But you can't do that. You might as well try to compare MMOs to a Michael Connoly thriller or a Cohen brother's movie or a Broadway Production of Les Miserables since they're all entertainment.
MMOs can only really be compared to other MMOs. As Quiz said, they have complexities that are unimaginable in single player games. Even the FPS games with on-line components you mention only have that tiny scenario PvP similarity to MMOs. MMOs do that and then 2000 other things that single player games don't have to do.
Many things that are extremely challenging to do in MMOs, are trivial in single player games. You don't have to look any farther than a world that changes depending on your actions to see that... or an NPC who evolves. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
Apples to apples? I'll stick to my original reply.
Of course you can. I compare novels, to movies, to games, to MMOs everyday. One min i am reading the latest Jack Campbell movie, is one minute i am not playing a MMO.
So obviously i have to judge, at every moment when i want some entertainment, what is the most fun for me. And that involves comparing all the entertainment.
I might be wrong here but this topic is about quality which has little relation to fun. A game can be of VERY low quality and you can still have a blast with it. You can have all the fun in the world and what you enjoy can be of low quality.
From an objective point of view you cant compare genres of entertainment to each other, but yes, you can compare them in the amount of fun they give to you but thats too subjective for this topic i think.
To follow up on a Skyrim reference, Bethesda shipped it with an awful user interface, which had to be fixed up by fan modders. It's not like all popular games are so much better. Especially when you consider the increased complexity of what MMOs have to do, even in all their forms.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
But you can't do that. You might as well try to compare MMOs to a Michael Connoly thriller or a Cohen brother's movie or a Broadway Production of Les Miserables since they're all entertainment.
MMOs can only really be compared to other MMOs. As Quiz said, they have complexities that are unimaginable in single player games. Even the FPS games with on-line components you mention only have that tiny scenario PvP similarity to MMOs. MMOs do that and then 2000 other things that single player games don't have to do.
Many things that are extremely challenging to do in MMOs, are trivial in single player games. You don't have to look any farther than a world that changes depending on your actions to see that... or an NPC who evolves. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
Apples to apples? I'll stick to my original reply.
MMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other.
For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial.
"...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.
Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
MMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other.
For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial.
"...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.
Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
From a tech standpoint they are more complex. When it comes to design they have rather different design goals. You must take other players into account in your design. Its why Skyrim with a bunch of other people around just does not make sense. Merely making a game "fun" is not enough if that game is not fun with other people. I agree that "unimaginable complexity" is absurd, but so is comparing a single player game to an mmo. Its like comparing masturbation to sex, they are similar in some respecs, but really are not comparable.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
But you can't do that. You might as well try to compare MMOs to a Michael Connoly thriller or a Cohen brother's movie or a Broadway Production of Les Miserables since they're all entertainment.
MMOs can only really be compared to other MMOs. As Quiz said, they have complexities that are unimaginable in single player games. Even the FPS games with on-line components you mention only have that tiny scenario PvP similarity to MMOs. MMOs do that and then 2000 other things that single player games don't have to do.
Many things that are extremely challenging to do in MMOs, are trivial in single player games. You don't have to look any farther than a world that changes depending on your actions to see that... or an NPC who evolves. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
Apples to apples? I'll stick to my original reply.
MMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other.
For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial.
"...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.
Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
Give me a break. Maybe you can tell us what factors in video games determine your subjective assessment of quality.
Is Astral Diamond duping a consideration? How about log-in queues? Is "phasing" a good or bad thing to you? How about the ability to handle 1000 players in the same area? Is the crafting in single player games better? Does it actually exists in many of them other than TES games? How is open world PvP working out in singe player games? How do you feel about single player end games? Are the raids in single player RPGs challenging enough for you? ...and so on... and so on... If you look at the most often cited reasons why MMO x or MMO y sucks or failed, you'll quickly see that 99.9% of them are related to their MMO nature.
It's silly and contrived to attempt to pass any kind of quality judgment on MMOs vs. their single player counterparts.
Yes they are all video games... and so are Mario World and Dance Dance Revolution.
And yes, people in the industry do say this all the time when referring to the thoughtless gamer's inability to understand why MMOs have more "issues" than single player games. Single player is easy. I have heard it with my own ears more than once.
As to "misquoting Quiz" ...did you see quotation marks in my statement that paraphrased his? Did he call me on it?
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Even implementing a feature in a single player game and then implementing the "same" feature in an MMORPG can easily be vastly harder to do in the latter.
Let's suppose that you want to implement a kill ten rats quest, for example. In a single player game, this is easy enough to do. You make rats spawn when a player gets moderately close, and then you count when they die. When ten rats die, the quest is completed.
Now let's suppose that you want to do the same in an MMORPG, and in an open area of the world rather than a private instance. You can't just have rats spawn when the player gets kind of close. Otherwise, you could be fighting rats and then have a bunch more spawn on top of you when someone else comes by. But you can't make it so that rats only spawn for the first player to come close, or else he could kill them all and stay there and make it impossible for anyone else to do the quest.
