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History of MMO's
arteskilla
Member UncommonPosts: 28
Machinima released a great 4 part video about the development of MMO's
This was indeed an interesting watch for me and I am sure a lot more people will enjoy it.
Part 1: "Crawling Through the Mud": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgYuJczGv8o
Part 2: "Expansions": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9IVlCE89bk
Part 3 "High Level": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnR9P_dqINg
Part 4 "End Game Content": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDXorHNo3eE
Now stop all the "WoW Clone" stuff as it is obvious that WoW only used what was successful in MMO's before it.
I am sorry if this was posted before, personally haven't seen it here.
Comments
It's definitely a good watch for people that joined the genre later, gives a good understanding of the roots and how we got to where we are. Recommend watching, i enjoyed it quite a bit myself and the nostalgia sort of felt good.
Agreed. Though good luck on stopping people labelling stuff WoW clones. Its pretty common knowledge its never innovated. Just copied.
"If 'everybody knows' such-and-such, then it ain't so, by at least ten thousand to one."--RAH
The problem is that when some people use the "I" word in forum context, they seem to expect major sweeping changes to every system in the game. Themepark that's not a themepark, a sandbox that's more like a sim than a game.
It's usually best to avoid using simplistic generalizations.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Very good documentary!
Last part is conviniently titled "End Game". Wish I could go back to 1999.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Nice...interesting documentaries...but again emphasizing on WoW and its clones.
Good that it at least agrees that the industry (and buyers) are stupid to buy the same crap over and over again....
Buy Neverwinter Nights 1 here! | Unofficial NWN1 homepage | NWN1 guild on X-Fire
I didn't get any of those two ideas after watching it, at all.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Thanks to the OP for the links. The videos brought back fond memories.
Great documentary. Very informative and unbiased.
to me it was clearly made by someone who hadn't played most of these MMOs and gave no info of what each MMO did differently really. It was just boring to watch, I could have just read it on Wiki or a forum..
Does not matter. WoW set the standard and it is point of relevance to all developers and players and not EQ or Merdidan.
So really get used to that, cause it is more relevant and logic to call f.e. Rift a WoW clone than EQ1 clone.
All mmorpg's and especially all themeparks are and still will be compared for at least next few years to WoW.
Besides when WoW came out it was clearly a very different game from EQ. It copied a lot of things from EQ like basic structure but the combat, UI, and how you gained XP etc where very very different. WoW was the first game to come out that you leveled up on via quests, every single MMO before that you had to grind on mobs. WoW just made a set standard to which every MMO copies now and it is so obvious to how badly they copy it, WoW was just inspired by EQ and wasn't a copy.
I remember being WoW'd by the Dead Mines because you just didn't see that amazing level of quality content below end level in an MMO. That just raised the bar right there to where content had to be great from the get go, where before it was accepted that you had to grind through to the end game to get that stuff.
Problem is now WoW is a vastly dumbed down game to what it used to be and it used to be considered an easy MMO anyways. So every developer has taken note of that and making their MMOs even easier lol.
No it didnt, everquest 1 set the standard. Wow is only the standard for new pc players of this decade so kids.
Not sure about that, but there is a clear disconnect and clear remiss of the de-evolution or dumbing down of mmo's from UO -> EQ -> WOW ->SWTOR. From massively-multiplayer games being massively-multiplayer in a single persistent world, with more open-world and community-centric organic content & rich features, to being single / cooperative online role-playing with heavily instanced redundantly confining maps and inorganic content with limited features.
Todays so-called mmorpg's, a term first introduced and coined by Richard Garriott with Ultima Online, are nothing more than inorgaic repetitive cooperative online multiplayer games that are void of player interactivity, influence and replayability.
They are not virtual worlds (examples being AoC, WAR, STO, and seen with SWTOR) where all there is massively is people concurrently play in the same world and launch into a cooperative instance from a controlled pve lobby, then funneled down a linear path of quest hubs as they redundantly perform the same pve kill 10 rats mini-game ad nauseam; that as they queue for an instanced 8v8 shoe-box third-person shooter match of attack/defend.
The vast majority of today’s mmorpg’s are shallow attempts at ‘massively-multiplayer’, void of organic activities accomplished by players whose activities in a world should leave a trail which can be adopted, shared, lost or impact someone else's trail or activity in that virtual world in a cooperative and competitive means.
You are playing multi-user single-player & cooperative online games; not massively-multiplayer games today. Just saying.
You still don't get it do you?
EQ1 was not more succesful than few other mmorpg's that were avabile at same time or short after, at least diffrence was not big enough.
WoW did streamline and simplified and solofied genre and brought it to true mainstream.
That's why every developer of mmorpg's and most of players see it as certain standard.
Nothing will change that anytime soon.
For your infomrmation first mmorpg I played was UO, so kinda one of first ones and I still consider WoW as something that other themeparks base on, and compare to than EQ1.
If you watched the videos (or if you knew your MMO history already) the standard that EQ set was a technological one. Up until EQ, MMOs looked terrible. They were either sprite-based 2D, sprite-based 3D, or true 3D with very low poly count and very little texturing. EQ set the graphical standard by using high poly count models which computers lacking a graphics card would be unable to render in realtime. It turned out that this made a big difference for the game's popularity, and that's why more or less every MMO that came after EQ required a graphics card and used high poly count models.
The standard that WoW set was completely different. It was a gameplay standard, not a technological one. Solo levelling via a connected series of quest hubs had not been done before; levelling up had always been done by grinding. Now, any game that wants to attract a large userbase needs to cater to that playstyle.
Worth mentioning that to be considered a "WoW clone", you have to copy a lot more than just that one genre-bending gameplay innovation. But there are more than a few games that do blatantly copy more than that.
Thanks to the OP for linking this. It was interesting and enlighting. I think the pacing of the videos was a bit odd. They did a nice job in the first one with the origins of MMO's. Then they turbo charged the history through the last 3 videos. They could have made this a ten part series at least.