Not that I'm knocking MMO's, but what's with the huge obsession with creating ten thousand of them all of a sudden? There are several big name MMO's and tons of smaller ones out there, yet all I see on GameDev is "I want to an MMO!" and "Looking for team for a (you guessed it) MMO!" Not that I'm the most original person on the planet, but why does no one want to create a normal video game anymore?

All of a sudden? It seems to have been going on for years.

The revenue potential for an MMO far exceeds that of "normal" games, so the industry loves them.

The combination of social interaction, a game setting, and clever desgin can be very addictive - hence the players love it.

And, given it's the biggest thing in (both as a trend and in complexity) gaming right now, everyone wants to make one. In the past it's been everything from FPS/RTS and RPG that you couldn't get away from.

I don't know what will replace the MMO but something eventually will and then we'll all be complaining about that :).

Also the complexity of MMOs prevent them from doing a lot of things they have the potential to do. Players realize this and end up getting a lot of ideas of how they can be improved.

These ideas are good, but of course the players don't realize that they have never been implemented not because nobody else thought of them, but because the production of even a simple MMO is so huge.

MMOs have a ton of allure -- big, persistent "do anything" worlds. It's the dream game, a virtual reality paradise. Combine that with the people who enjoy the immensely popular MMOs like WoW and want to emulate it "but better," and it should really come as no surprise.

As the above poster says, they're populated by a majority of players with little to no technical understanding, or just enough technical understanding to be dangerous. These people all think they can trivially improve the state of the game -- I mean hell, just look at this thread containing speculation about 'what would you do if Guild Wars (hardly even an MMO) were open-source?'

Half of them think 'open source' is a single blanket term, the other half think that adding complex features would take a matter a minutes.

They're just noise; tune them out.

Quote: Original post by jpetrie
... Guild Wars (hardly even an MMO) ...

In terms of 'MMO-ness', Guild Wars is pretty close to WoW. Sure, the game is heavily instanced, but then WoW relies on the fact that most players aren't bunched up in a small area using skills. The game is designed so that the server can completely ignore anyone farther than about 80 yards of a given player's position, with respect to that player doing anything at all. The average case of which isn't much different to Guild Wars handling 16-32 players in a small area.

Instances are bigger in WoW, but WoW doesn't bother with dynamic collision detection. Nor does WoW allow commands to be queued up. Sure you can travel around in WoW instead of clicking to teleport to places, but Guild Wars simply has no need for timesinks like that.

So I can't really see why you would want to separate Guild Wars from other MMOs when in fact it really isn't doing much less work in the multiplayer regard.

I can completely understand why people are obsessed with creating an MMO.

The persistent server aspect of things, with data that persists between plays, is something that is very compelling for a lot of people. That, and the possibility of more interesting interactions between large numbers of players, like say, one player putting a bounty on another player's head.

Some more factors: MMOs have no endings, thus if one quits playing one it does not give mental closure and the player's brain is still in 'thinking about MMOs' mode. Also MMOs are a relatively young genre, which combined with their complexity means that they have a lot of evolving to do, unlike most other genres of game where the basic gameplay seems finalized. Then there is also the fact people design the kind of game they are playing, and there are a ton of people playing MMOs currently.

I think a big appeal behind MMOs is that (if done well), they have the ability to replicate so much of our world an its social interactions without being artificial in the same way an offline game will inevitably be. When many people play MMOs, the one thing that happens more often than keyboards getting mashed is voice chat. The games fulfill a gap in the market which is one that thrives off community interaction and creating a world that exists independent of any one individual player.

While I'm personally not a fan of the genre (mainly because of the massive time investment involved), I can definitely understand their appeal. Of course, the large time commitment may be one of the "kinks" which come to be ironed out as the genre evolves. The market for MMOs is both new and lucrative, providing incentives on both the creative and business side of things.

My hunch is that lot of these wannabe MMO designers are players who've got bored of their current favourite massively multiplayer online game and have turned to proposing what they think would be obvious improvements. This would explain why most of the ideas I've seen here fall in the more hardcore area of MMO design, with the "obvious improvements" usually being the bits that are the hardest to implement from either a technical or a social level (sometimes they're borderline impossible).

It's a cycle that everyone goes through. I was dreaming up improbable FPS, strategy and space sim ideas back in the nineties. It's a question of whether once these developers see the mountain of effort they need to put in to make their dream game they put in the hard work to gaining the ability to make them (usually by climbing the chain of developing easy games to hard), or whether they give up and try something else. Or whether they take the much worse third option of ignoring the mountain exists and getting stuck in limbo for all eternity.