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Games Entertainment

MMORPGs Matrix and Star Wars 225

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-i-play-as-trinity? dept.
Jedi2099 writes "Warner Bros., Monolith Productions and EON Entertainment are combining forces to create a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on The Matrix using Monolith's new LithTech Discovery System. " Personally I'm much more interested in the fact that the Star Wars Galaxy Beta that has started taking beta apps.
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MMORPGs Matrix and Star Wars More

MMORPGs Matrix and Star Wars

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  • Right now I would just be happy if Project-Entropia would give me a damn account.

  • What is the matrix?

    - Freed

    • Simple (Score:2, Funny)

      by Wrexs0ul ( 515885 )
      For 12.99/mo you will know the matrix.

      ---

      Got Web Hosting? RackNine [racknine.com]
    • Well,
      It's a club in Reading where a few people keep getting shot.
      It's a 2d vector array, usefull for 3d stuff like air flow, or lighting/shadows.

      It's a toss film that really missed the point, I won't tell you the point, just incase you missed it to and quite liked the film.

      Oh and a game by the looks of things
    • "The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

  • Can there be a market for all these MMOGs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Fenresulven ( 516459 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:48AM (#3573433)
    Somehow I have a feeling that a lot of them will crash and burn due to an insufficent market.
    • There can, there will. In time, subscription-based gaming will be the only thing in the market (why would I want to publish a game that can only make money once?)

      The question is, when will we move beyond the UO/EQ style of MMOG and start exploring other paradigms of massively multiplayer gaming? Why aren't there any MM strategy or simulation games? I'd love to play a simulation/strategy game like Civ, but set in the Fire Upon the Deep galaxy with 3000 of my best friends....
      • > There can, there will. In time, subscription-based gaming will be the only thing in the market (why would I want to publish a game that can only make money once?)

        Because there is a significant section of the market for whom on-line games hold little appeal. You won't get their money, and currently, they are the vast majority. Why would you turn down their money?
      • The reason could be the complexity of the games. The server can syncronize the location of a 3000 single entities on the map, or it can syncronize 3000 armies consisting of about 200 units(give or take), with each unit in the army having different orders from the rest of them. I've hit major lag with just 4 people playing AOE on a 100 Mb LAN.
      • Do you really want to play Civilization with 3000 other people? You'd be lucky to get one turn per week. Early in the game you'd spend a few months just waiting around for your first city to build a settler... :)

        A real time strategy game like Warcraft would be interesting though. Have a huge world with plenty of room for hundreds to play, have a great diplomacy system to forge alliances with other players, and a good AI to hold the fort while you're asleep in case someone attacks.
      • I'd love to see an MMOG based on Frontier: Elite 2. Anyone know of something like this? The closest thing I can think of could possibly be the first expansion pack for Star Wars Galaxies.
    • I'm sure that's what'll happen, but the appeal is just too great... Think about it, instead of getting your game on the shelves for a couple of months, you ensure a cash stream for a couple of years at least. That's every single subscriber you've got not only shelling out $40 - $60 for the game in the store (of which you only get a percentage), but also paying $10 - $15 to you *directly* every month.

      That's like getting somebody to buy a new game from you every four months, but with only a fraction of the money spent on development, distribution and marketing of what you would with a traditional game model.

      I'm sure that all these companies are fully prepared for the risk of a failure due to market saturation, but if you weigh the benefits against the dangers, I think you end up coming out with a pretty profitable proposition, as long as your product is decent.

      Besides, if all these games in the market drive up the overall quality of the genre, everybody wins. With so many companies fighting over the players, I'm hoping to see the end of the "we can always fix in in a patch" mentality that dominated the early days of MMORPGs.

  • ARG! Don't /. the SW:G beta!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by StupidKatz ( 467476 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:48AM (#3573434)
    ... damn. Too late. :( Guess I'll have to wait until December to play now. You people are EVIL! :)
  • I loved it, but can you imagine automatically going into it every time someone on a massively multiplayer service turned it on? ;-)

  • This isn't news... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 )
    Every great movie gets a game. 95% of those games are GIANT FLOPS.

    I'll try it once the reviews come out.

  • I have an idea for a mmorpg (Score:4, Funny)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:51AM (#3573455)
    howbout RealLife? You go outside and interact with other people. Great graphics, although it is rather difficult to advance in levels. Oh, and no starting over.

