Cloud streaming and 5G won't make a bit of difference, as they're solutions to problems that MMORPGs and cell phones don't have.
You don't need very much bandwidth to make an MMORPG work. That's why there were MMORPGs back when most people were on dial-up. Even now, the initial download and later patching are the only things that take much bandwidth unless a developer decides to be sloppy with bandwidth because it doesn't matter. Transmitting the state of the world near a player to him in real time takes on the order of kilobytes per second, and is already scarcely more than a rounding error on a modern 4G phone.
Meanwhile, even cell phones have plenty of rendering power to implement nearly whatever game mechanics you want. A modern cell phone has hardware performance in the same ballpark as a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago. Unless you believe that the problem with games twelve years ago is that not much was happening because everyone was waiting for more powerful hardware, that's not the problem with phones today.
Rather, mobile gaming is heavily restricted by the form factor. You have a tiny screen, and not much in the way of input options. You could add more input options by tacking on a D-pad and some other buttons, but that's been done for more than 30 years and isn't popular today. Even then, you don't get anything remotely near a full-size keyboard and mouse. And neither 5G nor streaming will do anything to change that.
Cloud streaming and 5G won't make a bit of difference, as they're solutions to problems that MMORPGs and cell phones don't have.
You don't need very much bandwidth to make an MMORPG work. That's why there were MMORPGs back when most people were on dial-up. Even now, the initial download and later patching are the only things that take much bandwidth unless a developer decides to be sloppy with bandwidth because it doesn't matter. Transmitting the state of the world near a player to him in real time takes on the order of kilobytes per second, and is already scarcely more than a rounding error on a modern 4G phone.
Meanwhile, even cell phones have plenty of rendering power to implement nearly whatever game mechanics you want. A modern cell phone has hardware performance in the same ballpark as a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago. Unless you believe that the problem with games twelve years ago is that not much was happening because everyone was waiting for more powerful hardware, that's not the problem with phones today.
Rather, mobile gaming is heavily restricted by the form factor. You have a tiny screen, and not much in the way of input options. You could add more input options by tacking on a D-pad and some other buttons, but that's been done for more than 30 years and isn't popular today. Even then, you don't get anything remotely near a full-size keyboard and mouse. And neither 5G nor streaming will do anything to change that.
Kind of misrepresenting what you can do with streaming. I currently stream games, and I can play anything on maximum resolution at max graphics on any screen.
Mobile games can't do that. Most people can't afford 50-60 GBs of space for a game like GW2 or FFXIV to run on their phone or tablet. With game streaming, you don't need that at all. You have no storage, you have no graphics restrictions.
Mobile devices are much more powerful than they've ever been but you can't do everything on them that you can with a PC... Until now. I can play anything you can on my phone, tablet, PC, or just about anything my cloud app will run.
Absolutely allowing a better throughput, stability, and lower ping will help all games to be played anywhere, anytime.
The thought of playing an MMORPG on a mobile device is horrid. I know there are some "mmos" on mobile now, but still, not anything like the immersive worlds we are used to. I could not imagine the same immersive experience on such a small screen.
Meh -- it is the lowest common denominator and we are not it.
Always makes me feel like Abe Simpson:
"I used to be with it,
but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and
what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too."
Biggest issue I have is the limited controls of mobile games.
For me MMORPG means an RPG with lots of players and this means many possibilities for your character which needs a lot of buttons/commands.
What I believe could be possible to have a fight system like GW1 with limited skills and automatic move to target but still enough depth behind it (interupts, curses).
This is doable for mobile.
As for the life skills (non combat related stuff or long term buffs like levitation, under water breathing,...). They could be easy accessable on PC and hidden in a menue for mobile.
This way there is complexity paired with easy controls to allow mobile-pc cross play without creating those stale 4 button auto-play mmos we have now
So no, not in any way, shape, or form is the crowdfunding model unreliable. It's just that most MMORPG players have unrealstic expectations of how long something actually takes to develop and publish.
I'd have to respectfully disagree. Pathfinder didn't release, at least, in the way it was supposed to and wasn't playable.
Greedmonger was DOA.
SOTA was never what it was supposed to be.
City of Titans is in its second round of funding, with little more than a beta of the character creator released.
The Repopulation is running, but isn't populated at all, about 3 people in the past week.
Hex: Shards of Fate has 14 players, as recorded on steam (granted this one was ported to mobile so maybe it found a following there, but even their reddit is pretty barren.
There are some okay games that have kept going after their kickstarter campaign.
Crowfall is still kicking.
Temtem released (as early access) on steam and has gotten good reviews.
Ashes of Creation is supposedly still around, though they released a battle royale with microtransactions to keep going.
Camelot Unchained is working on a second game to continue production (purportedly).
Star Citizen has had its controversy with their endless funding, and nonstop wildly expensive ship costs.
Pantheon, as you may know, is still kicking and many of us here are looking forward to it.
What can we expect from a Kickstarter game? We don't know! Sounds unreliable to me.
I played Pathfinder the day of release for about 2 weeks straight. It's also one of the best CRPG available.
Odd to use one of the best examples of crowdfunding success as a "respectfully disagree.
Pathfinder as a best example of crowdfunding success? OMG its the poster child for failure. I HOPE you mean something other than Pathfinder Online...
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
So no, not in any way, shape, or form is the crowdfunding model unreliable. It's just that most MMORPG players have unrealstic expectations of how long something actually takes to develop and publish.
I'd have to respectfully disagree. Pathfinder didn't release, at least, in the way it was supposed to and wasn't playable.
Greedmonger was DOA.
SOTA was never what it was supposed to be.
City of Titans is in its second round of funding, with little more than a beta of the character creator released.
The Repopulation is running, but isn't populated at all, about 3 people in the past week.
Hex: Shards of Fate has 14 players, as recorded on steam (granted this one was ported to mobile so maybe it found a following there, but even their reddit is pretty barren.
There are some okay games that have kept going after their kickstarter campaign.
Crowfall is still kicking.
Temtem released (as early access) on steam and has gotten good reviews.
Ashes of Creation is supposedly still around, though they released a battle royale with microtransactions to keep going.
Camelot Unchained is working on a second game to continue production (purportedly).
