Why an MMO?

Back in November, I started a thread over on the Epic Slant forums entitled “Does everything need to be an MMO?”  The spark for that post came from the various announcements of features for the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic. Things like full voice, instancing, henchmen, focus on story, etc. all lead me to believe this game is going to play like a single player game where you might sometimes group up with other people.  I mean, how advanced is the story telling a full voice going to be?  If I get a mission to hunt down an escaped criminal, and we end up having to kill him, only as the healer of the group I stood in the back while my buddy killed him, will the quest text change to reflect that?  Will my buddy’s name be a part of the quest or will it be like every other game and proceed either a) thanking me for something I didn’t do, or b) generically offering thanks without naming anyone in specific.  Obviously, there is a lot of “wait and see” when it comes to these things, but as I said in the thread, as more is announced I’m getting further and further from purchasing at launch.  As it is right now, I’m probably going to wait at least three months because I want to make sure the advancement and progression of the game doesn’t fall apart.

Over at The Banstick is a post about Away Team Tactics in the recently launched Star Trek Online.  It looks very cool.  But I have to wonder why I’m subscribing to an MMO to play a game with an NPC team.  Tying back into the forum post linked above, from my time in the STO beta I can say I absolutely would have jumped into this game if it were a Single Player RPG with a subscription option to participate in the MMO elements and perhaps some downloaded expansion packs later on.

Global Agenda, despite being more FPS than RPG, has an interesting model.  You buy the game, and that buys you the typical FPS.  There is a good overview at That’s a Terrible Idea.  If you decide you like the game, you can subscribe which gets you access to more game play modes and other MMO type elements (in game email, auction houses, player run bases, and more).

STO could do this by making solo play planet and space exploration free, as well as perhaps a few “arena” style PvP areas, even some multi-player PvE stuff, then having a subscription to actually participate in Federation vs Klingon vs other empires and have an impact on the balance of power.

I really hope that more games that want to be MMOs consider Global Agenda’s model, as I think it is a superior one.  It allows players to scale up and down their participation and their cost without the all-or-nothing simple subscription model.  As it stands, from the beta I won’t be picking up STO as it, to me, felt a lot like Pirates of the Burning Sea which I also sort of liked but felt it was too much to pay for what I was getting.  But I’ll probably pick up Global Agenda, and if I enjoy it I may drop in to the full MMO from time to time when I feel its worth it.

To get back to the original question posed by the title, “MMO” is the latest craze in gaming buzzwords.  WoW has delivered so many money bags to the offices of Blizzard that every title wants to cash in, to be an MMO, whether they would be good at it or not.  I think more companies should take the time to consider if their game is actually going to be worth playing, and paying for, as an MMO and then design accordingly.  Either make an MMO or a Single Player game with some MMO elements, but don’t make a Single Player game and then charge a monthly fee for it.

Stop! Socialize!

Back when I played EverQuest, I often described the game as a chat server with a D&D style game tacked on to it.  This felt right because most of the game could be played without paying specific attention to the graphics.  Most of the action happened in your chat window.  People talked, the NPC text scrolled by, even damage output was all in this little window (until they allowed you to customize the UI, at which point I shoved all the damage output into a tiny window that I barely paid any attention to so I could focus more on the chatting).  With World of Warcraft they put more of combat into the hotkey bar, made you care about refresh timers and started dragging your attention away from the chat window.  They even eliminated the wall-sitting exp grind and forced you to keep moving around, so you had to actually watch the screen instead of just waiting for the puller to get back with a mob to fight.  In Free Realms, the mini game design requires so much attention that I find myself playing for an hour and realizing that I haven’t been reading the chat window.  I complain about not being able to find my friends in Free Realms, but to be perfectly honest, they might have come on and sent me tells, but I missed it because I was too busy chasing NPCs or looking for quests, or in mini games where I’m too busy playing a game to be watching chat.

The progression of MMOs that I am seeing is to get people more involved with the game, but less involved with the people.  In order to socialize in Free Realms, I have to actually stop playing and stand around.  In EQ, progression and socialization could happen (did happen) simultaneously.  And we won’t even go into the fact that I have not once grouped with anyone in Free Realms, even when I’ve wanted to and tried, it just doesn’t seem to be something people care about… or maybe they simply aren’t seeing my area chat asking for a group because no one is reading.

