It can be argued that the game development tools aren't available. In fact, I saw something on /. today about some nVidia developers discussing the reasons for the lack of game development on Linux:
- lack of mature toolsets
- lack of audience
- lack of games

A circular argument, to be sure.

The last two are chicken and egg, but what about the other? I want to know what is meant by a lack of a mature toolset? Unix is meant to be a developers playground, so the toolsets have to be mature,right? gcc, SDL, OpenGL, etc, are all mature and robust. Eclipse, KDevelop, etc are great IDEs if people prefer them to CLI editors, which are also great.

I am disinclined to believe that the tools are not up to snuff. Maybe one can talk about Blender and the Gimp not being up to the same quality as 3DSMax/Maya and Photoshop, but I've still seen some amazing quality come out of the free tools.

Maybe I should start a new thread on this...

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Original post by GBGames It can be argued that the game development tools aren't available. In fact, I saw something on /. today about some nVidia developers discussing the reasons for the lack of game development on Linux: - lack of mature toolsets - lack of audience - lack of games A circular argument, to be sure. The last two are chicken and egg, but what about the other? I want to know what is meant by a lack of a mature toolset? Unix is meant to be a developers playground, so the toolsets have to be mature,right? gcc, SDL, OpenGL, etc, are all mature and robust. Eclipse, KDevelop, etc are great IDEs if people prefer them to CLI editors, which are also great. I am disinclined to believe that the tools are not up to snuff. Maybe one can talk about Blender and the Gimp not being up to the same quality as 3DSMax/Maya and Photoshop, but I've still seen some amazing quality come out of the free tools.

I think the toolset is mature enought, but people resist change, and developers are people, therefore, developers resist change (remember how much we disliked VStudio .NET after being used to the 6.0 interface?), add to that the fact that using command line is seen as going back to the 70's [rolleyes], which adds even more resistance to change, I for one just love Autotools and shell scripting.

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Original post by GBGames Maybe I should start a new thread on this...

I sure think so [smile], if you do, let me know (PM me)

I hate to say it, but MMO's suffer from the same problem as any other program...And everything still follows the old Program addage:

Power
Ease of use
Low Price

Choose any two.

For MMO's the categories can be expanded: Content, Time, Price, Interactivity, Atmosphere, size, speed, etc. But the old addage still bears true...you CAN'T get it all into one game. If you put it all into one game...the price goes up, speed goes down, and time to for the developers to do anything goes up. I'd have to say we could place MMO's into the addage of:

Content/Power
Speed
Price/Customer service

Choose any two

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Original post by Cosmic One I think the concept of MMO and RPG mix like oil and water... you can toss em together all you want, stir them up, but they still won't work. Your 'role' in the typical MMORPG is demolished by the fact that everybody else is playing an equally important 'role'. Make an RPG with one to ten people together and sure, you have some memorable characters who can make a difference in the world... but massivly multiplayer games make you a faceless hero in a world overwraught with mindless, eternal peril which you can never fully overcome. While you are still technically playing a role, it's not one very suitable for an epic adventure. You can't all be built into the central storyline. You can't all be heros. NPCs treat everybody equally. Personality has no development, only skills. So my point is stop wanting to make the ultimate MMORPG, make another kind of MMO, one more focused on gameplay and interaction. I suggested something like this here if you care to see some ideas. Just my opinion. I do enjoy MMORPGs, although I think enough is enough. Move on, and think of more suitable genres to go with MMOs. As ever, **Cosmic**

I agree that thousands of players on a server is too much, but couldn't even, say, 50~100 be fun?

If they were in different groups with different goals and allies/enemies I think it could work. Players wouldn't interact with enemies beyond shouted taunts on the battlefield or illicit secret meetings, but they would know that they were fighting intelligent opponents. Honestly, a true small online RPG where everyone is actually role-playing would be the most fun kind of game I can think of.

An orc wouldn't trade with the paladin (...unless someone played a corrupt paladin; there's all kinds of fun possibilities). Everyone wouldn't hang out at the inn and chat peacefully; they would form bands and command NPCs in their guild. They would form 'armies' (large parties, 10~20 PCs and NPCs) and fight for territory. Two great empires would fight until a new threat forced them to work together. Maybe there is no generic force of evil trying to take over the world.

