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Lets build a definition of "MMOG" most of us can live with
Iselin
Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719
I can here the groans already: "Oh God. Not this again." Yes, this again. But this time let's try to keep it abstract without pointing fingers at a game or some games that make or don't make the cut in our opinion. Let's try to boil it down to the essentials of what specific characteristics make us feel a game fits the confines and which don't.
OK. That's not 100% accurate. From both a technical (server capacity) and a game play perspectives instancing in virtual worlds has always been with us. But I think we can all agree that the extent to which low concurrent user instances form a significant part of the game play experience in MMOs has grown exponentially from being virtually non existent in the first crop to being rather large in the current offerings.
This is a rather crucial part of this whole question of game genre classification and is I suspect a key factor - and a generational factor at that - in whether we personally consider a game to be an MMOG or not. If you didn't play those no instance, early offerings from 18 years ago this may not matter much at all to you. But if you did, having the majority of the game play take place in the non-instanced world is the one criteria to rule them all.
More than a decade ago both Brad McQuaid and Raph Koster weighed in on the relative merits of instancing and their importance with regard to the feel of a virtual world. Just click on their respective names for those two Nov. '05 articles. Well worth reading.
Let's get one thing clear right off the bat. Etymology, the study of word origins and changed meanings over time, doesn't concern itself with acronyms or initialisms. Be that as it may, the usage of the term those initials stand for, Massively-Multiplayer Online Game, can change over time and its meaning can also mean (hopefully slightly) different things to different people.
This is where our frequent arguments here about the correct usage of the term usually bog down into nit-picking squabbles about numbers like 2, 4, 16, 64, 100, 1000, etc. with one camp firmly entrenched on the position that "Massively-Multiplayer" has an immutable meaning not subject to etymological vagaries.
This is all well and good and IMO, a technically correct argument. It is also utterly useless for our purposes. Why? because those initials have over time come to mean something other than what the initials originally referred to. The term primarily describes a type of gaming we have all experienced and is much more evocative of our own personal MMO experience over time than it is a refection of the meaning of the initials. It is much more now about what features, activities and experiences we associate with those games than their dissected ultimate meaning.
Since the time of WOW's launch in 2003, the vast majority of MMOs we have played have contained a mix of open world and small group instanced content. They differ from each other somewhat on the % of open world content vs. small group (or solo) instances but most of them have this mix.
Nonsensical though this may sound, in a sense the small group instanced part of MMOs, ubiquitous though they may be in current MMOs, are a non MMO feature imported into the genre for variety of reasons. Whatever good things these small group instances do for us - and that includes equitable distribution of space, activities, items, etc. - they also serve to destroy that subjective sense of expansiveness MMOs need to have to, IMO, be accurately classified as an MMO.
The more reliant on small group instances a game is the less "MMOish" it feels to me. And exclusive use of small group instances notwithstanding the common abstract or 3D (town) hubs, IMO, disqualifies a game from being categorized as an MMO.
To me the key criteria is that a significant part of the content essential to the game play must happen in the open world where random strangers may participate or just wander by while you play. That is what makes a game feel like an MMO to me. It really doesn't matter to me whether the technical load-balancing decisions of the developers means that I have a loading screen between different parts of the world or not, nor does it matter to me if they use megaserver tech to generate multiple instances of a world chunk in 100 player (or some other number) increments. The important thing is that most of the key game play happen in those overland world areas and that the game have those in the first place.
Anyway, that's what I think. How about you?
In the beginning there were no instances.
OK. That's not 100% accurate. From both a technical (server capacity) and a game play perspectives instancing in virtual worlds has always been with us. But I think we can all agree that the extent to which low concurrent user instances form a significant part of the game play experience in MMOs has grown exponentially from being virtually non existent in the first crop to being rather large in the current offerings.
This is a rather crucial part of this whole question of game genre classification and is I suspect a key factor - and a generational factor at that - in whether we personally consider a game to be an MMOG or not. If you didn't play those no instance, early offerings from 18 years ago this may not matter much at all to you. But if you did, having the majority of the game play take place in the non-instanced world is the one criteria to rule them all.