One of the best things about the Xbox 360 is the built in voice chat that works by default in all games.  If you play multi-player, you can chat with the other players.  It would be nice if MMOs could integrate voice chat more fully since they are taking our eyes away from the chat box and using our keyboard more for play than talking.  Ideally, a game would have some sort of spacial chat, similar to the way “say” worked in EQ (and other MMOs), so people within a certain distance would hear you.  That way when you were hanging out with your group in a dungeon, your group hears you, and when you walk in to town you hear players within an X foot radius, approaching people you want to hear, moving away from people you don’t.

I’d love to see it happen, because the current trend of having to choose between playing and socializing is killing my interest in their games.

One Step Closer

The 360 takes another step toward closing the Console-PC gap with its upcoming release. Check out the details over at gamerawr.

The biggest thing to me, and the step I’m saying they are taking, is the addition of the keyboard. Frankly, voice communication has only come so far, and for games supporting multiple chat channels, like MMOs, voice is severely limited. Some games just need text, and without a physical keyboard its just too hard to do. If you don’t believe me, trying using virtual keyboards, or even your 10-key phone pad to write long messages. There is a reason people invented text message short hand. (And deep in my heart of hearts, I hope this goes toward the erradication of needless short hand.)

Should this take off as I expect it to, we could be seeing the beginning of the end of PCs as a gaming platform. Though some might think this is great, its not entirely all roses. How do indie game devs break into the console? Maybe Microsoft could start offering a program to burn viable 360 discs so that indie games could be run… but I don’t really see that happening because it opens alot of doors to piracy. Also, if game modding continues to be popular, consoles do not exactly support making mods, at least not modeling and creating textures. As, of course at this time I don’t believe Microsoft supports external game servers… the PS3 claims it will though (or will support paid hosting of game servers).

In any event, the 360 is adding something new that may have an effect on the industry as a whole. Time will tell…

Voice Chat for Games

Okay, let us begin, as always, with a disclaimer… I hate Ventrilo and all the other software voice chat stuff people use for MMOs and whatnot. There is just something I feel is clunky about using a tool that is outside the game, and if there is one thing I am a big proponent of is putting tools in the game for the players (any game without an in-game notepad annoys me, I don’t want my desk covered in notes, let me put them in the game).

To that end, what I would really like to see is a move toward “realistic” voice chat in game. I wouldn’t do away with text chat entirely, because text works much better than voice for managing multiple rooms or private chats. And, to a degree, I don’t mind if interaction with NPCs for quests and stuff has to stay text based, that’ll come later if a game can manage what I want.

The first step is to build a sound engine and structures within the game engine to support distance with sounds. For a simplified system, lets just say there are 4 levels of sound: Whisper, Normal, Loud, Yell. Roughly equating these to distances: 5 feet, 15 feet, 30 feet, 100 feet (this might need some adjusting as this is just off the top of my head stuff). Every sound effect in the game has a sound level attached to it. When a sound plays, the appropriate distance from the sound emitter is calculated and the sound will be played for every listening object (mostly players) in that range, at the appropriate level. What that last clause means is that something said at “Normal” level doesn’t just travel 15 feet and stop, it travels 15 feet at Normal, and then another 7.5 at Whisper. A Yell would travel 100 feet at Yell, 50 feet at Loud, 25 feet at Normal, and 12.5 feet at Whisper. Then, you build “echo” objects that will repeat any sound they “hear”
modified by the properties of the echo object. If you have been in caves you’ll know that sometimes an echo can actually come back at you louder than the original sound, or distorted, not always just softer.

Okay, now that you have it so sound plays at distance and have echoes, the next step is to make NPCs react to sound. Imagine what games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft would be like if your footsteps made sound and the monsters could hear you. Pretty cool, eh? You can bet suddenly people would stop running and jumping to get everywhere.
Now, the final step of my plan… Voice Chat. The player logs in and sets levels in the options for Whisper, Normal, Loud and Yell by speaking into there microphone at the different levels. This way, when the player Yells into his mic, the game will play his sound back in the game as a Yell… 100 feet, then 50, then 25, then 12.5. Everyone in those ranges just heard him, good or bad.

After that, you can get real tricky by utiliting modified echo objects linked together to work like a walkie-talkie or cell phone. I whisper at my end, and even though you are 500 yards away my whisper comes out your end as a whisper (perhaps even with static or other sound modifications added to it).

I know this won’t be easy, as its not a simple sound stream, but I’d love to see it done. Anything that moves MMOs away from the feel of a graphical chat room and adds more spacial awareness is good to me.