LOTRO Dev Talks About Bringing MMOs To Consoles

Jeffrey Steefel, executive producer for Lord of the Rings: Online recently spoke to Eurogamer about the game's upcoming expansion and its future in the MMO market. One thing he mentions is the challenge of designing an MMO for consoles, which have a larger player base than PC games. He admits that UI development would be a huge issue, but also thinks MMOs could benefit from splitting tasks between various devices. "Long term, for me, the real exciting vision is ... thinking about a game, a franchise, as this centralised content. There's this thing called Lord of the Rings that sits on a bunch of servers ... and whether you're on your PC, your console, your mobile device, those are all just access points, and they're all good at different things. ... The console is great for fast action, immediate activities. Combat, raids, things like that could be a lot of fun sitting on your couch. And some things that are necessary but slightly rote and boring, like managing your inventory or setting up for a raid, or some elements of crafting — those are things that you can do instead of playing Bejeweled when you're sitting on the train or on a break or whatever it happens to be."

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

I'd be willing to guess that the reason Guild Wars doesn't make as much is because they don't have a grind. Grind satisfies that lucrative OCD-fueled core of the target audience by giving them something to channel their compulsions. The community can be heard to grumble about the grind; but day in and day out they're in there, grinding honor, faction, mats, DKP, and whatever else goes on in WoW these days. Sure, everyone says they hate it, but it shines and sparkles just so; and they can't look away.

If you don't populate the game with enough BS to keep the 24/7 players happy, they will leave. If you do, you're forced to balance the time investment requirement to that standard. Thus forcing casual players to invest more of their time to keep up with the Joneses.

But while structuring reward systems to require as much time to complete as possible is good business. Taking up every moment of your free time to get those rewards is still your choice.

Been done. Was shallow.

[Moraelin]

Yes I've played Phantasy Star Online, and nowadays its successor, Phantasy Star Universe. It did that. It also had about as much depth as a mud puddle. It was just a glorified button masher.

Managing all those abilities and possibilities and synergies between them, is half the fun of WoW. It's basically like a puzzle game. You have all these pieces, and your team mates have some more, and you have to see what cool things you can build out of them. In real time.

PSO had two lists of 3 buttons each. One normal block of 3 (the fourth button was for a substitute limit break) and a shifted one. Considering that two of those are your normal attacks, it leaves very little room for depth in your abilities. It's also a mere half a WoW action bar.

But let's say you use both shoulder buttons as shifts, and all 4 buttons. That's 12 different icons, or the equivalent of one WoW action bar.

It might be enough for an over-simplified straight-up damage class like rogue or maybe warrior. A mage is already getting squeezed in there. But it would make hybrids utterly impossible. You can't play, say, a druid where the whole _point_ is that you get the skills of 3-4 other classes (if weaker than the pure classes equivalents of those powers), with barely enough buttons for _one_ such class.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[MBGMorden]

Are you serious? MMORPG's can't "Save" like a traditional game can (in reality they "save" every instant you're playing the game, as essentially what happens, happens. There is no returning to a previous save), nor can they be paused. The reasoning is simple: you're not playing alone. You can't pause the entirety of the game world in WoW every time some kid needs to run off to dinner. The game would literally never UNpause because some new kid would be running off. You also can't expect it to do so even in instanced content. 24, or even just 4 people in the case of regular instances, have better things to do with their OWN time than to sit around waiting for some kid to go to dinner, take out the trash, finish his homework, etc.

The simple reality is that if you don't have sufficient control over your schedule to set aside a small block of uninterrupted time (naturally emergencies are exempted), then you really should either stick to single player games, or stick to non-interactive aspects of the MMORPG, in which case just as I mentioned - there is no requirement to save anyways.

You might say that "OMG you can't have a life if you do that", but it's actually quite common in many other activities. If you're out bowling, do you suddenly have to stop, take out the trash, and then return to the alley to continue? If you're at baseball practice, does your mom make you come home and eat dinner between pitches while the rest of the team waits? Such situations are common: when doing an event that requires that you be participating with a lot of other people, you don't interrupt it unless absolutely necessary (and you don't even get involved if you know you can't stay for the entirety of the event).

Console MMOs possible, is the market there though?

[iregisteredjustforth]

People need to remember that MMORPG's aren't the only MMO games out there. Sure they are the dominant archetype among mmo's, but successes have been made of others too, many of which are more suitable for consoles.

An MMOFPS like Planetside would suit console's perfectly in my opinion - easy enough to control using a standard console controller, and a good mix of action / twitch and persistent elements. Some console games are halfway there, they provide persistent elements in having ranks / xp for characters and allow weapons and skills etc to be selected accordingly ala COD4 or BF:BC.

The main difference is the lack of persistent elements affecting the environment of scenarios the players are playing. They are still playing standard multiplayer games but with added persistent elements on their characters. Part of me wonders why few people are bothering to try anying mmo-like on consoles, considering the potential money to be made. I can see no real technological reason full blown mmo's can't be done on consoles more often, so it makes me think developers simply think the market isn't there.

It could be that developers think most console gamers would be totally against paying monthly for the privelage to play a game. Big mmo's with high server and support costs maybe won't exist until people are more used to the idea of paying monthly for a game.

Someone will crack it at some point though, and make millions(billions) when they do.