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Modable mmo's is what we need for longlevity
calranthe
Member UncommonPosts: 359
Now let me first put down what I am not talking about, I am not talking about script mods, GUI mods or places like the foundry or forge, while good examples of ways that people can be allowed to change the experience of an mmo to suit them, all very valid and have people who love or hate them.
What I am talking about is the following.
Graphics, Animation and sound, every engine out there is able to be changed in this way otherwise developers would not be able to build the worlds we play in and while we have seen the balance and logistic problems of created content, graphics animation and sound fall into a different category.
Mostly we only see this available to players on single player games but lets take a "what if" step, the internet mod community as a whole is one of the most creative sets of people you will every find, give them the slightest tools and they can turn your game into a work of art.
Because it would be client side the only person whose performance is affected is yours and you could decide what enhancements to use.
single player examples are easy to find Oblivion came out in 2006 but you can easily go to nexus and grab HD textures city packs clothing and equipment revamps which bring it on par with skyrim or even better, fallout new vegas has the 4086 HD texture packs which turn the nevada desert into something amazing and beautiful new skies and all.
Skyrim there are graphical mods out there that can challenge the best gamers rig and make that game look like a film.
Imagine playing an mmo that was 8 years old but someone brought out a complete hd texture and lighting pack, new models and landscape not because they were paid to do it but because they loved the game, how much better would that be than anything a dev had time to put together.
Yes I understand it would take time to release the art creation tools but think of what could have been done with cox, anarchy, daoc or eq1
Comments
Solo game its perfect.
But mmo its different story.
What if thousends are making mods seems soon enough where all playing different game and what5 if some like this others like that you get one big messed up game community.
And devs can they even track whats going on with there own game?
Remember you are altering only sound, visuals and animation not gameplay, think of it like the minecraft texture packs, I use a sol2.3 redux HD pack for my minecraft, it alters everything visually, my wife used a different type she perfers, hell all the people we know use different modded versions of the graphics but we all log into the same game and it in no way affects gameplay between us.
Visuals, sound and animation are what age an mmo faster than anything else, games companies find it too expensive to redo an aged game.
What do you perceive would be the value to the developers or the players of such a feature? You haven't mentioned that so far, so I'm interested in your answer to that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Visusals/sound, texture sounds nice and indeed skyrim had some nice mods for that alone.
Neverwinter lets players make their own dungeons which is a step in the right directed for giving players more control over their environment.
It is not impossible to have billions of people modding a game. I play TS2 and the more modders involved the better the out come. The people form up on forums and have rules if you mod is allowed to be posted. It has to be "test driven" tried and proven to be sound. The more people involved in a project the better grade mod we come up with.
I see this in Minecraft as well. Before people will download your stuff you have to earn a decent reputation as a modder. It can be done.
Visuals, sound and animation are what age an mmo faster than anything else, games companies find it too expensive to redo an aged game.
The client would have to be modded fairly extensively to take advantage of higher resolution textures. It would take even more extensive changes to mod the animations. I think sounds would be the easiest thing to mod.
I think the idea is OK, but the scope of work is pretty ridiculous. Those mods for Skyrim and Oblivion took years to complete. They did a fantastic job, but they had a team of people and spent years on it. It's the kind of thing you'd put on your resume to get into the game industry. By the time anyone managed to update textures for most MMORPGs, most people would have moved on to another game. Not to mention updates from the developer that could bork all the work done to the texture engine.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Minecraft (MMOish enough to bring up) has certainly proven that there is interest in this sort of thing. Second Life (which I must admit I've never actually tried myself but which has a signifcant player base) has shown that you can make an entire world out completely player-generated graphics.
Another (non-MMO) game I like to mention is Spore with it's system of editors and database of shared assets. The game was a disaster on many levels, but I still feel there was a brilliant sandbox concept at its core of providing a skeleton of gameplay structure then farming out all the details of asset creation as part of the gameplay.
For developers ability to concentrate on gameplay and new content enhancements
Players, play the game you want to play the way you want it to look., you just got a new computer grab that new set of hd textures, want all the characters in game to do asian style socials or dance bring in that asset someone made, we love to personalize things, hell we even download new smiley packs for our messenger.
It only seems difficult if you do not build the framework, look at steam and the workshop, look at the thousands of mods, imagine an mmo that the developers can concentrate on gameplay and you make the game you want to see.
Not to hard really think of it this way most single player games last under a year only with mods or expansions do they go further, mmo are designed by there nature to last multiple years, remember all the tools we are talking about are out there for every game engine all that would need to happen is a limited tool set with specific setup NOT easy but not a mountain.
Think of what SL does and how the client can be modded even that piece of horrible coding that is the sl client people have messed with and recoded far better than the devs because people mod not just for a resume but because they love the game and for that they will spend 80 hours on a mod and not think any different