Star Citizen has had its controversy with their endless funding, and nonstop wildly expensive ship costs.
Pantheon, as you may know, is still kicking and many of us here are looking forward to it.
What can we expect from a Kickstarter game? We don't know! Sounds unreliable to me.
I played Pathfinder the day of release for about 2 weeks straight. It's also one of the best CRPG available.
Odd to use one of the best examples of crowdfunding success as a "respectfully disagree.
Pathfinder as a best example of crowdfunding success? OMG its the poster child for failure. I HOPE you mean something other than Pathfinder Online...
Parhfinder Kingmaker, they were talking about two different Pathfinder games
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Finally an article that discusses mobile MMO something I've been waiting for on this site for a long time cause if we don't discuss it we can't figure it all out.
There are already a few "mobile sucks" comments in this thread as expected but we must push past the "success" barrier bias of mobile games because when people hate on mobile they are part of the time hating that they've been successful in wrangling the next generation of gamers from right under PC gaming's feet. They've done this in a few ways by providing the gaming experience to a generation on their phones which they've had since a very young age so they don't think anything of playing games for hours on them and convenience of being able to do that anywhere.
People who dislike mobile often complain about not being able to play on their PC and even if there is bluestacks which allows most mobile games to be played on pc that program is sometimes unreliable and feels kind of budget. With the hundreds of millions of players who play mobile a sizable percentage of them would probably want to play on their PC so why doesn't someone like Google buy Bluestacks. Instead of creating Stadia that has hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions of players Google could have bought Bluestacks, improved it, stuck the Google label on it and allowed the probably billion+ players who use their play store to play most android games on their PC. That would be a huge step forward for MMO's when you think about it.
When you compare what mobile MMO's offer vs PC MMO's the basic foundations are the same.
-Provide character progression
-Provide a world
-Provide a multiplayer experience
Those three basics are the same from classic MMO'S to mobile ones. The extras like monetization and everything else is where the complications start. With crowdfunded titles the dishonesty is they tried and are still trying to sell people ideas and concept art and things "they plan to do". There is no way to hold anyone accountable just with words on what they "plan to do" cause situations change and those changes in a court of law almost always favor the defense in modern times. I could go into detail more about it but it'll take too long. Mobile games created their product and released it and even though they are asking you for 100 bucks and not shy about it they aren't baiting you along for a decade and making money off your hope that some day you can play the game they promised. Mobile games provide you the full product for the most part minus microtransaction stuff WHEN YOU INSTALL IT.
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
The scourge that is mobile games are skewing every statistic. I would really appreciate it if we don't discuss MMORPGs and include them as evidence of anything except within their own category. Don't lump PC and Console MMORPGs with mobile games.
Finally an article that discusses mobile MMO something I've been waiting for on this site for a long time cause if we don't discuss it we can't figure it all out.
There are already a few "mobile sucks" comments in this thread as expected but we must push past the "success" barrier bias of mobile games because when people hate on mobile they are part of the time hating that they've been successful in wrangling the next generation of gamers from right under PC gaming's feet. They've done this in a few ways by providing the gaming experience to a generation on their phones which they've had since a very young age so they don't think anything of playing games for hours on them and convenience of being able to do that anywhere.
People who dislike mobile often complain about not being able to play on their PC and even if there is bluestacks which allows most mobile games to be played on pc that program is sometimes unreliable and feels kind of budget. With the hundreds of millions of players who play mobile a sizable percentage of them would probably want to play on their PC so why doesn't someone like Google buy Bluestacks. Instead of creating Stadia that has hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions of players Google could have bought Bluestacks, improved it, stuck the Google label on it and allowed the probably billion+ players who use their play store to play most android games on their PC. That would be a huge step forward for MMO's when you think about it.
When you compare what mobile MMO's offer vs PC MMO's the basic foundations are the same.
-Provide character progression
-Provide a world
-Provide a multiplayer experience
Those three basics are the same from classic MMO'S to mobile ones. The extras like monetization and everything else is where the complications start. With crowdfunded titles the dishonesty is they tried and are still trying to sell people ideas and concept art and things "they plan to do". There is no way to hold anyone accountable just with words on what they "plan to do" cause situations change and those changes in a court of law almost always favor the defense in modern times. I could go into detail more about it but it'll take too long. Mobile games created their product and released it and even though they are asking you for 100 bucks and not shy about it they aren't baiting you along for a decade and making money off your hope that some day you can play the game they promised. Mobile games provide you the full product for the most part minus microtransaction stuff WHEN YOU INSTALL IT.
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
yeh right 5G is the solution we will have great games and all the technology at our fingertips but we will die of radiation,lol
guess what Israel is the only country in the world that will not have 5G and their cell frequencies are also different than all other countries i wonder why?
original post was moronic from a paid douchebag!
Finally an article that discusses mobile MMO something I've been waiting for on this site for a long time cause if we don't discuss it we can't figure it all out.
There are already a few "mobile sucks" comments in this thread as expected but we must push past the "success" barrier bias of mobile games because when people hate on mobile they are part of the time hating that they've been successful in wrangling the next generation of gamers from right under PC gaming's feet. They've done this in a few ways by providing the gaming experience to a generation on their phones which they've had since a very young age so they don't think anything of playing games for hours on them and convenience of being able to do that anywhere.
People who dislike mobile often complain about not being able to play on their PC and even if there is bluestacks which allows most mobile games to be played on pc that program is sometimes unreliable and feels kind of budget. With the hundreds of millions of players who play mobile a sizable percentage of them would probably want to play on their PC so why doesn't someone like Google buy Bluestacks. Instead of creating Stadia that has hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions of players Google could have bought Bluestacks, improved it, stuck the Google label on it and allowed the probably billion+ players who use their play store to play most android games on their PC. That would be a huge step forward for MMO's when you think about it.
When you compare what mobile MMO's offer vs PC MMO's the basic foundations are the same.
