Not MMORPG... OMRPG! Thread

Hi Guys,

Was just thinking about why everything has to be massively multi-player these days. I understand that this is most likely because companies are aiming for the most profit etc etc etc, but I don't know about everyone else, but I'm over it.

I think DayZ got it right, you don't need a mass amount of people on a server to achieve greatness.

Ever since playing Gothic (mainly on Gothic III), I always thought to myself, this would be a great set up for an online multi-player game. Not a game where you have 1,000 players on a sever at one time together, where 98% or something of the player base will never interact with each other and are just grinding up through the quests and the crappy AI mobs that instantly re-spawn behind each other. But a small player base of 30-60 on one sever, in an action RPG setting, where you have all your twitch combat, our internet is capable of this, and if you're aiming for a small player base on a sever at one time, it is completely possible.

Aiming for small player bases per sever, means that the mobs you encounter can be individual and actually have AI, and your character more meaningful or important in the world. A persistent world is an awesome concept, but it doesn't really have any impact in an MMO (I'm talking generally here!). And although a persistent world is a great idea, it doesn't have to be eternal, what's wrong with an ending or reset at some point?

Allow players to build houses/towns/cities and crap, craft, fight, kill, steal etc from each other and whatever base NPC/MOBs there are, let people completely dominate a sever to the point where they control the entire game... then, end it and start again. If a player dies, let them start again, who cares if its hard, because that's where reward comes... no more carrot dangling in front of us for that next level, lets play it out like Demon Souls/Dark Souls... make it harder, make it rewarding for the skill, not the grind.

Just stop the MMORPG, and have the OMRPG... It's all about quality and not quantity!

Many are likely to be the product of "Ooh-shiny Syndrome" (I think that one is pretty self-explanatory). They see dollar-signs, think that MMOs are licenses to print money, post a few crude concept drawings, and that's the last they're ever heard from. But that applies to pretty much any and every genre of game.

Just as many are likely to be the products of legitimate reasons. Some concepts only work as MMOs, for example. Some developers just want to make an MMO rather than a smaller multiplayer or a single player game (a perfectly valid and legitimate reason). Some want to create literal worlds for players to inhabit (easier to do and make interesting when there's more than a couple dozen at a time). You can also say that quantity is it's own quality.

I myself hope to, in the next few years, create one because I find them to be infinitely fascinating because of social machinations that you can only see in games where hundreds or thousands of people are all interacting, competing, cooperating, existing, and beating the tar out of each other simultaneously.

I'm not exactly sure what you're protesting here though. The existence of one type of one sub-genre of one genre of games?

I'm not really protesting, just that I'm worried that companies are now only looking at the larger market of the MMO, and this is also what developers are looking at making.

I'm not saying that all MMO's are crap, or there is not quality or amazing parts or experiences to them. But if MMOs are what companies are aiming for, then I think nothing really new gets done as people seem more interested in clones. I think it would be interesting and more enriching to build a smaller based online multi-player game, and introduce a lot of elements to game-play you couldn't accomplish with the thousand player games out there.

I'm not saying get rid of them, but that I hope there are some out there that see the potential of other sorts of online multi-player games and experiment with it a little or at least toy with the idea of how you make the online component work. I felt that DayZ confirmed a lot of things for myself, that running through severs the way it does can work, and you don't loose out on action game play. Just hoping someone out there can try this for an RPGish setting .

I totally agree with you. I'm actually working on such a game right now =P

AAA Companies have preferred making "safe" clones over "less safe" original games since the beginning of the industry. Indies hoping to make AAA games are also forced to make safe games. Both have the same reason: the shear complexity and expense of making a AAA game. It's very hard to justify spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on something that might not sell.

Give DAyZ a chance to make money or not; if it does, someone else will try it. If they make money too, others will begin taking a look. If, after all this, it turns out that DayZ-like games are a guaranteed sellable item, then you can expect to see a proliferation of them.

MMOGs sell. They're guaranteed to bring in money the majority of the time. MOGs are an unknown. You may be convinced, but most developers are not.

Unknown? I dont think so. I'm sure many ppl will join me in giving examples of good MOGs. Starcraft1/2, Warcraft 3, TF2, Dota1/2, COD, MOST multiplayer console games, ie Borderlands etc. And thats just in 2 minutes of thinking.

Also, MMOGs are definitely NOT guaranteed to bring in money. Many more have failed than have been successful.

Edited by: lancer611

TerranAmbassador wrote: MMOGs sell. They're guaranteed to bring in money the majority of the time. MOGs are an unknown. You may be convinced, but most developers are not.

They cost hundreds of millions and years to develop, and the majority fail. Those that have succeeded are fairly rare examples; it's rumoured that even World of Warcraft is now losing money.