  • Aren't we already playing? (Score:5, Funny)

    by VertigoAce ( 257771 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:51AM (#3573457)
    Wasn't the matrix a MMORPG in the movie? The AI developed a system in which the humans would lead ordinary lives simulated inside a computer. So couldn't one skip the $50 and just go lead a normal life and get the same effect?
    • This brings to mind the (rather bad) movie called something like "The Thirteenth Floor", in which scientists who developed a portal to a 'virtual reality' eventually discovered that they were themselves 'virtual'. It's not exactly grand philosophy, but at the point at which these games become sufficiently immersive - and their NPCs sufficiently fleshed out (no pun intended), we may indeed start to question the nature of reality.

      Of course, the sollipsists amongst us are already there...
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • This brings to mind the (rather bad) movie called something like "The Thirteenth Floor", in which scientists who developed a portal to a 'virtual reality' eventually discovered that they were themselves 'virtual'.

        I remember reading once that Philip K Dick (Sp?) the author of Blade Runner, drove himself mad thinking about this kind of thing.

        Best not to think about it... ;-)

  • Also, of note... (Score:4, Informative)

    by nherc ( 530930 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:51AM (#3573458) Journal
    Besides the next generation of the current crop of MMORPG's like Asheron's Call 2 [msn.com] and EverQuest 2 [sony.com], Cyan has finally announced their intentions of doing a MMORPG with the MYST universe [avault.com].
    • Cyan has finally announced their intentions of doing a MMORPG with the MYST universe

      Excellent. So instead of being stuck on the same puzzle for hours and hours by yourself, you get to share the experience with hundreds of people from around the globe! Witness frustrated cursing in dozens of languages!

  • Have you ever played a MMORPG so real, that you wondered if this game is reality or not?."

    And right about then your shit would be fucked up.

  • And, when server loads get too great.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by kafka93 ( 243640 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:52AM (#3573466)
    .. new sign-ups get to play as "batteries"..
    • Yes, that is one EULA you'll want to read _thoroughly_ before clicking "Accept". Could this be how the Matrix began?
    • That's hilarious.

      I can just see tons of messages scrolling across:

      Newbie(Battery Farm): Will someone pleaze come rescue me?

    • Distributed MMORPG (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kaladorn ( 514293 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:15PM (#3573661) Homepage Journal
      The poster was being funny, but the idea is interesting. Distribute some of your processing load to unused cycles on user's systems. Not all MMORPGs require all the horsepower a system can provide. It might be a neat feat and it would mean that in some cases, adding users might be a significantly lower drain. This might help with a few of the problems of scalability for MMORPGs. Imagine that you could also earn account hours or credits in game for leaving your PC hooked up when you aren't there if you have a good BW connection so the server can offload some processing onto your machine. Probably a lot of issues involved, but it might offer some interesting lines of investigation.
      • Hacking, cracking and general bug exploiting are already nightmarish in these games. I don't think offloading server functions to client machines would be a good idea...
        • Well, yes, if you offloaded anything relevant to that character. If you offload background processing for some NPCs on the other side of the game world, or the same for PCs on the other side of the game world, the risks are lower. And anytime I found a cracker playing around, I'd can his user ID and he'd be SOL for world access until he paid for a new account.

          • Re:Distributed MMORPG (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Kingfox ( 149377 )
            Seriously, the other less-polite reply to your comment is right. It's one thing to just go around canning suspicious users on web games [neopets.com] or M*s [vv.com]... it's quite a different story when the enduser is a paying customer.
            • Not really. You have ToS. There *is* a point to such documents. Some may feel "I paid my money, I can mount whatever attack on your system integrity I want" or "I have a good given right to reverse engineer" or "I live to hack". That's too bad, so sad, goodbye.

              Any MMORPG that is to be a workable on-going community has to make at least an effort (and no system is fool proof nor any idiot proof) to deal with malicious vandals, script kiddies, cheaters, and the mythic black-hat e-commerce hacker.

              If you don't deal with the more common of these threats, you end up with an inviable community. I think we've seen several examples in the last few years have we not?

              If you take an account with a company, the company agrees to provide a service (which you agree to use in the prescribed manner) for a fee. If you start taking a swing at the data integrity, start doing DoS or engange in other probing and general hijinx, if they are satisified that it is you, they can refund you the balance of any money and evict you. You have no God-given right to be on their system and in the end this defends the community.