You know the solution to this, of course: you make rats spawn on their own timers regardless of which players are around. But then you have to keep track of mobs all over a server. You get the problem of rats spawning on top of you--sometimes unexpectedly if someone had killed them and you didn't realize that they were there. Keeping track of when to make various mobs spawn and having to track mobs all across the game world at all times rather than just the area the player is in adds some complexity.
And then there's still the question of how fast rats should respawn. Make them respawn too fast and players can quickly get overwhelmed by being attacked by respawning rats and the quest is unreasonably difficult. Make rats respawn too slowly and players spend a good chunk of their time standing around waiting for rats to respawn, which isn't fun. The ideal rate at which rats respawn should depend on how densely populated your game world is.
But the population density of a given zone varies wildly. During peak times, you have far more players online than in the middle of the night. As a game has been out for a while, you end up with a higher proportion of your players in higher level areas, leaving lower level areas far less populated than they used to be. If players discover that farming rats gives 5% better loot than same-level alternatives, you may end up with vastly more players in that particular area than if farming rats gave 5% worse loot than the alternatives.
In an MMORPG, there's also the issue of who killed the rats. Surely the kill ten rats quest shouldn't be completed if you wait in town for ten rats to die somewhere on the server. But what if you do half of the damage to kill a rat? Should you get credit for killing it? How about 10% of the damage? 90%? Should it matter if you did the first hit?
What if other damage was done by someone else in your group? If you're standing right next to him, maybe you should get credit, but what if you're halfway across the map? Surely you don't want to make it so that five players can form a group, go quest independently, and get credit for five quests in the time they personally do only one.
And what if you're grouped with players of wildly different levels from your own? If you go to an area where mobs could one-shot you, but group with a higher level who can kill them, should you get massive loot for it? Should the higher level get normal loot as if he were solo, or should being in a group modify it? What if the group is for content of the level of the lower level player? Should having the higher level around heavily nerf the loot you get?
Furthermore, you can't just answer all of these questions with an eye toward saying, go do whatever you want and you'll get plenty of loot. If you make it possible to get massively more loot by doing some crazy grouping scenario, players will figure it out and heavily abuse it. In fact, players who want to just play the game will get mad at you for giving them far less loot than players who abuse the leveling system by doing something stupid and not fun.
And that's just for a kill ten rats quest, which is relatively easy to do and a staple of MMORPG design. If you want to do something more complicated, the complexity only goes up from there.
MMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other.
For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial.
"...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.
Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
From a tech standpoint they are more complex. When it comes to design they have rather different design goals. You must take other players into account in your design. Its why Skyrim with a bunch of other people around just does not make sense. Merely making a game "fun" is not enough if that game is not fun with other people. I agree that "unimaginable complexity" is absurd, but so is comparing a single player game to an mmo. Its like comparing masturbation to sex, they are similar in some respecs, but really are not comparable.
Great post, and I'm going to have to put the last bit in my sig
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Originally posted by jimdandy26 Originally posted by QuirhidMMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other. For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial."...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
From a tech standpoint they are more complex. When it comes to design they have rather different design goals. You must take other players into account in your design. Its why Skyrim with a bunch of other people around just does not make sense. Merely making a game "fun" is not enough if that game is not fun with other people. I agree that "unimaginable complexity" is absurd, but so is comparing a single player game to an mmo. Its like comparing masturbation to sex, they are similar in some respecs, but really are not comparable.
Just saying something isn't comparable doesn't make them not comparable. Neither does using bad analogies, however amusing they may be.
Compare the questing in Skyrim to the questing in SWToR. One or the other will score more points with players.
Compare the PvP offered in League of Legends with the PvP offered in WoW or GW2. One or the other will score more points with the players.
Compare the story in Mass Effect 1 or 2 to the story told in The Secret World or SWToR. One or the other will score more points with the players.
Saying two things can't be compared is a cop out.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The general public doesn't. And that's a big reason I believe WoW is still the most successful. The average person won't deal with the lack of polish most MMO games have. We vets accept MMOs for being rough around the edge but new comers do not.
That said I do think GW2 feels the most polished since WoW.
Agreed. It's the long time MMO players that accept lower quality products. This behavior extends to an extreme degree especially when one takes into consideration how they select their games. If anything, F2P has saved the entrenched MMO gamer from themselves as they had long since stopped comparative shopping among the pricepoint-bound subscription games. With F2P they have embarked on the logical and ironic quest to discern what they will be getting for their money with each title.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by lizardbonesSome of these threads are hit and miss, either what gets posted resonates with people or it doesn't.
The problem seems to lie with certain gamers (frequent repeaters) who apparently view themselves as the Voice of the Resistance.
Or are they just addicted to the drama?
