So the new Star Wars MMO news is pouring in now, and I thought I’d have a little look at what’s known about it so far, and post some thoughts.
The thing that Bioware are most keen to emphasise is that this will be an MM that tells a story. They’re aiming to make this a game in which their classic RPG-creating skills will come to the fore, allowing MMO players to have a solo adventure of the highest standard. This is commendable, I suppose, at least if you set it against the backdrop of World Of Warcraft and the other big, quest-based MMOs. If The Old Republic is able to tell a lengthy, on-going story that encompasses our entire game life, rather than a series of multi-level bursts of questing narrative, then Bioware could be on to something.
What’s perhaps most intriguing about this focus on story is the announcement that players will have “companion characters” accompany them through the game. These are definitely not pets, but sidekicks or party-members, as seen on other full-blown single-player RPGs. Creative designer James Ohlen told Shacknews: “Companion characters–we want them to be more than pets, we want them to be virtual friends. We want you to interact with them and become friends with them. You’re gonna be able to customize your companion character in different ways. Your companion characters are going to be levelling up and getting different equipment.”
I have to admit that this intrigues me. I’ve long argued that NPCs will undergo a slow revolution in games, the point where they essentially become artificial people. Videogames are the one industry driving the commercial need for artificial life, and I suspect that it’s in projects like this that we’ll see advancements made. We’re already seeing signs of the artificial person in Turing Test-beating chatbots, and plot-driving emotive central characters like Alyx in the Half-Life games, but there’a hell of a lot more to come. When these elements all converge on a demand for believable not-people, then we’ll start to see players rating games in similar ways the way they rate friendships and interactions with other people. Of course I don’t believe that The Old Republic’s companion characters will manage more than another foundational fragment of this kind of future, but if they are a success then they will only inspire more work on NPCs in multiplayer games, and nudge us towards more sophisticated artificial people over time. If nothing else, I hope Bioware deck out The Old Republic world with believable, coherent NPCs, rather than the static quest dispensers we put up with elsewhere…
So we can safely assume that these NPCs will be tied into the story which, we are assured, can be played through solo. What many players will be intrigued to hear, however, is how PvP will factor into this. Realm versus realm conflict – between the Republic and the Sith – will also be tied into this big over-arching story that Bioware are so keen on. “This is Star Wars,” they assure us, and that means grand conflict between space empires. We’ll be fighting either as Sith or Jedi for the fate of the universe, and it’d be fun to think that if Bioware are really serious about a story with irreversible consequences, then maybe they’ll allow for the success or failures of RvR combats to actually end up changing something palpable in the world, rather than being a really big, long game of capture the flag.
Of course this notion of there being story-wrapped-PvP is nothing by vague promises for now. What is clear is that “gamers can even play it as a solo game“, which for a multi-player zealot like me is a little disheartening. I’m happy for my single-player and multi-player experiences to converge, but I want big brave MMOs to look at how to make the most of having thousands of people in a single game. If thousands of them are paying subscriptions to play a single player game, then you are doing it wrong. However good the story is, I can’t help feeling like people would rather have a single game that they could play co-op with chums, rather than have to deal with a subscription and an “OMG LoL”-spewing MMO universe.
Finally, as a child who was firmly rooted in the “Star Wars is best” camp, I feel somewhat disconnected from this attempt to make a Star Wars MMO. Whether or not the KoToR games were great RPGs is, for me, meaningless. The attraction of the Star Wars world is not the shiny space fantasy of the Republic, but the grungy dystopia of the Empire vs Alliance conflict. The repeated failure of the original Star Wars MMO was monumental and unforgiveable, but I don’t think the world of the original films should have been so readily discarded. The Old Republic might make a fine science fiction setting, and Bioware might just make a great leap for MMOs, but it’s still not the game that the original, treasured franchise deserves. That, I can’t help thinking, might now never show up.
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@elias
Raiding for phat Jedi Manadlorian Armor, of course!
I still don’t see why Alyx is a good virtual character. It’d be interesting to see a blog post for why some(!) regard her as one such.
And it’s great to see new intercharacter relations added to MMOs – first Champions’ archnemesis, and now ToR’s companion.