More than a decade ago both Brad McQuaid and Raph Koster weighed in on the relative merits of instancing and their importance with regard to the feel of a virtual world. Just click on their respective names for those two Nov. '05 articles. Well worth reading.
The (sort of) etymology of the term and its uselessness
Let's get one thing clear right off the bat. Etymology, the study of word origins and changed meanings over time, doesn't concern itself with acronyms or initialisms. Be that as it may, the usage of the term those initials stand for, Massively-Multiplayer Online Game, can change over time and its meaning can also mean (hopefully slightly) different things to different people.
This is where our frequent arguments here about the correct usage of the term usually bog down into nit-picking squabbles about numbers like 2, 4, 16, 64, 100, 1000, etc. with one camp firmly entrenched on the position that "Massively-Multiplayer" has an immutable meaning not subject to etymological vagaries.
This is all well and good and IMO, a technically correct argument. It is also utterly useless for our purposes. Why? because those initials have over time come to mean something other than what the initials originally referred to. The term primarily describes a type of gaming we have all experienced and is much more evocative of our own personal MMO experience over time than it is a refection of the meaning of the initials. It is much more now about what features, activities and experiences we associate with those games than their dissected ultimate meaning.
IMO, the real criteria we should be looking at, subjective though it may be
Since the time of WOW's launch in 2003, the vast majority of MMOs we have played have contained a mix of open world and small group instanced content. They differ from each other somewhat on the % of open world content vs. small group (or solo) instances but most of them have this mix.
Nonsensical though this may sound, in a sense the small group instanced part of MMOs, ubiquitous though they may be in current MMOs, are a non MMO feature imported into the genre for variety of reasons. Whatever good things these small group instances do for us - and that includes equitable distribution of space, activities, items, etc. - they also serve to destroy that subjective sense of expansiveness MMOs need to have to, IMO, be accurately classified as an MMO.
The more reliant on small group instances a game is the less "MMOish" it feels to me. And exclusive use of small group instances notwithstanding the common abstract or 3D (town) hubs, IMO, disqualifies a game from being categorized as an MMO.
To me the key criteria is that a significant part of the content essential to the game play must happen in the open world where random strangers may participate or just wander by while you play. That is what makes a game feel like an MMO to me. It really doesn't matter to me whether the technical load-balancing decisions of the developers means that I have a loading screen between different parts of the world or not, nor does it matter to me if they use megaserver tech to generate multiple instances of a world chunk in 100 player (or some other number) increments. The important thing is that most of the key game play happen in those overland world areas and that the game have those in the first place.
Anyway, that's what I think. How about you?
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Comments
Well it was relative to an actual number , when Garriot coined the phrase he was asked to describe Ultima online ... And he described his game at the time .. a persistent world which thousands of players could interact (UO servers can handle (i think)up to 10K).. This was the (pun intended) Origin of MMORPG ... So when he coined the phrase "MMORPG"he was most ceratainly referencing his game and its server capabilties among other things ..
Simple test ... lets play .. One of These things is not like the other..
1.UO 2.Destiny 3.BDO 4.SWG
Tell me which one is different and give the most signifigant reason why
and again
1. Destiny 2. Call of Duty 3.EQ 4.Ark
These are rhetorical questions of course .. We all know which is different and why ...
The problem we have is developers began sometime 2007 or so labeling there Multi player games as MMO/RPGs when they werent , to get to/appeal to a broader younger audience (ill add more gullible and easily suggestive audience also )
Convoluting the phrase MMORPG to entire generation of gamers , I could take a dam condom , poke a hole in it and sell it as a condom , But the smart kids know its not doing what was intended to do , Just like games like LOL,Destiny ,Ark etc .. arent doing what an MMORPG was/is intended to do .
And fortunatley for the MMORPG genre Devs/Publishers are now steering away from attaching what is seen as a stigma, to them ,to there games ... That arent truly MMORPGs as recently as Destiny 2 and others which the devs are not/and do not want that label attached to there games ..
