[MUD-Dev] Why are we all making RPGs?

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Kirmse <akirmse at pacbell.net>

> I'm interested to hear what the people on this list, the hardest
> of the hard-core RPG developers, think about their genre and the
> potential for new online genres.  What parts of today's RPGs have
> we learned to be so essential that they should also be present in
> non-RPGs?  What single-player genres could make a natural or
> interesting transition to online?  What totally new genres might
> work only with large numbers of people, and how can we
> realistically go about building them?

Beyond what you described, I think there's three things at work in
the current emphasis on RPG's:

  1) RPG players are disproportionately represented in the "Early
  Adopter" community.  They are more willing to overlook the the
  crudities of our systems (compared to the games we'll be making 10
  years from now), just as they were in the early days of computer
  games.

  2) Follow the money.  Every MMOG concept should be evaluated for
  what the player is going to pay you every month for, that they
  cannot provide for themselves.  This is why I'm somewhat skeptical
  of games like The Sims Online: What, exactly, are the players
  paying for?  Is there anything their subscription can pay for that
  a player community cannot eventually reverse-engineer and provide
  for themselves?  In an RPG game, what they are ultimately paying
  for is the developers efforts to protect and enhance the integrity
  of the game world.  That's why the "Free Shards" of UO Emulators
  have never been, and IMHO will never be, a threat to equivalent
  commercial efforts.

  3) Quite frankly, to speak of the "community" of players of casual
  games is to speak of something that as near as I can tell, does
  not exist.  The proportions of players participating in any
  "community" beyond chatting with their fellow players while
  playing in those games is miniscule.  If all of the web portals
  offering these games went away tomorrow, by next week there would
  be peer-to-peer equivalents, possibly using IRC as a backbone.
  And there still wouldn't be a community.

I believe that FPS games have great potential for MMOG's once we
solve the problems of providing depth and strategic layers to them,
and thereby provide gameplay that cannot be matched by the
distributed-server environment.  I think RTS will also do well, but
it will prove to be *very* difficult to deal with the social and
gameplay scaling issues and they'll be the last one to come into
their own.  I think "Builder" environments will do well *as*
distributed server environments, but not as centralized subscription
services in the long run (there may be a lot of money made before
then).  And I still think the "Casual Gamer" is a chimera, we may
make games that convert some casual players into low-end hardcore
gamers, but we won't ever come up with a version of Online
Backgammon that people will pay a subscription for.

New genres?  Hmm....  If I could figure out what they'd be, I
wouldn't say, that kind of thing tends to be obvious once somebody
has pointed it out, and a huge money-maker for the first group to
actually do it.  I think it's more a case that future MMOG versions
of current single-player genres will diverge so significantly from
their originators (and meld into each other so much) they will be
recognized as separate genres in their own right.

--Dave Rickey

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