“Personally, I can think of literally nothing better than having a world so fundemntally player driven that I get my missions from players who are higher up on the food chain than me. I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. I want a dynamic play environment where everything I do makes a difference, no matter how small.”
Indeed. It really baffles me why so many developers and publishers keep putting out what are, in the grand scheme of things, WoW clones. It may have made sense at first, given how much money WoW makes, but after the first few fell to the wayside, you’d think more people would have tried something properly different, like Football Manager Live. Where’s the Madden MMO? Where’s the Company of Heroes MMO? Where’s the Total War MMO? The answer is that, to the extent they’re done, they’re done by fans/bedroom coders and organised outside the structure of an “official” game – for instance CoH: Europe in Ruins, Goalline Blitz and so on. They’re enormously popular, for the scale of the development budget, but imagine what they’d be like if they were “officially” supported, released and marketed, rather than spread through word of mouth among ubergeeks.
Bioware is, like, known for making many old-school hardcore RPGs in the past, yeah. So I’m, like, confident that even a MMO by them is going to have an intelligent, mature story, serious choices and consequences – like, all that stuff that boring old PC games had before, you know, next-gen and shit. It’s going to be a true classic like Oblivion and Fallout 3.
Of course, some nerds would probably say that this is a fucking waste of a decent franchise. Why would anyone ever cater to these retards?
@ Andy
Jim and I and all the other complaining about lack of player interaction aren’t specifically talking about having to group to advance because that is in fact part of the fabric of MMOs that just doesn’t need to exist.
Player Interaction and influence comes in many ways that aren’t “Grinding through content”. The markets in Eve are almost exclusively player driven now so when you finish your PvE Quest from your Agent and sell your loot and buy a new bigger ship you are still interacting with players even though you haven’t actually spoken to them or are even aware of it.
An example within the confines of a Diku-Styled MMO might be that a player needs to gather crafting components to make some uber-armor. Instead of grinding themselves to get them they can post a Quest to a notice board offering a reward for delivering the components within a time limit. It’s player generated content that doesn’t actually require direct interaction with other players but is part of a much larger player driven world.
You can exist in Eve quite happily as a solo player ignoring everybody around you but you are part of a larger universe of players that you are interacting with.
In short: Player interaction doesn’t only mean PvP and grouping and while Eve has only scratched the surface nobody else is willing to take what Eve did and either dig deeper or put a more accessible experience on top of it.
@andy
Clearly I’m fine with people playing online games in a single player way, but the fact that it’s seen as such an important feature is kind of the point: it’s another multiplayer world where interaction with other people is *optional*. Often people don’t see much point in interaction with others in these worlds, because they’ve not played a game which has shown them how and why that is awesome. The fact that there are thousands of people in these game worlds, all interacting, should be incredible, central, crucial to what’s going on. Another spectacular multiplayer-optional game is great, but I’d rather someone was unveiling a living, breathing, player-populated Star Wars world and saying: “people are going to play together in their thousands, and it will be fucking awesome because of the thousands of people and what they can do.”
I am playing Devil’s Advocate somewhat because I’ve enjoyed solo time in WoW too – but the fact that solo-play and scripted story are the main events in a game in which there are thousands of players seems to me to speak of a failure of imagination. Player interaction is not “LFG, dungeon X”, it’s about using people’s activity and creativity to bring virtual world’s to life – SWG’s buildings, Eve’s economy, etc etc. All that clever emergent stuff that happens when you give players tools to do more and more, and let the stories take care of themselves.
If a multiplayer game is trumpeting its single-playerness and solo-supporting story then I want to stand up and point out that it doesn’t have to be that way. Because that’s *exactly* the game design problem that these kinds of games are running into: people kind of maybe want to have the option, but they’re often not seeing the benefit of, or enjoying, their interactions with other people. That *is* a waste of what MMOs are capable of. Fine, play solo, but I think games like this should be pushing much harder. MMO is an amazing technology currently suffering incredibly limited usage, and I think that’s driven by trying to make games where interaction with other human beings is optional.
I wouldn’t consider Fallout 3 a ‘true classic’ seeing how it’s not due for a week, I think. Unless you meant 2 or something.