All of this would happen because of players; there would be no scripted quests. There would be NPCs behaving based on the AI (no intelligent conversations; I'm not suggesting the currently impossible). They would belong to a faction and try to further its goals, or they might be a community of semi-intelligent creatures working to stay alive in the wild. I think that would be fun, but it requires a more open-ended game and an open-minded player community to work.

Now I'm talking about something that couldn't be called MMO, but if you had that working and expanded it you could have an amazing game. I don't think it would scale well, though. Players would become much less important and you would have trouble getting everyone to roleplay. It would be much harder to have a system of analyzing NPC behavior with huge numbers of factions and players. I don't think this concept would work for a true MMO. I guess I don't believe that a true MMO would work at all.

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Original post by Aurvandil Have you ever tried A Tale in the Desert. Right up your alley. [smile]

In nearly all aspects, this game is spot on. Note that there is NO combat in this game.

So the first goal is to get off Newbie Island and reach Egypt, where upon arriving you have to find a mentor to start you off. The trick is, this mentor is actually another player on the server. Most people in this game are really nice, and finding someone who is a willing to show you the basics is fairly easy. Once they have taught you the basics of the game, they might also be nice enough to show you to a school. Here you can choose paths such as art, architecture, whatevever.

Now, once you have chosen your school (I chose art), you need to finish your first assignment, which for me was to build some kind of statute/art piece out of whatever materials I can make, and get 20 people to admire it (to have your piece admired, it is put on the street for show, and passing people can right click on it and select admire if they think it is good enough). I tried to make a big sign saying 'Egypt is too sandy!' but my free trial ran out and I never got a chance.




In the end, I made heaps of great friends and had an awesome time playing. My best memory was that one of the emotions you can do is dance the hambone. I managed to find 4 other people, and we stood in a fairly busy area dancing together. Some people were nice enough to donate some bricks (which we needed at the time). Geez it looked funny [smile]

Apparently they have released a sequal now, so I might download it when I get home and give it a shot.

My problems with various MMOs(I try free trials/beta tests quite often) :

Content: The world is usually very boring. All MMOs that I've played are graphiaclly boring, but they're also boring plotwise. "Go kill 30 orcs", "Capture the 6 points before the NPCs do", "Clear the building of clockworks and then click the bombs to disable them", "Collect 30 magic pebbles", "YAY! That somehow added up to saving the world! For the 2347629784678th time! Just like everybody else did!"
It might sound like variety at first, and it would be, except that after you do them each once, you get to do them all a second time, and a third time... and it gets old REALLY fast.

Making a difference: I don't expect to make a difference individually. Sure there are probably millions of orcs and clockworks and whatever else, but when I take down a dragon/boss/etc it should make a difference! Maybe not instantly, but after my guild of 10 people completes some huge undertaking the world should change eventually (maybe 15 days later IRL at most to notice the first changes). The problem is that there are too many heros in an MMO which all need something to do. If dragons died forever, it would be a peacefull world really fast. The solution is procedural content. Let people discover new continents/etc once old ones quiet down, and let the frontier move outward from the initial lands.

Economy: Every MMORPG I've played that had an economy had a really bad one (except for one). I'm not really sure how to explain this except to say that if it was like MMOs in the real world, it would have collapsed long ago and we'd have somethnig new.
Guild Wars is the one exception to this. It actually worked fairly well during the preview event - initially NPCs sold things for very little gold, but as demand increased so did prices. Near the end of the trial, things that started as ~10 gold were going for ~200 (reguardless of whether you bought it from players or NPCs - supply was matching demand via a cost shift). It still lacked in the other ways.

Boring Gameplay: In most MMOs that I've played, you can click once and walk away from the computer and you'll finish the battle. In others, the game could easily be played with a bot given the right information (a simple sequence of if statemenys:if party warrior taking hits and eblow X% HP, heal. if enemy spellcaster doing well, cast backfire on it. etc) and is still very boring.
City of Heroes had the best combat of all I've played, but even it got old after a while (and the rest of the game didn't help)
I don't ask that MMOs be made into twitch games, but there needs to be some thinking required to do well in combat and that shouldn't mean that you just have to solve the simple AI and heal slowly enough that it doesn't realize killing the healer would be better than doing nothing to the warrior.