Of course some of them are more effective at raising the rabble to revolt than others, that's the nature of demagogues.
I'm not sure what other people do with their threads. If I notice something or see people talking about something, I'll start a thread on that subject. I'll try to reference my source material if possible. Sometimes what I post seems to be the start of a coherent discussion, sometimes it's just a mess and other times they just fade away quietly. :-)
I've seen it posted several times over the years about how people put up with things in MMOs that they wouldn't put up with in single player game releases. What I've noticed is the following:
* MMOs seem to get pushed out the door too soon, with the expectation that they'll get finished later. * MMOs release with a "beta", but nothing changes from the "beta" to the "live" release. I can't think of many, if any single player games that have done this. * Recently, MMOs have started in "beta" with live cash shops, where players are encouraged to spend money.
I'm sure other people can come up with some other examples. I wanted to stick to the general quality and feature lists of the games though, since it's fairly subjective, and not obvious. I can subjectively say the questing in Skyrim beats the socks off of most MMOs and that the story in Mass Effect 1 beats the socks off of most, if not all MMOs, but is inferior questing and story telling something MMO players are putting up with, or something that doesn't matter because they are getting something else that's somehow more valuable?
** ** **
Also possible, is my subjective view just wrong?
What I don't accept is people saying you can't compare MMOs with single player RPGs. That's just a dodge.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
* MMOs seem to get pushed out the door too soon, with the expectation that they'll get finished later. * MMOs release with a "beta", but nothing changes from the "beta" to the "live" release. I can't think of many, if any single player games that have done this. * Recently, MMOs have started in "beta" with live cash shops, where players are encouraged to spend money.
* Yes, they do. But that's the nature of the product, orders of magnitude more complex than the same game as a single-player.
If WoW had sat on the shelf for six more months (Blizzard somehow had a psychic message telling them ("Buy every piece of server hardware your manufacturer can make until we tell you to stop")), it would perhaps had a smoother launch.
Yet despite those (almost legendary now) road bumps, what was creating their issues was enormous, unprecedented, unpredicted success...selling too well. Horrible position to be in, right?
* That's just a by-product of Betas not being Betas any more. Gamers aren't willing (with few exceptions) to do the testing required of a beta-tester, they're just there to play the game early, and for free.
* Ditto.
Look, apparently the producers are recognizing the transient nature of the gamers encourages a more fluid, short-term game play by design intent. Grab the cash quick, they won't be here six months from now.
You can grab a new gamer early and hang onto him for a good while; but where are the new gamers going to come from? That not sustainable. But vets seem to (once they leave their First Love) to become enormously transient, while they move from game to game seeking to recapture the magic.
It's possible that they're listening too much to the lessons learned by their console divisions. It's possible that gamers are just too bloody negative for any game to every hugely succeed, ever again. It's possible that we've got a heterodyne effect here--a feedback loop. Developers looking for the next WoW, seeing game after game fail to live up to that, resulting in shortened expectations (from the company) which produces more failures (from a gamer POV), resulting in shortened expectations (from the company) etc.
The upshot is that if you compare MMO development to single player game or multiplayer game development, it seems like the MMO developers produce lower quality products, with fewer features, longer development cycles and a lot more bug fixes.
Now, ignoring the exponentially larger amount of work that goes into an MMO, because the general gaming public neither knows nor cares about that additional work; why does the general gaming public seem more forgiving towards the flaws of MMOs?
I think it's because MMOs offer an experience that just isn't available in other games. Running around in a virtual world with other people doing stuff around you. This is something that is missing from every other type of game, and it's something that people miss when they don't have it. Players are willing to put up with more to get that feeling.
What do you think?
OP for sake of discussions like this, I suggest in the future you separate "BUGS" from "GAME DESIGN" when talking about quality. Because most people replying with the excuse of MMOs being harder to develop will be using it to defend the bug issues, not the game design flaws of the MMO development.
my opinion, ignoring bugs of course, MMO developers have flawed game designs. That's why most MMO fail.
Originally posted by QuirhidMMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other. For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial."...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
From a tech standpoint they are more complex. When it comes to design they have rather different design goals. You must take other players into account in your design. Its why Skyrim with a bunch of other people around just does not make sense. Merely making a game "fun" is not enough if that game is not fun with other people. I agree that "unimaginable complexity" is absurd, but so is comparing a single player game to an mmo. Its like comparing masturbation to sex, they are similar in some respecs, but really are not comparable.
Just saying something isn't comparable doesn't make them not comparable. Neither does using bad analogies, however amusing they may be.
Compare the questing in Skyrim to the questing in SWToR. One or the other will score more points with players.
Compare the PvP offered in League of Legends with the PvP offered in WoW or GW2. One or the other will score more points with the players.
Compare the story in Mass Effect 1 or 2 to the story told in The Secret World or SWToR. One or the other will score more points with the players.
Saying two things can't be compared is a cop out.