-Provide character progression
-Provide a world
-Provide a multiplayer experience
Those three basics are the same from classic MMO'S to mobile ones. The extras like monetization and everything else is where the complications start. With crowdfunded titles the dishonesty is they tried and are still trying to sell people ideas and concept art and things "they plan to do". There is no way to hold anyone accountable just with words on what they "plan to do" cause situations change and those changes in a court of law almost always favor the defense in modern times. I could go into detail more about it but it'll take too long. Mobile games created their product and released it and even though they are asking you for 100 bucks and not shy about it they aren't baiting you along for a decade and making money off your hope that some day you can play the game they promised. Mobile games provide you the full product for the most part minus microtransaction stuff WHEN YOU INSTALL IT.
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
Yes, yes, yes to both of these! MMOs have always been about being immersed into another world, stepping into that alternate level of reality. Mobile is going backward. VR would be a giant leap forward, especially as it advances.
Finally an article that discusses mobile MMO something I've been waiting for on this site for a long time cause if we don't discuss it we can't figure it all out.
There are already a few "mobile sucks" comments in this thread as expected but we must push past the "success" barrier bias of mobile games because when people hate on mobile they are part of the time hating that they've been successful in wrangling the next generation of gamers from right under PC gaming's feet. They've done this in a few ways by providing the gaming experience to a generation on their phones which they've had since a very young age so they don't think anything of playing games for hours on them and convenience of being able to do that anywhere.
People who dislike mobile often complain about not being able to play on their PC and even if there is bluestacks which allows most mobile games to be played on pc that program is sometimes unreliable and feels kind of budget. With the hundreds of millions of players who play mobile a sizable percentage of them would probably want to play on their PC so why doesn't someone like Google buy Bluestacks. Instead of creating Stadia that has hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions of players Google could have bought Bluestacks, improved it, stuck the Google label on it and allowed the probably billion+ players who use their play store to play most android games on their PC. That would be a huge step forward for MMO's when you think about it.
When you compare what mobile MMO's offer vs PC MMO's the basic foundations are the same.
-Provide character progression
-Provide a world
-Provide a multiplayer experience
Those three basics are the same from classic MMO'S to mobile ones. The extras like monetization and everything else is where the complications start. With crowdfunded titles the dishonesty is they tried and are still trying to sell people ideas and concept art and things "they plan to do". There is no way to hold anyone accountable just with words on what they "plan to do" cause situations change and those changes in a court of law almost always favor the defense in modern times. I could go into detail more about it but it'll take too long. Mobile games created their product and released it and even though they are asking you for 100 bucks and not shy about it they aren't baiting you along for a decade and making money off your hope that some day you can play the game they promised. Mobile games provide you the full product for the most part minus microtransaction stuff WHEN YOU INSTALL IT.
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
Yes, yes, yes to both of these! MMOs have always been about being immersed into another world, stepping into that alternate level of reality. Mobile is going backward. VR would be a giant leap forward, especially as it advances.
I disagree that VR will change MMOs in the near future. At least, not VR as we know it now. I think AR will, though. Putting on some AR glasses that don't entirely take you out of the world may be a little less immersive, in some cases, but wearing glasses that gives you access to your entire gaming library, and being able to play on a virtual TV screen the size of an IMAX screen is very appealing to me.
You can't realistically play a VR game everywhere. You're closed off from people and what is going on around you. In an AR system, you can be on a train, see and hear the people near you, but still focus on playing your favorite PC game.
I do think one day, VR might get there, but I think there is a lot that has to happen first. Mobility is my biggest issue. We would need cost effective rigs if we really want a feeling of "being" there.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
How does mobile as anything to do with VR? Please do tell, because to me, it desn't make any sense at all. For the record, I'm all for VR, but I also understand that the level of VR that is requiered for it to be good is still far far away... like maybe 15 years or more.
Probably because mobile games bring gaming to suck an extreme in terms of lack of immersion while VR is the complete opposite. The more people get sucked into playing a shallow game with crap controls on a tiny screen, the more they will want something on a grad scale.
How does mobile as anything to do with VR? Please do tell, because to me, it desn't make any sense at all. For the record, I'm all for VR, but I also understand that the level of VR that is requiered for it to be good is still far far away... like maybe 15 years or more.
Maybe it's been a while since you've tried VR? It's there now. The last six months alone have shown the true capabilities of VRs potential.
I disagree that VR will change MMOs in the near future. At least, not VR as we know it now. I think AR will, though. Putting on some AR glasses that don't entirely take you out of the world may be a little less immersive, in some cases, but wearing glasses that gives you access to your entire gaming library, and being able to play on a virtual TV screen the size of an IMAX screen is very appealing to me.
You can't realistically play a VR game everywhere. You're closed off from people and what is going on around you. In an AR system, you can be on a train, see and hear the people near you, but still focus on playing your favorite PC game.
I do think one day, VR might get there, but I think there is a lot that has to happen first. Mobility is my biggest issue. We would need cost effective rigs if we really want a feeling of "being" there.
I think AR will be the next evolution of mobile gaming. I think VR will be the next evolution of PC gaming. It doesn't have to be one or the other. They will both advance in their own way. The biggest difference is, VR is 100% capable now. AR is not.
yeh right 5G is the solution we will have great games and all the technology at our fingertips but we will die of radiation,lol
guess what Israel is the only country in the world that will not have 5G and their cell frequencies are also different than all other countries i wonder why?
The overwhelming majority of the electromagnetic radiation that you'll get is in the visible light and infrared ranges, at least as measured by energy. The former is generally sunlight or electric lighting, while the latter is blackbody radiation emitted by basically everything that is near room temperature. If those were dangerous to humans, they'd have killed everyone long before you were born.
The radiation that actually is dangerous is the ionizing radiation in the upper portions of the ultraviolet range, as well as everything above that, which includes x-rays and gamma rays. The reason it is dangerous is due to the photoelectric effect, as individual photons that are very high energy can rip an electron off of what they hit, which can have nasty follow-on effects. That has nothing to do with normal operation of 5G phones (or 4G, 3G, or any other phones).
Cellular communications use the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is vastly lower in energy than the infrared radiation that your body is giving off right now, both on a per photon basis and cumulatively. Visible light has a frequency on the order of a PHz. Cellular communications have frequencies on the order of a GHz. For comparison, 1 PHz = 1 million GHz. As energy is proportional to frequency, that's a huge difference.
