Will We See Smaller MMOs? - General Columns

SBFord · October 2016

Will We See Smaller MMOs? - General Columns

Yesterday, Gamasutra ran a feature about how players can only process about 200 social connections drawing attention to Dunbar’s Number theory. It brought up a very interesting point in the MMO world and how important the true size of a game really need to be? The vast worlds of 2000 to 2010 have given way to highly instanced MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2.

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BillMurphy · October 2016

Heck WoW has been reduced to instance running MMO, if you removed most of the open world zones many players wouldn't even know as majority just stand in town waiting for queue to pop.

As a player of WoW, this is false. Trove I'd say is a smaller MMO, but not TSW or Neverwinter. Both were feature-packed at launch. I believe the "smaller" MMO idea means more focused like Pantheon, less "Every Item on a Check List" like WildStar.

Nepheth · October 2016

DMKano said:

We've been seeing smaller MMOs for years already - Trove, Neverwinter, The Secret World etc...

Heck WoW has been reduced to instance running MMO, if you removed most of the open world zones many players wouldn't even know as majority just stand in town waiting for queue to pop.

Umm no. Ever since Legion release that's not the case anymore. I only go to towns for my personal needs and that's all. Other than that I'm always outside in the world running around for world quests, mythic dungeons, story quests etc... I don't even go to my class hall if I don't have any quest to take or don't have to spend my artifact power. And for my other needs, I can always use my phone.

MaxBacon · October 2016

Technology needs to continuously move on, I'd say people are still waiting for that amazing MMO experience and end up with more of the same.

So they pushed things graphically and mechanically as well; having massive numbers of players on the same places being to whole matter more expensive causes struggles on both servers and rendering.

Planetside 2 approach has a MASSIVE pop-in/pop-out to deal with those big numbers of players on the same place and keep both the server and the client performing. Even EvE Online has cuts on several parts to achieve such large numbers.

As some devs push on cloud technology we will see more persistence on the game world and slowly move away from the classic isolated instances like GW2. On the other side others are pushing on Procedural technology to give large scale to the game world.

Nepheth · October 2016

DMKano said:

Nepheth said:

DMKano said:

We've been seeing smaller MMOs for years already - Trove, Neverwinter, The Secret World etc...

Heck WoW has been reduced to instance running MMO, if you removed most of the open world zones many players wouldn't even know as majority just stand in town waiting for queue to pop.

Umm no. Ever since Legion release that's not the case anymore. I only go to towns for my personal needs and that's all. Other than that I'm always outside in the world running around for world quests, mythic dungeons, story quests etc... I don't even go to my class hall if I don't have any quest to take or don't have to spend my artifact power. And for my other needs, I can always use my phone.

But does average WoW player play this way? Or do they stand in town like they've been doing for years?

Yes average WoW player plays this way. Maybe only pvp players can play WoW with standing in town all the time which even they are doing world quests etc. for the gear they want. You can even farm honor ranks with pvp world quests.

Kyleran · October 2016

Not a new idea at all, for years now MMOs have been shrinking the "world" size.

I'm looking forward to the return of vast open worlds with some up and coming titles such as D&L, always the direction the genre should have gone.

Bill should slap Garrett up side the head for suggesting 60 players was ever a MMO. :P

FelixMajor · October 2016

I can think of a few. Hellgate London, Global Agenda, the crime one (crime craft or something)?

rodingo · October 2016

I think as long as there is a market for MMOs on consoles then the overall size of AAA Western MMOs will be small enough to accommodate them. Consoles are more standardized and are an easier platform for studios to make games on. Plus console game sales are at least three times that of the PC, mostly. So it's a no brainer that our MMOs will be adjusted in size and scope to perform well on that platform. Thus we will continue to see smaller, more focused MMOs that can be cross platform until the console can match the power of the PC in more ways than just graphics.

Phry · October 2016

I think personally that MMO's just need to stop chasing the multi million player status, it rarely happens, a more realistic objective would be to have a game that has under 1 million players, and base their revenue requirements accordingly. Being a Niche game is fine, as long as its a good one.
I don't think smaller game worlds though are a good thing, you end up with the Dragon Age2 scenario where you have to re use the same areas ad nauseum, to compensate for the lack of variation.

MaxBacon · October 2016

Phry said:

I think personally that MMO's just need to stop chasing the multi million player status, it rarely happens,

Well isn't that what games like Ark Survival Evolved are? Or Life is Feudal? Wurm Unlimited?