              I agree there are risks in such policies (false positives). However, there is a very clear risk in not mounting an active defense. No protocol can be entirely secure (witness N varieties of bot and other hacks). But anyone found rapidly advancing or whose character mysteriously jumps stats/etc (this can be tracked with some data mining) becomes a good candidate for scrutiny.

              I can't and won't go into proprietary matters related to how this is implemented nor will I suggest any system is foolproof, but the next few generations of MMORPGs will continue to offer better and more complete security and tighter communities, and in the long run, distributed processing of some form (dunno what it will look like - if I did, I'd invest accordingly and make a mint!) will probably appear on the scene in most worlds... it is one of the only sensible scaling ideas (given a lot of gamers have zippy PCs at home just waiting to help out!).

              Heck, you don't have to believe me. I'll let developments vindicate me... ;)

              This opinion is worth what you paid for it.... every cent...
      • The problem with that is security. You simply can't trust the client or anything on the client's machine.

        One way to get around this is periodic auditing and having clients with low-ping to one another hosting each other's game and AI. Still its risky and the overhead to the protocol can outway the advantages.
        • You can certainly offload a fair amount of background processing, and in big enough world clusters, you can ensure the systems getting funneled data don't get stuff anywhere near them. Also, you can probably arrange redundant operations and do some comparisons on results. If they don't tally, you don't use them.

          Anyone who thinks this type of thing is impossible is probably wrong. The question is only if it is possible to do know and worthwhile to explore.
      • This idea is, in fact, being pursued. A company in Pasadena (CA) called HorizonGOT [horizongot.com] is developing exactly such a solution. A friend of mine is their CTO, and I can assure you that they're not smoke and mirrors--they are working on getting this tech adopted in some next generation MMOs (ie, ones that are starting development cycles soon). They were actually supposed to be doing a technology demo at E3, although I haven't heard how it went.
        Basically, though, these guys are much brighter than say your typical DRM inventors. They understand VM attacks, debugger attacks, network spoofs etc etc, and have clever math and encryption to fight it. This has been developed by a team of bright mathemeticians, coders, and security guys over the last 2 years or so, and I'm pretty convinced (for what it's worth) that it'll take a serious black hat effort to defeat their system. But just like anything, it'll be a game of cat and mouse; can they fix holes as fast as the black hats find them? I wish them the best of luck.

      • Re:Distributed MMORPG (Score:2, Interesting)

        by kiniry ( 46244 )
        That's one of the key principles of DALi (Distributed Artificial Life).

        Secure distributed simulation is the only future possible for MMORPGs, especially if they are to become truely "massive". The current DALi architecture scales to millions of interacting individuals, far beyond anything else commercially available.

        See http://www.dalilab.com/ [dalilab.com] and http://www.daliworld.net/ [daliworld.net] for more information.

  • I always wonder if these licensed games tend to hurt the worlds they're designed to cover. I enjoyed the matrix and idea of Neo as "the one" because of the limitless freedom and ability he'd found by simply freeing himself of doubt.

    Then again you have to wonder if in the movie what we didn't see was the user's HUD or in-game chat: "Trinity, I'm down to 12% health, find me a med-pak!", or better yet: "he's using a wall hack!"

    ---

    Got Web Hosting? RackNine [racknine.com]

  • Addiction... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rgraham ( 199829 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:54AM (#3573491) Homepage
    Great, another game to get hung up on. Time has an article [time.com] on the addiction angle of all these MMORPGs.
    • Yeah, some people get horribly addicted..remember the guy A HREF="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/02/ 1558246 I think he has a level 50 character. I'm amazed he has the time for that.
      • Oops, went to preview and deleted it somehow. Remember the guy who committed suicide over Everquest and his mother tried to sue? [jsonline.com]

        On a sorta related note, did anyone else catch ESPN's Outside the Line feature on athletes and videogames? Curt Schilling mentioned he plays Everquest; he has a level 50 something character. I can't believe he has enough time to play that much EQ.

  • Ironic? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Copperhead ( 187748 ) <.talbrech. .at. .speakeasy.net.> on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:55AM (#3573501) Homepage
    Does anyone else find this a bit ironic? Isn't the movie about a small group of people trying to unplug humanity from a virtual world? So, now Warner Bros. is creating a virtual world for fans of the movie to plug themselves into.