5G does expand the portion of radio frequency used upward. The "normal" 5G portion stays below 6 GHz, but the mmWave portion (which only works over very short ranges) can go up to 300 GHz. That gets you to about 0.03% of the energy of a photon of visible light, and still far under 1% of the energy of the infrared radiation that you're emitting right now. That's not dangerous in the slightest.
Cloud streaming and 5G won't make a bit of difference, as they're solutions to problems that MMORPGs and cell phones don't have.
You don't need very much bandwidth to make an MMORPG work. That's why there were MMORPGs back when most people were on dial-up. Even now, the initial download and later patching are the only things that take much bandwidth unless a developer decides to be sloppy with bandwidth because it doesn't matter. Transmitting the state of the world near a player to him in real time takes on the order of kilobytes per second, and is already scarcely more than a rounding error on a modern 4G phone.
Meanwhile, even cell phones have plenty of rendering power to implement nearly whatever game mechanics you want. A modern cell phone has hardware performance in the same ballpark as a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago. Unless you believe that the problem with games twelve years ago is that not much was happening because everyone was waiting for more powerful hardware, that's not the problem with phones today.
Rather, mobile gaming is heavily restricted by the form factor. You have a tiny screen, and not much in the way of input options. You could add more input options by tacking on a D-pad and some other buttons, but that's been done for more than 30 years and isn't popular today. Even then, you don't get anything remotely near a full-size keyboard and mouse. And neither 5G nor streaming will do anything to change that.
Kind of misrepresenting what you can do with streaming. I currently stream games, and I can play anything on maximum resolution at max graphics on any screen.
Mobile games can't do that. Most people can't afford 50-60 GBs of space for a game like GW2 or FFXIV to run on their phone or tablet. With game streaming, you don't need that at all. You have no storage, you have no graphics restrictions.
Mobile devices are much more powerful than they've ever been but you can't do everything on them that you can with a PC... Until now. I can play anything you can on my phone, tablet, PC, or just about anything my cloud app will run.
Absolutely allowing a better throughput, stability, and lower ping will help all games to be played anywhere, anytime.
Anything you could do on a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago, you could do on a cell phone today, apart from restrictions due to the form factor. That's true of CPU, GPU, storage, memory, and at least if you're on a good Wi-Fi connection, Internet connectivity. If there are cool things that games that ran well on that old desktop did and mobile games today don't, it's not because the phone isn't powerful enough to handle it. Rather, it's because of either:
1) restrictions intrinsic to the small form factor (e.g., small screen and limited inputs), or 2) people generally aren't interested in doing it on a phone.
You cite storage capacity, but that's not a meaningful barrier, either. A terabyte of NAND flash doesn't cost that much anymore, and its costs are downright trivial as compared to the cost of getting enough bandwidth for game streaming. If phones with half a TB of storage aren't ubiquitous, it's only because there isn't much demand for them.
Finally an article that discusses mobile MMO something I've been waiting for on this site for a long time cause if we don't discuss it we can't figure it all out.
There are already a few "mobile sucks" comments in this thread as expected but we must push past the "success" barrier bias of mobile games because when people hate on mobile they are part of the time hating that they've been successful in wrangling the next generation of gamers from right under PC gaming's feet. They've done this in a few ways by providing the gaming experience to a generation on their phones which they've had since a very young age so they don't think anything of playing games for hours on them and convenience of being able to do that anywhere.
People who dislike mobile often complain about not being able to play on their PC and even if there is bluestacks which allows most mobile games to be played on pc that program is sometimes unreliable and feels kind of budget. With the hundreds of millions of players who play mobile a sizable percentage of them would probably want to play on their PC so why doesn't someone like Google buy Bluestacks. Instead of creating Stadia that has hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions of players Google could have bought Bluestacks, improved it, stuck the Google label on it and allowed the probably billion+ players who use their play store to play most android games on their PC. That would be a huge step forward for MMO's when you think about it.
When you compare what mobile MMO's offer vs PC MMO's the basic foundations are the same.
-Provide character progression
-Provide a world
-Provide a multiplayer experience
Those three basics are the same from classic MMO'S to mobile ones. The extras like monetization and everything else is where the complications start. With crowdfunded titles the dishonesty is they tried and are still trying to sell people ideas and concept art and things "they plan to do". There is no way to hold anyone accountable just with words on what they "plan to do" cause situations change and those changes in a court of law almost always favor the defense in modern times. I could go into detail more about it but it'll take too long. Mobile games created their product and released it and even though they are asking you for 100 bucks and not shy about it they aren't baiting you along for a decade and making money off your hope that some day you can play the game they promised. Mobile games provide you the full product for the most part minus microtransaction stuff WHEN YOU INSTALL IT.
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
Yes, yes, yes to both of these! MMOs have always been about being immersed into another world, stepping into that alternate level of reality. Mobile is going backward. VR would be a giant leap forward, especially as it advances.
I disagree that VR will change MMOs in the near future. At least, not VR as we know it now. I think AR will, though. Putting on some AR glasses that don't entirely take you out of the world may be a little less immersive, in some cases, but wearing glasses that gives you access to your entire gaming library, and being able to play on a virtual TV screen the size of an IMAX screen is very appealing to me.
You can't realistically play a VR game everywhere. You're closed off from people and what is going on around you. In an AR system, you can be on a train, see and hear the people near you, but still focus on playing your favorite PC game.
I do think one day, VR might get there, but I think there is a lot that has to happen first. Mobility is my biggest issue. We would need cost effective rigs if we really want a feeling of "being" there.
Well, I think you said it yourself. Just not anytime soon. I think we will solve the issue of "other people" as we see advancements in haptic technology. We are definitely still a bit off, but where we are on VR now is all ready so immersive. I can get lost in some of those games for a very long time and forget that they are games. Well, at least the ones that don't make me sick, which is another issue altogether.
I just don't see AR as being as immersive as VR for massive muli-player worlds. The environment is such an important part of MMOs. Although, I see a lot of potential for use in educational settings, enactments, showcasing historical sites, etc. Imagine being in the same location as something that happened in the past, and putting on a pair of glasses and having it played out in front of you for a class history lesson. Or museum tour.
Regardless, it will be very exciting to see where both of these technologies go next!
Finally an article that discusses mobile MMO something I've been waiting for on this site for a long time cause if we don't discuss it we can't figure it all out.