A game is nota set of individual features, its the sum of its parts. You cant compare the story of an mmo and a single player game because of the way each type of game interacts with the rest of features. Also again...this are very subjective matters.
The only way you could compare quality of two games is if you had a chart with how much money was spent on each game and how it was used in it....imho.
Actually, in many MMOs the story acknowledges the personal progress more then it does in single player RPGs. The all-mighty arch-mage, war hero, general of the empire and so on player will still receive "kill 10 rats" quests in Skyrim, whereas you usually end fighting legendary monsters by level 10 in MMOs.
Dragon Age was a bit more personalized, and Mass Effect took it another step, but still, after the first conversation after having saved another planet people would still go back to like nothing happened.
Skyrim is either a particular bad or good example to compare single player RPGs with MMOs, as it neither has that dense story that *should* be in a RPG, nor has it long-term progression or interaction with other players. On the other hand, the vast landscape and the crafting have more in common with MMOs..
Also, of course you can compare any game with any other, or even with non-games. The problem isn't that one isn't an MMO, or that you compare apples with pears, but there is no universally accepted way to define the quality of entertainment. It boils down to whether it keeps someone entertained, or, as ArenaNet put it, "is it fun" - but that's not something that's universal, either.
Except maybe on the race toward photo-realism, i'm not sure if MMOs do have worse quality (there is a difference between using the newest features game engines and graphics cards can deliver, and being visually appealing, especially five, 10, 20 years later).
There are quite a lot of bad MMOs from a technical point of view, but most non-MMOs do have so many glaring bugs, too..and there are things that often are better with MMOs: The network code usually works, you can often adjust your UI, multi-language support without re-installing, some more.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
Why do we accept less compelling story from a fighter?
Why do we accept less character building from a fps?
Why do we accept less depth from a rts?
Why do we accept less visceral gameplay from a 4x?
They're different genres, with different expectations.
In the case of MMOs you have that as well as other limiting factors, such as being large scale multiplayer, persistent game world, and being primarily server based. There's a reason these games cost so much, take so long to make, and yet are inferior in most ways to single player games.
That being said there's plenty of room for improvement in this genre, it's simply lack of trying or lack of incentive TO try that prevents it.
Now, ignoring the exponentially larger amount of work that goes into an MMO, because the general gaming public neither knows nor cares about that additional work; why does the general gaming public seem more forgiving towards the flaws of MMOs?
I would change 'general gaming public' to 'MMO gamers' because the general gaming public doesn't put up with what MMOs deliver.
Yeah? What are your sources that support that "fact"?
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
A game is nota set of individual features, its the sum of its parts. You cant compare the story of an mmo and a single player game because of the way each type of game interacts with the rest of features. Also again...this are very subjective matters.
The only way you could compare quality of two games is if you had a chart with how much money was spent on each game and how it was used in it....imho.
Well you definitely can compare those things individually.
You just have to be willing to admit that games are experienced holistically, and that the overall design quality is based on the synergy of many systems interacting.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The upshot is that if you compare MMO development to single player game or multiplayer game development, it seems like the MMO developers produce lower quality products, with fewer features, longer development cycles and a lot more bug fixes.
Uh, no they don't. MMOs have a huge amount of features and content.
Let's compare two recent high-profile games. Skyrim is probably the largest mainstream modern SP RPG on the market. It's ~41 square km. People have calculated that vanilla Guild Wars 2 was roughly 100 square km. Unlike Skyrim, GW2 has multiplayer, social features, a semblance of class balance, hundreds of different skills and lots of different enemy types. It has bosses, too, most of which are better than the one boss copy-pasted all over Skyrim.
Actually, the only feature Skyrim, a SP "sandbox" has that most MMOs don't have nowadays is player housing, but it's much easier to make in a SP game. Skyrim is also full of bugs, but people don't mind them as much in SP games.
That's Skyrim, currently the largest mainstream SP RPG, compared to a relatively simple MMO like GW2. If we took another SP like like CoD... how many features CoD has? "Run forward", "shoot" and "watch explosions"? Yeah, not much of a contest.
I'm surprised you haven't figured this out yet, but quality also matters, not quantity. And are we supposed to take your final comments on FPS gameplay seriously?
What quality? If we take another look at Skyrim, most of its landmass is completely empty and most of its dungeons are same-ish and populated by bandits or draugr. Most of its quests are simple "go there, kill that" quests without branching storylines. Its writing is mediocre at best. On the other hand, there are games like The Witcher 2, with high-quality quests, solid writing and hand-made environment, but they only provide less than 40 hours of content.
As for my comments on CoD (not FPS gameplay), yes, it's pretty much that simple. CoD's single-player campaigns are utter crap and its MP component barely changes between titles. There are better shooters out there, of course, but CoD is what people play and - I suppose - like.
There are some SP games with plenty of complex systems, such as Wizardry 8, but people tend to ignore them and favor the next shiny thing with lots of hype.
