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Games Entertainment

Where Do You See MMO Games In Ten Years? 30

Posted by simoniker from the crystal-lag-ball dept.
An anonymous reader points out this Stratics Central story, which talks to gaming executives about where they see the massively multiplayer genre in ten years time. Respondents, including representatives from Codemasters' Dragon Empires and Majorem's Ballerium, talk about genre changes, different spectator experiences, and, well, virtual knights running around Santa Monica.
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Where Do You See MMO Games In Ten Years? More

Where Do You See MMO Games In Ten Years?

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  • Fewer McJob Games (Score:5, Funny)

    by frenchgates ( 531731 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @05:23PM (#5913880)
    Perhaps in ten years they will have figured out how to make playing MMORPGs less like working at a really boring job interspersed with waiting in huge lines.
  • on my computer monitor.

    Not this one though, on a better monitor. Perhaps in 3D.

    But I don't see any of those games being Duke Nukem Forever.

  • Until I got a chance to read past the headline, I thought we were discussing the games insurance companies play to prevent paying claims. Oops.

    Back on-topic: I think MMO games will only continue to get larger, as more people get the network capability installed in their homes to make it practical. While the Sims online didn't do as well as some expected it to, Evercrack is still addictive (from what I've heard anyway.)

    Add to wider adoption of broadband, reduced costs for computers and game consoles and it

  • Swami sez... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Captain Beefheart ( 628365 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @05:36PM (#5914033)
    I suspect photo- and audiorealism will bring a level of immersion that will make for a very thin line between reality and gaming. Movies, television and the Internet will fall by the wayside in terms of entertainment appeal. Fiber optics will probably allow for almost instant transfer of relatively huge chunks of data. Compact discs will become as quaint as vinyl as everything gravitates towards solid state storage and 'Net based game streaming a la Valve's Steam project.

    I suspect gaming will also be eventually offloaded onto consoles, assuming the tech gap continues to close and prices remain rock-bottom cheap.

    Moving onto MMOGs proper, you will probably see the market dominated by three or four "games," akin to the dawn of television with NBC, ABC and CBS. Mergers galore, as only huge corporations would be able to deliver complex, stable and immersive games within remotely reasonable time frames. I suspect new terminology will arise to describe MMOGs, although I won't venture into any guesses that will likely look hokey even five years from now. Language and dialect move too rapidly for that anyway. "Neophyte" becomes "nub," "yay" becomes "w00t," etc.

    Monthly fees will become steep as MMOGs become a habit occupying hours every day as television and Web surfing do now. The breadth and depth of available game elements will be as complex and configurable as a cable channel lineup.

    All pure speculation, though.
    • Nub is slang for newb is slang for newbie is British slang for new boy.

      Not neophyte.

    • Re:Swami sez... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @07:22PM (#5914869) Journal
      Where have you been? Most MMORPG players would rather go for a hunt then out for dinner NOW... 10yrs from now we will have MMORPG anonymous meetings for them. I don't know anyone who spends as much time browsing as a MMORPG player does on their game.

      They build their computers centering them around how their game functions on it. They spend between 12 and 16hrs a day on the game, sometimes doing nothing but getting up and logging on, logging off before bed, catching meals and bathroom breaks when it won't disrupt the group.

    • Re:Swami sez... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lightwarrior ( 73124 )
      "I suspect gaming will also be eventually offloaded onto consoles, assuming the tech gap continues to close and prices remain rock-bottom cheap."

      Unless DRM cripples computers, I doubt that this will ever happen. Simply put, consoles do not have the expansiveness of functionality that computers do.

      First of all, console controllers absolutely suck for many game types. You lose a huge portion of control - precision, accuracy, turn rate - when switching from mouse/trackball to stick. I've found games like
      • Oh, I agree they are very underwhelming at the moment. However, compare GLQuake to what consoles had to offer then, and then compare DOA Extreme Volleyball to what's available on the PC now. The gap is only resolution, flexibility and input variance. It used to a world of aural and visual quality. Remember that the Xbox also has 5.1 digital surround sound. Consoles will eventually get their keyboard and mice combos as well. And HDTV capabilities combined with cheaper and cheaper television tech will narrow
  • Imagine how many soj I'll have amassed by then!

  • User driven, changable worlds (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @06:19PM (#5914400) Journal
    Already, newer MMORPGs are showing that dynamic worlds will probably become the norm. I'll use Shadowbane as the example. Out of the box, players log in, and start playing a normal seeming MMORPG. Once a player advances enough, they can leave "newbie" island and enter a user created world. The guilds of the world create the majority of the cities, and guild warfare ensures the map will change over time. Games like Star Wars Planet, err, I mean Galaxies, will eventually add such features.

    Other things I see games doing is allowing more people to interact. Something Shadowbane had planned on was interconnecting all the servers, allowing any player to travel and meet another player. This didn't ship, but should be in by the summer.

