Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
The mmo servers of the future
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
In the near future i personally believe that most mmos will ha a seemles world, with no loading times.
but, there will be instancing and phasing, but also the loading to these parts of the game will be in the background, this will be so smooth that it will feel totally naturall and in most places there will be other players around, in other parts you will be alone or with your group ready for a special mission.
All in all, there will be an open world feeling with the advantages of instancing and phasing..
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
Good luck with that.. What you are describing is a single player game with co-op online options.. That is being done to death, and I think many ( at least I have ) are just tired of that.. I'm a bit tired of the storyline themeparks.. If I wanted to experience a pre-written story, I'd buy a book.. I"m still trying to understand how someone thought Phasing was a good MMO tool to use.. /shrug
Seamless worlds were done many times years ago. This is certainly not a technology of the future. Lineage II (2003) had a fully seamless world with no zoning at all and ran pretty well. Part of the issue today is people keep asking for higher and more demanding graphics. With better graphics comes more lag and the need to chop up the world into bit sized zones. With the whole way modern MMOs are made its' not practical to have a seamless open world any more.
There has also been a falling out of sorts where the development studios have turned their back on old school game design and instead are pushing for more instanced gaming. So even if the newer MMOs have open worlds they are typically smaller then old school open worlds and are only used for solo quest leveling. All the group content and especially raid content is done in instances. So when a developer is deciding where best to spend their money and resources most of the development dollars are going to be plowed into instance design and not putting together a full seamless open world.
For a modern MMO to be made with a seamless open world a number of things would have to happen.
- Graphics downgrade: this is probably the hardest pill to swallow because nobody wants last generation's gfx
- Contested content: People are going to have to spend most of their game time in the open world for it to be worth developing. No point in making a seamless open world if the players are going to spend all their time in instances anyway. To get players out of instances the content also has to be taken out of the instances and make contested. That means players are going to need to learn the patience of camping again.
- More sandbox and less themepark. It is better when the journey not destination is the goal.
- If there is PvP there can be no instanced battle grounds. People are lazy so if given the option to queue up to shoot fish in a barrel that they will do. Make people go out into the open world and hunt for that PvP.
We allready had seemles world, with no loading times and now we have next gen Zynga MMOs tech.
MMO peeps call it "evolution"
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
MMO server of the future will be requires to:
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
LoL is already doing that.
If I was going to wildly speculate, I don't feel that the traditional "map with mobs" will be efficient to extend to large worlds. It's not just computing power, it's managing all that information in a way that admins can understand and troubleshoot. So instead, I tend to imagine a world that's sort of a mix of Minecraft and EvE - endless procedurally generated landscapes, but dotted with instances with different levels of permanence.
A lot of MOBAs and FPS offer some kind of spectator mode. It's very doable when you only have 6-16 players on the field. I'm thinking more down the line of sieges, wars and the type of battles you see in AoC, Lineage 2, Aika or even EVE. Also for broadcasting things like LOTRO's Weatherstock and other large player events.
I'm also talking about media servers to stream an event. This would allow the devs to host commentators, mix in other broadcast media (interviews, QnA, latest patch/expansion info, etc). Currently, in most games with a spectator mode, the developers don't stream anything, the player do, and they have to use third party resources to do so.
To head off your next post... optional, not mandatory, either can do it, just as an option, both player streams and dev streams can exist for different events, choice, option, choice, you can don't have to watch either dev content or player content if you find one or both objectionable, people can choose to do either, devs will have the choice to run an event if they want to, people have the choice of watching whichever.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Are you thinking in terms of creating event logs that could then be reassembled into a video by a client?
( I've watched a few videos of RTS games, oddly only for game I don't play ... I've just never put any thought into an MMO doing it so it's taking me a minute here to wrap my head around what exactly it would be ... but you have me curious )
While what you're describing isn't really that far from existing games (like WOW where the only loading is between continents and instances,) streaming loading tech is something that basically has to be redone from scratch in every game -- and it would be a tough thing to develop a universal solution for.
So while some games may get closer to this, it's not likely we'll see the entire industry shift to it.
Basically it represents a pretty significant development (money) cost for each new project, at a time when most MMORPGs aren't especially profitable.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Most MMOs make money my friend, and many even make good money. Even SWTOR is making money right now, development costs have been earned back, and that game has a long time before them, MMOs is still where the money of the future is.
And i absolutely realise that the technollogy to create a game like i just described has been around for atleast 10 years, but so far the developers have been lazy and did not recognise that fact how important the open world illusion is for players immersion
IF you combine what WoW has been doing and how SWTOR handles story instances, you actually are pretty much where you want to be.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Yes! Imagine not only watching the stream of a competition, but being able to download that and, with a client-like video player, be able to move the camera anywhere you want within the video as it played back. An example of a similar recorder and playback system would be the one in Lineage 2.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
PV/10Six did not then, nor does it now, support one million players in the same area.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
With a unified hardware platform to maximize engine efficiency, and fiber speeds to every user - we could do this today!
Or, we could do this today while using the graphics of 10 years ago.
Lack of competition in the consumer internet market + having to code for a wide range of PC hardware = no real technological advancement in the MMO space.
Something to keep in mind is that just because the world acts seamless to the Client doesn't mean that it needs to be seamless server side with a single Server running the entire world. The world can still be zoned Server side as long as everything Client side is seamless and you (The players) would never know that it was in fact zoned Server side. This is how Seamless Worlds work now and how they will be handled for the foreseeable future. It would take a MAJOR breakthrough in computing to allow an entire seamless world to be hosted on a single Server.
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
The problem isn't that it requires a significant cost, but that the value of that cost is rather nebulous, and the value of applying the same cost to other parts of the game is clear. As a game designer I would strongly prefer to spend that pretty significant chunk of dev time either on a new feature, or on enabling new types of monster abilities -- basically the types of things which are very discernable to all players, rather than something (streaming loading) which is only important to a small group.
Honestly I find immersion comes far more in the form of how a world is presented than the load times. Skyrims' and Mass Effects' worlds have been more immersive than anything I've experienced in an MMORPG, and it comes from (a) how the world and its inhabitants act, (b) level design, and (c) not having other players. In MMORPGs I find that scripted behaviors of NPCs do far more to make a world feel immersive and alive than streaming loading would.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver