the lack of innovation in MMO's is the result of several compunding issues.


Barrier to entry:

to develop an MMO is a technical giant. writing a good load balancing, clusterable server is tough. essentially a few years of coding to develop the skills necessary to meet industry standards(though the term industry standards in relation to net-code is a very broad brush). All this before you develop a AAA quality game on top of it.

Content creation for an MMO is a huge barrier to entry.

Server cost for a "proper" MMO is also a barrier, but this is slowly changing as the one year old server becomes more and more capable.


From an investor standpoint. a game investment is already a risky proposition, once you put a few million behind development you become more and more risk averse.


If you want to see more innovation in the MMO market you will first have to see a reduction in the entry barrier. well developed and market proven middle-ware, or an innovation in content creation.

Tis a market problem, plain and simple.

Quote:

Original post by Avatar God I agree about the setting. Far too many MMORPGs use a combination of Norse, Greek, and Tolkein myth, and little or nothing else. Either we need a new Tolkein (he did, after all, revitalize the elves and invent the hobbits), or we need to use a different era. The problem with modern-day settings is that, well, they're *normal*[...]

As far as the setting, I suggest there needs to be more alternate history games - most settings with magic etc just do something like 'middle ages + magic' without really thinking it through. History would be _SIGNIFICANTLY_ different if the kind of magic that was exists in most games was introduced at any point prior, and just taking magic on at the end and pretending it was always there but never changed anything is silly.

The plagues that decimated the population from the early 1300s until the early 1400s wouldn't had had much impact if clerics of the many religions could walk around and cast cure disease, or heal or whatever spells are presented in fantasy, and wars would have been much different if armies has super-cannons in the form of various explosive spells long before cannons were first envisoned. It's hard to imagine that magic suddenly appeared the same time as PCs did yet it is still so well known that there are hundreds of spells that give mages both breadth and depth.

I'd love to see an MMORPG that (besides other fixes such as making combat interesting) took place in the year 2000 in a world crafted by a few good writers getting together with some historians and psychologists to put together an alternate history that made real sense.

[Edited by - Extrarius on April 8, 2005 12:43:33 PM]