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

[cruise]

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Mike Rozak wrote:
> Most people WANT to play a single player game. Or, they want to play a game with their close friends. Only a minority of the population wants to play in a world with thousands of other players (for PvP, raiding, trading, or other reasons). I wrote about this a few years ago in "The player pyramid."

Everyone wants someting slightly different from a game exprience.
Usually your friends' desires are close enough to yours (that's why
they're your friends) that you won't notice. With enough people that you
don't know, however, the chances of finding a player who wants
something, and therefore plays, completely different increase. Veteran
gamers have figured this out, neophiles learn it very quickly. The
player pyramid is something that springs naturally from social interaction.

> Something signficant has changed since then...
> 
> The internet has gotten faster, AND importantly, easier to connect to (being "always on" and wirelessly "ubiquitous" in many households). At the same time, more and more MMOs are free.
> 
> These three changes have a signficant demographic effect on "MMO" players:

I'm surprised more MMO/POWs haven't offered small taskbar apps that can
provide status feedback, or even allow communication without the main
client running. I think doing so would use the benefits of an always on
'net connection, and greatly increase the socialisation capabilities of
the game. Can you imagine WoW if you could effectively use your account
as an IM with any other player?

> The only downsides are that the single-player store-bought games still provide better single-player gameplay.... but for how long?

For as long as the MMO/POW tag is enough to attract people and make them
ignore deficiencies in gameplay because it's "Massive" and there's still
novelty to seeing characters controlled by other people moving on /your/
screen.

> What kind of hybrids are possible? How about taking Guild Wars a step further, and providing Bioware/Bethesda style single-player-CRPG gameplay in an instance, with walled cities/towns being public? It could play just like a single-player game, except that (a) you could invite friends into your instance, (b) meet new players in the towns, and (c) all the orcs in your instance would be wearing "Pizza hut" emblazoned armor.
> 
> FPS's could use the same formula, but would need to rely more on the client CPU's processing and low-latency (at the cost of exploits). Even adventure games would work as massively single-player games.

It's actually hard to say whether that's the next natural step of
single-player games or POW's. If you took many games that have a
"multiplayer" portion (like a lot of BioWare's RPGs, and most FPSs), and
made the game browser and server creation interface part of the game
world, you'd have what you described. I think it's definately already
happening, and is a natural progression. The "Massive" part will simply
be the potential players to pick from (oh, look, like the 'net), with
ways of finding groups or activities that specifically appeal to you
(oh, look, like google).

> Which leads me to conclude, the "massive" part of MMOs is going away. The dinosaurs are shrinking to chickens.

It's not "going away", simply being organised and categorised better.
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