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RPG Devs Should Beware MMOGs
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue May 29, 2007 03:30 PM
from the going-to-eat-your-lunch dept.
from the going-to-eat-your-lunch dept.
CVG is reporting on comments made by Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. In an interview with the site, he points out that traditional PC RPG developers are in danger of permanently losing out to the developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. "He believes it's key that developers of non-MMO RPGs look closely at what the genre offers over MMORPGs to ensure the RPG genre doesn't lose out to the increasingly popular massively multiplayer online world. 'I think those of us that make non-MMO RPGs need to look at what a single-player/small multiplayer RPG can do that MMOs can't and spend our time and effort on those things', Urquhart said. "
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Not the same market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the same market! (Score:5, Insightful)
jRPGs/console RPGs are a different genre and a different market. aRPGs either need to either jump onboard with the MMO stuff, or learn a few things about story and character development from their friends across the Pacific. Both genres have merrit and a strong future, single-player, non-linear RPGs, however, do not. Elder Scrolls, I'm looking at YOU!
Parent
Fallout (Score:5, Insightful)
While the very mention is liable to start a Bethesda-oriented flamewar, it should be pointed out that American RPGs used to put jRPGs to shame, story-wise. Notable behemoths like Final Fantasy 6 and 7 aside, the character customization and storyline (and subplots, for that matter) of Fallout and, even more, Fallout 2 are rarely approached in Japanese RPGs. The same could be said for the original Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate... storytelling has not always been solely the province of offshore game companies.
Don't get me wrong, I love Final Fantasy and even some of the Tales games, but the problem is not that Americans can't tell a great story. The problem is apparently that Americans (speaking more broadly now) don't buy a great story. Half of the people who love Final Fantasy "for its great story" don't really understand the story, they are just utter Japanophiles who will refuse to acknowledge great American games. Note the recent Shadowrun game. Apparently it's great, if you like FPS games (which I don't), but what a missed opportunity! At least, I think it's a missed opportunity to make a great RPG with the Shadowrun universe's brilliant backstory, but it's obvious that right now, great story is not what Americans are craving. The greater market, whether I like it or not, is craving World of Warcraft and Halo.
Sadly, story-intensive RPGs have merit and marketability but I think you're wrong about them having a "strong future." They are a niche in America and are likely to remain a niche in America. The reason you perceive Japan as a place to "learn from" is because the Japanese market has stronger support for story-intensive games. The people you really need to focus on are not the American developers, who can actually make some amazing stuff, but the American market that largely rejects a good story in favor of thumb-twitching action and/or graphical feasts.
Parent
...WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then tell the millions of gamers to get over their japanophilia, or maybe more properly their anglophobia. I grouped myself with people who love Final Fantasy, at least Final Fantasy 4, 5, 6 and 7. The stories are great. But I have met dozens, hundreds, yes veritable hordes of greasy-haired teenagers who turn up their noses at great American games simply because "Japan does it better." They don't even know Japan does it be
Re:Not the same market! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's an interesting statement, given how successful Oblivion was.
I liked Oblivion, but I hate online games. I can't be the only one. I like having a sandbox to play in that has no connection to anyone else. I don't want to have to worry about people cheating, or bad behaviour from other people. Conversely, I want to be able to cheat and use the world editor to change or screw things up as much as I like without causing problems for other people. I also want to be able to install the game at some date in the indeterminate future and have it still work.
Parent
Re:Not the same market! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Oblivion is illustration of the bad state of RPGs (Score:5, Insightful)
It's endemic of the "next-gen" hype that leads to budgets spent on crap like SpeedTree and FaceGen rather than making the fucking game.
Parent
Re:Not the same market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I mean, Oblivion only sold 3M copies, it's obvious that the single player non-linear RPG is doomed!
I must admit I'm a bit confused why you think Morrowind/Oblivion don't have strong stories. They do. In fact, most of the single-player "western" RPGs I can think of have *better* stories than the jRPGs I can think of- Fallout, Planetscape Torment, Icewind dale, etc. There aren't a lot of them since they are hard to make- the people who like them demand massive amounts of content, multiple plot lines and actual (re)playability, and sales figures for those that don't measure up suck. jRPGs don't have to worry about most of that- it's much more canned. You don't have to figure out six different ways to finish every questline to avoid pissing off the guy who went stealth and couldn't steal the Frobizz of Justice- you're just going to watch the pretty graphics and develop your character into the same one everyone else has.
