What a load of old rubbish: MMOs. They're doing it wrong. | Hacker News Reader

What a load of old rubbish: MMOs. They're doing it wrong.

blog.parallax-rising.net

9 pointschaostheory11 comments

Several of his complaints seem to stem from a desire that each player should have a brand-new experience, unique from any other player's. I find this desire odd. If I am reading a novel, I do not pause to lament that others have already read the same words, and if I am playing a board game, I am not worried that someone may have used exactly the same strategy as mine.

I'm not so certain that procedurally generated content would be more entertaining than custom content in an MMO. Procedural games like Angband (and descendants like Oblivion) are entertaining, but they do not command the audience that WoW does. Most MMO players are not troubled by their repetitive experiences, so I wouldn't say the MMO's are "doing it wrong".

The appeal of being a person in a virtual world is in creating your own stories. If your experiences are identical to everybody else's, if you can't have a real effect on the world, then you're a passive observer rather than a real participant.

Passive interactivity (it's an oxymoron but I think you get my meaning) can be fun, of course. The problem is one of expectations; if you come into a static game expecting a virtual world, you'll be disappointed. It doesn't help that MMORPGs "look" like worlds, or that (to some extent) they're marketed as them.

Suppose someone (cough we cough) were already working on everything this guy's talking about - would you play it?

Immense scale and/or procedurally generated content would sell me alone. At any rate, don't be shy -- plug your game -- I'll be sure to check it out!

Depends. I have yet to play a (MMO)RPG with procedural content that is more engaging than one with well-crafted static content. IMO it works for strategy games, but not so much for RPGs. Yes, the procedural world is larger and has more replayability, but once your brain becomes used to the algorithms used to generate it, it becomes as repetitive as anything else.

I'd be happy to find a game that proves me wrong (not that I can afford the time to let myself get sucked into an MMORPG anymore...)

There are two camps; people that want to make/play games, and people that want to make/play worlds. For now at least, it's easier to make games than worlds.

Agreed. This guy's problem is that most MMOs are MMORPGs -- games. He doesn't want to play games. He wants to live in a virtual world. So: false choice. He's complaining that an apple isn't an orange.

I think it's more charitable to say that he's complaining that nobody's selling oranges, but fair enough. :)

Perhaps, and I'm all for being charitable. :-) But he does spend a fair amount of time complaining about the apples.

Ignoring gameplay issues, I think another interesting feature of procedural game dev is the memory/CPU tradeoff.

For example the 97,280 byte FPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

Ultima Online was on the right path.

Everquest set MMO's back 10 years in my opinion. :(

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