They are leaving that label for games that truly fill those requirements which games like Destiny DO NOT
And to add the MMORPG genre was DEFINED by games such as UO , Anarchy Online , EQ, DAOC , Asherons Call and a few others , These games literally defined a genre and era of gaming they set the bar for what an MMORPG was/is ..
These games all shared some common traits , Thousands of players in the same persistent world at the same time etc...
With the success of MMORPGs post the 600 lb gorilla (WOW) being the strongest example , But the hype and selling power of that tag led Devs/Publishers to attach this tag to there games that truly were not MMORPGs .. As i pointed out above .. The pendulum has swung .. And this trend should benefit the communities and DEv/Pub houses of each seperate genres of MMORPGS /COOP/MULtiPLAYER/AND FPS as devs have begun to label there games correclty , targeting the proper demographics for there games ..
http://www.aiag.org/expertise/supply-chain-management/inbound-materials-management/global-materials-management-operations-guidelines
More seriously, what we need is not so much a hard cut-off of what is or is not an MMOG, but rather, a sliding scale of massively multiplayerness. Perhaps a time average over the time while you are actively playing the game of the logarithm of the number of players in the same instance as you with whom you plausibly could meaningfully interact.
Even if it does disqualify one of my favorites of GW1.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
1) No cash shop, they don't and never did belong.
2) Something above incredibly easy, I'll even take medium difficulty at this point.
3) Open world, at least not deeply instanced.
4) Don't give a rats ass about graphics.
The past few posts explain this pretty well, which one of these things is not like the other? We used to play the game in kindergarten, it is not hard.
Games featuring multiplayer, co-op, or have other online features are not freaking MMO's. Just stop.
oh look . . . no games meet that criteria . . . . . . . [sarcasm]
I solved the age-old question of the definition of an MMO. My next task, will be solving the meaning of life.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I know it's human nature to what to classify everything, and for everything to need to fit neatly into a label. But gaming, especially, doesn't do that. We get genre-bending titles all the time, ones that take multiple concepts and mash them up from different genres, and occasionally one that actually invents something new that defies all the existing genres. Sticking with very strict definitions doesn't leave a lot of room and then we end up with silly names like Metroidvania, RogueLike, and the differences between a JRPG/ARPG/SRPG/WRPG/MRPG/TRPG/etc....
It reminds me of a legal tale, actually. In 1964, the US Supreme Court was trying a case that involved, of all things, the First Amendment versus Pornography. Specifically, trying to define pornography was becoming a tricky subject - how do you differentiate between, say, the statue of Peter by Michelangelo and a photograph of Ron Jeremy in the same pose? Is a mother breastfeeding in public the same thing as a topless dancer?
Now, being legal minded individuals, they ultimately tried very hard to come up with a definition, so you could very clearly say ~This~ is pornography and should not have the protection of free speech, but ~That~ is art, or public expression, or nature, and should be covered by the Constitution. The Justices could all agree Pornography and similar immoral/obscene material should not be entirely protected by the Constitution, and that communities should have the right to protect themselves and their children from exposure to such material.
But they could never clearly define exactly what Pornography was. It boiled down to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, quoting his legal aid Alan Novak, in defining pornography as "I will know it when you see it."
That's pretty much how I define an MMO - I know it when I see it.
MMOGs the genre.
MMOFPS (Newer so some older MMO veterans are having a "wtf why" moment) and MMORPG (Has been around the longest so people think this is the only type of MMO) are BOTH sub-genres of MMOGs.
WoW - MMORPG - Raids, Heroics, Dungeons, Loot, Guild System, Character Creation, Shared game space, online-only experience, Fantasy Setting, large instance
Destiny- MMOFPS - Raids, Heroics, Dungeons, Loot, Guild System, Character Creation, Shared game space, online-only experience, Sci-Fi Setting, small instance
Both do similar things same features all of that good stuff but the difference is one has a far bigger instance than the other. I'm still waiting for somebody to explain how Destiny isn't an MMO. I said MMO, not MMORPG.