There are already a few "mobile sucks" comments in this thread as expected but we must push past the "success" barrier bias of mobile games because when people hate on mobile they are part of the time hating that they've been successful in wrangling the next generation of gamers from right under PC gaming's feet. They've done this in a few ways by providing the gaming experience to a generation on their phones which they've had since a very young age so they don't think anything of playing games for hours on them and convenience of being able to do that anywhere.
People who dislike mobile often complain about not being able to play on their PC and even if there is bluestacks which allows most mobile games to be played on pc that program is sometimes unreliable and feels kind of budget. With the hundreds of millions of players who play mobile a sizable percentage of them would probably want to play on their PC so why doesn't someone like Google buy Bluestacks. Instead of creating Stadia that has hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions of players Google could have bought Bluestacks, improved it, stuck the Google label on it and allowed the probably billion+ players who use their play store to play most android games on their PC. That would be a huge step forward for MMO's when you think about it.
When you compare what mobile MMO's offer vs PC MMO's the basic foundations are the same.
-Provide character progression
-Provide a world
-Provide a multiplayer experience
Those three basics are the same from classic MMO'S to mobile ones. The extras like monetization and everything else is where the complications start. With crowdfunded titles the dishonesty is they tried and are still trying to sell people ideas and concept art and things "they plan to do". There is no way to hold anyone accountable just with words on what they "plan to do" cause situations change and those changes in a court of law almost always favor the defense in modern times. I could go into detail more about it but it'll take too long. Mobile games created their product and released it and even though they are asking you for 100 bucks and not shy about it they aren't baiting you along for a decade and making money off your hope that some day you can play the game they promised. Mobile games provide you the full product for the most part minus microtransaction stuff WHEN YOU INSTALL IT.
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
How does mobile as anything to do with VR? Please do tell, because to me, it desn't make any sense at all. For the record, I'm all for VR, but I also understand that the level of VR that is requiered for it to be good is still far far away... like maybe 15 years or more.
Improvements in display technology, e.g. higher resolution, greater durability, faster response times, etc., will benefit everyone, especially VR users.
No need to wait 15 years: there are some pretty nice single-player VR games available right now...and they're only going to continue to improve. If you're talking about VR MMOs then, yes, I'm inclined to agree, but my timeline is more like 10-12 years from now.
Cloud streaming and 5G won't make a bit of difference, as they're solutions to problems that MMORPGs and cell phones don't have.
You don't need very much bandwidth to make an MMORPG work. That's why there were MMORPGs back when most people were on dial-up. Even now, the initial download and later patching are the only things that take much bandwidth unless a developer decides to be sloppy with bandwidth because it doesn't matter. Transmitting the state of the world near a player to him in real time takes on the order of kilobytes per second, and is already scarcely more than a rounding error on a modern 4G phone.
Meanwhile, even cell phones have plenty of rendering power to implement nearly whatever game mechanics you want. A modern cell phone has hardware performance in the same ballpark as a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago. Unless you believe that the problem with games twelve years ago is that not much was happening because everyone was waiting for more powerful hardware, that's not the problem with phones today.
Rather, mobile gaming is heavily restricted by the form factor. You have a tiny screen, and not much in the way of input options. You could add more input options by tacking on a D-pad and some other buttons, but that's been done for more than 30 years and isn't popular today. Even then, you don't get anything remotely near a full-size keyboard and mouse. And neither 5G nor streaming will do anything to change that.
Kind of misrepresenting what you can do with streaming. I currently stream games, and I can play anything on maximum resolution at max graphics on any screen.
Mobile games can't do that. Most people can't afford 50-60 GBs of space for a game like GW2 or FFXIV to run on their phone or tablet. With game streaming, you don't need that at all. You have no storage, you have no graphics restrictions.
Mobile devices are much more powerful than they've ever been but you can't do everything on them that you can with a PC... Until now. I can play anything you can on my phone, tablet, PC, or just about anything my cloud app will run.
Absolutely allowing a better throughput, stability, and lower ping will help all games to be played anywhere, anytime.
Anything you could do on a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago, you could do on a cell phone today, apart from restrictions due to the form factor. That's true of CPU, GPU, storage, memory, and at least if you're on a good Wi-Fi connection, Internet connectivity. If there are cool things that games that ran well on that old desktop did and mobile games today don't, it's not because the phone isn't powerful enough to handle it. Rather, it's because of either:
1) restrictions intrinsic to the small form factor (e.g., small screen and limited inputs), or 2) people generally aren't interested in doing it on a phone.
You cite storage capacity, but that's not a meaningful barrier, either. A terabyte of NAND flash doesn't cost that much anymore, and its costs are downright trivial as compared to the cost of getting enough bandwidth for game streaming. If phones with half a TB of storage aren't ubiquitous, it's only because there isn't much demand for them.
Again, what you're talking about is kind of a non starter. Infrastructure is changing whether we want it to or not. 5G is coming, and the buy in isn't astronomical for the consumer. See the difference is, you could play a streamed game on a 30 dollar appliance or a 3k dollar one. You could play it on a machine with integrated Intel 630, a mobile adreno gpu, or a fire stick Mali gpu.
It doesn't matter the hardware much at all for a game to stream well. I can get any game running at 4k and between 30 and 60fps, with sub 30ms latency. Many times I've even hit single digits. A gaming PC that would do the same would run over a grand easy.
I can also access my games anywhere. A friend's PC, at my parents house... Really there's no contest.
Cloud streaming and 5G won't make a bit of difference, as they're solutions to problems that MMORPGs and cell phones don't have.
You don't need very much bandwidth to make an MMORPG work. That's why there were MMORPGs back when most people were on dial-up. Even now, the initial download and later patching are the only things that take much bandwidth unless a developer decides to be sloppy with bandwidth because it doesn't matter. Transmitting the state of the world near a player to him in real time takes on the order of kilobytes per second, and is already scarcely more than a rounding error on a modern 4G phone.
Meanwhile, even cell phones have plenty of rendering power to implement nearly whatever game mechanics you want. A modern cell phone has hardware performance in the same ballpark as a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago. Unless you believe that the problem with games twelve years ago is that not much was happening because everyone was waiting for more powerful hardware, that's not the problem with phones today.
