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What would MMOs look like in 2040?
JohnP0100
Member UncommonPosts: 401
At a university career night which I talked about my career (usual boring stuff; what does your day look like? How did you get started? etc), I received a fairly unique question. I was asked whether my bias/preference growing up influences my decision now; 20 years later at a real life job.
The question can be modified to suit this forum; 'the gamers in their teens will be the game designer / decision maker 20-30 years from now. What would they make?'
If anyone from 30 years ago was asked this question, the dumb answer is 'Platformers cause Super Mario!'
Well, 30 years on, it isn't just platformers or hard reaction based games.
It is FPS, MMOs, 4X, DDR, Strategy, heck even Dancing/singing games.
So here's a question, what do you think MMOs would look like 30 years from now?
And don't be that guy with the dumb answer.
It shows what PvP games are really all about, and no, it's not about more realism and immersion. It's about cowards hiding behind a screen to they can bully other defenseless players without any risk of direct retaliation like there would be if they acted like asshats in "real life". -Jean-Luc_Picard
Life itself is a game. So why shouldn't your game be ruined? - justmemyselfandi
Comments
I find it completely reasonable to believe in a fully working virtual reality.
I mean 20 years ago we didn't even have internet or cell phones.
Once they invent something new it developes rather fast and becomes a world wide standard at some point.
I really think you will find an infinitely wide variety of games in another 25 years. There will probably be a few mega popular titles, but I believe with game design becoming more streamlined "out of the box", you will find games that cover every demographic you can imagine, and then some.
Things will not just "evolve" in one direction with concepts like skill based or action combat taking over, but rather you will find an amalgamation of every genre mixed and matched, where people find a synthesis of all their favorite forms of gameplay. You can already see this in ideas from MOBAs and RTS games being used in MMORPGs. If I had a window into the future, I would not be at all surprised to find not only full blown shooter MMOs, but also classic rpg "turn-based" MMOs. Games with few abilities, games with dozens or even hundreds of abilities. Games where you can play the role of any npc of any faction in a virtual world. I think the options are really limitless, as soon as the industry shakes off the emulation mindset and starts to innovate again.
I can pretty much guarantee we won't be using a keyboard and mouse.
My bet is we will be playing either VR and/or hands free holographic games.
One of the comments in the 'Augmented reality' device that MS showed off was whether TVs were irrelevant now.
Why have a TV when you can just have one of those Aug-Reality devices and look at your wall?
I think the VR idea is still decades off and I probably won't see one in my lifetime (i'm 39 years old).
Mainly because the idea has been around for decades and no one can still get it right.
I've tried Occ-Rift Dev1 and Dev2 and my opinion still hasn't changed.
It does bring interesting questions of Occ-Rift + MMO = ??
It shows what PvP games are really all about, and no, it's not about more realism and immersion. It's about cowards hiding behind a screen to they can bully other defenseless players without any risk of direct retaliation like there would be if they acted like asshats in "real life". -Jean-Luc_Picard
Life itself is a game. So why shouldn't your game be ruined? - justmemyselfandi
Well, that's an easy one, at least. I've only been following the trend for the last three years.
In 2040, who knows? Technology is already changing so quickly. Some futurists think that AI will have surpassed human intelligence by then; that will probably be the most significant change. Other emergent technologies may have unpredictable effects.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
way things are going, will probably be full body suits and vr. cant see it getting to the stage where everyone just plugs in ala the cyberpunk novels but that will probably come eventually.
couch potatoes will just plug in and live their lives in cyber worlds as reality will be just too much for some people by then given the way things are going. There will be a new occupation - specialist nurses who go from one gamer to another and change their drip feeds and nappies once a day or two.
mind you, perma death will be interesting if the games get so advanced that people "feel" everything through sensors attached to their body. Will there be any more Leroy Jenkins type players around when you actually feel the damage the mobs are doing to your avatar?
i look this wrecked because i've got GIST.
Whats your excuse?
http://deadmanrambling.com/
Depends.
If we still have capitalism, they will be more crappy and shitty than ever. If anyone can still afford them, because the rich will be insanely rich at that point and the rest of the people will be very, very poor anyway. So you'll rather spend your money on luxuries like drinkable water.
If we have (real) democracy instead and theres actually companies out there who are trying to make great products, instead of trying to make more money than anyone else, well I would assume full 3D reality and maybe we'll get even sensory data for the other senses, so the forest would smell like a forest etc.
After WW3 we can be happy if theres any HUMANS left, let alone computers and the knowledge, ability and energy how to create and run them.
The internet, at that time called ARPA net, exists since 1969. The WWW was developed in the first half of the 1990s. Cellphones also exists since the 1960s, and in the 1980s and 1990s they became more widespread.
I myself have been in the internet since ca 1993. In the beginning, there was no webbrowsers, though. Then Mosaic appeared, not much later Netscape.
