Why dont most MMOs allow players to play "monster races"?

Question2

Look at pretty much every MMO out there. Maybe 95% or more are simply human/elves/dwarves and the standard fanstasy races. Cyborgs/Robots of some kind, sure. Some MMOs have beastfolk races. Yet, pretty much no MMO will let you play traditional monster races like undead. The ones that do basically turn them into a race that plays "pretty much like humans except you are technically undead". WoW comes to mind for this. Beastfolk races where you play as a human with fur also annoy me.

It just seems like a really unexplored niche. Im sure there are no shortage of players who would love to play an actual vampire, think something along the lines of what the world of darkness MMO would have been like before CCP's incompetence killed it (just read up on that story if you want to know what poor project management is). Humans/Elves/Dwarves have been way overdone and I cant remember the last time I saw an actual creative attempt at them.

You don't need to make quest lines involving killing helpless women and children anymore than you need to make quests involving killing helpless orc babies. I mean, look at the city of heroes villains expansions, you had the chance to play a villain but it wasnt about recreating hitler or anything over the top stupid. With city of heroes, you had the chance to play the stereotypical hero but the expansion also let people play the "bad guys" which almost never happens. There was an obvious niche there which they exploited.

But with most MMOs its just the standard fantasy races fighting some ancient evil (or each other). I cant think of any where you actually get to play the monsters instead of "humans who are evil" or "humans who are evil and with green skin". Why is nobody exploiting this niche?

I'm specifically excluding simple text based MUDs, RPG maker, etc from this. Think of something at least on the scale of something like BDO, Tera, Aion, etc.

Quizzical

There are a number of reasons.  One of them is that if all of the playable races are similar shapes, then they can share clothing models, which makes it practical for all races to have a lot of clothing options available.  A race that is different enough from all others to not be able to share clothing models with them would either be incredibly expensive to produce many custom models for just that race or else have to have few clothing options available.  If you're okay with all characters of a given race looking exactly the same up to colors and some size sliders, then having a greater variety in playable races is far more practical.

Viper482

If you ventured into WoW lore you would see the Forsaken are one of the most unique and interesting races in the game with very rich roleplay opportunities. 

Wizardry

Well op sadly it would take a lot of writing to explain it in full detail.
First of all i have experienced every type of game design out there,i have seen how gamer's play these games and there is definitely a common trend in every game.

Now that i got that out of the way,i can tell you that such a game exists,players don't care.They see an early gimmick but if there is not some shiny rewards at the end of the rainbow,nobody cares.So the problem is not always the developer,it is usually the gamer's.
Too many players are NOT mmorpg gamer's,they want some superficial game that has nothing to do with role playing nor an MMO environment and immersion,they seem to not care one bit.

What is that trend?RACING to end level,then expecting Raids to attain the best gear,99% of the players couldn't care less about anything else.Then what happens is if the developer sees that nobody cares,they stop developing good content ideas.

Pancrase:a cool design that allows players to capture creatures in the world and use them to fight in an arena,nobody cares.

Play as the mobs?Yep and with a decent in depth design,nobody cares.They are all off running end game stuff going for that best gear,they couldn't care less about immersion or a role playing game.

Moblin maze mongers:a System whereby you can design the dungeon to some extent,it even has some rewards in the system,but guess what ,nobody cares because the end game gear is still the most desirable option.

So why would a developer waste time and resources to create lots of content and systems if all players care about is Raiding for end game loot?It is all about profits so if the majority are shallow minded gamer's ,this si exactly what we will keep getting.

4507

Probably because for every monster race they make playable, they lose content opportunity - if vampires, for example are playable, they can't have superhuman strength and agility, night vision, a powerful bite (unarmed melee attack), etc. That eliminates several raid, quest and mob opportunities to only produce a very humanoid race that would likely play very similarly to humans for balance reasons anyway. 

Humans, dwarves and elves are almost never enemies in MMOs, so from a design standpoint, making them playable doesn't remove any future content opportunities.

LynxJSA

Quiz nailed it. 

Theocritus

I've played many that let you play the bad guys (Orcs, Goblins, Cyborgs, etc) but msot arent going to let you play spiders, scorpions, or other monster types because it would be a pain to have to design all those into gameplay, unless its a MUD.

Kabulozo

Lineage Eternal is coming with a class system similar to a MOBA, you don't have a generic race-class but you can play one of the 20+ heros available. It has its advantages and drawbacks. I'm more worried about the world pvp freedom because it looks like to have too much instances.

ste2000

Quizzical said:

There are a number of reasons.  One of them is that if all of the playable races are similar shapes, then they can share clothing models, which makes it practical for all races to have a lot of clothing options available.  A race that is different enough from all others to not be able to share clothing models with them would either be incredibly expensive to produce many custom models for just that race or else have to have few clothing options available.  If you're okay with all characters of a given race looking exactly the same up to colors and some size sliders, then having a greater variety in playable races is far more practical.