Rather, mobile gaming is heavily restricted by the form factor. You have a tiny screen, and not much in the way of input options. You could add more input options by tacking on a D-pad and some other buttons, but that's been done for more than 30 years and isn't popular today. Even then, you don't get anything remotely near a full-size keyboard and mouse. And neither 5G nor streaming will do anything to change that.
Kind of misrepresenting what you can do with streaming. I currently stream games, and I can play anything on maximum resolution at max graphics on any screen.
Mobile games can't do that. Most people can't afford 50-60 GBs of space for a game like GW2 or FFXIV to run on their phone or tablet. With game streaming, you don't need that at all. You have no storage, you have no graphics restrictions.
Mobile devices are much more powerful than they've ever been but you can't do everything on them that you can with a PC... Until now. I can play anything you can on my phone, tablet, PC, or just about anything my cloud app will run.
Absolutely allowing a better throughput, stability, and lower ping will help all games to be played anywhere, anytime.
Anything you could do on a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago, you could do on a cell phone today, apart from restrictions due to the form factor. That's true of CPU, GPU, storage, memory, and at least if you're on a good Wi-Fi connection, Internet connectivity. If there are cool things that games that ran well on that old desktop did and mobile games today don't, it's not because the phone isn't powerful enough to handle it. Rather, it's because of either:
1) restrictions intrinsic to the small form factor (e.g., small screen and limited inputs), or 2) people generally aren't interested in doing it on a phone.
You cite storage capacity, but that's not a meaningful barrier, either. A terabyte of NAND flash doesn't cost that much anymore, and its costs are downright trivial as compared to the cost of getting enough bandwidth for game streaming. If phones with half a TB of storage aren't ubiquitous, it's only because there isn't much demand for them.
Again, what you're talking about is kind of a non starter. Infrastructure is changing whether we want it to or not. 5G is coming, and the buy in isn't astronomical for the consumer. See the difference is, you could play a streamed game on a 30 dollar appliance or a 3k dollar one. You could play it on a machine with integrated Intel 630, a mobile adreno gpu, or a fire stick Mali gpu.
It doesn't matter the hardware much at all for a game to stream well. I can get any game running at 4k and between 30 and 60fps, with sub 30ms latency. Many times I've even hit single digits. A gaming PC that would do the same would run over a grand easy.
I can also access my games anywhere. A friend's PC, at my parents house... Really there's no contest.
You sound like you've never used a cell phone in your life.
Suppose that you wanted to play WoW on a phone today. If you've got a nice phone, you've got a powerful enough CPU and GPU, fast and large enough memory, plenty of RAM, and a plenty fast enough Internet connection. There are really only two things stopping you:
1) lack of compatibility in OS and API support 2) lack of an interface usable on a phone
Part (1) might already be solved today via something akin to Steam Link. Whether or not it has been solved, it's certainly solvable in software, and without Blizzard needing to formally port the game to Android and iOS, though a proper port would obviously be preferable.
You're basically arguing that 5G will solve problem (1) via game streaming. But problem (1) isn't the main problem. Problem (2) is the killer problem. Try to run the PC version of WoW on a phone and you'll end up with hotbars with a bunch of buttons that are about 3 mm across. Try to press one with your fingertip and you press about a 4x2 grid of hotbar buttons. You can't assign hotkeys to 1234567890-= because your phone doesn't have those keys, or any other keys. Game streaming could display the game on your phone, but it doesn't give you a way to control it.
That's why mobile games tend to make the buttons much, much larger than PC games. They know that they have to in order to make the interface usable on a phone. Larger buttons tends to lead to fewer of them so that there is room to have them all on the screen at once, plus whatever else the game needs to display. That's fine for a game that never needs to give you more than 10 input options at a time. That's not a very good description of WoW, however.
Any game on any device is a nice slogan, but it will never happen because game streaming can't add input options. The reason you'll never be able to play WoW on a typical toaster is that one knob and one button is plenty of input options for a toaster, but not for WoW. 5G doesn't change that in the slightest, as it is network connectivity, not input controls.
If there were a demand for playing most PC games on a cell phone, the key hurdle to fix is better input options. There's no reason why you couldn't build a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard that would give you plenty of hotkeys for games. That used to be common back when RIM dominated the smartphone market. But it's not common today because there isn't much demand for it. And 5G isn't going to change that.
But mobile isn't just phones, and mobile phones aren't just tiny little machines anymore with no inputs and no integration. Foldable phones are now a thing. By comparison the Samsung Galaxy fold expands to nearly 8 inches. How big is the handheld screen for something like the switch? Less than 7 inches.
And that isn't even the half of it. You're fixated on just mobile phones, but currently, my phone acts as a tether for other devices that aren't internet enabled. To run at 4K with a decent frame rate, you generally need a steady 20mbps, 4G can achieve this, sure, but it's also somewhat unreliable. For example I just ran a speed test and it came up with a very shaky 15mbps.
Cloud gaming may not be a cure all, but it has made a difference in my gaming habits, and I know once I can get a stable connection anywhere, capable of streaming the content I want to play where I want to play it, it will make an even bigger difference.
Crowd funding is the enemy, especially with a mixed cocktail of millennial gen developers or disgruntled past game studio employees that got canned. It has allowed amateur developers to bypass the original business model of developing a game, gaining investors and going gold in order to earn money. Just like an invention or a movie or anything else in this world. You should not be paid for anything until its ready or you're finished. Commonly this happens in home projects where the contractors never finish the job or never finish as well as they would if they were still hungry. It's when people are fat and fed that they get lazy.
The majority of the developers that do crowdfunding that never make it to the big shiny stage were let go from class A publishers and studios for their lack of an ability to see it as a company. Their inability to develop a game as a team. So they run to the hills and think they can do it all by themselves. What none of us realize is that whether they will ever really launch a game or not they make 10 times the amount of money they made at the game studios by simply dragging all of us along on their paths of imagination and lies. The goal becomes not really ever launching their games and renaming in "early access" bullshit forever. They know they don't have to fix their game in "Early Access".
A the re-release program that steam allows hurts this industry even more because now they are only doing it because they want the money too. It's all commission based point systems and its destroying the idea of game development of the goal of providing a truly quality gaming experience to gamers or fans of the IP.