    Beyond that, I hope to see some other generes go MMO. We have RPGs, and hints of FPS with Planetside, but I would love to see an MMO RTS. Shadowbane has a few RTS elements, but 10six was the only true RTS type game I can thing of in the MMO space. I also see MMO becoming the next hype item for game makers, much like 3D was. So many early 3D games did 3D just because they could, and not because they should.
  • I'm hoping that there will be a shift between MMO games that benefit from being MM (FPS war games where it's fun to have hordes of opponents and allies battling it out at once) and those that are weakened by it (most MMORPG's where you really have very little effect on the world around you).I'm still hoping to see a Dream Park type experience where you can role-play in a smaller, more controlled environment drawing from a large pool of participants. Ideally being able to observe games during the course of p
    • It's not massive without lots of players. NWN for instance is NOT a MMORPG. It's not Massively multiplayer anymore than pen and paper d&d is. Most of the MMORPG's now have warfare such as you mentioned only appropriate to their theme. For instance dark ages of camelot has 3 realms per server and the three realms battle it out for control of forts.
      • Agreed on NWN. I was thinking more about how it has been built up with sites like neverwinter connections, giving you a fairly large player pool to draw from.But isn't that the point?MMORPGs tend to not be about role-playing as much as the level-treadmill. I haven't played DAoC but what you are describing sounds more like a MMO war game using a fantasy/medieval theme.
        • It's actually a level treadmill up to a certain point and then you are allowed to enter the practice rvr, then the real rvr at higher levels yet.

          There are guilds and alliances, there are role play servers and such.. there is a social scene to it as well. It's as RPG as any of them are with war rpg added on... one world on one server I know actually has a player formed military hierachy, with generals and such directing battles and planning strategic attacks and long term battle strategy.

          But I've yet to s
    • Maybe a MMORPG where instead of one huge sprawling world filled with legions of players you have many smaller pocket worlds with coherent plotlines/games going at once
      ------
      This has been one thing about Shadowbane that has also impressed me. Wolfpack hired several people to play "Featured characters". These people work with the person who created the lore, and go in game to push the story foreward. Guilds who work with the lore are rewarded by being included in these stories. Right now, a hearld has an
  • Funnily enough, I just finished my report on my MMRTS game.

    http://130.88.226.154/project_report.sxw

    and

    http://130.88.226.154/freecraft/screenshot/
    (be gentle with the screenshots :)
  • I would hope that it would go in the direction of Neal Stephenson's concept of the "Metaverse" from his book Snow Crash. I would not be suprised to see something like that (immersive, with the capability to be as realistic as the coder makes it) and would not be suprised in the least to find the same divisions that spring up today in online "content"...some people are content with the front page, dreamweaver, and WYSIWYG edited pages, that have 50Bn extra lines of code, and there are hackers, who would have
    • precisely what extra lines of code does dreamweaver add?

      I could be wrong, but I don't recall seeing much, if any extraneous code in pages done with dreamweaver. I donno, maybe you like playing with layouts for a couple hours trying to get it to look exactly like you want it to, but I would much rather use a WYSIWYG and get it over with.
      • any time you don't edit the code yourself, extraneous code is added. it may be less so in dreamweaver, than in frontpage, in fact I don't doubt that it would be less. I was mostly getting at the fact that there are WYSIWYG people, and emacs/vi/notepad/metapad people. this division has existed since WYSIWYG was invented, and shall from now on. personally I like to hand code, but I think that it's just a preference. neither is inherently better or worse.

  • Removing the Veil (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Inevitably, the interface challenges that we are struggling with now using keyboards, mice, monitors, and other physical constructs will be overcome. Specifically, once we can place an image directly onto the eye (likely in 10 years) or into the brain (not so likely in 10 years), many of the challenges current game developers face in getting people online will vanish.

    What will emerge in its place is a kind of reality flipping mode of entertainment. Once people can carry a display with them, and flip ove

  • One: the sheer amount of them causes the genre to kill itself off

    Two: several winners will emerge and the rest will die slow deaths

    or Three: the genre will continously reinvent itself and only those companies with the bankroll to come out with a new game every year or two will even bother with the concept anymore.
  • I'd really like to see an MMORPG similar to what was featured in .hack//sign.
  • "Massively Multiplayer" is a bit of a misnomer, in my opinion. NO game today actually allows you to participate with other players en masse. At best, you might interact with dozens of other players at once, but in the current crop of "massive" online games all that means is a big lag fest. You get that many players together and one or both of the following happen: Your 3D card chokes on all the polys and your framerate drops; or your bandwidth can't handle simultaneous updates from all the other players
  • Ignoring the whole technology advance thing, I see two schools of players right now: the power gamer and the role player. I have rarely seen anyone balance the two well. Having both co-exist in the same on-line game is difficult and one ruins it for the other (usually the role player loses out). Worlds such as detailed in Snow Crash are obviously a derivation of a role play world but is it the future? I don't think so. While I wish the role-player environment would win, todays kiddies want to slay othe
  • None of the interviewees mentioned sex. Odd.
  • Mind you, I still have this delusion of seeing a MMO Nethack.

    You hit Groo the barbarian! --more--
    Tim the wizard casts slow monster on you! --more--
    Groo whispers to you in private, "DIE DIE DIE" --more--
    Groo the barbarian hits! --more--
    Joan the archeologist yanks your Vorpal Blade off your hands with her whip! --more--
    You are caught in Tim the wizard's fireball! --more--
    You die...

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