Even implementing a feature in a single player game and then implementing the "same" feature in an MMORPG can easily be vastly harder to do in the latter.
Let's suppose that you want to implement a kill ten rats quest, for example. In a single player game, this is easy enough to do. You make rats spawn when a player gets moderately close, and then you count when they die. When ten rats die, the quest is completed.
Now let's suppose that you want to do the same in an MMORPG, and in an open area of the world rather than a private instance. You can't just have rats spawn when the player gets kind of close. Otherwise, you could be fighting rats and then have a bunch more spawn on top of you when someone else comes by. But you can't make it so that rats only spawn for the first player to come close, or else he could kill them all and stay there and make it impossible for anyone else to do the quest.
You know the solution to this, of course: you make rats spawn on their own timers regardless of which players are around. But then you have to keep track of mobs all over a server. You get the problem of rats spawning on top of you--sometimes unexpectedly if someone had killed them and you didn't realize that they were there. Keeping track of when to make various mobs spawn and having to track mobs all across the game world at all times rather than just the area the player is in adds some complexity.
And then there's still the question of how fast rats should respawn. Make them respawn too fast and players can quickly get overwhelmed by being attacked by respawning rats and the quest is unreasonably difficult. Make rats respawn too slowly and players spend a good chunk of their time standing around waiting for rats to respawn, which isn't fun. The ideal rate at which rats respawn should depend on how densely populated your game world is.
But the population density of a given zone varies wildly. During peak times, you have far more players online than in the middle of the night. As a game has been out for a while, you end up with a higher proportion of your players in higher level areas, leaving lower level areas far less populated than they used to be. If players discover that farming rats gives 5% better loot than same-level alternatives, you may end up with vastly more players in that particular area than if farming rats gave 5% worse loot than the alternatives.
In an MMORPG, there's also the issue of who killed the rats. Surely the kill ten rats quest shouldn't be completed if you wait in town for ten rats to die somewhere on the server. But what if you do half of the damage to kill a rat? Should you get credit for killing it? How about 10% of the damage? 90%? Should it matter if you did the first hit?
What if other damage was done by someone else in your group? If you're standing right next to him, maybe you should get credit, but what if you're halfway across the map? Surely you don't want to make it so that five players can form a group, go quest independently, and get credit for five quests in the time they personally do only one.
And what if you're grouped with players of wildly different levels from your own? If you go to an area where mobs could one-shot you, but group with a higher level who can kill them, should you get massive loot for it? Should the higher level get normal loot as if he were solo, or should being in a group modify it? What if the group is for content of the level of the lower level player? Should having the higher level around heavily nerf the loot you get?
Furthermore, you can't just answer all of these questions with an eye toward saying, go do whatever you want and you'll get plenty of loot. If you make it possible to get massively more loot by doing some crazy grouping scenario, players will figure it out and heavily abuse it. In fact, players who want to just play the game will get mad at you for giving them far less loot than players who abuse the leveling system by doing something stupid and not fun.
And that's just for a kill ten rats quest, which is relatively easy to do and a staple of MMORPG design. If you want to do something more complicated, the complexity only goes up from there.
Ofcourse there's always an ad hoc way to do things and the smart way to do things. Comparing how things should work in an MMO to an ad hoc solution is not fair.
But you forget what single player games can do without the limitations MMOs have. They can do, hit detection client-side, path finding, advanced AI, collision detection, physics... There's all this stuff that adds plenty of complexity which are largely a no-no for MMOs, because they are very resource intesive.
Single player games can do more than MMOs. They should do more. And if they do more, the technical challenges are comparable, no?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
What quality? If we take another look at Skyrim, most of its landmass is completely empty and most of its dungeons are same-ish and populated by bandits or draugr. Most of its quests are simple "go there, kill that" quests without branching storylines. Its writing is mediocre at best. On the other hand, there are games like The Witcher 2, with high-quality quests, solid writing and hand-made environment, but they only provide less than 40 hours of content.
As for my comments on CoD (not FPS gameplay), yes, it's pretty much that simple. CoD's single-player campaigns are utter crap and its MP component barely changes between titles. There are better shooters out there, of course, but CoD is what people play and - I suppose - like.
There are some SP games with plenty of complex systems, such as Wizardry 8, but people tend to ignore them and favor the next shiny thing with lots of hype.
Which CoD? I admit they are riding on their success from CoD: Modern Warfare still, but CoD has had very solid campaigns compared to other FPSs. It is a solid game, very high level of polish and well-thought-out multiplayer. Writing has took a nose-dive since Black Ops tho.