I wouldn’t call Oblivion – The Monotony, a classic either. Though that’s just personal taste.
@Jim
And i happen to think that your chain of thought is one of the reasons why the technology is suffering this incredibly limited usage :) because people are trying to pigeonhole the technology into “all social all the time” more often than not. :)
@schizoslayer:
i like what you said overall and agree. as for EVE, i’ve always wanted to play that game, but have always been under the impression that there’s parts (too many?) of the game world where things are open/non consensual PvP, isn’t that the case? i.e. unless you become a pawn in some guild there’s places you can’t go as you become nothing more than target practice for someone else who is. and there seems to be a high price for dying in this game if i recall.
Also most of the people I know wanted to be Han Solo not Luke Skywalker. Jedi’s suck.
EDIT: Actually, you’ve lost me.
The other thing I want to point out about EVE’s market is that it’s easy. Meaning that it’s a system that attempts to facilitate inter-player commerce as best it can. EVE isn’t the only MMO with a player-based economy by a long shot, but the EVE market is a very, very far cry from, say, a system that involves those who wish to sell things sitting around AFK in the streets with shops open.
Required grouping for grinding/quests does encourage player interaction, but the problem with it is that it’s more about making accessing content logistically more difficult. As in, you don’t play the game to interact with the people; you play it to explore the content, and required grouping simply puts a barrier in the way of that.
But, like . . . playing a multiplayer FPS with real people is many, many times more fun than playing one with bots. The experience itself is fundamentally multiplayer – you actively seek out other people to play it with, and only default to playing by yourself if no other option presents itself. Much of an MMO, on the other hand, is fundamentally singleplayer, and you only grudgingly hook up with other players when you have to.
This is why a lot of people who start playing EVE have such a shit time. Because it’s an abysmal single-player experience. Now, EVE is a flawed game in many ways, but as Schizoslayer said, I think it’s on the right track. WAR is on this track too.
I don’t think The Old Republic is.
. . .
On the other hand, we totally need an X-Wing MMO. Planetside in Space, we can call it.
Also what everyone else said while I was typing this up.
@Jim:
I guess his words painted a different picture for me than yours did :)
I consider an mmo “all social” when you the majority of latter level content is designed for grouping/guilding/raiding with no alternative for those that aren’t into that.
anyway, we can agree to disagree, doesn’t matter to me, our opinions on the matter don’t really matter to anyone but ourselves anyway :)
i hope to be playing some heavy gun toting guy in this game. all these lightsabers have always annoyed me.
@Bobsy: That choice comes before the purchase, not during play. If you don’t want to play with other people, why are you playing a Massively Multiplayer game?
Why play an MMO solo? Simple. To experience the game world. Take something like WoW, Guild Wars and perhaps even EVE – absolutely stunning game worlds in terms of design, which pretty much outstrip anything you’d find in a traditional single-player game. I’d say it’s more of a strength of these games that you can play them solo if you want to, rather than a weakness.
The biggest problem inherent with all multiplayer games is the fact that they’re multiplayer; that is, other people are idiots. Not as a rule, but it only takes one sadistic moron to corpse camp you for an hour before you renounce all of humanity. If there were a way of forcing players in MMOs into not being assholes, then perhaps we could really pursue the concept of player-created content and emergent behaviour in these kinds of games. Unfortunately, I don’t really see how that’s possible while people still act like, well… people.
Though I do agree with Rob and Jim that the EVE model of MMO is most likely to really progress the possibilities of the genre, but from my experiences of the game, lordy, they do desperately need to try and put it into an experience that doesn’t feel like a second job.
Heck, think of all those MMO gamers these days who moan about being jumped by other players (Or groups thereof) who have no idea what actual player character death is like (Myself being one of them).
In any case, MMOs also suffer from a huge problem – Its players often don’t know what they actually want. For instance with this example pulled from ‘Designing Virtual Worlds’ (Richard A Bartle), players want a massive world with multiple continents/regions, but they want to be able to travel through it really quickly.
So they want a massive world and then they want to shrink it.
@Larington: So they want a lot of content and a lot of variety, but they want to be able to access it without tremendous inconvenience.
There’s not a lot of contradiction there.