Parent
Daggerfall !?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Not the same market! (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? American RPGs need to stay the fuck away from JRPGs as much as possible. Most of us don't want to watch a linear emo-anime story unfold in the exact same way no matter what we do about it. I hate that there were almost no good RPGs on the PS2, a console supposedly lauded for them. Yeah, if you like spiky blue haired androgynous protagonists with gigantic swords and cute poses you're in luck. But if you like meaty stories that aren't aimed at Japanese teenagers, and those fanboys who emulate them, you're out of luck.
Bring back RPGs of the 80's. Oblivion is a good start, but it had some killer flaws (I must admit it tried too hard to be non-linear). Neverwinter Nights is a even better one. NWN2 was a big step backwards.
You know what the best old-school RPG was last generation? Gladius. Especially with the swing meter turned off. Good old fashioned party-based RPG goodness.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not the same market! (Score:4, Insightful)
Planescape Torment
Baldur's Gate 1/2
Neverwinter Nights
Star Wars: KOTOR
Jade Empire
Now, Bioware is admittedly a Canadian company, but they're still "over here". That aside though, the above games were every bit, if not more story-driven and engrossing than any console RPG I've played, and there are some things that I like more about a western RPG story - namely that just culturally, some things that the Japanese can accept and have fun with, just seems out of place to many westerners (I made it half-way through Final Fantasy X-2 before I was getting nauseous at the "kiddy" factor).
That's not to say I don't enjoy a good console RPG either - I like story driven content. I'm just saying that there is some good stuff from this side of the ocean too.
Parent
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Where am I going to find that opportunity? Obviously not on the big screen!
The bottom line is that computers allow for a variety of different story telling opportunities. Story-telling, in all its linear, pre-composed glory, has existed for thousands of years. I, personally, as an artist, am a lot more comfortable with a distinct "author/audience" separation. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of "lack of author", it scares me a little... as a creative person. I want to hear what other people have to say, and be able to interpret that for myself... not the other way around.
I know I'm just one opinion, but I think there's room for both. And A LOT of people out there crave a story where they have the interactivity to simply be immersed in it, but not neccessarilly control it. I find this desire for complete control a bit eerie, to say the least. A certain amount of it may be healthy, and there is a place for open-ended story-telling, but I certainly don't think it should be required.
Parent
Re:Not the same market! (Score:4, Funny)
CVG is reporting on comments made by Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart .
with a name like that, I'd fucking beware by default.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That said, traditional RPGs have a huge advantage over any of the MMORPGs
Advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
Might be hard to do (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
It's something I feel everyone should exprience.
I Agree! (Score:5, Insightful)
Without those things it hardly felt like any kind of immersive story-telling experience at all.
Parent
RGP vs MMOG (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well... (Score:2)
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And both should watch out for games which are both (Score:4, Insightful)
One of these days someone is going to come up with a game that both supports MMOG play but also has a single player campaign running on a mini-server. This title will rule the RPG world until someone brings out one that lets you run your own server, and create a portal from the mmog to your server (the portal simply doesn't appear unless your server is up; it could even be flickery if you have a poor history of uptime.)
One thing that we have all learned from the mod communities in this world is that players want open-ended, customizable games.
I can't speak for anyone else, but many people have told me that they won't pay for the client for an MMOG because it could become useless in the future, and they're offended by having to pay for a client AND pay a monthly fee anyway - this is precisely where I stand on the issue.
Re:And both should watch out for games which are b (Score:2, Funny)
Re:And both should watch out for games which are b (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really that hard to handle, and there are several solutions for handling it.
One possible solution is to simply restrict the player from
Already been done (Score:3, Insightful)
Coming from OBSIDIAN!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's key for Obsidian to develop games that don't have 50 bugs around every corner. I started the first act of NWN2 5 times, and they all ended up with corrupted save files after crashing, before I gave up on it. For KotOR2, I lost both my main save and my back up save to some weird bug.