The argument over how many players per instance is stupid. Destiny isn't a WoW level of instances but people need to stop acting like its borderlands or gears. Those are co-op games with offline modes. The Multiplayer parts are tacked on to those games. Destiny was designed for an online MMO experience.
Also btw.. Bungie isn't calling Destiny an MMO, they don't want that title. None of the new games do. Even if people like myself think its an MMO. Again this is a never-ending conversation. The games are what you want it to be, but I like to point out the facts.
The facts are that Destiny and WoW have more in common than some of you want to admit for some strange reason.
Edit: Is it Online Only? Does it have the traditional MMO features listed above? Are you able to play with many people even if its 100 at a time or 20 at a time?
It's an MMO.
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
but what about 5k? Thats less then what Garriot was referring to. Or 2k? Or would it stop at 500? What I am trying to say is that there is no exact tipping point between massively and non-massively.
And I am really no expert but 10k? I think very few games would qualify as an MMORPG then.
/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
Massively Multiplayer Online Game.
But now, we are getting into multiple threads on the same discussion.
But the true question here is........
why is it so EFFING difficult to drop an "M"?
It still wouldn't break this site's moniker.
It went from MMORPG to MMO+RPG
so
mMOrpG is still in there.
Multi-Player Online Game.
Was that so hard?
I've always cared more about the RPG half of the acronym anyways and no matter how I define the MMO half or get like minded people to agree with me, games that label themselves as MMOGs are going to continue to do so. I can scream until I'm red in the face or sit here and high five my like thinkers when we decide they aren't really MMOGs, but they seem to keep on going.
Almost like it doesn't matter.
I think the key here is that though some of us might quibble about certain MMOs that don't have all the characteristics we would expect to see, that is going to be a small minority of posters. What has been happening is that totally different types of games have just been shoved in under the MMO banner.
The gaming publishers often use the term MMO very loosely but they don't always do so. Warframe is an example. The publisher calls Warframe "A third-person, co-op focused action game". For me the argument ends there, it should not be on a list of MMOs, it is simply not a MMO.
UO could , EQ, DAOC ,AC ,SWG , WOW .. etc etc etc ... sooooo they all qualify ... no ..
And of course this means that amount of players can play in that world across , of course you cant shove them all in town ...
But pretty common for any of those games or numerous others to have 5k plus players on a server at any given time .. Interacting in the same persistent world..
bahh going to dinner ill bbl
Officially.....
It's MMORPG = For a game where 500ish players can interact in a single zone(that's not a hub)
Wow, Rift, EQ?
MOOWS = Multiplayer Online Open-World Survival?
Ark, H1Z1, DayZ
MOBA = Multiplayer Online Battle Area
Dota, LoL, Smite
MOLBRPG = Multiplayer Online Lobby Based Role-Playing Game
Warframe?
MMOFPS = Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter
PS2
What else we got?
MOARPG = Multiplayer Online Action Role Playing Game
POE, D3,
MOFPSARPG = Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter Action Role Playing Game
Destiny?
So for example, Vindictus and Overwatch are definitely MMOGs but are definitely not MMORPGs. FarmVille, NeoPets, Flight Rising, Summoners War, Words With Friends, and other online board and card game sites are not MMOGs.
I have one simple rule of thumb, and i think i explained in detail in the past but i'll keep it short,the game MUST adhere to it's title.
keyword >>GAME.Not the login screen not what the server says logged in,the actual game has to PLAY like it's title declares it to play.NOBODY is joining a game for the title or the login screen,it is THE GAME and ONLY the game that matters.
So a short example,if the game does NOT play like a MMO,it is not a mmo.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
We had 2 massive threads about this this summer.
to me RPG signifies a rich story driven plot and typically some form of character progression. (call of duty is not an RPG!)
At UO's time if was what 64? What is it now? Is there even a limit to differentiate then anymore.