Personally, I have no expectations at this point. I have moved on. Regardless of how you feel about the IP, Fallout 76 is probably on the right track in terms of what a viable MMO looks like going forward. Yes, I am on the fence given it is Fallout but the gaming approach seems solid regardless of the IP. People want progression and I'm not sure the old tried and true MMO canon works anymore for the volume audience a company needs to be successful.
I have fond memories of the original Everquest, WOW, Star Wars and others but as much as those were a blast, I wouldn't want to go back and play today. Questing, corpse runs, raiding... I'm over it. I have gotten older and just don't have the time to sink in. I remember pushing through playing The Secret World at launch because the story was so engaging but once completed, I no longer felt like logging in.
Today, I spend most of my time playing single-player games and having a lot of fun doing it; the Witcher, Divinity, Assassin's Creed, Skyrim (Still), X-Com,...
MMORPG's as a genre are in a terrible place at the moment, because it's become crystal clear that the ROI on these types of lengthy projects is dismal compared to other genres.
I believe the "Golden Age" of MMORPG's is forever gone. Perhaps the possibilities offered by new tech like SpatialOS may hold some hope, but given the fact that "more complexity" means higher development cost probably makes the ROI even less attractive...
I don't agree. Gamers have proven that "MMO" is very desirable. Make a great game that plays different, that's an exciting and adventurous world to play around in, and polish it well, and you've got something.
"Make a great game..." That's the tricky part.
Of course it is. And that's true with anything. Success requires a lot of moving parts in cohesion and conceptualized in an overall design plan. It requires knowledge and experience and leadership. And not just anyone can do that. From leadership on down.
Making an MMORPG equivalent of RPG maker is fine if the point of your game is the artwork or the storyline. If you're hoping to make something with interesting and innovative game mechanics, tools that try to handle most of the programming work for you are going to block most of your good ideas and neuter your game.
Expectations??...minimum as good as FFXI,SHOULD be better since any dev now can see how many games do stuff and should be able to improve on ideas and or add even more ideas.
Sadly most every dev is giving us less and with shallow systems.Example Amazon trying to sell us yet another empty Survival game,seriously just STOP with the crappy games.
Amazon's effort is like a 1/10,i expect a minimum of 6-7 out of ten with a steady improvement not just instances and bosses.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Making an MMORPG equivalent of RPG maker is fine if the point of your game is the artwork or the storyline. If you're hoping to make something with interesting and innovative game mechanics, tools that try to handle most of the programming work for you are going to block most of your good ideas and neuter your game.
I'm noit sure what you are talking about here, Quizz. Are you talking about bought programming tools?
Making an MMORPG equivalent of RPG maker is fine if the point of your game is the artwork or the storyline. If you're hoping to make something with interesting and innovative game mechanics, tools that try to handle most of the programming work for you are going to block most of your good ideas and neuter your game.
You would hope that a MMORPG maker would be very modular and customizable. The main part is to be able to have running MMORPG. That is a lot of leg work done. Maybe it is a pipe dream but it sure would be nice.
Making an MMORPG equivalent of RPG maker is fine if the point of your game is the artwork or the storyline. If you're hoping to make something with interesting and innovative game mechanics, tools that try to handle most of the programming work for you are going to block most of your good ideas and neuter your game.
You would hope that a MMORPG maker would be very modular and customizable. The main part is to be able to have running MMORPG. That is a lot of leg work done. Maybe it is a pipe dream but it sure would be nice.
There's an enormous difference between a library that does some small piece and a framework that asks you to fit your entire project into it. The latter can very often be useful. Putting #include <vector> at the top of your code doesn't foreclose any significant game design options.
But some libraries here and there can't mostly build the game for you. A game engine that tries to handle most of the programming for you will greatly restrict what you can do. Anything innovative that you wanted to do almost certainly won't be handled by the game engine. Merely having a vision for your game substantially different from what the designers of the engine anticipated will mean that you need a bunch of things that it doesn't offer.
In principle, if you have the full source code to the game engine, you can make the changes necessary to do whatever you want. And if you're willing to tear things up and make the changes necessary to get the game to do exactly what you want, using an off-the-shelf engine wouldn't intrinsically limit you in any way.