I think the ones that moved to the player-hosted, devs-hosted servers and game-worlds is pretty much who aims at the smaller scale of things; online persistent game world with RPG elements but on a scaled down map and player numbers. Though people will not call them MMO's.

sedatedkarma · October 2016

I still cringe when I see Destiny pointed to as an example of an MMO. Anyone who didn't work in the industry trying to cram this thought down our throat knew exactly what it was. A lobby game.

Phry · October 2016

MaxBacon said:

Phry said:

I think personally that MMO's just need to stop chasing the multi million player status, it rarely happens,

Well isn't that what games like Ark Survival Evolved are? Or Life is Feudal? Wurm Unlimited?

I think the ones that moved to the player-hosted, devs-hosted servers and game-worlds is pretty much who aims at the smaller scale of things; online persistent game world with RPG elements but on a scaled down map and player numbers. Though people will not call them MMO's.

The games you mentioned aren't really indicative, as they represent fairly short lived experiences.
People don't tend to call them MMO's, simply because they aren't, and if there is one word that applies heavily to player hosted games, its ephemeral, they might last anything from hours, to days, or rarely, weeks.
They last only as long as the host has an interest, and that can disappear very quickly and such games suffer heavily from a shifting interest that is very much reliant on trends, here today, gone tomorrow, not so much flavour of the month, as flavour of the hour.

MaxBacon · October 2016

Phry said:
The games you mentioned aren't really indicative, as they represent fairly short lived experiences.
People don't tend to call them MMO's, simply because they aren't, and if there is one word that applies heavily to player hosted games, its ephemeral, they might last anything from hours, to days, or rarely, weeks.
They last only as long as the host has an interest, and that can disappear very quickly and such games suffer heavily from a shifting interest that is very much reliant on trends, here today, gone tomorrow, not so much flavour of the month, as flavour of the hour.

The only one that is considered one MMO of the examples is Wurm Online. Games like Ark however are more PvP based so once you get frustrated and ragequit is as long it lasts, the same thing but with more PvE and more Cooperative game direction, then you have something longer-term.

cameltosis · October 2016

Doesn't Dunbars number refer to the number of friendly social connections one can maintain and understand? The number is 150.

So, how many people do you have to meet in order to generate 150 friends?

For someone like me, I only like about 1 in 10 people I meet (I can't suffer idiots) and of those 1 in 10, it's rare for me to maintain a stable relationship. So, for me to reach those 150 people referred to by Dunbar, I need to meet about 3000 people.

Given multiple factions, the anti-social / solo nature of the average gamer, different play times etc, I'd say I would need a server to support at least 10,000 players in order for myself to come close to dunbars number.

I would say that Dunbars number actually encourages massively open worlds with 1000s of concurrent users! Not the reverse. Smaller games, smaller worlds, more instancing.....you're just making it harder to make friends. If you're server only had 200 people on it, but was the same style of MMO as we have now, you'd never see anyone, maybe have 10 friends and it wouldn't feel like an MMO any more.

In addition to all of that, you need to bring in psychology and retention rates. Friends keep friends playing games for longer. If you are giving up on MMOs and just making smaller instanced online games like Destiny (which isn't an MMO...), you're making it harder to make friends, harder to be social and thus reducing retention rate. How is that a good thing?

Finally, I would like to point out that MMOs only have 1 unique selling point now - being MASSIVELY-multiplayer. Every other feature can now be found in other genres.

So, if you aren't making use of the MMO part, what's the point?

Ridelynn · October 2016

It may be that I can only process +/- 200 social connections at a time, but it takes a lot more than 200 people on a server to accomplish that. I don't necessarily establish a "social connection" with every single person running around.

I think @cameltosis explains it well in his post.

Iselin · October 2016

cameltosis said:

Doesn't Dunbars number refer to the number of friendly social connections one can maintain and understand? The number is 150.

So, how many people do you have to meet in order to generate 150 friends?

For someone like me, I only like about 1 in 10 people I meet (I can't suffer idiots) and of those 1 in 10, it's rare for me to maintain a stable relationship. So, for me to reach those 150 people referred to by Dunbar, I need to meet about 3000 people.

Given multiple factions, the anti-social / solo nature of the average gamer, different play times etc, I'd say I would need a server to support at least 10,000 players in order for myself to come close to dunbars number.