That's pretty much it.
Though there is one game with a good variety of non human player characters.......butthen again, they had the budget.



Pretty much the whole Horde line up is made of "Monster" Races (apart for the Blood Elves).
Maybe that's another reason why WoW is/was so popular.
I certainly was an Horde man, never played Alliance.

Bloodaxes

ste2000 said:

Quizzical said:

There are a number of reasons.  One of them is that if all of the playable races are similar shapes, then they can share clothing models, which makes it practical for all races to have a lot of clothing options available.  A race that is different enough from all others to not be able to share clothing models with them would either be incredibly expensive to produce many custom models for just that race or else have to have few clothing options available.  If you're okay with all characters of a given race looking exactly the same up to colors and some size sliders, then having a greater variety in playable races is far more practical.

That's pretty much it.
Though there is one game with a good variety of non human player characters.......butthen again, they had the budget.



Pretty much the whole Horde line up is made of "Monster" Races (apart for the Blood Elves).
Maybe that's another reason why WoW is/was so popular.
I certainly was an Horde man, never played Alliance.

Don't forget the exclusive emotes based on race too.

I liked the laugh (Evil laugh) and air guitar dance of the undead.

Quizzical

ste2000 said:

Quizzical said:

There are a number of reasons.  One of them is that if all of the playable races are similar shapes, then they can share clothing models, which makes it practical for all races to have a lot of clothing options available.  A race that is different enough from all others to not be able to share clothing models with them would either be incredibly expensive to produce many custom models for just that race or else have to have few clothing options available.  If you're okay with all characters of a given race looking exactly the same up to colors and some size sliders, then having a greater variety in playable races is far more practical.

That's pretty much it.
Though there is one game with a good variety of non human player characters.......butthen again, they had the budget.



Pretty much the whole Horde line up is made of "Monster" Races (apart for the Blood Elves).
Maybe that's another reason why WoW is/was so popular.
I certainly was an Horde man, never played Alliance.

A lot depends on how far from human the races are.  All of the WoW races have two arms, two legs, and one head, and in roughly the same positions relative to each other.  WoW can and does have all of the different races share the same armor models.  If you want four arms instead of two, or four or six legs, or slithering on a tail instead of legs, that's much harder to do if you want a lot of clothing options for each race to all look decent.

ilovespoons

Take a look at Shadowbane. You could of been a Centaur! All WoW races are humans, some are just bigger and more buffed out. It's all humanoid with more hair. They bend the legs and add at tail.

I don't see 4 legs, Winged race that can fly or anything that makes any race different from the next in WoW. Every race, is two legs, two eyes so on.. They bend the legs and add at tail.

TheJoda

EQ had trolls and ogers, those was quite large in size compared to some of the rest.

Quizzical

Another issue is that bipeds are the easiest thing to animate and have it look right, at least apart from flying creatures that don't touch the ground at all.  Most playable races in most games have two legs and have the feet naturally stand pretty close to each other, so that the convex hull of where the creature contacts the ground is quite small.  With more legs spread out more, or slithering on a tail that touches the ground in a large area, or wheels spread out like a car, that convex hull would be much larger.

The problem with a large area of ground contact is that it's much harder to make that contact occur near what looks like the surface of the ground.  This becomes a problem on rugged or sloped terrain, as the simplest way to animate creatures is to allow feet to either dangle in the air or poke into the ground.  With a small convex hull of ground contact, feet either come close to the ground or go not very far into it.  An eight-legged spider could easily have two feet poke so far into the ground that the knees are underground, while two other feet don't come come within a foot (as in 12 inches) of the ground.

You might think that's a big problem with monsters that you fight against, too, but that's much easier to mitigate.  Awkward to animate races can be arbitrarily set to only exist in portions of the game world where the ground is fairly flat, so that it doesn't get too bad.  Fish that swim underwater can exist only underwater, and then how they'd flop around if on land is irrelevant.  Players have to be able to go everywhere, and so playable races have to look decent everywhere.

Aeander

Difficult to animate and extremely difficult to design armor for. Monster races drastically limit a game's armor pool and require a specialized animation set for every skill.

Moirae

There are logistics like animation design, armor design, etc. But there is also something else to it. People have an easy time relating to anything that doesn't look at least remotely like us to enemy and relegating them to "stupid". It's automatic. Just look at all these movies about aliens. The only ones we feel sympathy for are those that look relatively like us with slight differences. The enemies are always monstrous and frightening. 

