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MMOs, MUDs, and the Future
AndrewGoat
Member UncommonPosts: 160
In this post, I will attempt to elaborate on my humble opinions about MMOs and where I predict their Future should lie, and why you should care.
But first, some background about myself. I'm 26 years old, male, and a geek. I've been playing online games since I was 12. I'm pretty much the demographic most MMO companies aim for.
MMOs, in my opinion, originate from MUDs. MUDs are text based games, that are similar to MMOs, but of course, without the graphics. To compensate for this, the truly great MUDs have to have original gameplay to haul people in. I have played some truly epic and great MUDs, believe it or not, that in gameplay and originality truly dwarf every single MMO you can find today.
Now, this as I said, is because they have to compensate for lack of graphics. They're also able to take more risks with radical gameplay ideas because they don't have to really pay a whole lot for servers. Even the big MUDs, like the ones from Iron Realms Entertainment, likely don't cost nearly as much to run as an MMO.
Of course, you also have MMOs. In my opinion, MMOs started with Everquest. Yes, there were those before it, but the truly took off with Everquest. This is debatable, but for the sake of this post, we're going to stick with Everquest. Everquest was basically a MUD with graphics, truly, and utterly. People enjoyed it because it took the gameplay of console RPGs and MUDs, and gave you a sense of realism with the graphics, along with a community of players to experience it with.
Then of course, eventually, World of Warcraft comes along and changes the scene forever. We all have our opinions why, but in my experience, it's because it made the MMO less about compelling gameplay, and more along the lines of a race. You race to the top, you race for gear. You try to be better than one another. You don't have comraderie except with your guild, who ultimately, you use to get to the top of the race.
This is a very antisocial experience, in my opinion.
You also have sandbox games. Which, are very close to what I imagine the Future of MMOs should be. However, its not entirely the same as what I think it should be. Sandbox games are excellent because they're less of a race. They're still a race. You get skills, you try to make the items and things that you can do in the sandbox bigger and better than other peoples. But, you have options. That's the difference between theme park gameplay and sandbox gameplay.
But, I must ask you, doesn't being 'sandbox' really defeat the purpose of being 'compelling' or 'original'? If you play sandbox for the purpose of originality, or being different from theme park gameplay, you're still sticking yourself in the 'sandbox' genre. Why shouldn't I have theme park and sandbox both? Why can't players run shops, why can't players kill other players, and take their money, and gain levels from doing so? why can't I have the race, and the originality, and the community?
The MMOs of today are made to make money, plain and simple. That's why they're there, that's how they're able to sustain their massive numbers. MUDs, on the other hand, are made by people for the people. People who make MUDs want their mud to be the coolest, have their ideas that noone else has, and so forth. Sure, MUDs made by Iron Realms Entertainment do make money, but that's the exception to the rule.
Personally, I love MMOs still, regardless of how flawed they are. They're a lifestyle, really. They give you something to do with your spare time. They help you meet people. They make you think analytically. But, they could be so so much more.
The future of MMOs is to stay the same as they are now, ultimately. That's just the sad, cold, honest truth. The only way to see their fate changed is to see an MMO that at its core wants to be excellent. That's why Blizzard defined the genre. Blizzard knew they could make money, they wanted to, but IN ADDITION, they wanted excellence. They wanted people to love their game because they put themselves into it so much. They wanted people to be happy, like they had been with Diablo and Starcraft and Warcraft. Thats why they have the 'when its done', and that's why it succeeds.
Let me give you an example of the gameplay on a MUD I used to play that has several hundred players still. I don't play it anymore for various reasons, but here's some of the things that occur or can be done:
* Roleplay is enforced.
* Your roleplay can determine if people are allowed to kill you or not, also your actions.
* There are five cities, all ran by players, all with many government, and elected positions.
* There are a few NPC shops in every city, and then there are a finite amount of player ran shops, which can sell whatever they want.
* Every class has unique skills, and plays entirely differently.
* The combat is ran off of afflictions, diseases, bleeding, physical and magical damage, flying in the air, dropping bombs on people, etc.
* The cities have guards you can destroy, you can raid other cities, which are the characters homes.
* You can have families, and you can have player owned houses with furniture, and things that matter.
* Less emphasis on equipment. A shortsword, sabre, and a broadsword will all decapitate people.
* You can pike peoples heads after you kill them
* Etc.
This is kind of a vague example. But, my point is, there is political intrigue. Theres leveling. Theres many different skills. Your actions mean something. The people who run the game can, and will, interact with you through NPCs, regularly. The things you say and do in this world impact the world.
You kill a boss on an MMO, nothing happens. It respawns. You kill another player, they respawn, noone cares.
On MUDs like I described, you kill someone, and it matters. Their city will be pissed at your city, and they might raid your city, or through political intrigue, get your city to punish you in turn.