AI: The AI in all the MMOs I've played is TERRIBLE. Most of the time it involves standing there and attacking back. In some games it might be so good to have a one-liner like 'if healer is healing too much, attack healer' but even that is rare. I'd love to see some VERY simple tactics in MMORPG AI, such as when attacked by several _ in the middle of a forest, some of them fight head on and some walk around the group to attack from other directions or somesuch. Maybe even give them the ability to set traps in arbitrary locations so they can wonder around and make a small base by putting up some traps around an area or the like. Giving the NPCs the ability to grow (in a power way, such as making new castles and strongholds {even if they just appear rather than being built - just make sure its out of sight and in a place rarely visited}) would be an awesome addition to the interacticity and would give new levels for the AI to work on.

MMO: Where is the interaction? All these games tout being MASSIVELY multiplayer, and they have TONS of players on at any one time. And what are the players doing? Playing diablo2 style with parties of ~2-8 and ignoring the rest of the world 99% of the time. Guild Wars tried to solve this, but guild wars of 8v8 players with 10NPCs on each side just doesn't cut it.
Even worse, newer MMOs (Guild Wars, City of Heroes) even go so far as to section off players in missions so that you CANT interact with those outside your party even if you wanted to because you're essentially in your own little bubble.
I want a thriving world where I both can and probably need to interact with other players once in a while.

PvP: It just doesn't feel real when you're entirely safe the whole time. I can understand wanting to be safe, but I'd MUCH prefer having some kind of law system with players in charge of enforcing everything (and maybe even have the town governers give players money to keep the peace and vary amounts by the number of PVP killings dicovered by wandering guards). How hard can it be to make a simple guard system where they walk around and discover PvP killings instead of letting god tell them about every one instantly?
It'd be nice to have some real risk of some kind, and so far the NPCs certainly aren't providing it {in all that I've played, its either easy win or certain death, which means no risk either way}

Game System: So far, all the games seem to use a D&D-esque system for stats and everything (or something completely homebrew which is usually just as broken). Personally, I'd like to see something based on a point system like Hero or GURPS (or ideally a hybrid between Hero's system and GURPS's detail and something in between for skill rolls so stats have some but not too much impact on them) with some tweaks to make it more computer friendly - a computer can handle ALL of GURPS's advanced combat rules without a sweat, which would make things much more interesting.
Such a game system would allow for much more interesting combat as well, since there would be 50 ways to attack with the same sword, and you could treat such maneuvers in the same way as spells - each one takes so much fatigue and concentration and has a _% chance for each effect. This way melee can be just as complex as spellcasting and can have all the same benefits - specialize in a single way and you learn tons of attacks with it, but get disarmed(which should be possible against mages as well) or find an axe way better than your sword and its tough.

Crafting: I'm still looking for an interesting crafting system with tons of depth so both items and spells can be construction in so many ways that every meaningfully different permutation will never been seen.

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Original post by solinear Quote: The monthly fees. Who are you kidding? The monthly fees are a coup for the player. Most MMOG players will spend 15-30 hours per WEEK playing the game. Call it 60 hours per month, at $15/month, that's less than $.50 per day, or $.25 per hour. I consider MMOGs a great deal for my entertainment dollar.[...]

I bought halflife for around $40 and I played it for aruond 3 years.
$40/(365*3) ~= $0.04, or around $1.20 a month or $0.50 every 12 days.
I'd say I got more for that $1.20/mo than I'd get with any current commercial MMO which would cost ten times as much at least.

There is more, but I'm tired of typing so much =-P Maybe Later

[Edited by - Extrarius on November 12, 2004 12:40:22 PM]

I should retract my earlier statement and say that the BIGGEST problem with MMORPGs is that they are in their infancy development stage. Many changes are occurring, but the possibilities seem dauntingly limitless compared to the small scope of MMORPGs to date. Of course this applies to the whole of the gaming industry in general, but MMORPGs are all the rage now, so it's more apparent in them.

And @nagromo

You're right, I say for RPGs, keep trying the multiplayer and the online, but drop the massive.

As ever,
**Cosmic**

This is heaven! Every post on this thread is right on the money. Its sooo nice to see people thinking the same thoughts, Im thinking, and it gives me hope that gaming will someday fulfill its potential.

God knows right now the big gaming companies seem to be following the path of least resistance. I.E. Proven formula's, skill less, painless games, token gathering, level crunching traps. People playing them look as exited as old timers in Casinos with One Arm Bandits.

People need to be stretched to feel the rush.

Example "Williams Defender, 1980. It had too many buttons and controls and seemed difficult to master and the thought was that gamers would just walk away from it having spent their hard earned credit in a matter of seconds. Ahh its great when the experts are wrong isn't it." The the industry did not think this game would make it at the time. But once again in 2004 its conservatism that is still the norm in titles.

