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Roadblocks to MMOFPS?
jensen_34
Member Posts: 52
Specifically, are there any devs or just hobbyists that might be able to explain why a more in-depth MMOFPS hasn't been developed?
Is it a matter of hardware limitations? Net code optimization? Bandwith constraints or other terms that I really have no clue about, but like throwing around?
Or is it simply, no developer has been willing to put their balls on the line to capture the market?
There's obviously a huge market for FPS, if one could turn even a fraction of that market into subscription based customers and lock them into the hamster wheels that are MMO's... well you don't have to be a MBA from U Penn to figure out that could mean big returns.
PS Just to define what I would consider a true MMOFPS, think EQ's depth with BF2 gameplay.
Comments
I would love to see that game myself. Was hoping planetside was it but it didnt pan out.
I think all of the reasons you stated are probably to blame. If planetside had been more of a hit I think other publishers would be more interested. For now it's just too alien for them.
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There is no war in World of BoreCraft
Never give up and never surrender!
The answer is sounding Yes !
wait for Huxley and Tabula Rasa
People like seeing their avatars...not just a floating gun barrel.
It's simple.
You need a 10ms Ping to play a FPS very competitively. You need a 200ms Ping to PVP in a MMORPG very competitively.
A 100ms Ping in a FPS = Death. You're 1/10th of a second slower than your opponent.
A Work in Progress.
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Sorry that I'm the one to disappoint you but hobbits and gnomes will have size advantage.
I've been hearing "MMOFPS" for years now, but I don't think that the problem with MMOFPS has much to do with not understanding that there is a huge FPS following, the desire to "lock them into the hamster wheels that are MMOs," and get fat checks. In fact Jensen_34, I'd argue that the reason the MMOFPS isn't going anywhere is because they haven't answered the question of why FPS players would want to pay for a subscription to be locked into the hamster wheels that are MMOs?
Because they don't have to be locked into grinds in their peer to peer FPS today. For that matter, they don't have to be locked into a bill. Plus, they get a whole bunch of other features that you can't get in MMOs, like modding, level creation, skinning, and single player mode.
Part of the appeal of the FPS is that you get instant fast paced action from the moment you start. The problem is, when the map in a FPS gets larger, the action is harder to find. You wait around a lot. You have a hard time knowing where to go to find the action. Its more difficult to know the objectives, and the tactical positions. When people are jumping in and out, as is apt to happen in a 24/7 "massive" world that isn't peer to peer controlled, its difficult to know the odds, and its difficult to know what is possible, probable, or available. In other words, the things people play FPSs to experience (heart stopping action, thrill, clear contests, rematches, etc.) tend to break down the moment you place the FPS interface in a "massive" online service.
Part of the appeal of the MMORPG is that its the type of game that justifies the 24/7 perpetual world, because the game makes it easy to log on for extended periods of time. This isn't because the action is intense, like a FPS, because if it were, players would get burned out quickly. Unless you have adrenaline glands the size of an elephant, I really don't think you, or anyone else could handle or use a 24/7 server of adrenaline filled action every second. Even if you could, at what point would you decide you had enough ammo pickups, and power pills, before it became pointless? The appeal of the MMORPG is that there are more stress reducing activities available, then stress inducing activities. MMORPGs are escapes from stress, whereas FPSs are emotionally charged excitement. The two tend not to blend well without boring the FPS player, or making it too big of an ordeal for the RPG player.
Of course, the industry doesn't want to hear about the myth of MMOFPS. They want FPS players to send monthly checks, but that's about all they want. For it seems to me that what a FPS fan really wants is a better FPS. Better graphics. Better sound. Better maps. Greater equipment options. Larger teams. Larger maps. Its unclear that the massive format is uniquely qualified to give them that, and if the FPS gains nothing from a 24/7 massive format, there's no reason to subscribe to the service.
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You mentioned combining (and I love this part) the "depth" of EQ with the action of BF2. Let's assume that EQ actually had some depth to it and was not just a constant grind to the level cap. The only single player FPS games, that I can think of, that do that are System Shock 2 and Deus EX. Once you go down that road, you're flirting with a modern / sci-fi Ultima Underworld. Not that I wouldn't want to see an MMO version of Ultima Underworld, of course.
Do you know why most FPS games use some form of Punkbuster? It's because cheaters suck. Creating a game that simply rewards people unfair advantages because they've been playing longer would be a major turn off to most of the core FPS players out there, myself included. Yes, War Rock did have levels but that never stopped me from mowing down level 12 players when I was only level 1-5. What you're talking about would disrupt the formula of what draws people to FPS games in the first place.