    Weird.

    • Try explaining it to your friends (Score:5, Funny)

      by mblase ( 200735 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:01PM (#3573553)
      "What are you playing there?"

      A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.

      "What's the game about?"

      A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.

      "..."

  • I can see it now... (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheNecromancer ( 179644 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:56AM (#3573506)
    Call me fickle, but this MMORPG is just tooo similar to the first Matrix in the movie.

    Next, you'll be telling me that Skynet has automated all our stealth bombers, and they have had perfect flight records...

  • Oh the possibilities... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deosyne ( 92713 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @11:56AM (#3573512)
    Now I can finally follow Trinity around staring at her ass without getting the crap kicked out of me by her bodyguards every couple of days. Or play an agent and tap the hell out of the woman in red, since, you know, it wouldn't be weird having sex with a program or anything, since I'd be playing as a computer program myself. Of course I'd be a human playing a program having sex with a progr... god, I need to get laid.

  • MMORPG evolution (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (MMORPG) massively multiplayer online role-playing game
    gets bigger
    (BMORPG) Beowulf multiplayer online role-playing game
    players are now called drones. remove player/playing from acronym
    (BORG) Beowulf online role game
    people forget where the acronym got from, add a descriptor
    (BORG-collective)
  • Might want to link to the application [sony.com] rather than the error page..

    This will be the first online RPG I'll be trying since Ultima Online.. I hope it will be cool, although you can't be a stormtrooper :(

  • What th--? (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:02PM (#3573559) Homepage
    from the can-i-play-as-trinity? dept.

    I think the better question would be: Can I play *with* Trinity? ;)
  • then they began toying with our heads with those darn "Is it Live? or is it Memorex?" commercials knowing we couldn't tell.
  • Wouldn't that be like real life? I mean, that's what the Matrix was right? Eating soup, going to work, grocery shopping...

    But seriously, if you can get your friends to shoot at you and then do the whole slo-mo dodge bullet action that would be pretty cool. (There was a mod for UT that slowed down the game and did trails on the bullets and stuff)

    And from what I've heard of the Star Wars MMORPG, with being able to make your own light sabers(!!!!!) it sounds pretty kick ass

  • Screenshots (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by nob ( 244898 )
    Here's some screenshots [google.com].
  • Maybe they should combine the two... *Wavey lines as I dissapear to my fantasy world* "I know the force!" "Show Me" *Crack hisssss* *Morpheus waves his hand* "Stop trying to hit me and hit me!" Yoda : "Fighting, Morpheus and Neo are" Let's see if Agent Smith can dodge my force lighting.
  • getting excited about a sci fi role playing game. Maybe just because I am into computers all the futuristic hacking games etc seemed very silly. I am an avid fantasy rpg'r so I am sure it is my limitation. I'd just rather fight wizards and elves and dragons than aliens and robots.

  • Just talk to Bungie (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:06PM (#3573590)
    Oni's [bungie.org] gameplay was remarkably similar to "The Matrix", although its visuals obviously were not. They could save themselves a lot of time by just licensing the game engine, keep the buildings, changing all the characters, and making it massively multiplayer.

    (Yeah, I know Oni's fighting engine was rather simplified compared to, say, Street Fighter II, but when you're trying to go for widespread appeal, that's actually a Good Thing. Plus, Oni allowed you to pick up new moves as you advanced in levels, a feature which lends itself nicely to an MMORPG.)

  • Why I quit MMORPGs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:08PM (#3573606) Journal
    Three reasons:
    • You can't win. There are no real goals.
    • You can't pause. My GF hated when I used to play DAoC and she'd come into the den to say hi and I would tell her to wait until I could log out.
    • They require an obscene amount of time investment.
    Yup, that's why I keep my addiction to games I can win in a month or so and pause.

    Small scale multiplayer RPGs are fun, but MMORPGS just seem to eat time. Even when I played a lot of Quake 2, I could drop out any time and not feel guilty about letting my character lvl fall behind my friends' levels.

  • Time for Activision to wake up! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joe U ( 443617 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:08PM (#3573609) Homepage Journal
    And use Zork as a template for an online game.