What is current:
Example. EQ2, as far as can see its a much prettier EQ1, with more bells and whistles and moderated difficulty to appeal to an even wider audience. Not be disrespectful to a truly brilliant team of programmers and artists. But.. can't there be more? Is this really the next generation of game? There are still zones, still scripted npcs playing over and over the same words, and lots of ways to "fix an unfavorable game experience", I was amazed that my level froze at level 6 until I became a citizen of Quenos, or that npc in towns can't be attacked. Wait more controls on the player?.. Lots of work arounds it seems are the norm instead of just getting to the next generation. In a sense the old EQ1, getting lost, dying losing your stuff, attacking a quest NPC by accident seemed more real.

To get to the next paradigm is universal not just a problem that SOE is having. MMORGs need to keep up with the human spirit. Plain and simple, people are becoming more jaded. The old XP crunching and reward tokens will have absolutely no effect or gratification on someone who has already been through a 4 year XP latter. To them it just another day of mindless crunching, with a new skin.


1- HIGH RISK / HIGH PENALTY
Die start over. Simple as that, maybe some wealth can be stored for your children/next generation in game but that’s’ it.

2- A strong PVP element
Nothing motivates or challenges like knowing there are other humans at work against you.

3- Ability to change the world/Environment.
"Blow up the Tavern" Man I love that quote from page one of this thread. So bluntly put. The MMORGS now feel like a disney ride. The pirate ship sinks for every roller-coaster that goes by it, again and again all day... And yet the ship is allways there again nothing changed all in vain as many have pointed out here.

4- Skill based. The MMORG has been reliant primarly on knowledge verses skill. I.E. I know where and when Lodizal spawns, and what spells and classes and levels we need to defeat it. As long as people have a pulse we can win. Now this is crap folks. Duck, strike, turn, get that arrow in a vital point, ect ect. Yes this requires people to twitch occasionally, as in a FPS but it beats mindlesses watching the computer fight itself.

WWII online by Rat software. Is making a bold move in MMOG. Though its not a role playing game per se, its showing great promise of having a world that is player changed, buildings blow up, towns are won or lost, and also the players need to have skill in aiming, strategy, when to fire, how to move evasively to aviod return fire etc. The true avator and mmorg ecomomy is yet to be developed being a virtual battle field simulation, however it is the future of massive gaming in that skill and resources and massive team effort will effect the global enviroment of the game. And that the players will in the future make the game.

I think the holy grail is a merge of the sim with the mmorg. An earlier post said it is oil mixing with water. This I believe will be proved wrong.

Imagine a world where you can travel, without zones, build things, lead people, and be led. War or trade with foriegn lands, and all the while YOU (not your avator) become sharp at the right moves and strategies, you become rich or poor. There is a burning lump in your stomac when you take on violence because the result could really wreck your day. Your character does evolve, you do gain wealth but also you have a feeling more of skill, of adventure of true life simulation.

This (round not flat) world would have
-no zones-
-no quest scripts-
-no leveling-
-no reward for playing like a bot-

and !

-no logging out!!! a character stays in the world indefinitly, before you disconnect you better run him into a hedge and hide him or something so he can sleep unmolested.. maybe.., put him in your guild house protected by others, on on a ship, cart going somewhere by your guild. He may have died while he was sleeping and be gone forever only the money and gear left to his kids would remain.

In 2004 the MMORG is still Pong to what it will be.

[Edited by - EugeneJarvis on November 13, 2004 2:36:37 AM]

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Original post by nagromo I agree that thousands of players on a server is too much, but couldn't even, say, 50~100 be fun? If they were in different groups with different goals and allies/enemies I think it could work. Players wouldn't interact with enemies beyond shouted taunts on the battlefield or illicit secret meetings, but they would know that they were fighting intelligent opponents. Honestly, a true small online RPG where everyone is actually role-playing would be the most fun kind of game I can think of. An orc wouldn't trade with the paladin (...unless someone played a corrupt paladin; there's all kinds of fun possibilities). Everyone wouldn't hang out at the inn and chat peacefully; they would form bands and command NPCs in their guild. They would form 'armies' (large parties, 10~20 PCs and NPCs) and fight for territory. Two great empires would fight until a new threat forced them to work together. Maybe there is no generic force of evil trying to take over the world. All of this would happen because of players; there would be no scripted quests. There would be NPCs behaving based on the AI (no intelligent conversations; I'm not suggesting the currently impossible). They would belong to a faction and try to further its goals, or they might be a community of semi-intelligent creatures working to stay alive in the wild. I think that would be fun, but it requires a more open-ended game and an open-minded player community to work. Now I'm talking about something that couldn't be called MMO, but if you had that working and expanded it you could have an amazing game. I don't think it would scale well, though. Players would become much less important and you would have trouble getting everyone to roleplay. It would be much harder to have a system of analyzing NPC behavior with huge numbers of factions and players. I don't think this concept would work for a true MMO. I guess I don't believe that a true MMO would work at all.