On the technical side, John Carmack already optimized online FPS netcode about a decade ago and the only reason we're beginning to see servers with populations in the 200's now is because of increased bandwidth and processing power. Although there are online flight sims (Aces High 2, Warbirds, etc.) that run about 500 players on a server at a time. I don't know enough about the back end of those games to know if they're using just one server or a couple of servers clustered together. At any rate, to make an MMOFPS you're going to need a parallel processing machine that's not unlike a Pixar render farm and some fat pipes to keep the traffic moving. If you have that, you're still going to need to keep the world size small enough, or transportation fast enough, to get people into the action as quickly as possible. FPS players aren't social creatures by nature. They want to kick ass right now, no waiting.
Most importantly though, there are tons of FPS games out right now that don't have a monthly fee and have all kinds of mods to keep the shooters happy. You would have to provide a product that would outshine Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2, and all the mods for both games, as well as provide content at an insane clip, before any FPS player would lay down cold hard cash for a monthly fee.
If you have a look at the Planetside future development stuff they are about to explode the game and take it up to the standard. The problem is with the fast pased action of the genre unlike high-fantasy MMO's you can't stop to craft or anything like that. And unfortunitly there isn't enough interest in them for a lot of design work to get decent expanded systems for the genre. Instead we get the biggest version of Battlefield 2142 and its a fantastic experience.
Saying that i would never play them as my sole MMO, would have to be something on the side for a few hours play every week.
huxley
your problem should be remedied soon
The netcode is there. Planetside, aside from serious lag issues in a few situations, played fine at launch. The reason I quit, the reason most of my outfit quit, which was unquestionably one of the top outfits on Johari, was because they fucked up the game with a patch. It drastically lowered FPS on top rigs of the time. Think about this way: they patched the game to go from WoW performance to Vanguard performance, and they didn't roll it back. This situation lasted for two months. By the time they fixed it, I had basically lost the will to play. I know most players of games like Vanguard and SWG have trained themselves to eat human feces when it's delivered to them by their beloved devs, but all I need is one patch like that to quit and never look back, and that's exactly what me and most of my friends did. Why should I play a game like that when even a rushed EA Battlefield sequel gets better support?
Aside from that, the playerbase in Planetside too rapidly deteriorated. In the start, I was seeing a lot of clans I had encountered in BF and Tribes, some solid players with real skill and a tactical mind. Three months into the game, it had, by far, the worst players of any FPS I had ever played, with the exception of Jedi Outcast. The only explanation I could come up for this was that all the FPS players had left and had been replaced by MMORPG players. There's really no prospect more horrible than playing with a nerdcore MMORPG PvP'er in a MMOFPS. Even thinking about it makes me sick. In a normal FPS, you just kill them in two seconds and move on, but in a MMOFPS, It's like fighting an army of lemmings with 1 hp whose only weapon is being an asshole and not playing the game as it was intended.
The reason there hasn't been a good MMOFPS is because nobody has tried, aside from Planetside. Tabula Rasa offers nothing to FPS players, and I'm not expecting good things from Huxley. I think there's really only one lesson to learn from Planetside. In MMORPG PvP, bigger is usually better. People love castle sieges and huge RvR fights for some reason, even if they're basically just giant meat grinders. I don't think people came to Planetside hoping for an increase in the scale of fights, and that was all they really delivered that was new. I think people were impressed by their promises of persistence. What would have been awesome is a game where territory was exchanged through a slow, protracted conflict. Instead, it effectively took a few hours for a zerg outfit to rape every base on a continent and then cap the last one through sheer numbers alone. I'm sure that sounds awesome to a nerdcore PvP'er who plays to win without competition, but a FPS player competes to win. I mean, it really says something (horrible) when a chAir Force officer who is a tech is regarded as some kind of tactical genius by a faction (take a guess which shitty faction I'm talking about).
Aside from this, it's not like FPS players are starved of large fights. We already have decent sixty-four player multiplayer and fairly large maps to go with it, and we don't have to pay a subscription fee to get shitty patches that ruin the game. Until there's a professionally-delivered MMOFPS that offers good combined arms gameplay and meaningful territorial exchange, without the usual developer bullshit expected from a MMORPG team, I don't think one is going to get off the ground.
Forgot about Huxley. Damn that looks cool.
When is the release date? Missed it on the site.
edit: Nevermind they havent even started beta yet so I guess it will be a bit. Looking forward to it though.
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There is no war in World of BoreCraft
Huxley is the closest thing to a real MMOFPS, and to be quite honest, doesn't seem to be providing anything remotely new to me. They've made a lot of incredibly vague promises, but I've heard a few opinions from reviewers I trust who have played the game, and this is the only conclusion I can draw from what I've heard: it's basically an incredibly formulaic shooter with only mild massive elements, one that is ten steps behind Planetside in terms of even playing field, persistence, and combined arms gameplay. Until I see something which suggests otherwise, I'm chalking this one up as another horrible shooter pandering to MMORPG fans, something along the lines of Gunbound or War Rock.