@Klaus: Your sarcasm detector is working fine, may I please borrow it?
It kind of depends on what sort of realism your going for. In a large old technology world, the fastest method of travel is horses… Is teleportation really appropriate? For instance, you can’t really justify it in Lord of the Rings, but the designers have been forced to make concessions which in effect are teleportation but under a different name (Path finding, or whatever)… Thats sort of what I referred to.
But then it’s no longer a question of players demanding contradictory features. As Noc pointed out, there’s no contradiction in demanding “lots of content and variety, spread out over a large world”, while at the same time wanting to be able to visit any part of it easily.
The contradiction only arises when you start imposing additional constraints, like “But I only want to allow horse travel”, or “I want time to pass in a linear manner”. But players didn’t demand any of that in this example. That could be said to be just an artifact of the game designer’s limited imagination. (Yeah, of course you need to be able to offer a consistent and somewhat believable universe, and a lot of players get hung up about realism too. The point is just that there’s no inherent contradiction between the features you mentioned. It depends entirely on the context you place it in.)
Well, in any case there is a reason that there are whole books devoted to the subject of making MMOs/Virtual Worlds.
But essentially you’ve got two audiences therefor, the ones who slant towards a realistic world and the ones who slant to more of an, err, game game.
I suppose the real challenge is to get these players to go to the game thats meant for them, rather than the other ones.
Arr hell, I only wanted one word italicised then.
JR makes a good point about this MMO.
Some of the things that make Star Wars Star Wars like Jedi, The Rebel Alliance, The Empire, etc… are missing from here. While I think the setting is interesting they’re going to have to try REALLY hard to make sure the game feels sufficiently Star Warsy since they’re really only working with a subset of the iconic Star Wars characteristics. SWG was a tragedy several times over for the way it missed the mark and then flailed about trying to hit it over and over.
Didn’t see anyone mention this, but Guild Wars introduced npc Henchman and then subsequently expanded on it with Heroes, npcs you would recruit and could level up like a player and with skill sets you could pick or tweak for them.
For single player it was excellent, made soloing the game so simple to the point where it was actually far easier taking the npcs with their auto reactions than bothering with humans. However for multiplayer it was a disaster, as nobody bothered to pug or group up. End result was a very empty game experience and as frustrating as random human players can be, the times when it works out makes a game infinitely better.
They are keeping the heroes for GW2 but as I understand it have wisely scaled them back in numbers. Curious to see that the Star Wars people either haven’t seen this or opted to disregard arenanet’s experience.
It isn’t just single-player elements being dominant in an MMO that is stifling for the genre, but the massive expansion of multiplayer elements which are not massively-multiplayer.
Right now, Warhammer Online is going to shit because Mythic ignored the loud and repeated warnings of myself(blows the ‘Chief Wyrmskin is Awesome’ trumpet) and others(blows the ‘Wyrmskin anonymous lackeys’ trumpet) concerning the emphasis on instances.
I raised the issue in WoW aswell, but we all know what the average IQ of a WoW player is(sitcom audience nervous reaction). It was an MMO with almost no MMO in it; a glorifed chat hub linking instances(the only real content) together. Not one of them was something which could not have been done in a non-subscription, non-massively multiplayer online game. Wait, didn’t we do group PvE in custom maps on Warcraft 3? Aren’t we about to do group PvE in Left4Dead? Do we have to pay subs for those and does Blizzard really think their trash raid dungeons, BGs and arenas even compare?
Now Warhammer is going the exact same way: the most accessible content is stuff which is anti-massively muliplayer and leeches from the genuinely MMO bits. I wanted to love it, but I won’t be re-subbing unless some desperate measures are taken based on the *evidence* of what happens when BG servers in WoW crash and what happened when scenarios were unavailable during the WAR beta.
EVE is the only MMO that does it right, but CCP keep repeatedly giving concessions to anti-PvPers and homogenising the ships and mechanics. If a developer wants to discourage ass-hats griefing in games: get rid of all artificial restrictions and make everyone potentially dangerous and capable of causing grief. Right now, the very measures put in place to supposedly prevent ‘griefing’(meaning legitimate PvP that just so happened to take someone by suprise) are exactly what helps real griefers.
