After reading an article on CNN entitled: Tale of Two Gaming Worlds: Online consoles soar while PCs tumble.
Maybe it's the gamer in me, but I really feel that comparing online console games with MMOGs on the PC is like comparing apples and oranges. There are some similarities, but aside from having the common feature of "playing them over the internet" (which is a lot like saying apples and oranges are both edible), they are quite different.
The writer of the article makes a major mistake in the telling of this tale, in that he never compares similar things -- the PS2 game he quotes: "SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs", is about as massively multiplayer as "Warcraft 3". The similarity between SOCOM II and Warcraft 3's online experiences mirror each other in that they both:
- have a single-player mode, allowing the player to play the game without going online.
- need to look for available games to join, and cannot join games in progress.
- have a out of game environment chat area.
- user account database stores information such as rank and statistics, and guild information, and little else.
- give access to thousands of players to play with/against
While I wouldn't go as far to say that SOCOM II isn't massively multiplayer -- because it clearly is, in that it does allow gameplay with hundreds of thousands of other players. Not surprisingly, from what I have heard about these single player games with internet play option is that roughly about 50% of the buyers go online with it. I'd say at least 50% of the PC game market includes some form of multiplayer internet support in their games. This is not true of the console market, where maybe 10% of the market has online multiplayer.
Persistent world games are games in which the game goes on even when the game player is not present. These are a different variation of massively multiplayer -- instead of one server running multiple copies of the game environment, in a persistent world, usually the game environment spans several servers, and only a small part of the total game 'world' is run on any individual server. The game player's data is stored on a database server for the game. All players are actually in only one game instance. EverQuest, Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies are all examples of persistent world massively multiplayer games.
SOCOM II is clearly not persistent-world, yet persistent-world is what the article compares the console market with. Why didn't the article compare Everquest Online Adventures or Final Fantasy XI, which are two persistent world MMOGs available for the PS2.
In SOCOM II, I can't call up 100 of my closest ingame aquaintences, have them all meet in a in-game location and charge the gates. For most peristent world games, you can do this. The lag will be horrendous, and the game server may crash, but it can be done. It has been, and is done on a regular basis in games like EverQuest and Dark Ages of Camelot.
The article also fails to mention that as of this writing, the Nintendo Gamecube does not have any online capability whatsoever, nor is any planned. The Xbox was the first console to come to market with a network adapter built into the console, but it was the third to try online console gaming (Sega tried two previous attempts, one on the Genesis, and again with a built-in modem on the Dreamcast).
The article also has a nice attempt at armchair game design:
Alan Cates, a 55-year-old Internet marketing consultant and gamer from San Marcos, California, thinks online PC games are better if they appeal to both hardcore and casual players.
"It seems to be a problem for the game designer. What do they do with those that spend 100 hours a week playing the game and those that spend four hours a month?" Cates said.
This is actually not the problem, but rather one of the symptoms of the problem. Appealing to hardcore and casual players is easy -- good game play will do that. The complaint I hear most from casual players is "there's too much to do, and I don't have enough time to play". Casual players still play MMORPGs despite the fact they know that others are spending much more time per week, because they get something out of the game experience in the time that they do spend in the game. People will spend different amounts of time on the game -- it's a given the game designer has to accept. The problem is creating enough to keep players paying (and playing) month after month.
As for appealing to a wider audience, the MMOG market is still young. A game production cycle for these games is anywhere from 3 to 5 years, and the market has been dominated by only a few games (mainly due to cost of production). Until game companies are willing to take the risk of trying non-EQ approaches to MMOG, we will be stuck with a never ending level treadmill as the paradigm for persistent world massively multiplayer.
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