Huxley is the closest thing to a real MMOFPS, and to be quite honest, doesn't seem to be providing anything remotely new to me. They've made a lot of incredibly vague promises, but I've heard a few opinions from reviewers I trust who have played the game, and this is the only conclusion I can draw from what I've heard: it's basically an incredibly formulaic shooter with only mild massive elements, one that is ten steps behind Planetside in terms of even playing field, persistence, and combined arms gameplay. Until I see something which suggests otherwise, I'm chalking this one up as another horrible shooter pandering to MMORPG fans, something along the lines of Gunbound or War Rock.
Some might argue that some of the things you say Huxley lacks over Planetside are what messed up Planetside. I know I had to give it up because it just wasnt working for me. And reviews of games that aren't even in beta yet are generally way off the mark. Heck it's hard enough to get an accurate review of a released game.
I think I'll wait and decide for myself.
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There is no war in World of BoreCraft
actually your simple....
10ms pings to play a fps....i guess if all you do is lan than yeah.... but the OP was referring to a mmoFPS, not a damn lan party....pings under 200 will be fine.
the problum has been and still is...player with not perfect gaming rigs< low ram video or what ever>
it will be interesting to see how huxley is welcomed and played on the PC and XBox platforms
This will eventually happen; it is really just a matter of three elements. The server clusters being used need to be powerful enough to support the graphical information being sent to and from them. The bandwidth that the servers are using can send that information at a speed that will allow for twitch gaming to be playable (e.g. pings from 1-100 optimally). Lastly, the bandwidth being generally used by the user base is large enough to support the flow of incoming and outgoing information from the servers.
Once the elements are all in order, well, then you will see the game you speak of.
The main things you have to realize is that this may never occur or take an extremely long time to occur. Graphical technology is progressing much faster than bandwidth technology.
We have had NIC cards able to handle 100+MB of flow for years but that kind of speed is no where near affordable to the average consumer.
Add real physics computations to the mix and you have a second chunk of information needing to go back and forth to the server.
FPS and TPS games are generally pretty basic graphically, with a couple of exceptions, but even with their nominal graphics and relatively small maps they don’t usually support more than 128 players per channel, server, or room (I’m not referring to lobbies but the actual maps players are playing on).
If you can imagine a Graphically Impressive MMOFPS with a large map or world and you are looking at many technological hurdles needed to jump through.
Each progressive year graphics will get better and physics will soon be added in mass (no pun intended). Add to that the slow increase in ISP allotted bandwidth and you pretty much aren’t going to see this kind of game accomplished (and functional) any time soon. Balance between the bandwidth and information being passed across the line, when you see that, you will probably see lots of “twitch” MMORPG’s.
But again, it may never happen.
An Ugly Large scale MMOFPS = yes.
A Beautiful Small scale MMOFPS = yes.
A Beautiful Large scale MMOFPS = unlikely anytime soon.
P.P.S - We are working on it......
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As far as graphics quality, that only increases load on the clientside. It's not like particle physics or explosions really affect gameplay, unless you're talking destructible environments, so there's zero reason for servers to track that data instead of clients. As far as actual movement physics, Planetside had a pretty good engine in that regard. The one they used at launch wasn't so great, but the second one felt a lot nicer. If Planetside can do it, I don't see where the big technology hurdle is.
FPSs are about speed. The normal human reaction time is 1/15th of a second, 1/5th(200ms ping) of a second slower and you're not going to be a very competitive player.
Which is why you see in Planetside no 1 shot kills like a good FPS. They have huge health bars, unlike any FPS on the market. Best you can do is 2 shots with a sniper rifle. There also isn't any hit zones in Planetside.
A Work in Progress.
Add Me
actually your simple....
10ms pings to play a fps....i guess if all you do is lan than yeah.... but the OP was referring to a mmoFPS, not a damn lan party....pings under 200 will be fine.
the problum has been and still is...player with not perfect gaming rigs< low ram video or what ever>
it will be interesting to see how huxley is welcomed and played on the PC and XBox platforms
Any Decent server on any FPS and you will be booted if your ping stays 100.
FPSs are about speed. The normal human reaction time is 1/15th of a second, 1/5th(200ms ping) of a second slower and you're not going to be a very competitive player.
Which is why you see in Planetside no 1 shot kills like a good FPS. They have huge health bars, unlike any FPS on the market. Best you can do is 2 shots with a sniper rifle. There also isn't any hit zones in Planetside.
