I'm writing this thread partially in response to another recent thread on these forums, and partially because of something that's been bothering me for some time. Obviously, most MMOs nowadays are MMORPGs. The reason would seem to be latency - the larger the playerbase and the amount of data the player must download, the faster the connection speed that is required to play with a low ping. But is this a self-causing issue? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics your attypical MMO, we see the following aspects:

It uses technology that is outdated, but only by a few years in single-player games.

It has a large number of players.

This playerbase often complains of latency issues. If we were to run a far less complex system (such as Ultima Online's) on a modern game server, then we would undoubtably have extremely high speeds. Why, then, do game companies not downgrade their graphics or complexity in order to allow for faster, more complex gameplay (such as that seen in a fighter)? If we had a massively-multiplayer fighter of the same generation as, say, Street Fighter, then today's servers could perhaps provide a high enough speed to make for a fair match. If we look at MMOs over a recent period, we see that they become more complex as technology develops - yet keep the same, frequently complained-about, gameplay. This may be why MMOs are mostly MMORPGs are never twitch-based. This eliminates a vast portion of the market who enjoy twitch-based gameplay. If we stopped with building complexity of MMOs and instead kept the same amount of data sending as older MMOs, could we create an exciting, twitch-based MMO? Are we, as designers, falling prey to love of polish? Or do the audience, perhaps, crave too much?

Graphics complexity has little, if any, bearing on network traffic and latency. MMOs are not streaming the bulk of their graphics over the wire, those are handled entirely client side.

The scalability issues that make 'twitch' gameplay difficult have to do with the number of concurrent connections -- the number of concurrent agents in the world whose data must be parsed and synchronized by the server, and then reported back to other concerned agents, et cetera.

In recent years, what with the availability and ubiquity of high-speed internet, this is becoming less of an issue (although still one that cannot be written off), and it is certainly possible to produce 'twitch' gameplay in a large scale environment. I think the reason you haven't seen so many is mostly down to market concerns.

Consider Blade and Soul, for example.

http://www.projectvisitor.com/

Latency depends to a non-negligible part on the speed of light which is approximately 150,000-190,000 km/s. Also, intermediate routers impose a delay as they queue and forward packets. You can increase the bandwidth almost trivially, but reducing latency is hard, if possible at all.

The speed of light is not likely to increase by a large amount any time soon, and as routers get more powerful, the amount of traffic going through them increases as well, so all in all I'd not expect a significant reduction of latency.

Umm, unless you can transmit packets faster than the speed of light, the issue of latency will always be there.

They're already pretty fast.

Quote:

Original post by Delphinus This may be why MMOs are mostly MMORPGs are never twitch-based.

Darkfall, baby. Just launched, and it certainly isn't perfect, but combat is a blast. PvP works really well, though PvE is still slightly out of sync. Every sword slash, arrow, and mana missile is aimed by the player, very much like Oblivion or Mount & Blade.

I should explain my post.

Project Visitor is an MMORTS/FPS.

Planetside has been around for ages and it's a FPS with battles in the 1000's. It's not like the tech has been missing, there are several innovative technologies to overcome large scale FPS MMOs latency problems, but it's more question of market will bear.

Since Planetside wasn't a breakout hit like WOW or Everquest was, the market has been dominated by fantasy themed MMORPGs every since ( and since that gameplay model rarely needs twitch aspects people have been pushing the MMO tech in another direction, more server side scalability and greater game logic and content distribution support ).

Only now have the advances in standard FPS technology have pushed the bar closer and closer to "massive", has the tech money been spent on the twitch problem for FPS and other fast paced games on a MMO scale, ultimately it will be these FPS companies which will create the next generation of twitch based technology for MMOs and they will probably rule that market.

Companies like Sony, Blizzard, Turbine, Linden Labs, etc.. have no incentive to develop these technologies as their gameplay models are completely different.

-ddn

Latency is not an issue if you can sample, interpolate, and work asynchronously.

I don't think it's going to change much with the lessening of latency in the RPG genre. Most of these games are just graphical MUDs, which in turn are based on turn based RPGs.

As for other genres, have you heard of Massive Action Game?