Alfheim Online
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
In 40 years: I hope for technological immortality and absolute control over my personal reality.
Uploaded consciousness into a virtual reality of my own choosing.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
How do you know we are not already in someone's virtual reality?
Download this weeks "HOT" game, play it for a few days, new game out next week, play that.
Rapid consumption software, treated as disposable entertainment media.
edit: revised
Many things today are limited not by technology, but by the cleverness of the programmer. Human intelligence doesn't scale with Moore's Law. We'll see some innovations now and then of things that could have been done today, but weren't. There's no technical reason why someone couldn't have made a MOBA 15 years ago, for example. But I don't expect a flood of such things that displaces everything we're familiar with today.
Some depends on how long Moore's Law survives. If it dies abruptly in a few years and quantum mechanics makes it impractical to scale chips below 10 nm, games of 2040 won't look like such a huge jump over today's technology. I'm not going to predict that that will happen, but for Moore's Law to still be alive and well in 2040 will require manipulating features of chips at a smaller scale than individual silicon atoms. And I am willing to predict that that won't happen.
Languages for writing both CPU and GPU code are pretty mature at this point, so I don't see huge changes there. The host code to allow the CPU and GPU to communicate is still in major upheaval, but I expect that to mature in the next several years. The APIs to do everything properly will scale down at least to cell phones and probably further. At some point, graphics APIs for phones aren't going to be stuck in 2006 anymore the way they mostly are today.
Higher level tools to make it easy for lesser skilled people to make mediocre games will get better and more common. So prepare for a flood of awful games made by amateurs that mostly get ignored. That won't do much to dampen the market for larger budget, professionally made games, however.
Virtual reality will come a long way, just like it has over the last decade. And the decade before that. And the decade before that, for that matter. There will be people who love it in 2040, but I expect virtual reality games to be a not especially large niche, though large enough that there's a lot of money to be made by those who can do it well.
Rather, I think the gaming market will split between virtual reality, gaming desktops with much better monitors than we have today, and mobile devices. All three of those will be mature, and most games will primarily target one of the three markets. None of those three markets will have to rely mostly on mediocre ports of games built for another market.
Keyboards will definitely be around and commonly used. Look, for example, at this typewriter that was introduced in 1873:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#/media/File:Sholes_typewriter.jpg
Keyboards have added some polish since then, but the basic design is still the same. That's not going to change in the foreseeable future, as if there were a nicer, fundamentally different way to fill a keyboard's role, someone probably would have figured it out long ago.
Mice will probably also still be around, though I'm not really sure how commonly used they will be. There are a lot of other analog input options today, from touch screens to motion sensors to thumbsticks, but nothing except trackballs works nearly as well as a mouse. And trackballs aren't going to replace mice. Nothing else is going to replace mice until it can work as well as a mouse. Someone may or may not come up with a viable replacement there by 2040.
It's certainly not going to be the case that hardware is so fast that all games run really well. Never underestimate the ability of bad software to run poorly on good hardware. Plenty of things that web browsers struggle with today would have been nearly instantaneous on a computer 15 years ago because the task is easy and browsers add so many layers of bloat that bad site designers find clumsy ways to do it.
In other words Second Life on LSD.
In 2040 I will be 85 and trying to afford to play whatever is around.
That's a signature if ever I saw one, Quizzical.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
By 2040 we'll probally have dot hack level tech, or maybe even sao. in dot hack it was a vr helm and a controller. in Sword art online everything was controlled by thought, it literally took over your bodys 5 senses, you could touch, smell, see, hear, and feel the wind on your skin. It also had a user/server configurable pain simulator that would cause you pain when you got hurt in the game. I'd suspect by 2040 we'd have something very simmlar to sao, I don't know about the taking over the senses so you feel your actually there, but the rest of it might be a possability.
Also the day we have something like sword art online technology wise, even if its not mmorpgs the human race as a whole is screwed.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
I have no idea what MMOs might look like in 2040, other than being very different from what we are used to. 25 years is too long to predict. But I'd like to comment on childhood experiences influencing adult design. I'm going to turn 35 in a few months, and I've been a gamer all my life. In my young childhood I was playing mainly Apple II games and Atari games, then when I was a little older I played NES games and DOS games. I'm also an amateur game designer, and have been doing this hobby since I was about 19. Those first game designs were influenced about 50% by things I played as a child. But now, having 15 years of being a designer to digest and reinvent ideas, my designs really don't bear much relationship to anything I played that long ago. Some PS1 and Gamecube games are now the oldest ones that I'd cite as influences when making a new game design, and they are being replaced more every year by newer PS2/3 and PC/online games. Maybe other people have longer memories than me, but, most creative people take in a lot of new influences every year and the particularly good ones often overwrite older influences in one's mind.
The way things are going, it will be an elaborate slot machine hidden behind state of the art graphics that says F2P but somehow still manages to drain your account.
THE FUTURE IS NOW!