  • Doesn't sound like much fun to me.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dbretton ( 242493 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:11PM (#3573628) Homepage
    What's so fun about online matrices?

    ubergeek1: "Ooh boy, I wanna be 1,3!!"
    uberggek2: "Oh yeah, well I'm 5,5"

    >
    >miscellaneous fighting noises...
    >

    ubergeek1: "Ha! I got normalized on yo' ass! Whatchya gonna do now, that I thrashed your second row??"

    ubergeek2: "Little did you know that I have the cloak of Cholesky! Prepare to die!"

  • OK let's see.. the matrix bested phantom menace for the visual effects oscar.. TPM was widely disappointing while the matrix was that year's big surprise... lucas gets constantly labeled as a media whore here on slashdot.. and yet taco still looks forward to a star wars-related mmorpg?

    guess we can only hope it doesn't turn out to be another star wars computer game disappointment :)
    • > TPM was widely disappointing while the matrix was that year's big surprise...

      I wonder if that's why it made SO MUCH money than the Matrix, specially after so many bad reviews and "bad word of mouth".

      And oh yeah, it had much better special effects, imagine, a virtual world that looks ... just like ours. Talk about photorealism !!!
      • More theaters means more money. Forcing theaters to play the movie for more time means more money. Lucas is the Bill Gates of movies when it comes to dealing with theaters. I'm surprised he hasn't demanded that they charge more for his movies while they're at it. God knows the masses will pay.

        Hope I didn't give him any ideas there. Naturally I assume he reads slashdot and slashdot comments.
        • > More theaters means more money. Forcing theaters to play the movie for more time means more money. Lucas is the Bill Gates of movies when it comes to dealing with theaters.

          You must be talking about the Spider-Man movie, which plays in more theaters, and which Sony paid more money to hold those screens for the Memorial Holiday. But then again, it's cool to bash Lucas, and not Sony when convienient.
  • Reading about all those MMORPGs reminds me of older times...
    Can ya recall when "Interactive Movie" games were "in"?
    *shudder* Every single game company on earth seemingly tried to create a game that contained 50%+ pre-rendered scenes - most of them were simply horrible.
    Same goes for the current "look ma, 3D graphics" trend...
    Call me old-school, but I dont think that 3D graphics should be the core element of some games - Dune 3 comes to mind *brr*
    Well, my point is - MMORPG will come and will go - I dont think that MMORPG is bad, there will be a couple of good games, along with a big bunch of bad ones, I just think we really should sit this one out, not go "wow, its MMORPG" crazy :)
  • Great, all we need is another online game to suck the life from my friends (who by the way, already spend 15 hours a day playing Everquest). Somebody unplug me, I am tired of living in this matrix (I mean world)!
  • What do you suppose the AF is for that tight leather outfit the chick wears?

    and instead of buying cloaks you buy 3/4 length dust coats

  • how it all starts (Score:2, Insightful)

    by xeno ( 2667 )
    I just had a perverse thought: What if this is how the Matrix starts? I mean, what better way to train a responsive and comprehensive environmental control system to become intelligent than to insert the activity of thousands of sentient entities into that environment? The words "self-fulfilling prophecy" come to mind.

    Well, the words "improbable," "obtuse," and "gotta get out more" come to mind as well, but it's a curious thought.

    -Jon
  • does it support neural uplinks?
  • ..the realism!
    if you crack the game, they send agents after you!
  • Personally I'm much more interested in the fact that the Star Wars Galaxy Beta that has started taking beta apps.

    Taco is eagerly awaiting his chance to play his long-imagined gungan character j4r-j4r during the beta.

  • Looking forward to crushing agents.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by bsdparasite ( 569618 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:46PM (#3573874)
    I would much rather play Morpheus than Neo. It would be quite something to unplug people and tell them this is not a joke and watch them throw up!

  • Same flaw SWG has..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheLostOne ( 445114 ) on Thursday May 23, 2002 @12:50PM (#3573899)
    Well.. personally I have played my share of EQ in my day. In case you haven't it's pretty clearly a ripoff of D&D straight across (which is all Tolken anyway.. but eh.. ). So maybe all the races have been seen before, maybe no new concepts. But it IS a new world.. it is their world (you're in our world now is their slogan).. this allows them to write history, future, plot lines..

    It allows you to be the main character in your own little world.. silly perhaps.. but

    If you put it all in a preexisting storyline, with a preexisting world with already established heros, already planned and acted major events...well what the hell is the point anymore?