Well, a lot of servers in many games have a high ping kick script running. I've never seen it below 150, though.
Honestly, you can still be competitive with a ping of 150-200 in some high-lethality games. Sure, in those situations where you turn a corner and find yourself facing an enemy, the guy with 200 ping is going to be fatally slower than the guy with 50. That will happen a lot if you play stupidly. In a game like BF2142 or Rainbow Six, though, reaction time isn't the only factor. If you have some situational awareness and the right gear, you can realize who's around you. If you couple that with some brains, you can get the drop on people or ambush them. In 2142, if you get the drop on an unaware person with any weapon, even a pistol, you usually kill them so fast that reaction time is irrelevant. You see it playing commander in 2142. Nine times out of ten, when I paint enemy infantry for some guy moving in on a silo, they'll kill that person with little trouble. In that game, situational awareness and initiative are king, not ping. The person who starts the fight usually ends it.
There are games where it's the exact opposite, of course. If you're playing something like T2, UT, Q3, or a HL mod, you can forget about competing with a 200 ping. I think therein lies the difference between twitch and tactical shooters. Twitch shooters all feature incredible speeds and acrobatics. In T2 or UT, also, the top tier of players are so astronomically high on the skill curve that you have less than zero chance with a high ping.
It seems to me that Planetside's huge health bars made it more of a twitch game than other titles. There really was no room for thinking when it came to close combat, unless you were a cloaker. If somebody better at running and gunning came up against you with the right weapon, you were probably dead. I saw it firsthand killing VS AI MAX's with the jackhammer (or noobhammer, as they would usually /tell me after I finished with them). I honestly loved Planetside's vehicle combat more than anything else. I racked up several hundred air kills in two months of play, almost all of them being my mosquito shooting down reavers. The vanguard was really fun, too, if you had a good gunner in your outfit. It was awesome because you knew ten magriders would show up if you brought a vanguard to a fight with the Vanu. Those were some crazy fights, one vanguard with three magriders chasing it, with your gunner blasting away while you tried to avoid fire. You could only pull that off on certain continents with heavy tree cover, and only if you were good enough to move full speed through it, but that was part of the fun of the game.
Eh. Now I almost want to play it again. Almost.
Diablo 1 was the first RPG that made multiplayer very easy. You could jump in and play very quickly without having to worry about being in the same point in the story and there were enough people that finding someone of a similar level was easy. Diablo 2 did what Diablo 1 did, but added the benefit of server-side characters and better anti-cheating mechanisms. This made pick up groups with random people much easier and more likely to be enjoyable.
MMOs provide roughly the same experience that Diablo 2 provides. That is, a multiplayer RPG that works. NWN and Guild Wars are examples of an alternative to MMOs. People play MMOs because they provide that multiplayer component that RPGs have lacked for so long.
Now, back to MMOFPSs. Let's take the existing genre and change it so that players can get the multiplayer experience they've always wanted! Wait a minute... They're already getting that. In fact, as already mentioned, it's likely that the MMOFPS experience will be worse than the experience of a standard FPS do to higher ping times.
To the best of my knowledge, the only thing that MMOFPS games can offer that will attract subscribers is they offered a larger meaning to it all. Like there is a game, MegaMek Net, which takes the game of Battletech, which by itself is a fairly complex tactical tabletop game, and then throws it all together to include continuity between battles, like an army that needs to be changed as mechs are destroyed and planets which are fought over for their use in manufacturing or for getting deeper into enemy territory.
Thanks Tunabun, that was the kind of answer I was expecting and searching for.
Everyone else chiming in about design issues and gamer psychology; thanks, but I already have my own BS opinion.
This nearly made me laugh out loud but only garnered a very long chuckle. I know where you are coming from saying the healthbars are huge because the time to kill is longer than the typical fps game but it's still an exaggeration. Not every game is lke Counterstrike where an AMP to the leg will obliterate you. You could absorb rocket launchers to the face in one shot if you had enough armor and the time to get off another shot is only mildly shorter than planetside.
Besides the real reason healthbars are so large is due to the presence of vehicles. YOu need enough health to atleast get a shot off with something like a Decimator or a jammer because if you couldn't what's the point of being infantry in a world of tanks and planes in outdoor areas?
Anyway FPS games are rare because autoattacking is so much simpler and far less resource intensive.
Small strides are being made into creating MMOs with fps style combat. This year alone we'll have Chronicles of Spellborn, Fury and possibly Huxley (in that order with Spellborn coming out in May in Europe). Next year Huxley will definately be out by then and darkfall might actually reach phase 2 of clan beta testing.