[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Dinosaurs evolve to chickens, MMOs evolve to massively single-player games

[Damion Schubert]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Mike Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:

> Beyond this though, I think you're seeing MMOs through a particular lens
> that isn't entirely accurate.  Many people like playing "solo" in MMOGs,
> but
> that doesn't explain the games' success.  It is the *potential* for
> meaningful contact with others, even if it is for some people rarely
> realized, that is part of the success of MMOGs.
>

I actually think that the potential to play solo -does- explain the success
of World of Warcraft.  Before WoW came out, too many designers were
utterly in love with the idea that playing with other people was MANDATORY.
EQ and EQ2 required grouping for any sort of non-tedious advancement.
UO and SWG had huge, complex economies predicated upon players
depending on other players to provide goods and services you needed.
Shadowbane and DAoC's best features depended solely on having the
player base on any given server reach critical mass, so you could enjoy
the pvp/raid game.  Soloing in all of them kind of sucked.

In WoW, the best content is by far the elder game content that requires
10, 25 or 40 people to play (raids and battlegrounds), and these elder
games have avid fans (and equally avid detractors).  But where WoW
differs from those other games is that they have plenty to do if you're
alone - including taking your character from level 1 to the cap.  This
idea would have seemed heretical in 1998, but is actually grounded
on a handful of simple facts.

* Sometimes your friends aren't online.
* Pick up groups often suck.
* A lot of gaming geeks aren't exactly social butterflies.

Look at it this way, and the solo-friendly MMO is a no-brainer.
A lot of people like to claim that WoW had no innovations in it.  In
my opinion, this is a big one - and may well have been the force
multiplier that took the classic MMO formula from six figures to seven.

Mike Rozak wrote:
> Most people WANT to play a single player game. Or, they want
> to play a game with their close friends.

To swing the other way - I don't think so.  People choose WoW
and other MMOs despite the fact that solo and small-group friendly
RPGs exist.  Some people come for big end-game experiences
(raids, city sieges) that can only happen in MMOs.  Others come
because, well, other people are content.  Chatter is interesting.
And it's fascinating to be part of a larger organism, even if you
tend to solo or only play with 3 friends.

In my personal opinion, the answer is NOT to make purely solo
or small-group 'MMO' experiences - you are then competing with the
people who can make those games faster and cheaper than
you, because you're not trying to tackle all of the infrastructure
an MMO requires.  To me, the answer is to provide a solid solo/
small group backbone to the game, but have those paths lead
to a truly 'massive' experience that only the MMO experience
can provide.


> In addition, I think your assertion about what most people want in an
> online
> game doesn't stand up to experiences ranging from the sprawling and hugely
> successful Chinese MMOGs -- where acting as part of a group is a necessity
> at anything beyond the lowest levels -- to the more casual but nonetheless
> compelling groupings occuring in many lighter games, from those like Mob
> Wars on Facebook (extremely casual, dead simple gameplay, hugely
> multiplayer, staggeringly successful commercially) to web-games like the
> RPG/RTS-ish Ikarium.  That's where to look for how MMOGs are evolving, not
> into re-treads of old concepts like Free Realms.
>

One of the key parts of the success of Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars
on Facebook is that they are played asynchronously.  Which is to say
that while the game SAYS you're killing enemies with your friends, in
truth, you're doing little more than poking them and sending them
mails.  Which is to say, you're really soloing (albeit borrowing a friend's
strength from time to time).

--d