Finite MMORPGs
While I certainly spend enough time playing on-line games, including team-based ones such as Battlefield 1942 and Unreal Tournament 2003’s version of RollerBall, I find massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as EverQuest massively boring. If the game companies want to woo me and my two friends (ok, my one friend, and even that’s being optimistic), they’ll have to do something different: Build an MMORPG that comes to an end when one side wins.
Imagine, if you will, an epic battle being fought by tribes or nations. Imagine that eventually — a few months, maybe a year — one of the sides will win. Imagine, perhaps, that the sides represent actual human factions: a USA vs. France death match set in a science fiction world with maces, phasers and rail guns as weapons and races such as American Blue Oxen and French Nouvelle Cuisine Artistes. Imagine the increasing excitement as the tide starts to shift.
Oh, there are details to work out. Are you assigned to a side by the game in order to keep them relatively balanced? Are you allowed to switch sides? Can you be a spy? When you die, how dead are you? But those are mere gameplay details, questions of balance, i.e., the really hard stuff. Get it right and we just might have ourselves a virtual Olympics.
Don’t forget the Terranova blog that studies virtual worlds as if they were sorta real.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
There are games sort of like this. Years ago I used to play a game called earth:2025 – basically you got your own nation and tried to make it the most powerful in a two or three month period. It was funning competing against thousands of other players. You could form alliances and stuff…but there was always this looming deadline…
have you tried dark age of camelot?
Well, I like MMGs well enough… But I agree that there’s a lot to be said for games that do come to a definite conclusion. From a business perspective, this is tricky, though; when a game ends, some proportion of your players would re-up for a new game, but you’d also lose a lot of your playerbase.
A Tale in the Desert (www.atitd.com) is intended to last one calendar year, at which time either Egypt will have built a great pyramid and “Pharaoh” will win in his struggle against the shadowy Stranger, or else Egypt fails and “loses.”
I was hoping that Planetside would go out on a limb and allow teams to actually WIN through conquest. as opposed to just the constant shifting of territory. Perhaps rewarding winning teams in some meaningful way.
DAoC isn’t any better– what would really be neat would be if one of the three realms could defeat through attrition the others by invading the homelands . Maybe death would be permanent or wotk like BF1942 Conquest map where All the control points can be held — i.e. enemies can no longer spawn. Imagine the deal s and diplomacy that might happen between realms. I might actually play DAoC again.
Different audience — I think a large enough portion of the players of MMOGs are not that competitive… in fact most people who play Everquest at least, like it in part because it doesn’t end, you can’t lose, and you don’t have to win by beating someone else. Or maybe that’s just me and my 2 friends :)
I agree. (The whole topic…) An actual competition would be great, but it’d suck people’s lives away. Instead of doing things that have meaning, they’d be stuck to the computer screen, and near the end of the entire game, it would become way too competitive, and people who don’t “log on” every day, or more than once a day would be shunned. It could get quite ugly…
In Shadowbane you could lose. You and all the friends you could muster could work for months, create a thriving metropolitan empire with major cities, towns, and small isolated villages, and have it all taken away in about a week when you decided to go to bed early in a vain attempt to erase the circles around your eyes… And then the survivors of your nation could get ground into dust over and over and never get a break until they quit and never logged in again.
Winning was a great rush, but losing was just about the worst experience one could have with a computer game.
But hey, its still running, so you can go there, pick a side, and lose all you want!
Having the ability to actually 100% lose in an MMORPG is perhaps the worse thing you could do for a game’s longevity and fun factor. Sure it sounds good on paper and sure it would be fun for the winner, but for the loser, it would probably be pretty earth shattering – mostly due to the amount of time invested in it.
But multiple rounds make it fun. Note: “Survivor” still gets good ratings after so many seasons.
Hey, have any of you guys heard of Lineage 2? When you reach level 20, instead of just fighting goblins or trolls, you can engae in gigantic all-player combats. Sometimethey have 2 or 3 hundred people on a team, easy. It really is a war. Check it out sometime.