you a bill of goods. Predetermined storylines and more quest driven content is just more of the same.

Originally posted by Hyanmen

Only until some other company comes and stops WoW's "monopoly"....

WoW does not have a monopoly.

mo⋅nop⋅o⋅ly
  /m??n?p?li/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [muh-nop-uh-lee] Show IPA
–noun, plural -lies.
1. exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.

To be a monopoly by definition, would mean that you have a market condition where there is only one seller of a good or service.  Obviously that is not the case as there are countless MMO options available.  It is just the most dominant.

I agree with you OP. The genre is crap, has been for about 4 years. There are some promising games coming out  in the near future, but as I watch the main game I am following slowly release more and more details about how it isn't the sandbox style game they promised, but a dumbed down over simplified FPS, my hope the genre will ever come out of this slump dwindles.

I had reserved a spot on this topic in the first page. Now I updated it with my post, check it out.

Originally posted by andmiller

Originally posted by Hyanmen

Only until some other company comes and stops WoW's "monopoly"....

 

WoW does not have a monopoly.

mo⋅nop⋅o⋅ly
  /m??n?p?li/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [muh-nop-uh-lee] Show IPA
–noun, plural -lies.
1. exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.

 

To be a monopoly by definition, would mean that you have a market condition where there is only one seller of a good or service.  Obviously that is not the case as there are countless MMO options available.  It is just the most dominant.

Yes, that's why the " "'s. I think it's controlling the commodity in the MMO market in a way that Blizzard can really do nothing about it. Not in the market share way, but in the way MMO's after it are designed. They're less and less like it's not-so-successful-competitors and more and more like it.

I think there might be a better word for this than monopoly but I can't think of one right now!

Originally posted by Interesting

reserved.

 

Great topic to discuss "for once and for all for the hundred thousand time" what Massive means:

 

First, MASSIVE is an adjective wich describes the scale of demographic density (its worlds we are talking about)

NUMBER OF PLAYERS IN THE SAME WORLD (each instance/room/shard/server/whatever means you use to separate players from each other IS a world by this concept, using instances/rooms to segregate players is an attempt to bypass the requisite of massive scale of number of players, this is through an theleologic and historic interpretation)

In short, the number of players in the same world HAS TO BE MASSIVE IN ITS SCALE. And it cant be considered massive if a server hubs xxx instances/rooms of a limited/capped number of players. It defeats the purpose of MASSIVE, this is cheating and we as an evolved community of players cant allow that to be kept pushed through our throats anymore.

Second, MASSIVE also describes the scale of time. WHAT?

Its massive in a sense of PERSISTANT WORLD, its lasts forever, its persistant, thats the sense of "persistant world". A world that exists regardless of your character presence.

Massive also describes the  (scale of time and therefore EFFORTbecause without effort spent nothing evolves from inercy, if there is evolution it has to be effort/action/energy whatever you wanna call it), spent by the PLAYERS in that PERSISTANT WORLD. It determines the need for character evolution over time, MASSIVELY (yeah, and the grind you all talk about is a by product, side effect of developers inability to provide an entertaining experience while the effort/time is being done to satisfy the massive requisite of providing evolution in that persistant world)

Third, since the number of players in the SAME world (not of the same game, neither in the same room/instance) has to be massive in scale, it also determines that the size of world has to be massive to allow that number of players.

From that we extract that MASSIVE also describe the scale of size of such persistant world.

So to have a MASSIVE game you have to satisfy the requisites of number of players, time and effort spent and size.

Those requisites were satisfied by the first MMORPGs, being derived from UO school or Everquest school of design decisions.

AND ARE NOWHERE TO BE SEEN IN TODAYS GAMES BUT THEY DO STILL USE THE SLOGAN "MMORPG", "MMOFPS", "MMO" for their games just because its a popular way of getting cheap advertising space in the thousands of gaming websites and communities, through the word of mouth they get people to test their product/service, but they only get that by false advertising a "massive" game that in reality is not.

This pisses me off and the ignorance of new players regarding what massive really means is recurrent every day in every board about "MMOs". Thanks Lobotomist for the opportunity to discuss this - again.

 

Interesting post...err, Interesting. :)

Originally posted by Zorndorf

To the history of MMORPG's UO  doesn't even exist. Just like you don't even know Ultima OFF line ever existed in the 80's.

Crap... *shrug* I learn something new about the history of MMOs and about myself everyday. Thanks, Zorndorf!

Only Wow exists and only Wow decides what the future of MMORPG's will become.

Get over it.

You keep thinking that, bro. Let us know how that works out for you.

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

The majority wants a game to play, not a new world to live in.

You nailed it.

But to be massive it HAS TO PROVIDE A WORLD TO LIVE IN.

They (companies/developers/publishers) cant change the meaning of Massive, if they want to offer a game, without the world to live in (persistant world - massive scale of size, time, effort, people) they have to STOP using the first "M" in whatever acronymn they use to describe their new games. Thats the deal. They have to stop false advertising first.

No problem if they want to make just games to play because thats what they see as more money maker, just dont advertise it as if it was a massive persistant world to live in (even if just for some years).

I think the elitist/snobby attitude is one reason devs don't try to make games like "back in the day".  Some people can't be pleased and are more content coming in here and whining about how the genre sux instead of putting some time into the plethora of games out there and having some fun.  They know that these nostalgic types will never be happy.  Just my O.

Z

Yeah, I'm fine if MMO devs don't want to make anything really "massive" anymore, but they really could forget  that first M in that case, haha. 

Maybe it's a massive in the sense of how much time you spend playing it!?