The New MMO - Streamlined Systems - Garrett Fuller at MMORPG.com

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The New MMO - Streamlined Systems - Garrett Fuller at MMORPG.com

MMOs have been around for a long time and have morphed and changed over the decades now as we enter 2017. We're in a period which I would consider the second era of MMOs with Ultima Online for all intents and purposes kickstarting the genre back in 1997. Games began simple and expanded over time, breaking off into sub genres, independent projects, and huge AAA titles. But we're going back to the drawing board...

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Loke666

Just one comment, as a former Meridian 59 player I really must point out that it started the genre a year before UO, it had quests, trinity combat and many other things modern MMOs have. There were also SSIs/AOLs Neverwinter nights that were a proto MMO years before that (I think it was '91).

UO did coin the term "MMORPG" but it wasn't really the first.

Nice article otherwise.

Volgore

"Also, I am a firm believer in offline crafting. Now that you have so much game ability on your phone or tablet. Why not log into a cool crafting interface from work and set up your goals for the night. "

I'm always wondering why so many players hate whatever form of offline progression or mobile access.

I would like to see crafting or otherwise managing my characters via mobile phone. It would be awesome if i could send my main and alts on missions to gather materials or give them something else to do while i'm not actively playing. Or with mobile access to the chat and my inventory, i could sell and trade items (the WoW app allows using the auction house).

Back then, the annoucement of Trion's mobile client for Rift got me excited and i couldn't wait for it.
Unfortunately it was a huge disappointment because they never got it properly working at all and the stuff it got you wasn't worth the hassle with the all along broken client. I heard Trion discontinued it about a year ago.

If not offline or mobile, at least i'd like to see some more options to leave your character in game doing something while you don't attend it. Like in the old days of SWG when it was perfectly normal to leave your medic online, running on macros and buffing people in the cities. I'd like to set up a crafting queue and let my character go at it.

But then again, at that time of SWG griefing and abuse wasn't a problem like it is today. You tipped that afk-medic for curing you and everyone was happy. Today within 10 minutes you'd have another afkchar next to yours executing a "spit"-macro on you. And we also saw these features like the afk-vendoring in Aion getting shut down by NCSoft after too much abuse.

Aurorikin

If I recall it was EverQuest or specifically Brad McQuaid that coined the term mmorpg. Though I could be mistaken, that was all quite awhile ago. I think the article chose to start with UO because that was the first major success. Tho meridian was great.. I remember playing that one too

Nanfoodle

Loke666 said:

Just one comment, as a former Meridian 59 player I really must point out that it started the genre a year before UO, it had quests, trinity combat and many other things modern MMOs have. There were also SSIs/AOLs Neverwinter nights that were a proto MMO years before that (I think it was '91).



UO did coin the term "MMORPG" but it wasn't really the first.



Nice article otherwise.

They may have been first in line but they didnt make MMOing something to be put on the map. First MMO to do that was EQ and will always be the grandfather of MMOs.

Amaranthar

I'd love to see offline crafting.
It can solve some big issues with MMO economies.
Turn it into a game of management rather than a player hammering out 500 swords and getting bored doing it.
With that, you can also remove the over abundance of swords or whatever. You can have an offline day of managed production and get 5 swords, and the player isn't bored out of their freakin' mind. And the economy can be much more viable.
Manage sleep time, food consumption, supplies, sales, shop equipment, maintenance, etc.

Advanced properties can be done with online play.

Tiller

EleanorDuncan said:

I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... http://goo.gl/D5iC10

go back to the MSN comment section

Ozmodan

Loke666 said:

Just one comment, as a former Meridian 59 player I really must point out that it started the genre a year before UO, it had quests, trinity combat and many other things modern MMOs have. There were also SSIs/AOLs Neverwinter nights that were a proto MMO years before that (I think it was '91).

UO did coin the term "MMORPG" but it wasn't really the first.

Nice article otherwise.

Meridian was for all purposes invisible to most people.  It was not carried in stores.  I was an avid gamer at the time and subscribed to about every game magazine produced and I never saw one mention of the game, it was that obscure.   The only way most of us even heard of the game was via people posting about it on in later threads like this.  So yeah, for all intents and purposes, UO kickstarted the genre, not Meridian.

DavodtheTutt

Best point may be the first: "You join an online world to see other players ..." One of the best things about my favorite MMO was that it was so easy to join a team and just have a lot of PvE fun together. Creating new areas, catering to the whiners about content for top levels, and adding player-made VR quests took away from that -- everybody was scattered all over or busy working on their own private little alternate reality. One of the reasons I lost interest in Star Wars: The Old Republic was that although it had such a rich, movie-like feel to it, it also seemed rather lonely and linear. The handling of how you play together is important, too. I started to be turned off from Ever Quest when I realized a newfound friend was raiding my "home" and killing off my AI "people." I decided to go exploring but that turned out to be a lonely, dangerous endeavor.

Another big quality that I look for is immersion, which I feel is more subtle than game creators always appreciate -- better graphics help, but they're not everything. There's a lot of things like internal consistency, viewpoint (playing with isometric-view animated dolls doesn't cut it), and richness of experience.

Immersion is also helped by: Open World, Sandbox, Persistent World. I've seen these terms used for rather small worlds with disguised barriers, numerous choke points, and constantly repeating/re-spawning events and AI creatures, etc. For all its disappointments, I think No Man's Sky's procedural generation shows the way to go. Google Earth might be a good study, too. Now, with some clever programming to make a huge world an MMO while reducing the data load... perhaps using user's computers for a cloud storage system and a mathematical data management system... well, I didn't want to get too detailed.

What you're looking for as an end result is a program that functions as an intelligent Dungeon Master, creating a world (or the outline of one and the rules for filling it out) with things to be discovered, gathered, etc. Then simply support and adjudicate the results of the player's decisions/action.

On crafting, what I would like to see (and I think quite a few MMOs have this to a large extent) is crafting that comes naturally and is not a matter of following arcane recipes that make little if any sense. For the gathering of materials, there should also be a logic to that, and I like the idea of it being off-line, or even something that can be completed automatically after setting it up before logging out.

Hope I didn't get carried away too much -- and remember, nobody made you read all this.