Griefers LOVE flag mechanics, they love low-sec space, hate 0.0 sec space where anyone can fight back pre-emptively and are not at all hindered, threatened or detered by hi-sec space, nor similiar idiotic ‘anti-griefer’ mechanics in any other MMO.
I get what Andy is saying; it’s theoptionto group rather than the necessity, and I completely understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you just want a break from your clan mates and the ability and option to just do your own thing in an MMO on an evening, but unfortunately a lot of MMOs just aren’t rigged that way. They cater towards clans and groups and exclude the individual player. Personally I like to play games with other people, but I’m not that fussy about hooking up after a session and making it a ‘meaningful’ long term relationship unless they are really worth the time. Nothing worse than being in a clan whose members you don’t ultimately like. ;) (been there, done that, sold the movie rights..)
Anyhows I do think the NPC companion thing sounds interesting, though how well implemented it will be whose to say.
@Korgan
I don’t know what that is, how much would one cost?
I noticed you didn’t mention Stalker for the NPC ‘characters’ list. I think that Stalker is one game where I actually give a shit about characters. Alyx was, to me, a meatshield. Occasionally an annoyance, I’d spend most of my time around her watching her slowly kill enemies, being mostly invulnerable, and then suddenly in one scene basically one-shot by an enemy.
In Stalker, because the characters are not dependent on the story, and can die at any time, I’d have “Vitoly Butters” or something as a guy I’d walk by, talk to, sell a gun, and help in combat. It was my choice to help him, watch him die, give him a medkit, etc.
A.I. still needs a lot of work. A lot of work. We still have games with Doom-style suicidal enemies. In fact, most do. Since Half-Life, the only real change has been a greater increase of flanking and life-preservation ideas, but not to any remotely realistic level.
While I like the idea of Companion Characters, they will be pets; because you’d rather they die than you (because them living is great and all, but if you die, so do they), and they will probably be so retarded you’ll find yourself waiting for them to catch up, swearing at them for being slow to kill things, wishing you could make them assault while you cover (but knowing that will never work), and so on.
One unfortunate part of this is that consoles will hamper this significantly, and consoles are currently more popular than PC’s. So while great A.I. would be nice, in-order processing makes this essentially a no-go.
Some day I will have my version of the perfect SW MMO finished and you will tell the people here that is worth the 20 peggle download.
“The fact that there are thousands of people in these game worlds, all interacting, should be incredible, central, crucial to what’s going on.”
Consider, though, that people are also the problem. When guy ‘x’ is central, crucial to what’s going on, and he’s a fucking ass-hat who doesn’t know he can heal himself, but will go out of his way to stop other people from doing what they’re supposed to, the idea starts to crumble. John-Q-Gamer is often quite stupid, belligerent, loud-mouthed, and anonymous. Basing an entire mechanic, hell, a core design for a game around grouping all of the John-Q’s together and hoping they don’t just tea-bag eachother for an entire day is going to leave you one frustrated person.
I agree the idea is good — the problem is the people themselves. The ‘massive’ in MMO is both the blessing and curse of the genre. And frankly, they’ve driven me away from it, as I’m tired of relying on people who cannot be relied on.
If you want to counter John-Q-Gamer’s anonymous-fuelled idiocy: give him a weapon. Then, give everyone around him a weapon.
Remember, there is a reason why savages are more polite than civilised people.
Agreed with Erlam. The idea of the MMO as a pro-active positive experience is a wonderful idea, but much like ‘user made content’ it’s a bit of a bug bear. If you can incorporate flexibility into your game model that allows for player to solo as well as group through choice rather than absolute necessity, you’ve made a better model. For a start Ass hats loose their captive audience, which encourages better attitudes (if they do want to team) and it means you as a player have the option to play as you want to and not be beholden to the time schedules of your friends. Frankly sitting around halway through an instance for 15 minutes twiddling your thumbs waiting for Y to sort his/her/its life out is no ones idea of fun as a gamer.
The trouble with designing an MMO to be an entertaining singleplayer game, is that the content runs out or gets boring and people leave. Other players are the source of new content as well as offering new ways and philosophies to experience the old content, and if you don’t have a very solid reason to be interacting with them on a regular basis, you’re mostly going to ignore them and vice versa.
