Originally posted by Terranah

From this article and other things I have read, this game does not play to the strengths of the mmo genre.  Yeah it is from a top notch developer, has high production values, it's Star Wars, and it continues the legacy of it's successful single player predecessors.  Based on these factors alone I think it will be a commercial success.  I'm buying it.

 

But as an 'mmo experience' I am not convinced. It just sounds like a financially well invested rpg with a coop feature added to justify a revolving subscription.

 

When I first started playing games in this genre, they were referred to as MMORPG's.  After awhile these games continued to evolve away from that immersive type experience and games starting leaving off the RPG.  So then we had MMO's.  Now it seems we will be leaving off the Massively in 'MMO' so that what we are left with is a MO.  Pretty soon it will just be O.

Quite so. Its probably been mentioned, but unless mmorpg.com is prepared to chop a lot of games off its list, it will probably have to change its url.

I don't think we're leaping to any mad assumptions here. Most of us are just aware of how the trend has developed.

I think the concern is fair: if this is another game where content is entirely soloable, and doesn't provide enough incentive for grouping up, people won't do it. WIthout a strong community of players who have reason to interact, people will not stick around. Its almost the only reason mmorpgs have gotten away with charging monthly subs.

Bioware has made great multiplayer games and even invented interesting new ways for players to interact with one-another. But would anyone have paid a monthly sub to play Neverwinter Nights? MMorpgs are different beasts.

Originally posted by Dana

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Oh yeah, cause nothing says MMORPG like:

"The Old Republic looks and feels far more like a single player RPG than an MMO."

I'm glad this gets some of you stoked. I'm not sure you are hanging out on the right website though....

 

For the record, I meant that line in terms of just presentation and polish. Not it's single vs. multi playerhood.

The presentation looked like how single player games are. That didn't by any appearence make it any "less" of an MMO.

Think of it this way. The game features voice acting and cut scenes involving your character. Something no one has in MMOs, but appears all the time in everything from Half Life to Prototype. Thus, the single-player-esque aspects. I honestly didn't see enough to judge its online aspects beyond the "multi player dialogue" discussed in the article.

Didn't Age of Conan have this?  I seem to remember it did, for the first 20 levels at any rate.

Depending on how burned out, bitter and jaded a player you are, you might see cutscenes as intrusions into your flow.

I think the appealing idea of an mmorpg is that given enough room to explore and grow, your story could be truly unique. When your character appears in a cutscene, any notion of uniqueness is done away with. You are now -this- character or -that- character, ie one of theirs, but certainly not the one you created for yourself.

Don't get me wrong, I look forward to Bioware's approach to getting the player connected to their character and to the game, but it does nothing to inspire the open-ended character-building opportunity that a content-rich sandbox game could  present. If such a thing existed.

So, have any of the E3 attendees learned anything about what actual multiplayer aspects there are to SW:Tor? I haven't found much info on this. So far it sounds like one of their previous single player games.

1. So many classes, but none have utility skills/spells. The skills are so similar to one-another, featuring countless minor variations on the theme of this amount of damage + this amount of DoT. Great class concepts, but ambushed by dreary game mechanics.

2. In pve, virtualy every mob is identical in effect, so the only actual "game" is in repetition of hotbar abilities. If computer games were sex, then War would be masturbation. pvp was pretty similar.

3. Poor chat channels. It was a disaster at first, and improved somewhat only after it was too late.

4. The imagination and enthusiasm of Paul Barnett was beyond the narrow design that the other developers had almost certainly set for themselves before they even started the project.

The Warhammer Online folks tried to make the journey more interesting by having two types of advancements, Rank and Reknown, the theory being that players could diverge from one source to the other, thus playing it their own way. 

But the only thing to do in War is fight, so one way or the other boils down to the same thing. Without some other game feature or more dynamic control of the game world in a way that really helps your side out and punishes the enemy, players could be forgiven for losing the point of it entirely.

I don't think its fair to chastise players for forgetting their sense of fun. The game must at least provide a context for the fighting, and the although the great struggle to eventually topple the enemy's capital is good in theory, its bloody hard to feel it in game when you're smacking squigs over the head for some reason.

