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FUTURISTS: What will replace MMORPGs?
- Thread starter Emirikol
- Start date
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
User-Designed Shared Worlds?
Think Second Life, but with more ability to turn it into your very own kind of game.
Celebrim
Legend
Kamikaze Midget said:
In a very real sense, we've already been there and left.
Some of the very first MMORPG's were of the 'MUSH' style, meaning 'Multi-User Shared Hallucination'. Players earned the right by participating to add thier own content and extend the game world. There were extensive scripting languages for creating events.
They were never particularly popular. For one thing, most people's self-created content is pretty lame. For another thing, as the standards of appearance and professionality go up, fewer and fewer non-professionals will be able to meet the standards we expect from our content. For another, creating your own game is alot of work, and most people go to a game in order to not work, not to find something else exhausting and tedious to do.
I don't think you can really get much bigger philosophically than a MMORPG. I think you'll see incremental improvements in emmersiveness, but I think we are long way from being able to pipe tactile and olfactory experiences directly to people's brains. I think we are likely to see improvements in the portals people use to choose and find games. I think we are likely to see increases in the breadth and social acceptibility of gaming. I think we may see some advances in AI, in the way MMORPG stories unfold, and dynamic content generation so that groups or individuals flit in and out of a community server space to socially interact and a group or individual space where the can truly be the protagonists and not merely someone else working on the quest. For example, the MMORPG Orson Scott Card envisioned in 'Ender's Game' (1985) seemed to work according to these rules.
But I think at least until we can plug chips into our brains and experience true virtual worlds we've basically plateaued.
A real issue is interactivity and having a real effect on the world. I worked as a dev on an MMORPG for a start up company, as well as worked as a GM at a more mainstream studio, and one of the biggest desires that players seemed to have is that they want to be able to affect change on the world. Relatively "minor" things like if players over-hunt in a certain area then eventually they could wipe out all the monsters there until something new migrates in. Little things like this make the game more realistic and make the players feel like they are part of something.
dougmander
Explorer
Kamikaze Midget said:
Well, Midget, it's entirely possible to create your very own kind of game in Second Life. I know one guy who is about to debut an RPG in Second Life that takes up two entire sims. He has spent about 1000 hours building an entire city for a Machiavellian intrigue RPG. He has over 100 people (including me) lined up to play and/or GM. I have been DMing games in Second Life on a weekly basis for several months, using in-game dice rollers, life-size 3-D scenery, and so on.
But SL does have two significant limitations for creating MMORPGs: no easy way to create AIs or mobs to interact with players, and no integral combat system. Individual designers have scripted clunky work-arounds for both (Dark Life , for example), but it's time-consuming, and requires scripting know-how.
Looking beyond Second Life, I think that easy-to-make user-designed shared worlds are on the horizon, and I'm following the Multiverse project with interest (it's now in beta).
Jondor_Battlehammer
First Post
I don't see them being replaced, only enhanced. Of course, if I could see the next big thing I'd slap a patent on thet lightning fast 
.
I can see some uber things, such as
VR interfacing.
AI opponents.
A world set up with absolutly no AI/bots, but populated with only users. This would be a big break, as such a world would have to great an ability to be run over by one faction. If any one remembers MPBT 3025, the only solution they had for one faction dominating in the course of a weekend was to do regular resets of the entire world.
.I can see some uber things, such as
VR interfacing.
AI opponents.
A world set up with absolutly no AI/bots, but populated with only users. This would be a big break, as such a world would have to great an ability to be run over by one faction. If any one remembers MPBT 3025, the only solution they had for one faction dominating in the course of a weekend was to do regular resets of the entire world.
PapersAndPaychecks
First Post
VR. VR technology will be as much of a change compared to the traditional MMORPG as MMORPGs were compared to pen and paper.