    Why bother with a Matrix mmorpg? Afterall you aren't the one... the one will fix everything... you are just a spudly.. you don't matter. No matter what you do, live or die, quest or destory evil bad guys... you have no effect.

    At least with EQ (which is quite a ripoff at times) they could make their own races... if they ripped off a race they could give it a new history.. they could make their own evil badguys.. name their own dragons.

    Can they REALLY do that in SWG and Matrix? The world is already defined.. races and classes already exist, already have a history.

    In other words.. EQ while being a ripoff allowed room for creativity, for discovery. SWG and Matrix are just yet another marketing device.. 'ooh ooh lets make a cool racing game.. then put it on Tatooine and call it SW Epi1 Pod Racer!!'

    It is one thing being yet another adventurer in a world with no pre defined heros or plotlines... but why pay the money just to play a cameo in a movie?

  • in light (Score:2, Interesting)

    by waspleg ( 316038 )
    of the fact that there have been like 8000 MMORPG announcements along with the xbox service and all the mmorpg games it is supposedly going to offer

    i just have one question, where do the think all the people who are supposed to subscribe are going to come from

    i'm going to asssume that most people, if they play at all, are certainly not going to pay subscriptions for 3 or 4 different MMORPGS at the same time, did this market just balloon into a 60 billion dollar a year industry when i wasn't looking? last time i checked the 2 biggest markets for these kind of games seem to be highly saturated (lets' face it, the main audience for MMORPGs is us, adn we are/have be en facing a huge recession, who the fuck wants to pay another $10 a month per game for 4 or 5 games on top of their car/apartment etc w/o a job
    the other market is the teenager/young adult gaming market, which is thoroughly saturated with tech gadetry and games from all sides

    it doesn't seem like all the MMORPGS can survive so why do they keep announcing new ones
    • Maybe this would be where the Xbox pricing scheme would come in handy? Ten bucks a month for all the online games you can eat, regardless of whether they're shooters, RTSes, MMORPGs, or whatever.

  • Hacking (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Grax ( 529699 )
    Is hacking the game to give yourself super-powers (able to jump tall buildings in a single bound, bullet resistance) considered brilliant? or illegal?

  • There's an inherent problem with MM online games. What do you do when too many people congregate in one place? How do you even know if they are all in the same place when there's thousands of people online at the same time? How do you determine this efficiently? The solution to this is difficult but was discovered by me and some others in the mid 90s. This solution was ignored by every game company we tried to get to adopt it (our pricing was pretty reasonable, but game developers have an ego thing about anything they didn't invent themselves) INCLUDING Monolith productions. Eventually the company was sold to Sony, which means that only SONY has the ability to publish a MMORPG that doewsnt' suffer from the horrible performance problems that Ultima Online, Everquest, et al suffer from.

    (To my knolwedge no other solution has been discovered, and ours was patented.)

    So, what al ot of people do is make it so that there can never be too many people in one place by spreading them over lots of servers, or putting in game limits. In othere words, what you end up with is a 32 player game-- not a MM game!

    So, given what I know about this situation (including the multiplayer architects at monolith) this game is going to suck ass.

    Which is too bad, because its a great concept and MMORPGs could be a huge gaming genre... but egos, bad marketing notions and a hollywood style of production ("just rip off last years hit and it should work" attitude) have given us a dark ages for video games.

    We had the solution before Ultima Online was close to release-- we deomod tens of thousands of players in the same area with NPC objects moving around independantly-- it was pretty amazing, like some of the more massive battle scenes from Return of the Jedi and epidsode 1.

    But the gaming industry wasn't willing to use a technology they didn't invent, and so one of them got a monopoly on it. This is not about patents being bad-- this was a worthy breathrough that was made. This is about bad choices leading to bad games.

    So, if your MMORPG experience sucks, blame the game developers. Their arrogance killed the solution, and they continue to develop poor solutions thinking you'll buy, as one gaming industry exec said "Shit in a box, if we market it right".

    • Hopefully Sony will buy out NCSoft before City of Heroes [cityofheroes.com] comes out. Screw Star Wars, being PKed by half a jillion identical Dark Jedi named Darth HaX0r0048 doesn't appeal to me.

      A large order of Justice with a scoop of Truth and The American Way on top, now, THAT'S a game.

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