I would say that Dunbars number actually encourages massively open worlds with 1000s of concurrent users! Not the reverse. Smaller games, smaller worlds, more instancing.....you're just making it harder to make friends. If you're server only had 200 people on it, but was the same style of MMO as we have now, you'd never see anyone, maybe have 10 friends and it wouldn't feel like an MMO any more.

In addition to all of that, you need to bring in psychology and retention rates. Friends keep friends playing games for longer. If you are giving up on MMOs and just making smaller instanced online games like Destiny (which isn't an MMO...), you're making it harder to make friends, harder to be social and thus reducing retention rate. How is that a good thing?

Finally, I would like to point out that MMOs only have 1 unique selling point now - being MASSIVELY-multiplayer. Every other feature can now be found in other genres.

So, if you aren't making use of the MMO part, what's the point?

Yeah. I said pretty well the same thing in the other thread about this a couple of days ago:
http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/457307/build-small-specific-instead-of-big-rich-lambert/p1

Also... it's all well and good to make smaller games designed to hold fewer players in the game world if that's what people want to play. But why do we need to continue to call them Mmos when we get rid of the massively multiplayer part and make them just multiplayer. Is there some sort of social stigma associated with just calling them MOs, which is what those are, that I'm not aware of that forces the use of that legacy extra M?

tonyvuknome · October 2016

As a long time MMO player I played Lineage 2 almost 7 years although not always on retail server mostly private servers. I can say I had more fun on less populated servers(while they were active) unfortunately "good" private servers never last for ever

What I noticed with smaller population severs where majority of people know each other.
1. You make good friends that stay around for a long time. You feel more connected to the people you play with.
2. You make mortal enemies that you will hate even after you meet in a new game
3. You get blacklisted by all the large guilds possibly the whole server if you scam people

What I noticed with a largely populated game
1. You make good friends but generally not for long if you're in a large pvp guild people come and as they get replaced with others who are better/more active. Smaller guilds can be the same as they eventually want to be more competetive and leave for a bigger guild.
2. You're enemies aren't really your enemies since you might never see them again or they join your guild.
3. You can scam some people and generally no one cares (runescape is famous for this)

Sabas · October 2016

Less statistics and metrics please. MMO's need to go back to what they were.

Virtual worlds where you can live out your alternate reality dream.

All I see these days is developers and publishers convincing the market that they are wrong for wanting massive persistent worlds. Instead of looking into real solutions they hide behind market reports to justify the mistakes on their end.

Sometimes I think its better for the MMO genre to go back to its niche origins. In the old days I could meet new friends in game. These days nobody cares about another player, times changed but so did the games. Game design is very relevant to how players treat other players.

Instancing and even smaller worlds wont make players magically like strangers.

Loke666 · October 2016

You certainly could make a fun smaller MMO if you used Diablo styled random dungeons. The open world do not have to be huge if you have lot of varying dungeons just as the other way around is true as well.

Both small dungeons and a small world is bad though. Of course vast totally empty areas doesn't make a good MMO either. I did play some AoC just after the (first if there been more since?) expansion came out, the new zones were huge but only one of them had much to do in. Vast empty areas will at best set the mood but that tend to get old fast.

JhiaPet · October 2016

A real economy is an important component of creating the MMO feel. It connects very large numbers of people without running into the social relationship ceiling and acts as a bedrock that anchors the game, giving meaning to the activities that players engage in.

It can also enable these groups of 150-200 (guild size groups) to interact with each other in ways that promote the whole game world feel and experience without requiring players to micromanage individual connections and maintaining complex business relationships. This is the primary purpose of an economy.

I think that the lack of these economies in some of these newer titles is having a negative impact on their being perceived as MMO's despite the thousands of players in the lobby. If you want to define interaction as being more than the temporary grouping a lot of the "MOBA" style games feature, economy can't be ignored.

Worries about RMT could be handled by embracing it rather than trying to police it. Designing a game to properly account for this possibility would keep the in game economy intact and preserve the feeling the game world is more than a postage stamp. It creates another dimension in the players mind that expands the backdrop, which is a necessary component of the whole MMO feel.

If a game doesn't feature an economy of some kind (players trading with players), then it's very questionable if it will be accepted as a true MMO as time goes on.

Greyed · October 2016

No, it is a misapplication of that number. Yes, any one given individual can only process ~200 social interactions. But that doesn't mean the each person has the same 199 other interactions. Nor that those interactions are with the same 199 people on subsequent days, weeks or years.