You'd have to define your game world with more than a single activity to make advancement more interesting. Earth and Beyond had three types of experience: combat, exploration and trade. They might have been grinds but they were three different types of grind, and although they weren't balanced very well, they encouraged you to make the most of what the game had to offer. Exploration in particular, showed the player that prying into every part of the gameworld would be rewarded. The xp gains for exploration in most games are usually trivial.

Incidentally, why is trading only ever a feature of Elite-inspired space sims? You'd think it would work just as well in fantasy mmos.

How about if the reward of all the main quests in a game were to unlock a skill/spell? Irrevocable character development choices, like picking a subclass, would certainly make people pay attention, and compete to achieve at the earliest opportunity.

You could try getting stupidly drunk, loading up a copy of Gauntlet on M.A.M.E., and pretend that the reason you don't meet anyone on it is because either you're all in seperate instances, or you haven't leveled up to them yet.

"WoW clone" has always been a bit misleading. If WoW was cloned, there'd be two WoWs, each with 5.5 million subs.

OK this probably isn't true. The second one would be a haven for pvpers trying to make fresh starts but would otherwise be ghostlands. The blood elf "Ghostlands" would be a sort of double ghostland.

"Ripoff" is a better term. Just because developers forever blatantly do this to one another's "I.P." doesn't make the deed less despicable, numb to it as I'm sure we all are. Perhaps if the definition of I.P. tortuously covered things like the layout of the UI, the colour of health and mana (and the name "mana"), we might eventually end up with a game that is original.

Creativity is just the power of association. If you associate with the most recent thing with which everyone is familiar, and bugger all else, you're not likely to offer anything new are ya?

Originally posted by eHero

I'm surprised anyone would look at something that works in other countries and then look at America and say, "Sure! It's inevitable!"  There've been better ideas that didn't hold water here.  Let's name some.

The metric system. 

The electric car (except the gas prices changed that finally). 

Bullet trains. 

From everything I've read, gamers in asian countries tend to be more cooperative and team-centered.  Whereas in the U.S. there's a larger trend toward individualism.  To me, even if a game doesn't put me in direct competition with someone else (via pvp), I'm still in competition with them as far as level and item gains go.  I'm proud of the fact that I've got Shiny Sword of Pigmailia on my max level toon, because I know how hard I had to "work" to get it.  And as well, if I see someone with something even better, there's a little awe for what they, likewise, were able to accomplish.

Now, give people the ability to speed through levels or gain cool looking items just by buying them with real money, that kind of thing sours me on the entire experience.  Now I don't know if that person with the awesome hammer actually earned it, or paid for it with dollars. 

Again, most of this is just my opinion, but I hope to not have to play a game where the richer person wins or has the ability to win based solely on his real world wealth. 

Heh! Great examples :)

I saw in Warrior Epic, you could buy cosmetic additions to place in your warrior hall, or whatever its called. Given how static the hall environment is, this isn't much more sophistocated than dragging pretty pictures into a photoshop image. Do people actually pay for this stuff?

Good article, and I like the points Nate makes.

I also wonder if the trend in mmo development has been catering to an increasing culture of selfishness, and this has been limiting the great strides in socializing and nation-building we once probably all imagined we'd be seeing about now.

Presently, almost all mmo gameworlds are defined by three things: environment, mob, player. New games focus so much on what a player can do, that the mobs have become almost irrelevant. You can play Warhammer Online right through without noticing any real difference from mob to mob other than whether it hits you at range or up close. That means you essentially get locked into a world that is entirely centered around your hotbars. The monsters are just there so that your hotbar abilities have something to activate on, and are otherwise an impediment to your leveling.

What am getting at is that I can't imagine the Next Big Thing happening until a game's development starts with the environment, and fills it with creditable hazzards and features, before introducing the element of the player. Does it seem to you that most games start with a list of the playable classes and work their way out from there?

"The Dungeon Archer". It'll be cool, you'll be able to kill things with a bow and have 30 abilities which express this in fine detail. What will you be shooting against? I don't know, some kind of leech. Does it matter? They're all essentially the same.

Am I still on topic? Sorry, never let a chance of a whinge pass by.