SomeHuman

LOTRO had an area where you'd play as a mob; I thought it was fun.  I imagine if that became popular enough, they would have expanded it over the years.  Any LOTRO players out there know if it is still around?

Dullahan

Besides the issues with armor assets and animations, most monster races don't really have the capacity for customization. People want to make characters they can give a unique appearance to. I guess you could add a few crooked teeth to your wolf creature or different colors of skin to your frog, but it's kind of limited.

I actually wonder how this might effect Pantheon with their gnomes which wear a mask. I suppose they will make it so you can customize your mask, but I'm afraid they are going to have a tough time allowing players to make them look unique.

Sweede

In everquest you can play as some kind of monster using npc's that transform you into another type of monster so you can go do low level stuff for instance.

tzaxagias

Mostly as they said its because of gear then its because of lore or the amount of time they would have to spend to create a whole new kind of character for example a warg in lotr creating unique gear and unique abilities would be really hard to make also there are class limitations and interactions with other characters and races 

Octagon7711

ESO did good with Vampire.  Anyone could become one at an early rank if they knew what to do.  It was a fun quest.  The only problem general quests didn't acknowledge you as a vampire or Werewolf and asked you to hunt them down because they were hated but didn't seem to notice your transformations.  Still if you love RP they can be fun to play.

observer

It's very difficult to create standard armor sets for non-humanoid races.  Take WoW for example, some armor textures look very stretched and the foot models have to be replaced entirely.  Now add every armor set to around 10 species, then you'll realize how much work needs to be done.  That engine is very old too, so it was relatively easier to get away with it, but very difficult in newer engines.

Not only that, but then it needs to be animated, rigged, textured, etc.

Po_gg

Rhoklaw said:

SomeHuman said:

LOTRO had an area where you'd play as a mob; I thought it was fun.  I imagine if that became popular enough, they would have expanded it over the years.  Any LOTRO players out there know if it is still around?

Yes, it is and the last time I played, you were able to make a spider, warg, several types of orcs and depending on quest rewards, you could unlock creatures such as the battle troll which was like an elite mob.

Yep, there was a similar (or more like the same, as in "why can't we play monsters") thread earlier, with the same posts (hard to animate, difficult on cosmetics, etc.) while there's LotRO's PvMP since almost a decade
Spiders (with tiny spider offsprings), wargs, orcs and Uruk-hai orcs, all with plenty of cosmetic options - sure you could still say the animation is choppy... :winky: Plus the time-limited troll play as well, as Rhoklaw said.

Question2 said:

With city of heroes, you had the chance to play the stereotypical hero but the expansion also let people play the "bad guys" which almost never happens.

I don't know from where you got that, CoV was really popular and if you look at favourite classes threads, Mastermind is almost always listed as one... And if you check the next Cryptic game (CO), it has even more "monster" options than LotRO, you can play anything from fishes to furries or robots or zombies or rodents or anything you can imagine. True, in CO's case Quizz's above mentioned theory is mostly fitting, you can't really differ from the 2 legs / 2 arms schematics, but you can miss one limb (or even the head ) if that's what you want.
And since CO has one of the most robust cosmetic systems out there, you can easily rule out the "would be hard to render the different cosmetics" theory. It can be done, if devs want it (or if their game is nicknamed as Costumes Online ).

Question2 said:

It just seems like a really unexplored niche. Im sure there are no shortage of players who would love to play an actual vampire,

I guess you're lucky enough for missing the (ill) chance of logging in into SL?

IsilithTehroth

Darkfall online has this where your point of view is altered when in first person because your character is either taller or shorter. They were suppose to add 4 legged run to mahirim but never did.

Loke666

Quizzical said:

There are a number of reasons.  One of them is that if all of the playable races are similar shapes, then they can share clothing models, which makes it practical for all races to have a lot of clothing options available.  A race that is different enough from all others to not be able to share clothing models with them would either be incredibly expensive to produce many custom models for just that race or else have to have few clothing options available.  If you're okay with all characters of a given race looking exactly the same up to colors and some size sliders, then having a greater variety in playable races is far more practical.

That and the "you are the hero" main story most MMOs had the last years. Adding an evil story means twice as much work.

And yeah, games with many weirder models have far less clothes and armors, look on EQ2. You can indeed play trolls and ogres there but most armors are the same with different colors, almost all mages wear the same pants robe.

Phry

Think the OP must have not played WoW, after all you can play as a variety of monster races there if you so wish, its called being a horde player.
In EQ1 for a time you could play as a mob, i had fun playing a wolf in the game, but it was something of a gimmick and your 'monster' play was over if you died, and i don't think they levelled up either.
MMO's have allowed players to choose 'monster' races for years, at least insofar as they fit within the lore of the game.