In MMOs, theme park, or sandbox, there is no player interaction like this. No immersion. Even in sandbox games.
Sorry for the long rant, but this is something that's been on my mind for awhile. Thanks for reading, if you did.
For those of you in the TL;DR crowd: MMOs suck, but are addicting. MUDs have great gameplay, terrible graphics.
Comments
I think and hope future MMO will look like TERA. I can't wait to try it out. If you havent seen or heard of TERA.. google it. Heres a small video from closed beta. THIS GAME IS JUST AMAZING! www.pvpve.com/forumdisplay.php
http://www.pvpve.com/
Muds are easy to do. You get the program, and start making your Mud. it doesn't take a genius programmer to figure it out, how to change it, how to put up a server.
But, my problem with Muds is my brain doesn't work like what is required to play a mud. You can go west, east, north, south. You go north, you go south, you go east, you cannot go in that direction. you go west, you go east, you go south, you cannot go in that direction. you go north, you go west, you go north, you cannot go in that direction. Ok, I'm done, no more Mud for me I'm just turning around in circles and completely sick of being told I can't go in that direction. I kinda need to see where I'm going.
you get to 2d mmorpgs, and it's a tiny bit more difficult, but not exponentially more difficult. And 2d mmorpgs are pretty popular. You can make those and do about anything you want to. But of course the graphics look like crap.
You want to make a 2d mmorpg? Go download Eclipse or something like that:
http://www.freemmorpgmaker.com/index.php
But then we get to the full blown 3d MMORPG. Now it is exponentially more difficult. It's difficult to make the models, it's difficult to program the quests, difficult ot animate the models, make game mechanics, it's hard to get a stable server running,, you need lots of bandwidth for your server, IF you can get it to run, and it gets expensive.
So there's a long, long way to go before there are cheap programs out there that let you make a 3d MMORPG and do whatever you want with it.
Even if you're going to use stock models.
Suppose everyone is entitled to their opinions.....even if they are virginal based......
I refuse to recomend anything from Iron Realms Entertainment, even if I do play lusternia(for now). These games are literally worst case scenrio cash shops, even the fairest game out of the bunch(Lusternia) costs around $400 to $600 or 300-600 hours in cash grind to get to a PvPerable level, You can't even max out a SINGLE skill in Lusternia if you don't get a hold of OOC credits to transfer into lessons. Which is pretty horriable because to use combat to it's fullest you're going to need 2-5 skills full transed/maxxed depending on your class or how you fight.
Then again IRE games are basically the Blizzard of Text based games. When I venture into other Muds I'm usually going WTF and quiting within an hour. It's also worth mentioning that the honors quests are awesome when compared to normal MMOs, the first newbie "honors" quest is difficult but is basically repairing one of the weapons of mass destruction which is just fun(Lusternia again).
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Basically muds trump out over normal MMOs when you want dynamic and well scripted stuff. If they can't do that it's impossibly stupid to play a MUD, and the really sad thing is that most MUDS don't take advantage of that at all.
I also don't get why most MUDs don't have a web client of some sort. Java has a few libraries for supporting telnet, an utterly massive library for supporting string manipulation, and can be deployed as an applet. I mean really you can get an "ok" Java programmer to make that in a month, then in another month have support for basic triggers/macros/variables.
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As for hardware you are wrong about a MUD server hardware being able to be crap, well at least wrong when saying a Mud server can be crap when compared to another MMO of similar size.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
To me, the problem with MUDs is theyre a bad susbstitute for pnp roleplaying. Even today i could just make a couple of phone calls and find a group of people my age doing old school (original White Wolf, AD&D 2nd ed) campaigns. No matter how good, a MUD is never going to beat that... Im not saying your point is without merit, but the example you yourself provided of a game sounds extremely niche to me. Roleplaying enforced? I havent roleplayed in well over a decade and its for the same reason i never joined a top guild in WOW, i no longer have the time for something that to all practical purposes requires the dedication youd put into a half time job. Would rather go back to doing college theater.
The kind of gameplay you describe would be very difficult to produce in an MMO. Creating content in a MUD is nothing but writing a few lines of text. Content in an MMO is a bit more complex... Not to mention "sandbox" has become an easy way of saying nothing. "Yay, youll be able to choose" amongst what? Its become such a cliche to talk about sandbox and merely point in the direction of preNGE SWG (which no one can try) or EVE (which probably has one of the largest barriers to entry in all MMOs, apart from being a very specific niche) as a way to avoid actually dealing with discussing concrete features...
The future of MMOs is not in MUDs, nor in divorcing "themepark" elements from "sandbox".
Just to make things clear...
I speak for myself and no one else, unless i state otherwise mine is just an opinion. A fact is something that can be independently verified, you may challenge such but with proof. You have every right to disagree with me through sound argument, i believe in constructive debate, but baseless aggression will warrant an unkind response.