In my opinion, Hellgate London and AutoAssault both failed because they did not reward group-play. Oddly their run and gun gameplay made it hard to coordinate and feel like you were actually cooperating with other players, even when you did team up. So not only did they not require group play, not only was there no reward for group play, but even if you grouped up just for fun.. it wasn’t fun. I only grouped up in the old Star Wars MMO five or six times, and also found it incredibly lacking.
A lot of online players aren’t worth interacting with, funny thing is even the ones that are worth it don’t look like it when they’ve got their attention on the game itself. If there aren’t strong mechanisms in place to encourage beneficial interaction, we generally assume we’re surrounded by idiots because we only notice them when they annoy us. Thus, most people seal themselves into solo play, the social players can rarely find anyone to play with, it gets boring like all singleplayer games eventually do to 99% of players, and they leave.
Without an emphasis toward interacting with other players, we assume everyone is an asshat and interaction dries up. Queue servers merging, new content appearing glacier slow or not at all due to lack of interest, and eventually the game being discontinued.
I hate this forced-interaction-mentality-bullshit that comes with the term MMO. Bioware are making a game where you do not have to deal with a bunch of EQ shitsock EVE fanatics? THREE CHEERS FOR THEM “but but its an MMO theres other people lets all play together massive multiplayer massive did I say multiplayer you are playing it wrong let me know all the details of your life interact with me poop in that sock” Jesus Christ…
“If you want to counter John-Q-Gamer’s anonymous-fuelled idiocy: give him a weapon. Then, give everyone around him a weapon.”
How does that stop them? They shoot you, someone shoots them, then they do it again. Or 40 John-Q’s get together and find small groups of non morons.
This is like the (oft American) idea that if everyone has a gun, no-one will get shot. What happens is the reverse, where one bigger group attacks a smaller one, and super fun time starts.
If you want MMO’s to be fun in groups, try not doing WoW’s patented 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 attacking in instance mechanics. Warhammer made some attempts towards it, but fell up short. I think MMO’s can be fun in theory, but they’d need more working NPC’s. Actual team-mate A.I. with lives and so on. Then there’s far less reliance on other people.
I played SWG primarily “solo” (technically duoed with my wife).
And yet I spent a good portion of my time hunting for meat and skins for people, shopping in player vendors, buffing in towns (if you call standing in line to pay a doc “interaction” you’re a silly person), etc.
I couldn’t have done that in a single player game (not in the same uniquely interesting way). And yet, I primarily solo’ed. Even going to the cantina and watching people interact was really a solo experience – I’d do that for a while, chat a bit, then go off and kill stuff.
Sorry, this will be mostly off-topic, but did anyone else find it strange that this game is supposed to take place centuries after the KotOR singleplayer games? I was so convinced that setting it in the Mandalorian Wars would be a superb choice, giving so many options to players and room for new content.
“Without an emphasis toward interacting with other players, we assume everyone is an asshat and interaction dries up.”
With it, we *know*.
I don’t play mmos so eve model and wow model means nothing to me, but the idea of ai contolled companion characters in a multiplayer game seems like missing the point. In singleplayer fine, and the sooner they get more life like the better but then they always were stand ins for your friends in a pnp game. Playing an mmo solo is one thing, but shouldn’t you be actually playing it solo? If you don’t want to play nice with other people fine, but having your own group of ai contolled followers doesn’t that sound a little too much like the guy with 36 wow accounts?
The Old Republic era always seemed more logical for an online game with loads of Jedi and Sith running around, maybe now (eventually) we can get a single player rpg set in the rebellion era, after all turnabout is fairplay.
As mentioned by various people this sounds quick similar to Guild Wars, being able to play the game solo and NPC companions. It also sounds similar to what Guild Wars 2 promises, a single NPC companion you can choose to adventure with.
Okay, how about to put it constructively: the genre is “Massively Multiplayer”. There has to be a social element to it. Without that social element, it’s just an “Online Game”.