I think CF should be illegal, it allows children and others to give complete strangers money based on some drawings with a idea that they think they develop a video game. However it allows them to steal money from everyone and not actually provide a finished product. There should at least be some form of restrictive vetting or fines against companies that breach the agreements of actively attempting to release their games that they acquire funds from.
Any mobile game will have the p2w limitations and I rather not have it bleed more into mmorpgs space because we have enough money mongering developers asking for EA, pledges, half assed games, games that are in development 8 years later, canceled AAA mmorpgs and many games not even within the same realm calling themselves mmorpgs.
WoW ruined mmorpgs. Unsustainable numbers that forced a WoW mold era for 10 years and then left us with nothing but empty promise mmorpgs.
I think free to play is still viable. If you look at the games that did it right (Path of Exile and Warframe), they do well without betting for money. They don't make it so if you pay you have a better chance than a non-player. I think this makes people want to pay because they don't feel pressured (at least with me. If I feel pressured I delete the game).
Another thing I find wrong with MMO's is they haven't really changed much. Sure we went from games that are tap combat to more fluid real time combat, but the quests are basically the same (kill so many monsters, or bring someone something, or escort quests). There really isn't much new and I'm not sure if its the technology or since people will play these cookie cutter games, the publishers just get complacent.
I can't wait to see if VR or AR brings anything to the table. The thought of carrying a gun type controller and firing excites me. Having true movement of my body equal the movement of my character sounds great to me. No I wouldn't want to have to have a big area so I can run outside, thats why I said gun controller or should I say gun plus controller in one of sorts.
Also I still say lobby games where you have to wait for a group aren't true mmo's. Warframe where your ship or the planet are your lobbies are toeing the line, but games like COD or Overwatch aren't MMO's.
Basically I'm looking for a game that can rival a good movie or TV show where the character can do almost anything.
Comments
You don't need very much bandwidth to make an MMORPG work. That's why there were MMORPGs back when most people were on dial-up. Even now, the initial download and later patching are the only things that take much bandwidth unless a developer decides to be sloppy with bandwidth because it doesn't matter. Transmitting the state of the world near a player to him in real time takes on the order of kilobytes per second, and is already scarcely more than a rounding error on a modern 4G phone.
Meanwhile, even cell phones have plenty of rendering power to implement nearly whatever game mechanics you want. A modern cell phone has hardware performance in the same ballpark as a high-end gaming desktop from twelve years ago. Unless you believe that the problem with games twelve years ago is that not much was happening because everyone was waiting for more powerful hardware, that's not the problem with phones today.
Rather, mobile gaming is heavily restricted by the form factor. You have a tiny screen, and not much in the way of input options. You could add more input options by tacking on a D-pad and some other buttons, but that's been done for more than 30 years and isn't popular today. Even then, you don't get anything remotely near a full-size keyboard and mouse. And neither 5G nor streaming will do anything to change that.
Mobile games can't do that. Most people can't afford 50-60 GBs of space for a game like GW2 or FFXIV to run on their phone or tablet. With game streaming, you don't need that at all. You have no storage, you have no graphics restrictions.
Mobile devices are much more powerful than they've ever been but you can't do everything on them that you can with a PC... Until now. I can play anything you can on my phone, tablet, PC, or just about anything my cloud app will run.
Absolutely allowing a better throughput, stability, and lower ping will help all games to be played anywhere, anytime.
Educator, writer, and Gamer.
Follow me at: MMOG Musings and MMOGology
Always makes me feel like Abe Simpson:
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too."
For me MMORPG means an RPG with lots of players and this means many possibilities for your character which needs a lot of buttons/commands.
What I believe could be possible to have a fight system like GW1 with limited skills and automatic move to target but still enough depth behind it (interupts, curses).
This is doable for mobile.
As for the life skills (non combat related stuff or long term buffs like levitation, under water breathing,...). They could be easy accessable on PC and hidden in a menue for mobile.
This way there is complexity paired with easy controls to allow mobile-pc cross play without creating those stale 4 button auto-play mmos we have now
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon
Pathfinder as a best example of crowdfunding success? OMG its the poster child for failure. I HOPE you mean something other than Pathfinder Online...
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
I can't do it. I feel like mobile gaming is going backwards. MMOs gained popularity because they provided a huge world with thousands of people playing worldwide. I just can't get in to a huge world with thousands of people while playing on a 4" screen on a game limited by a mobile processor and less than rudimentary controls.
Someone mentioned HMDs. Maybe when mobile gaming can include a VR setup they will be viable. Personally, I think VR is the future of MMOs, and gaming in general. There's nothing like actually standing in the world you have only been able to look at via a 30' monitor. If that includes mobile VR HMDs, cool.
I think that VR is the future of MMOs, too...it's really a no-brainer to people like us, yes? Imo, the drive toward mobile gaming will only accelerate the drive towards VR gaming...so, it's really a win-win for everyone.
guess what Israel is the only country in the world that will not have 5G and their cell frequencies are also different than all other countries i wonder why?
original post was moronic from a paid douchebag!
Educator, writer, and Gamer.
Follow me at: MMOG Musings and MMOGology
You can't realistically play a VR game everywhere. You're closed off from people and what is going on around you. In an AR system, you can be on a train, see and hear the people near you, but still focus on playing your favorite PC game.
I do think one day, VR might get there, but I think there is a lot that has to happen first. Mobility is my biggest issue. We would need cost effective rigs if we really want a feeling of "being" there.
Maybe it's been a while since you've tried VR? It's there now. The last six months alone have shown the true capabilities of VRs potential.
I think AR will be the next evolution of mobile gaming. I think VR will be the next evolution of PC gaming. It doesn't have to be one or the other. They will both advance in their own way. The biggest difference is, VR is 100% capable now. AR is not.
The radiation that actually is dangerous is the ionizing radiation in the upper portions of the ultraviolet range, as well as everything above that, which includes x-rays and gamma rays. The reason it is dangerous is due to the photoelectric effect, as individual photons that are very high energy can rip an electron off of what they hit, which can have nasty follow-on effects. That has nothing to do with normal operation of 5G phones (or 4G, 3G, or any other phones).