Oh yes strict roleplay enforced is ALWAYS funny. You can't even say "getting door be right back" without getting yelled at maybe even punished. I mean really now you can't "teleport out" to get away for a sec, and you can't go AFK and get caught.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
If the day comes where there is one MMO with the graphics of TERA and the gameplay of Achaea then I'll be a happy camper. I don't need them all to be that way... just one.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
I'm sorry, but how was Everquest so fundamentally different from WoW? Nearly everything you can do in Everquest you can do in WoW: Raid, Farm Dungeons, Get Drunk, Roleplay, Quest, etc. The only major difference between WoW and Everquest is that WoW revamped everything to make it more streamlined and mainstream. The UI is much easier to deal with. Downtime is significantly lower. Quests are clearly labeled and you are always pointed in the right direction (after finishing all the quests in an area in WoW you are typically given a quest to go to the next higher level area). You have maps, clear descriptions of where to look for things in quests (and now mods that show the actual quest locations), and clear goals you can achieve. WoW's gameplay is far more compelling than Everquest with faster combat (cooldowns and casting times are much lower), more abilities (as well as multiple skill trees), and less reliance on the Holy Trinity (though it still exists).
Everyone wants to bash on WoW because it's so popular, but forget the bad things about Everquest. Lack of quests, poor quest rewards, ridiculously long level time to end game, spawn camping (sometimes for days), roadblocks that required guilds to farm for months on trivial content, uninspiring gameplay (mash your best nuke key over and over or complete heal rotations), etc. Same goes for Ultima Online although the gameplay actually is fundamentally different than WoW's and EQ's, but people only remember the good things about it and forget all the negative things those games have.
I also don't think "sandbox" games are the future. I absolutely hate this term and it's misuse - but I disgress - freedom to do whatever you want isn't necessarily going to be the key to improvement. Playing with a lot of players and having that freedom leads to lots of abuse, and most people simply don't like getting abused. If anything compelling DYNAMIC content is the future. This would be good for both "themepark" and "sandbox" MMOs. Randomization does wonderful things. It's a shame that EQ's LDoN expansion (which a suprising number of people dislike for some reason) added a bit of randomization that hasn't been copied much yet. Diablo series and similar games show that creating random (and compelling) content is possible, just a shame the industry isn't making any strides to do so.
Still, I agree MMOs aren't making any effort towards innovation. Copying WoW obviously is not equal to success. No idea why developers keep trying the same method that leads to failure over and over. 2010 (particularly late 2010 or even as late as early 2011) looks like it might be the year for the next generation of MMOs though; some of the new ones in the work do seem to be trying something different.
Well, since MUDs rely on text to make you "see" the world, studios seems to immediately come to the logical conclusion "we need people who can write entertaining texts in good English".
In any video game (MUs "only" being computer game, since there isn't any graphics), studios jsut seem to assume "am image is worth 1000 words, so let's do without a true "author"". When in truth, there is has much need for someone to invent a lore, to write quests dialog, and to tell a story...
Plus, because now everybody learns how to write (*cough* though you'd doubt it seeing some messages on the internet...*cough*), people tend to think writing can be done by anyone. That "good" writing isn't a skill too, a learnt and trained skill just like any art form like drawing or singing.
Thanks to everyone who replied.
I want to make something clear, though. This post wasn't intended to say 'MUDs are better than MMOs'. That's not the case. My point is that I think some of the features of certain muds are far superior, gameplay wise, to what we're offered in MMOs today. And it is my opinion that its going to remain that way for some time, because people are complacent with the mediocrity that MMOs provide.
The vast majority doesn't care about superior gameplay. Just a superior race to the top.
Which, I think is sad.
I tend to agree but this is only because creating content even code for MUD's is so much easier than a large scale game like a MMO. It does have a significant advantage there because it is text based, C/C++ supported and small community bases (depending on the MUD).
Glen ''Famine'' Swan
Senior Assistant Community Manager - Funcom
I tend to agree but this is only because creating content even code for MUD's is so much easier than a large scale game like a MMO. It does have a significant advantage there because it is text based, C/C++ supported and small community bases (depending on the MUD).
Yeah, I get that too. I just refuse to buy it. I know that the overwhelming majority just think it would be 'too hard' to implement some of the sort of things I'm implying, but really, as far as programming and even technology has come in the last 10-20 years...is it really impossible?
I tend to be of the mindset that its just people don't want to try to think outside the box. I can understand, given that it's all just big business now. MMOs, I mean.
I'm sure, Famine, you wish you could have Age of Conan's devs have done things differently, or deep inside, you wish you could have helped see things differently, but it is what it is. I just wish someone was able to truly break the mold.
Ah well, such is life.