So, to the “solo types”, who are insisted that “Massively Multiplayer” games have no social component: what exactly is it about these games that appeals to you over the single player ones? Is it the thrill of public masturbation as opposed to drudgery of doing it in private? Even (and above all) public masturbation is a social activity.
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that MMOs shouldn’t have any social component, merely that the game should be playable and fun if a player chooses not to use it. Here are some reasons why I like to be able to play solo:
This morning I woke up at 6.30, so I got up and played WoW for a bit. There was no socialising to be done because there were very few other people around.
Sometimes I just don’t feel like it. I want to log into the game and do a few quests, explore the world, whatever, without relying on other people to help me do it.
Why don’t I just play a single player game instead? Because I want to level my characters before the next expansion comes out, because I want my characters to have appropriate level and equipment for when I do want to play in a group with people, because soloing in WoW isn’t very difficult and therefore a good thing to do when you’ve just woken up, and because yes, it’s designed in such a way that makes it rather compulsive.
Yeah I have to say if you don’t want to interact, socialise play or deal with a bunch of EQ shitsock EVE fanatics then why not play a Single Player game? The very thing that makes an MMO is that interaction with other players is the very core of the experience. Otherwise you’re just paying a subscription for a single player game, and if you’re doing that I have to call into question the way you spend your money. There are plenty of great single player RPGs you can play instead and save yourself that cash.
Well now I look like a silly head. Damned timing. :(
I should add though that I’m aware that I’m not really explaining myself very well, but that doesn’t really matter. I don’t expect you to understand my gaming preferences and habits, and I wouldn’t expect to understand yours.
What is important for an MMO developer is to understand that people who like to ’solo’ in such games represent a significant section of their potential market. They are free to not cater to them of course, but they shouldn’t then wonder why WoW has millions of subscribers and they get a few hundred thousand at best.
I find the argument that anyone who wants to play games in this way is either being manipulated by the evil developers or simply doesn’t know any better incredibly patronising.
Oh look, Far Cry 2 has just come through the letterbox. Maybe I will go play a single player game instead.
So, to the “solo types”, who are insisted that “Massively Multiplayer” games have no social component: what exactly is it about these games that appeals to you over the single player ones?
Whilst there are loads of singleplayer games where you can find WoW’s appealing character development (in the sense of the talent system and seeing your character go from rags to spectacular armour) in one sense or another, there’s no singleplayer-only game with similar gameplay that features WoW’s world, areas and lore. I’m sure solo players could find loads of single player geared games to suit them gameplay-wise but those lack the other major factor of the game – the environment.
I don’t insist multiplayer games to be aimed towards those who like to go solo, but I do think it’s very nice that you can get a lot out of those games even if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t enjoy actively playing and working together with strangers.
What I want from TOR, not as the PR for the game for a mo’, is for my friends to be able to take over as my companions when they want to; for some reason, I can see Alec as a T3 or Kieron as an HK droid.
“If you want to counter John-Q-Gamer’s anonymous-fuelled idiocy: give him a weapon. Then, give everyone around him a weapon.
Remember, there is a reason why savages are more polite than civilised people.”
“Savages” are more polite than civilised people, not because everyone is armed, but because they tend to live in small close-knit communities where they rely on the people around them for day-to-day survival.
It’s when population densities increase and you start interacting with people you don’t know, don’t need and don’t care about that rudeness becomes common.
If you give everyone the capability to be dangerous at all times, it won’t stop griefers being asshats, it’ll just mean they can be asshats whenever they like. It won’t just mean you can defend yourself from griefers at any time, it’ll mean you HAVE to defend yourself from griefers all the time.
The problem with griefers is that there are no consequences for their actions that they care about. In real life, if someone goes around randomly attacking people they’ll either be put in jail, or killed. In game, they don’t care about dying (they’ll respawn), about in-game money (they’ll just find a weaker character to take more from) – all they care about is fighting and making a nuisence of themselves.
I meant to put quotes around “civilised people” too in the above – just imagine they’re there…
npc’s like real people? so like, they will occasionally disconnect, go to the toilet, have to walk the dog etc… cool!!! :D
It’d be an interesting experiment, to create an MMO (or just set up a server for an existing one) and populate it entirely with human-like AI NPCs, then just leave it running and watch what happens.