Also it is a misapplication of the mechanics of instancing vs. open world. The reason why Asheron's Call, 16 years later, is still a stand-out world to me isn't because I had X interactions with people. I had interactions with maybe a dozen. But the fact that I could run from one side of the continent to the other and take hours to do so had nothing to do with how many people I was chatting with. It was the mechanics of having a vast open space to explore.

In the 5 years AC I played there were locations on the main continent I never saw. I could fire up the client right now and head off in directions I had never seen. Instanced MMOs with their highly scripted and lead-by-the-nose directed themepark instanced areas, not so much.

So no, misapplying Dunbar's Number doesn't even remotely apply to MMO population sizes nor how they operate mechanically. Though it does provide a fine example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Greyed · October 2016

Bill should slap Garrett up side the head for suggesting 60 players was ever a MMO. :P

60 isn't even a full FPS server in my eyes. t'hell with this recent trend 5v5 tripe in the FPS scene.

waynejr2 · October 2016

BillMurphy said:
As a player of WoW, this is false. Trove I'd say is a smaller MMO, but not TSW or Neverwinter. Both were feature-packed at launch. I believe the "smaller" MMO idea means more focused like Pantheon, less "Every Item on a Check List" like WildStar.

Didn't we just have a post about smaller world/budgets the other day? Now this post comes along?

It is like some of the websites I visits, someone makes a topic and in the next week "everyone suddenly has the same idea for an article". It stinks.

Look, there is a one way to look at how to manage a business. Lean design is vogue and I hate it. These smaller games are promoted as smaller but better because we don't have to focus on all that extra areas. If they really make it great that might be ok, but they should own that they are being thrifty about the project.

I love to explore world even if it doesn't provide loot/xp etc. In fact, after GW2 I think I prefer if there isn't any benefit exploration than just being there. A larger world is better for me as an explorer. The smaller they make the world the more they should consider just making a damn lobby game. Don't bother with the pretense of having a world for an mmoRPG...Or just make a shooter.

[Deleted User] · October 2016

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Loke666 · October 2016

waynejr2 said:
...
Look, there is a one way to look at how to manage a business. Lean design is vogue and I hate it. These smaller games are promoted as smaller but better because we don't have to focus on all that extra areas. If they really make it great that might be ok, but they should own that they are being thrifty about the project.

I love to explore world even if it doesn't provide loot/xp etc. In fact, after GW2 I think I prefer if there isn't any benefit exploration than just being there. A larger world is better for me as an explorer. The smaller they make the world the more they should consider just making a damn lobby game. Don't bother with the pretense of having a world for an mmoRPG...Or just make a shooter.

Focusing only on specific parts is not bad, if a game can make those parts really great instead of all standard parts average I don't see any problem.

If a game put most or all of it's resources on one or 2 types of gameplay it can really make those good. And balancing is easier as well. Not all games need to have everything. I for one would love a game focused on exploration with little or no dungeons and raids and all that content put in the open world instead. If I want to do dungeons I can pick up something else.

A little of everything is a terrible idea since nothing will really be great that way. In a perfect world you can do everything huge and perfect but few games have the budget fopr that today.

CrazKanuk · October 2016

Mtibbs1989 said:

BillMurphy said:

Heck WoW has been reduced to instance running MMO, if you removed most of the open world zones many players wouldn't even know as majority just stand in town waiting for queue to pop.

As a player of WoW, this is false. Trove I'd say is a smaller MMO, but not TSW or Neverwinter. Both were feature-packed at launch. I believe the "smaller" MMO idea means more focused like Pantheon, less "Every Item on a Check List" like WildStar.

I disagree with Neverwinter being a larger MMO. It was one of the smallest MMOs I've played and it took 2 days at most for me to explore the entire game. Not to mention a lot of it clings through community created content to make up for any lack thereof.

I also dislike seeing games where the vast majority of my time is spent in a loading screen. But load screens don't make games like Neverwinter small. Just the lack of content provided.

As far as worlds go, they say size doesn't matter

Honestly, we're constantly asking for larger and larger worlds, but that will simply lead to more disappointment. First there is PG, and we know people will complain about PG based on recent PG games. Next is player created content, the blessing and the curse of it. Neverwinter is one example where you can have AMAZING story content. However, there is the flip side to that where the content just sucks and feels horribly disjointed. Better curation maybe? Then we've got Landmark as another example, where the world would ultimately be sculpted into forests of penises if some people had their way.

Is something like Shards Online the answer? Player-created, player-curated shards? Like the Minecraft model in an MMO. I just don't know.

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