you don't have friends.

just MMOless people.

=P pwnt

siafad...

ecks dee

we tried to get that one made into a proper acronym. They wouldn't let us -_-

I imagine creating a vast world, coming up with the various rules for races and classes, and creating enough quests so that you don't find yourself with nothing to do is a lot harder than creating a regular console RPG which has at most only 50 quests, more than half of those being part of the chain of events that is the main quest.

*shrug* which might be why they take longer in the making and have larger production teams.

^^ doesn't mean that the actual work itself is harder. i'm not really arguing either way, the only thing i'm arguing for is our own ignorance of the question.

Rofl! Nuub i hav lik +43 Archty n00b Lmao!!!-----MMO TALK

Basiclly the MMO genre is filled with bad grammer. like this sentence.

You waven't seen Diablo talk. Two players in town. Goes like this:

"wug"
"wuw"
"vipermagi"
"2 soj"
"ok"

anyone understood that? =P

Not a thing

Haha, here's the translation.

They're talking about business. That is, trading equipment.

"What U Got?"
"What U Want?"
"(Skin of) Vipermagi" -> name of an unique armor
"2 Stones of Jordan" -> name of a very rare unique ring, not surprisingly used as currency...
"OK"

Hehe. I miss those times =P

And.......you know this from experince?

The mmo I played was Graal. It was kinda like Zelda: lttp. It was meh.

Still, I played the damn thing for 5 years.

I'm talking about commercial MMOs. That requires a looooot of money.(servers ect..)

I guess what I was trying to say in the beginning that I may have done a poor job of is that I don't like MMOs because they lack something (or possibly many things) that off line games offer. I don't have a real sense of purpose when I play most MMOs. I feel like I'm just another face in the crowd with no real possibility of becoming something more, even if I devoted my life to it like many people do (and I'm afraid I like sunlight, people, and activity for that). I don't want to quest to become the strongest because that's never been a goal of mine in anything, really. I'd like to find an MMO where it's about more than that, and I can have a real sense of accomplishment when I get to where I'm going... Maybe I should just stick to real life, but I'd like to find something virtual that I can enjoy too.

I agree with you. I have absolutely no patience to sit home the whole day long power-leveling, item-hunting or whatever. To stand out in a MMO, you gotta be really good.

That's what I liked in Oberin... being Mac-only, it had (by the time I played it) very few players... it was much much much less combat-oriented than most MMOs out there... so it was basically your character trying to make a living.
It was damn hard to come across money, and you needed it to buy better equipment, and food (yes, you did need food). Best way to go was selling stuff you did yourself (skills like Blacksmithing, Woodworking, Tinkering, even Tailoring) to other players. The rest you spent either gathering natural resources (wood, iron ore, etc) or chatting at the town.
That's what I liked about it. Very very pleasant setting and environment... More realistic than, let's say, griffon-riding dwarves from WoW!

That would be a 'no'

This argument (the one vs DP) is dumb.

*shrug* as far as i can tell, this thread is basically us suggesting MMO's to someone who actually titled the thread;

'MMO's... and why i hate them'

This whole thing became dumb very early on, and continued in the same vein throughout. on the other hand, it's provoked a conversation. It wasn't really meant to do any more than that.

=P

OMG, who is "The One"?!

...

I don't play any MMORPGs... the only MMOs I play revolve around shooting people. Which is a good thing for the simple fact you don't have to worry about levels and crap, which seems to be the big social sucker of MMORPs.

For the faint of reading there is a summary at the bottom .

Well let me chime in on the difficulty of an MMO.

While I won't say whether or not they are the hardest genre to make, they are one of the hardest. Here are some actual reasons why (other than I said it on the internet so it's now fact).

It encompasses lots of different aspects of Computer Science (like most games but these also have to deal with networking issues, which many games and genres do not, or only have to deal with in a trivial manner). So from a programmatic stand point, that makes a lot more things to think about when you are writing your game logic, you have to be able to handle things like latency, people logging off/getting disconnected mid battle, and things of that nature most games don't have to worry about.

Then there is the balance issue. While it is true most games are fairly open to how much leveling you can do, now you must expand this over many players which will all inevitably be at varying levels of skill in the game. How do you balance all these players so that they feel the game is balanced, but not too simple?

Moving on from that, if you have an updatable game, or one which downloads the levels for the game off the net (not necessary, but in a lot of them), this tacks on to the networking burden, and also requires that you come up with a really good compression algorithm for your game data that favors space over speed but cannot sacrifice too much speed to compress/decompress the data.