Cellular communications use the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is vastly lower in energy than the infrared radiation that your body is giving off right now, both on a per photon basis and cumulatively. Visible light has a frequency on the order of a PHz. Cellular communications have frequencies on the order of a GHz. For comparison, 1 PHz = 1 million GHz. As energy is proportional to frequency, that's a huge difference.
5G does expand the portion of radio frequency used upward. The "normal" 5G portion stays below 6 GHz, but the mmWave portion (which only works over very short ranges) can go up to 300 GHz. That gets you to about 0.03% of the energy of a photon of visible light, and still far under 1% of the energy of the infrared radiation that you're emitting right now. That's not dangerous in the slightest.
1) restrictions intrinsic to the small form factor (e.g., small screen and limited inputs), or
2) people generally aren't interested in doing it on a phone.
You cite storage capacity, but that's not a meaningful barrier, either. A terabyte of NAND flash doesn't cost that much anymore, and its costs are downright trivial as compared to the cost of getting enough bandwidth for game streaming. If phones with half a TB of storage aren't ubiquitous, it's only because there isn't much demand for them.
I just don't see AR as being as immersive as VR for massive muli-player worlds. The environment is such an important part of MMOs. Although, I see a lot of potential for use in educational settings, enactments, showcasing historical sites, etc. Imagine being in the same location as something that happened in the past, and putting on a pair of glasses and having it played out in front of you for a class history lesson. Or museum tour.
Regardless, it will be very exciting to see where both of these technologies go next!
Educator, writer, and Gamer.
Follow me at: MMOG Musings and MMOGology
It doesn't matter the hardware much at all for a game to stream well. I can get any game running at 4k and between 30 and 60fps, with sub 30ms latency. Many times I've even hit single digits. A gaming PC that would do the same would run over a grand easy.
I can also access my games anywhere. A friend's PC, at my parents house... Really there's no contest.
Suppose that you wanted to play WoW on a phone today. If you've got a nice phone, you've got a powerful enough CPU and GPU, fast and large enough memory, plenty of RAM, and a plenty fast enough Internet connection. There are really only two things stopping you:
1) lack of compatibility in OS and API support
2) lack of an interface usable on a phone
Part (1) might already be solved today via something akin to Steam Link. Whether or not it has been solved, it's certainly solvable in software, and without Blizzard needing to formally port the game to Android and iOS, though a proper port would obviously be preferable.
You're basically arguing that 5G will solve problem (1) via game streaming. But problem (1) isn't the main problem. Problem (2) is the killer problem. Try to run the PC version of WoW on a phone and you'll end up with hotbars with a bunch of buttons that are about 3 mm across. Try to press one with your fingertip and you press about a 4x2 grid of hotbar buttons. You can't assign hotkeys to 1234567890-= because your phone doesn't have those keys, or any other keys. Game streaming could display the game on your phone, but it doesn't give you a way to control it.
That's why mobile games tend to make the buttons much, much larger than PC games. They know that they have to in order to make the interface usable on a phone. Larger buttons tends to lead to fewer of them so that there is room to have them all on the screen at once, plus whatever else the game needs to display. That's fine for a game that never needs to give you more than 10 input options at a time. That's not a very good description of WoW, however.
Any game on any device is a nice slogan, but it will never happen because game streaming can't add input options. The reason you'll never be able to play WoW on a typical toaster is that one knob and one button is plenty of input options for a toaster, but not for WoW. 5G doesn't change that in the slightest, as it is network connectivity, not input controls.
If there were a demand for playing most PC games on a cell phone, the key hurdle to fix is better input options. There's no reason why you couldn't build a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard that would give you plenty of hotkeys for games. That used to be common back when RIM dominated the smartphone market. But it's not common today because there isn't much demand for it. And 5G isn't going to change that.
And that isn't even the half of it. You're fixated on just mobile phones, but currently, my phone acts as a tether for other devices that aren't internet enabled. To run at 4K with a decent frame rate, you generally need a steady 20mbps, 4G can achieve this, sure, but it's also somewhat unreliable. For example I just ran a speed test and it came up with a very shaky 15mbps.
Cloud gaming may not be a cure all, but it has made a difference in my gaming habits, and I know once I can get a stable connection anywhere, capable of streaming the content I want to play where I want to play it, it will make an even bigger difference.
The majority of the developers that do crowdfunding that never make it to the big shiny stage were let go from class A publishers and studios for their lack of an ability to see it as a company. Their inability to develop a game as a team. So they run to the hills and think they can do it all by themselves. What none of us realize is that whether they will ever really launch a game or not they make 10 times the amount of money they made at the game studios by simply dragging all of us along on their paths of imagination and lies. The goal becomes not really ever launching their games and renaming in "early access" bullshit forever. They know they don't have to fix their game in "Early Access".
A the re-release program that steam allows hurts this industry even more because now they are only doing it because they want the money too. It's all commission based point systems and its destroying the idea of game development of the goal of providing a truly quality gaming experience to gamers or fans of the IP.
I think CF should be illegal, it allows children and others to give complete strangers money based on some drawings with a idea that they think they develop a video game. However it allows them to steal money from everyone and not actually provide a finished product. There should at least be some form of restrictive vetting or fines against companies that breach the agreements of actively attempting to release their games that they acquire funds from.
MurderHerd
So under this definition, yes, MMORPGs are thriving.
Another thing I find wrong with MMO's is they haven't really changed much. Sure we went from games that are tap combat to more fluid real time combat, but the quests are basically the same (kill so many monsters, or bring someone something, or escort quests). There really isn't much new and I'm not sure if its the technology or since people will play these cookie cutter games, the publishers just get complacent.
I can't wait to see if VR or AR brings anything to the table. The thought of carrying a gun type controller and firing excites me. Having true movement of my body equal the movement of my character sounds great to me. No I wouldn't want to have to have a big area so I can run outside, thats why I said gun controller or should I say gun plus controller in one of sorts.
Also I still say lobby games where you have to wait for a group aren't true mmo's. Warframe where your ship or the planet are your lobbies are toeing the line, but games like COD or Overwatch aren't MMO's.
Basically I'm looking for a game that can rival a good movie or TV show where the character can do almost anything.