Maybe they should worry about ironing out their bugs before they worry about competing with MMOs.
Re:Coming from OBSIDIAN!? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
You mean, like, telling stories? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like books, before them.
I don't see any danger here to the RPG.
That said, it might be fun to read a book (play an RPG) with others some time, and if they made it possible in the game, that might be neat, if it worked out.
Perhaps you get cues, on what to say and act, but you do it in your own words, with language tips to the side, and briefings before-hand? (Like a computer-mediated LARP?) Could be neat.
Mod parent up... (Score:2)
Re:Mod parent up... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
He makes a good point (Score:3, Interesting)
One example I can think of would be Gothic 2 & Gothic 3. Gothic 2 gave players a real choice about how they would... role-play, being good, or bad, or neutral. Where as Gothic 3 felt like a single player MMO, runnig around killing things, only without the respawns.
Quick tips for Obsidian (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the answer would be obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oblivion - 3 million, Baldur's Gate 1&2 - 2 million each, and the various Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Games from Square - Around 3 million each
How are these games different from the most successful Fantasy MMO, WoW? Depth and immersiveness of combat comes immediately to mind. Also Story, all of these games have a much more cohesive story than WoW itself (whose story is mostly conveyed reading background information on the WoW website. To be honest, that really ought to be enough to build games around. Create a game with a solid combat system and a story, and you've got the basis for a solid single player RPG. The trick really, is not to be misled into thinking you can build a WoW-killer. You can't. Blizzard has the budget and the installed base to bury you. So don't even try.
not even close... (Score:2)
Didn't know there was one... (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted it was a WHILE back that I looked for (S)mallMORPG, but I didn't find anything so I eventually setup a MaNGOS server. Blizzard is missing out BIG TIME. If they were to release a version of WoW that was scaled for personal use, they would make a killing. I would have no problem paying $120.00+ US for something like that (PLUS a yearly fee for content updates). Obviously there are people out there that want / need the "massiveness" of the MMORPG, but there are others (like me) that just want to play the game. Granted I have kinda gotten into the aspect of developing the game (the database not the core), but at times it would be nice to just PLAY and know that things work, not have to hunt down why a particular quest is bugged.
For those that don't know MaNGOS is the Massive Network Game Object Server. It isn't being developed for any one client, it just HAPPENS to work with the World of Warcraft client. In addition to the MaNGOS core, you need a backend database that drives the world. There are several out there that are being actively developed, but I prefer SDB.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, an incompatible EULA [mangosproject.org] for a GPL-project? Yikes, and small chance it'll stop the onslaught of Vivendi lawyers. We'll see...
NWN as a model (Score:5, Interesting)
NWN and NWN2 are games designed with multiplayer in mind. The original spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of "persistent worlds", which were mini-MMOs. Some linked servers ended up supporting hundreds of simultaneous players, and individual popular servers handled 50-95 simultaneous users, often stopping only at the limit of the hardware and the engine (as an NWN PW developer, and experienced sysadmin, it seemed very much to me that the engine had some sort of O(n squared) cost associated with users; going from 1 to 35 would barely dent a server, but going 35 to 55 could bring the same server practically to its knees).
Imagine if WoW supported user mods. There could be an "official server" and any number of player servers. The people setting up a player server could allow a player joining there to import their character in from the official server (not the other way around, of course). The people on the player servers would start with a base world, but have tools to add, remove, and modify the content. Add in a scripting language and a way to distribute customized art assets (models, animations, etc), and you have something like Quake 3 w/autodownload, but applied to an RPG instead of an FPS.
Bioware began to hook into another possibility when they started offering their "digital distribution" modules for NWN. For some small amount ($4-$12 depending on the module), you got an add-on game experience for NWN; a sort of new official campaign to play through. Imagine if a game like NWN or NWN2 had an "NWN live" service you could subscribe to. You pay $8 a month or something, and it gives you access to some cooler online features, as well as content updates. New models, new portraits, new adventures, etc. Bioware seemed to indicate they were pleasantly surprised with the reception of DD modules for NWN1.