Complexity is not the same as depth. A game doesn't have to be complicated in order to be deep or entertaining. People just might not care what Wizardry 8 has to offer. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
All mmos suck, the corporations are just out to spoil our fun, the 'next generation' players are just inherently inferior, the 'previous genation' games were just better, mmos are doooomed. Familiar topics?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
MMO's are faaar more complex than SP games. How do we know that? Well they take longer to make, cost faaar more if you want ti to be polished and you need 2 or 3 times as many devs to make a triple a mmo. The argument that mmo devs are less skilled that's why it takes them longer to make games is bs. Just go and read some devs interviews and basically all agree that making an mmo is the hardest task you can get in gaming industry. B/c of that and the limitation of the platform (eg you have to think about an expierience of thousands of players and not only 1 at a time) people are more forgiving when it comes to polish. MMO's are usually more complex but less polished games.
Comments
I might be wrong here but this topic is about quality which has little relation to fun. A game can be of VERY low quality and you can still have a blast with it. You can have all the fun in the world and what you enjoy can be of low quality.
From an objective point of view you cant compare genres of entertainment to each other, but yes, you can compare them in the amount of fun they give to you but thats too subjective for this topic i think.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
MMOs are games, Iselin. They can share much the same code, same assets, same developers, overlapping target audience... They teach game design by assigning students to develop board/card games. And you can certainly compare games and their similarities with each other.
For example, how lame duck situation should be avoided in all games and sports. MMOs are not on a pedestial.
"...complexities unimaginable in single player games..." No one in the industry would make a comment like that. Not only that but you're misquoting Quiz.
Yes, MMOs suffer from certain limitations, but by no means does this result in "unimaginable complexity". If anything, those limitations are holding them back, and if there is any genius in MMO design, it is precisely how to best cope with those limitations - make the best of what you got.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
From a tech standpoint they are more complex. When it comes to design they have rather different design goals. You must take other players into account in your design. Its why Skyrim with a bunch of other people around just does not make sense. Merely making a game "fun" is not enough if that game is not fun with other people. I agree that "unimaginable complexity" is absurd, but so is comparing a single player game to an mmo. Its like comparing masturbation to sex, they are similar in some respecs, but really are not comparable.
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
Give me a break. Maybe you can tell us what factors in video games determine your subjective assessment of quality.
Is Astral Diamond duping a consideration? How about log-in queues? Is "phasing" a good or bad thing to you? How about the ability to handle 1000 players in the same area? Is the crafting in single player games better? Does it actually exists in many of them other than TES games? How is open world PvP working out in singe player games? How do you feel about single player end games? Are the raids in single player RPGs challenging enough for you? ...and so on... and so on... If you look at the most often cited reasons why MMO x or MMO y sucks or failed, you'll quickly see that 99.9% of them are related to their MMO nature.
It's silly and contrived to attempt to pass any kind of quality judgment on MMOs vs. their single player counterparts.
Yes they are all video games... and so are Mario World and Dance Dance Revolution.
And yes, people in the industry do say this all the time when referring to the thoughtless gamer's inability to understand why MMOs have more "issues" than single player games. Single player is easy. I have heard it with my own ears more than once.
As to "misquoting Quiz" ...did you see quotation marks in my statement that paraphrased his? Did he call me on it?
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Even implementing a feature in a single player game and then implementing the "same" feature in an MMORPG can easily be vastly harder to do in the latter.
Let's suppose that you want to implement a kill ten rats quest, for example. In a single player game, this is easy enough to do. You make rats spawn when a player gets moderately close, and then you count when they die. When ten rats die, the quest is completed.
Now let's suppose that you want to do the same in an MMORPG, and in an open area of the world rather than a private instance. You can't just have rats spawn when the player gets kind of close. Otherwise, you could be fighting rats and then have a bunch more spawn on top of you when someone else comes by. But you can't make it so that rats only spawn for the first player to come close, or else he could kill them all and stay there and make it impossible for anyone else to do the quest.
You know the solution to this, of course: you make rats spawn on their own timers regardless of which players are around. But then you have to keep track of mobs all over a server. You get the problem of rats spawning on top of you--sometimes unexpectedly if someone had killed them and you didn't realize that they were there. Keeping track of when to make various mobs spawn and having to track mobs all across the game world at all times rather than just the area the player is in adds some complexity.
And then there's still the question of how fast rats should respawn. Make them respawn too fast and players can quickly get overwhelmed by being attacked by respawning rats and the quest is unreasonably difficult. Make rats respawn too slowly and players spend a good chunk of their time standing around waiting for rats to respawn, which isn't fun. The ideal rate at which rats respawn should depend on how densely populated your game world is.
But the population density of a given zone varies wildly. During peak times, you have far more players online than in the middle of the night. As a game has been out for a while, you end up with a higher proportion of your players in higher level areas, leaving lower level areas far less populated than they used to be. If players discover that farming rats gives 5% better loot than same-level alternatives, you may end up with vastly more players in that particular area than if farming rats gave 5% worse loot than the alternatives.
In an MMORPG, there's also the issue of who killed the rats. Surely the kill ten rats quest shouldn't be completed if you wait in town for ten rats to die somewhere on the server. But what if you do half of the damage to kill a rat? Should you get credit for killing it? How about 10% of the damage? 90%? Should it matter if you did the first hit?
