The Future of MMOs

IGN has some interesting coverage of a panel at GDC 2008 that featured some of the top names in the MMO world who got together to discuss the future of the genre. "On hand were Jack Emmert of Cryptic Studios, Mark Miller of NCSoft, Min Kim of Nexon and Rob Pardo of Blizzard Entertainment. MMO newbie Ray Muzyka was also on hand to share his thoughts as BioWare moves into the MMO arena. [...] The conversation got a lot more heated when the subject of micro-transactions was introduced. This is a popular revenue model in Asia, where the games themselves are free to play but charge a premium for a variety of premium extras, from vanity items to additional content or abilities. It's a model that's working well for Korean developer Nexon but hasn't been adopted by many American developers."

Re:Micro-complaints.

[moderatorrater]

Yes, but there's a difference. The value of decorating your horse on a single-player only game is different than the value of decorating your horse in a multi-player-only game. Oblivion then came out with more mods that added value to the game and the community's received them much better.

Re:Emmert? Oh, no.

[Danse]

For 100 point's I could pretty much make an unstoppable character. Fortunatly, I put role playing first.

But others will not put role playing first. They will create characters that exploit whatever defects there are in the system (and with such a complex system, there will be many), and even worse, some will create characters to use for nothing but griefing, and probably be wildly successful at it.

APB

[*weasel]

Sounds more like he was describing APB, a new MMO being developed by Realtime Worlds.

Re:I Hope MMOs All Die

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Agreed, just whatever you do, get yourself into a 0.0 corp ASAP and never go into empire again.

Re:Fantasy MMORPGs are getting stale

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Eve online if your not wanting the grind, I used to play that one quite frequently and you don't have a grind to level instead it's based upon time invested in a particular skill,(which of course there are skills to speed up). There are also areas in the game that are completely(within reason) player run, you can setup starbases and fight over them, blow up other peoples stuff etc.

Re:Emmert? Oh, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they bought up the rights to use the Champions name, but the system is not HERO. At some point the game was intended to be a marvel license.

Freeform point buy systems barely work for tabletop games (a single munchkin *will* ruin your game if you let them), I seriously doubt anyone with a real development budget would try to make that work for an MMO audience.