Right, that's the BIGGEST problem of today's MMOGs, which is,

Today's MMOGs are all about a persistent world without a peristent virtual society, with virtual conflicts and virtual politics.

Today's MMOGs are all about a persistent world with a player society, player conflicts and player politics. As long as everything inside a MMOG is all about inter-player encounters, you CANNOT have any emotional encounters, and you CANNOT have any heroic deeds and meaningful quests.

Without such a persistent virtual society, storyline design will be difficult to carry on or even to be introduced.

Moreover, a clan as an entity in today's MMOGs doesn't have a niche in the virtual world, due to the lacking of a persistent virtual society with vitual conflicts and virtual politics.

The driving force for all kinds of events in today's MMOGs is all about how to cause player conflicts and player politics, which makes today's MMOGs more like another reality than a virtual world.

While a persistent virtual society will help on,

1) the drop-in of emotional encounters
2) the positioning of clans in the virtual world
3) the climate for the virtual "Time of Crisis"
4) the drop-in of heroic deeds and meaningful quests
5) the social aspect and RP aspect of an MMORPG

The model built in the movie LoR gives an illustration of what I am talking about. It's a virtual world with several Kingdoms and thus the conflicts, politics, political alignments. The Good vs. Evil conflicts, with each King/Queen adapting the various alignment tendencies from lawful-good, evil-good, neutral-good etc, they war with each other sometimes and align with each other some other times to fight against the common enemy which is the absolute evil. There is also the racial conflicts, say, between the Hobbits and Orcs.

So if you are living in such a persistent virtual society, both you and your clan will be easier to find your niches. Even with the simplest form of such a persistent virtual society where the various Kings/Queens are persistently existing inside the game, the following can be droped in,

1) Emotional encounter
You and you clan will be serving the beloved Aragorn. You and your clan will help him to ally with his friends and to fight against his enemies.

2) Heroic deeds and quests
The persistently existing Evil Lord (who's leading a whole realm) is going to stir all the sheets in the virtual world for players to fix, such as, kidnapping the nobles (perhaps the princesses, for emotional encounters) for you to rescue.

3) The "Time of Crisis"
That's when the Kingdoms are united together to fight against the Evil Lord, for the endless reasons arranged inside the storyline design.

4) The drop-in of a smoother storyline
With all the Kings/Queens/Evil Lord persistently inside the virtual world, you can make whatever stories as you wish

5) Clan development, clan wars, racial wars, siege driven by virtual conflicts, virtual politics and storyline
With all the Kings/Queens/Evil Lord persistently inside the virtual world, you will have all the virtual conflicts, virtual politics which are closely tightened to the storyline.

6) RP aspect and Social aspect
No doubt, a persistent virtual society will help building the RP aspect and social aspect of an MMOG, with the above elements introduced.

7) Need to point out that the existing of a persistent virtual society will never hinder the various playstyles such as grinding, crafting and PvP.

Today's MMOG direction is,
With only player encounters, and putting hope in causing player conflicts and player polictis to drive the game events. While a persistent virtual society doesn't exist.

The opposite direction is,
With both interplayer and player-NPC (or even NPC-NPC) encounters, game contents are driven by virtual conflicts and virtual politics, with the existence of a persistent virtual society.


What's inside a RPG of which a MMOG lacks, other than a hero toon, is a *persistent virtual society*. To a certain extent, a MMOG cannot be a RPG without a persistent virtual society. While MMOG can be a RPG with the existence of a persistent virtual society. That's about my conclusion.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on November 14, 2004 10:51:14 PM]

Basically what you just said is this:

You prefer the game designers to impose a pre-determined matrix on player behavior that pushes them toward certain types of behavior which you find more enjoyable.