What if other damage was done by someone else in your group? If you're standing right next to him, maybe you should get credit, but what if you're halfway across the map? Surely you don't want to make it so that five players can form a group, go quest independently, and get credit for five quests in the time they personally do only one.
And what if you're grouped with players of wildly different levels from your own? If you go to an area where mobs could one-shot you, but group with a higher level who can kill them, should you get massive loot for it? Should the higher level get normal loot as if he were solo, or should being in a group modify it? What if the group is for content of the level of the lower level player? Should having the higher level around heavily nerf the loot you get?
Furthermore, you can't just answer all of these questions with an eye toward saying, go do whatever you want and you'll get plenty of loot. If you make it possible to get massively more loot by doing some crazy grouping scenario, players will figure it out and heavily abuse it. In fact, players who want to just play the game will get mad at you for giving them far less loot than players who abuse the leveling system by doing something stupid and not fun.
And that's just for a kill ten rats quest, which is relatively easy to do and a staple of MMORPG design. If you want to do something more complicated, the complexity only goes up from there.
Great post, and I'm going to have to put the last bit in my sig
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
The problem seems to lie with certain gamers (frequent repeaters) who apparently view themselves as the Voice of the Resistance.
Or are they just addicted to the drama?
Of course some of them are more effective at raising the rabble to revolt than others, that's the nature of demagogues.
Just saying something isn't comparable doesn't make them not comparable. Neither does using bad analogies, however amusing they may be.
Compare the questing in Skyrim to the questing in SWToR. One or the other will score more points with players.
Compare the PvP offered in League of Legends with the PvP offered in WoW or GW2. One or the other will score more points with the players.
Compare the story in Mass Effect 1 or 2 to the story told in The Secret World or SWToR. One or the other will score more points with the players.
Saying two things can't be compared is a cop out.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Agreed. It's the long time MMO players that accept lower quality products. This behavior extends to an extreme degree especially when one takes into consideration how they select their games. If anything, F2P has saved the entrenched MMO gamer from themselves as they had long since stopped comparative shopping among the pricepoint-bound subscription games. With F2P they have embarked on the logical and ironic quest to discern what they will be getting for their money with each title.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I'm not sure what other people do with their threads. If I notice something or see people talking about something, I'll start a thread on that subject. I'll try to reference my source material if possible. Sometimes what I post seems to be the start of a coherent discussion, sometimes it's just a mess and other times they just fade away quietly. :-)
I've seen it posted several times over the years about how people put up with things in MMOs that they wouldn't put up with in single player game releases. What I've noticed is the following:
* MMOs seem to get pushed out the door too soon, with the expectation that they'll get finished later.
* MMOs release with a "beta", but nothing changes from the "beta" to the "live" release. I can't think of many, if any single player games that have done this.
* Recently, MMOs have started in "beta" with live cash shops, where players are encouraged to spend money.
I'm sure other people can come up with some other examples. I wanted to stick to the general quality and feature lists of the games though, since it's fairly subjective, and not obvious. I can subjectively say the questing in Skyrim beats the socks off of most MMOs and that the story in Mass Effect 1 beats the socks off of most, if not all MMOs, but is inferior questing and story telling something MMO players are putting up with, or something that doesn't matter because they are getting something else that's somehow more valuable?
** ** **
Also possible, is my subjective view just wrong?
What I don't accept is people saying you can't compare MMOs with single player RPGs. That's just a dodge.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
* Yes, they do. But that's the nature of the product, orders of magnitude more complex than the same game as a single-player.
If WoW had sat on the shelf for six more months (Blizzard somehow had a psychic message telling them ("Buy every piece of server hardware your manufacturer can make until we tell you to stop")), it would perhaps had a smoother launch.
Yet despite those (almost legendary now) road bumps, what was creating their issues was enormous, unprecedented, unpredicted success...selling too well. Horrible position to be in, right?
* That's just a by-product of Betas not being Betas any more. Gamers aren't willing (with few exceptions) to do the testing required of a beta-tester, they're just there to play the game early, and for free.
* Ditto.
Look, apparently the producers are recognizing the transient nature of the gamers encourages a more fluid, short-term game play by design intent. Grab the cash quick, they won't be here six months from now.
You can grab a new gamer early and hang onto him for a good while; but where are the new gamers going to come from? That not sustainable. But vets seem to (once they leave their First Love) to become enormously transient, while they move from game to game seeking to recapture the magic.
It's possible that they're listening too much to the lessons learned by their console divisions. It's possible that gamers are just too bloody negative for any game to every hugely succeed, ever again. It's possible that we've got a heterodyne effect here--a feedback loop. Developers looking for the next WoW, seeing game after game fail to live up to that, resulting in shortened expectations (from the company) which produces more failures (from a gamer POV), resulting in shortened expectations (from the company) etc.