One of the things about NWN and its expansions was that each expansion featured a bunch of new things (new classes, support for prestige classes, new models, new spells, new voices, new vfx and sfx). These were featured in a new official campaign adventure - one you could play through - but they were also remixable into a lot of new user adventures, and also could be combined with custom content for more possibilities. And a nice toolset to tie it all together.
A game that was gorgeous and easy to use and fun like City of Heroes could have reached its true potential with a scripting language and a toolset and a way to use that end-user content, because hobby content creators would have come up with enough refreshing content to avoid the "gets dull" label CoH earned for its repetitive missions.
The real difference is money, not genre (Score:2)
The real difference that puts RPGs at such a disadvantage isn't playability or content - it's money. MMOGs are the gift that keeps on taking, and financiers are increasingly interested in funding a multi-bazillion dollar MMOG in hopes that five years down the road, they'll still be rak
Some things that MMOs can't match (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, in a single-player RPG, there are no griefing assholes out there to camp your corpse or talk smack about how you're a n00b or spam the chat. Some people are willing to put up with the grief or find ways to avoid it cuz they like a world filled with people, and that's why MMOs are so popular these days. But there are people who don't and need to get their RPG fix in a non-MMO form.
Personally, until there's a massive paradigm shift in the general attitude of MMO communities and people start playing nice with each other, I'll just stick to Star Wars: KotOR, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and the like for my RPG needs.
some differences (Score:3, Interesting)
You are Neo or Luke Skywalker and noone else can have that power.
Only you can save the world.
No MMO gives that today.
Even super heroes games like http://www.cityofheroes.com/ [cityofheroes.com] have so many heroes that you dont have the sensation of being so marvelous.
You spend your time harvesting missions, badges and now crafting.
Not very heroic !
MMO RPG (or so called) emphaze on the community experience.
You share stories with others,
you show your achievements to others,
you develop your character with others.
You oppose and win against others.
These "others" are people,
and this is important.
Even though oponents were bots with behaviour no different that humans,
knowning they are bots would render them not as interesting as humans.
After all I prefer to chat a girl than a bot and
I prefer to constantly win and humiliate another player rather than a mob.
OK, some would prefer chatting a bot...
Last comment, MMO RPG are no RPG.
I spent a tremendous amount of days playing table top RPG when I were young.
And the experiment is no comparison with computer RPG.
Compared, computer RPG are really flat and
MMO RPG are event flatter than solo RPG.
There is only basic heroism, limited sense of achievement and
no way to come with innovative solution that game author did not imagine.
The killer game will provide real freedom and content ,
the sense of being unique and
still experiencing with tons of other players.
Right now it's a matter of a few things. (Score:4, Interesting)
2) Continuity of Storyline. Look at Matrix Online. Everyone wants to be Neo, but nobody can. Look at SWG. Everyone wanted to be a Jedi. But nobody could be Luke Skywalker. Not true in an offline RPG. You can literally live the storyline of your favorite character.
3) User created content. Look at Morrowind for example. The game came with a construction set. You could build your own world. You were the god of that world you created. Now shift to WoW. You're a peon, and if you're lucky you can get 24 other people together to take down raid mobs. But you'll never be able to do it solo. You'll never BE that raid mob.
When the day comes that they give a player the chance to control a raid mob (with their current abilities and hitpoints) that's the day a raid wipes every time on that mob, forever. The AI on those mobs is particularly stupid. Tactically, if I were said mob, I would immediately kill all the healers, then the DPS. Which would leave the tank beating on me with his sword 'n board. To which I would let loose a huge laugh, do a
TLF
Re:Isn't this a no-brainer? (Score:4, Insightful)
(By the way, I hate that 'no-brainer' phrase. As if people don't have enough encouragement not to think, the phrase emphasizes that conclusions can be met with no thoughts. I doubt there are any questions that cannot have multiple answers and also require no thought to obtain.)
Parent
Re:Isn't this a no-brainer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never ending trips into UBRS, LBRS, MC, BL, Strat, Scholo, ZG, etc. does not equate to never-ending opportunities for character advancement and development.
Parent