Then as draygone pointed out your worlds are much more expansive and therefore will require more creativity and work to create. So while not hard in the technical areas of game creation, this makes it harder on the creative people in the game making process.

Quite possibly the hardest obstacle to overcome in a good MMO is drama management. How do you keep a continuous story going while having so many completely autonomous, and to a certain extent, uncontrollable agents affecting it. While this is also a problem in open ended games (like Oblivion and the like), here it's all happening simultaneously, making the problem become a little more difficult as you must now solve it in real time.

Then of course you have the one area to deal with almost unheard of in all other games, server maintenance and control. No other game must keep such large amounts of data stored in a central location (usually, to prevent cheating), which must be retrieved at a relatively fast speed. So while not particularly difficult, also not really a field of Computer Science associated with Games.

So while not much harder than your standard online PC game (since that includes most of the basics needed to create an MMORPG), having all these problems on a much larger scale does make them at least slightly harder (especially Drama management, since most RPGs are expected to have a rich story [though technically story is NOT part of a game, it's a nice extra]).

So will an MMO require more resources than a standard game (obviously given the same quality standards, a Korean text based homebrew MMO will more than likely be easier to make than a AAA FPS), definitely. Is it harder to make, probably (given that larger staffs are also harder to keep inline and all on the same page).

But really from a standard game the only basic differences are Scale and Networking. An MMO is really just the next step up from a cooperative game (fully cooperative game, not Tales of Symphonia or other games where it's only cooperative in the battles). Though the main reason you don't see too many companies make these is cost, not really difficulty (though that can be tied to cost given more competent employees typically require more salary). But as Blizzard has seen, it can also reap the greatest rewards.

Either way MMORPGs will require more time and resources to create.

SUMMARY

MMORPGs deal with a few more technical areas than most games, and in all the other areas deal with a much larger scale than most genres of games, and therefore make them harder to make.

As for MMORPGs I never got into them. Mainly because I really don't play a game more than once through, and I jump around a lot on which game I'm playing. Plus I'm not really interested in the social aspect of the MMOs, and the fact that the world changes a lot. Also I've seen what they do to other people, and how many college semesters have been completely blown off to play these games. Though I would like to think I have more self control than that, you never know. Of course I also don't really like playing games on the PC.

SUGGESTIONs.

WoW (expensive but it seems to be the one everyone plays)
Guild Wars (decent, and FREE (well you have to buy the game but no monthly fee)

As for MMOmakers, I'm pretty sure there are some MMO game engines out there. Pretty sure in my video game design class one group used one to make a small scale MMO adventure/platformer. They got a couple of levels and such but nothing spectacular (they did only have 4 people and one semesters time - 15 weeks).

i'd disagree as to your argument that balancing an MMORPG is harder because of player numbers. half an hour on any MMORPG will show you that some players are still hopelessly... hopeless, and others are efficient and intelligent enough to hold a party together. The system isn't necessarily made to accomodate the skilless players, those players who lack skill have to themselves learn how to play within the rather rigid environment that is provided. Or find a way to play where they at least look something like they know what they're doing. Anyone who has failed the same mission 5-10 times because their party has contained unskilled members or insufficient co-ordination will know that MMO's weren't built to just accomodate the worse players. While balancing an MMORPG would require a lot of time, due mostly to the sheer amount of items and skills, as well as other customisation options, i wouldn't say it requires a particularly high IQ to do. Just a lot of time

I'd also mention that Blizzard didn't actually incorporate a story into WoW or the Burning Crusade. *shrug* so i don't really think they can claim any real drama management. They're essentially a theme park, offering players an interesting quest or a 40-man raid dungeon. So a good MMO doesn't necessarily need to worry about drama management.

I've found that the world within an MMO will, rather than change dramatically, remain virtually the same over long periods of time. The players who are wandering through it will change, but the world itself is exactly the same. Which is why i <3 story-based MMO's *stares at GW*

The only game I can relate to this topic is Diablo. I can understand the boredom. Once you beat the game, theres really nothing else to do with the other people online. What ends up happening is that people enjoy just sitting there hacking away at the game instead of playing it. Trying to copy or "dupe" items. It gets really boring. I know when people where getting bored with Splinter cell, people would just sit there and try to find glitches. I'm sorry.. if the game becomes that boring where I have to go out of my way to look for glitches, its not worth playing anymore.