MMO Vs MPO

Cleverjack

I'm a massive MMO fan and for years its mainly what I've played. It was always great logging into your favorite toon and getting messages from your guild or people on your friend list and setting out on an adventure. The social interaction(for good or bad) added to the worth of the game(one of the reasons I am a massive advocate for pvp only servers in mmo's)

Back in my days of UO, SWG, Vanilla WoW so socially driven. Which added to the already amazing gameplay, because you had to coordinate with people, build a network. You couldn't get that with a MultiPlayer game  at the time cause it was just you in a room with ya friends or family. But now that has so changed because of the internet becoming so much more, and also for the recent crap mmo's that have come out this year.

I still am apart of a massive MMO group that started in SWTOR and those guys just made that game so special. yes SWTOR has its kinks but it was over looked by the fun of doing content with people you enjoyed. We all got ESO and even though we had a great social aspect(we were a big guild in the EP we deteriorated because the game was just bad. People enjoyed the group atmosphere so much that even though they didn't like the game they would still join us in TS to just chat. Even I a guild officer unsubbed to eso, and this got me realizing that no amount of great community can save a terrible gaming experience.

I started playing borderlands2 and was surprised when people joined my game and where talking to me and just playing and enjoying the content that was there. It wasn't a hundred players like it would be in an mmo but just a few people just bullshitting and having fun. The same can be said for Diablo 3, where you get a similar effect. I use to laugh at the who hub system of original GW and Phantasy Star and how they tried to pass that off as an MMO when it was clearly a MultiPlayer Online experience.

What made me even think of this is while watching an interview with the head of the studio that made borderlands 2 he was asked if they had any plans on making Borderlands a MMO, and the head of the studio asked, what does it mean for a game to be an MMO any more? Is it having a lot of people on your screen at once, or just being able to play a game online with other people regardless of the number.

Is there even really a difference any more, and if there are where exactly is our place in gaming. I've tried more Multiplayer games of late and when asked what games I typically play I call myself an mmo'er and the sound of disgust in some people's voices become really surprising.  Seems as though we've become the cesspool of gamers where as all those Multiplayer games where you just pick up and join content, and leave as you please seem to be a happier crowd. 

eldaris

"sound of disgust in peoples voices"....in borderlands ,a fps game... Maybe that disgust had more to do with the rpg part, some people think is cool to play cod or some other third rate fps but anything rpg makes you a nerd,same type of person was complaining on wildstar forums that a poster was making comments in character as a chua.If that's the case I hope multiplayer games get better and better and this kind of people stays there, I prefer to not meet them while playing mmorpgs since they are one of the main reasons community is so bad in recent games.
I could not care less about multiplayer games since the main reason I am interested in mmorpgs does not exist in multiplayer,massive worlds with hundreds or thousand of players.

Cleverjack

I was thinking about that also with MMo"s having the benefit of being a massive world with lots to explore and do other than quests, but that was back then with the good ole mmo's, now people  just play most mmo's as a single player game. at that point what's the point of calling it an mmo?

cyberpunkhobo

MMOs aren't designed to maximize the amount of time you spend having fun, but rather the amount of time you spend playing, period. The longer they can keep you around, the more money they're likely to make. And they do that quite well (for example, by inundating you with time sinks). People scoff at the "MMO gamer" label largely because they deplore how tolerant MMO gamers are of what they believe to be game design that is just not fun.

If you have a small group of people you regularly play with, I would almost always suggest you stick with co-op RPGs. But the bigger the group of people you are gaming with--or want to game with--gets, the smaller the list of games you can play with them becomes. And that's where MMOs come into the picture, promising to provide you and your sizable party with a virtual playground to explore.

Like you noted, however, more and more people are playing massively multiplayer games by themselves. And those players, like it or not, are shaping development decisions. So you end up with a genre that doesn't know what to make of itself; a genre where fewer and fewer elements are designed with group play in mind and where playing with others often means trivializing content that might otherwise be challenging if you just played by yourself.

The game you're looking for OP is probably being worked on right now by some indie dev studio, if there isn't something out already to suit your fancy. But don't expect a AAA title to be it.

andre369

Originally posted by Cleverjack
I was thinking about that also with MMo"s having the benefit of being a massive world with lots to explore and do other than quests, but that was back then with the good ole mmo's, now people  just play most mmo's as a single player game. at that point what's the point of calling it an mmo?

And people complain as soon as there is some sort of grouping required. Maybe it is time for developers to more clearly communicate that grouping is required? 

 

fivoroth

I ended up grouping more in games like D3 and Borderlands 2 more than in most MMOs. People also seemed to be more willing to chat. 

It is true that most people make fun of MMOs because of the amount of anti-fun elements in them. It's more important to keep you playing for hundreds upon hundreds of hours than to have fun.

Loke666

CORPGs are different than MMOs but they are often more group focus than the nowadays usually solofocused MMOs.

Playing only with your regular group of friends do have some advantages and can be a lot of fun. Played plenty of GW and some DDO together with more FPS based games with my friends. More strategical games as well.

The thing is that no matter what game you play the important thing is the people you play with. PUGing can be fun but tend to be pretty annoying no matter what type of game you play.

I wish there were more nice lan RPGs out there, getting some friends and a few cases of beer together and playing a weekend is really fun.