The problem is that most of the time, what the engine is built to do won't be exactly what you want. If you were willing to redo absolutely everything that wasn't quite what you want, trying to use a bad starting point and change it is likely to be more work than just making your own game engine from scratch. Trying to modify someone else's code that you don't understand is a lot more work than making equally large modifications to your own code.
Rather, what's likely to happen is that you say, that's not really want I wanted, but I didn't really need that particular feature that I had in mind, so I'll just use what the engine offers, call it good enough, and move on. As you create the game, a lot of the cool little things that you wanted to do that would have made your game good get stripped out one by one, as it's too much work to modify the game engine to do them. And then you end up with a fairly generic knock-off of some other game that is actually good, unlike yours.
As I said above, having a game engine that handles most of the programming for you is fine if the point of your game is the artwork or the storyline or something else that isn't game mechanics. That can be the case when trying to monetize some non-gaming IP. It's commonly the case for simple things like visual novels.
The proliferation of off-the-shelf game engines that can handle a ton of the work in creating a game for you have made it massively easier to create a bad game than it was twenty years ago. They're a lot less helpful in creating a good game, however. Most of the games that I've really liked had a game engine created for that particular game, or at least an engine created by the same company that made the game and used for several games, as that really gives the game developers the freedom to do whatever they want.
Comments
I have fond memories of the original Everquest, WOW, Star Wars and others but as much as those were a blast, I wouldn't want to go back and play today. Questing, corpse runs, raiding... I'm over it. I have gotten older and just don't have the time to sink in. I remember pushing through playing The Secret World at launch because the story was so engaging but once completed, I no longer felt like logging in.
Today, I spend most of my time playing single-player games and having a lot of fun doing it; the Witcher, Divinity, Assassin's Creed, Skyrim (Still), X-Com,...
Seaspite
Playing ESO on my X-Box
Success requires a lot of moving parts in cohesion and conceptualized in an overall design plan.
It requires knowledge and experience and leadership.
And not just anyone can do that. From leadership on down.
The biggest hurdle, of course, is money.
Once upon a time....
Sadly most every dev is giving us less and with shallow systems.Example Amazon trying to sell us yet another empty Survival game,seriously just STOP with the crappy games.
Amazon's effort is like a 1/10,i expect a minimum of 6-7 out of ten with a steady improvement not just instances and bosses.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Are you talking about bought programming tools?
Once upon a time....
But some libraries here and there can't mostly build the game for you. A game engine that tries to handle most of the programming for you will greatly restrict what you can do. Anything innovative that you wanted to do almost certainly won't be handled by the game engine. Merely having a vision for your game substantially different from what the designers of the engine anticipated will mean that you need a bunch of things that it doesn't offer.
In principle, if you have the full source code to the game engine, you can make the changes necessary to do whatever you want. And if you're willing to tear things up and make the changes necessary to get the game to do exactly what you want, using an off-the-shelf engine wouldn't intrinsically limit you in any way.
The problem is that most of the time, what the engine is built to do won't be exactly what you want. If you were willing to redo absolutely everything that wasn't quite what you want, trying to use a bad starting point and change it is likely to be more work than just making your own game engine from scratch. Trying to modify someone else's code that you don't understand is a lot more work than making equally large modifications to your own code.
Rather, what's likely to happen is that you say, that's not really want I wanted, but I didn't really need that particular feature that I had in mind, so I'll just use what the engine offers, call it good enough, and move on. As you create the game, a lot of the cool little things that you wanted to do that would have made your game good get stripped out one by one, as it's too much work to modify the game engine to do them. And then you end up with a fairly generic knock-off of some other game that is actually good, unlike yours.
As I said above, having a game engine that handles most of the programming for you is fine if the point of your game is the artwork or the storyline or something else that isn't game mechanics. That can be the case when trying to monetize some non-gaming IP. It's commonly the case for simple things like visual novels.
The proliferation of off-the-shelf game engines that can handle a ton of the work in creating a game for you have made it massively easier to create a bad game than it was twenty years ago. They're a lot less helpful in creating a good game, however. Most of the games that I've really liked had a game engine created for that particular game, or at least an engine created by the same company that made the game and used for several games, as that really gives the game developers the freedom to do whatever they want.