OP for sake of discussions like this, I suggest in the future you separate "BUGS" from "GAME DESIGN" when talking about quality. Because most people replying with the excuse of MMOs being harder to develop will be using it to defend the bug issues, not the game design flaws of the MMO development.
my opinion, ignoring bugs of course, MMO developers have flawed game designs. That's why most MMO fail.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Perhaps. But "your opinion" just leads directly to appeal to authority without passing "Go", right?
No better or worse than BillyJoeBob's (IQ 72) opinion, until we start fanning out the degrees and posturing for forum cred.
A game is nota set of individual features, its the sum of its parts. You cant compare the story of an mmo and a single player game because of the way each type of game interacts with the rest of features. Also again...this are very subjective matters.
The only way you could compare quality of two games is if you had a chart with how much money was spent on each game and how it was used in it....imho.
Actually, in many MMOs the story acknowledges the personal progress more then it does in single player RPGs. The all-mighty arch-mage, war hero, general of the empire and so on player will still receive "kill 10 rats" quests in Skyrim, whereas you usually end fighting legendary monsters by level 10 in MMOs.
Dragon Age was a bit more personalized, and Mass Effect took it another step, but still, after the first conversation after having saved another planet people would still go back to like nothing happened.
Skyrim is either a particular bad or good example to compare single player RPGs with MMOs, as it neither has that dense story that *should* be in a RPG, nor has it long-term progression or interaction with other players. On the other hand, the vast landscape and the crafting have more in common with MMOs..
Also, of course you can compare any game with any other, or even with non-games. The problem isn't that one isn't an MMO, or that you compare apples with pears, but there is no universally accepted way to define the quality of entertainment. It boils down to whether it keeps someone entertained, or, as ArenaNet put it, "is it fun" - but that's not something that's universal, either.
Except maybe on the race toward photo-realism, i'm not sure if MMOs do have worse quality (there is a difference between using the newest features game engines and graphics cards can deliver, and being visually appealing, especially five, 10, 20 years later).
There are quite a lot of bad MMOs from a technical point of view, but most non-MMOs do have so many glaring bugs, too..and there are things that often are better with MMOs: The network code usually works, you can often adjust your UI, multi-language support without re-installing, some more.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
Why do we accept less compelling story from a fighter?
Why do we accept less character building from a fps?
Why do we accept less depth from a rts?
Why do we accept less visceral gameplay from a 4x?
They're different genres, with different expectations.
In the case of MMOs you have that as well as other limiting factors, such as being large scale multiplayer, persistent game world, and being primarily server based. There's a reason these games cost so much, take so long to make, and yet are inferior in most ways to single player games.
That being said there's plenty of room for improvement in this genre, it's simply lack of trying or lack of incentive TO try that prevents it.
Yeah? What are your sources that support that "fact"?
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Well you definitely can compare those things individually.
You just have to be willing to admit that games are experienced holistically, and that the overall design quality is based on the synergy of many systems interacting.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
What quality? If we take another look at Skyrim, most of its landmass is completely empty and most of its dungeons are same-ish and populated by bandits or draugr. Most of its quests are simple "go there, kill that" quests without branching storylines. Its writing is mediocre at best. On the other hand, there are games like The Witcher 2, with high-quality quests, solid writing and hand-made environment, but they only provide less than 40 hours of content.
As for my comments on CoD (not FPS gameplay), yes, it's pretty much that simple. CoD's single-player campaigns are utter crap and its MP component barely changes between titles. There are better shooters out there, of course, but CoD is what people play and - I suppose - like.
There are some SP games with plenty of complex systems, such as Wizardry 8, but people tend to ignore them and favor the next shiny thing with lots of hype.
Ofcourse there's always an ad hoc way to do things and the smart way to do things. Comparing how things should work in an MMO to an ad hoc solution is not fair.
But you forget what single player games can do without the limitations MMOs have. They can do, hit detection client-side, path finding, advanced AI, collision detection, physics... There's all this stuff that adds plenty of complexity which are largely a no-no for MMOs, because they are very resource intesive.
Single player games can do more than MMOs. They should do more. And if they do more, the technical challenges are comparable, no?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Which CoD? I admit they are riding on their success from CoD: Modern Warfare still, but CoD has had very solid campaigns compared to other FPSs. It is a solid game, very high level of polish and well-thought-out multiplayer. Writing has took a nose-dive since Black Ops tho.
Complexity is not the same as depth. A game doesn't have to be complicated in order to be deep or entertaining. People just might not care what Wizardry 8 has to offer. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
A better question might be:
Why do we assume common gripes that take place ad nauseam in our little microcosm of the gaming universe are Huge Trends in the gaming world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
All mmos suck, the corporations are just out to spoil our fun, the 'next generation' players are just inherently inferior, the 'previous genation' games were just better, mmos are doooomed. Familiar topics?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.