The qualities that are most important to me are persistent shared world and not so much an exact number of people. There should be a good mix of familiar and new people and a sensible population density for the game world and zone size. I don't think you can specifically quantify that, but extremes on either end (too sparse or densely populated) break the model.
Personally would have loved to hear Raph Koster's perspective in the interview. He has some ideas about the mmoification of the internet and society that are thought provoking. One problem in our "What is an MMO" debate is that our paradigm and perspective is narrow and limiting. We're not leaving any room for evolution. We're trying to hold onto fossils in hopes that we can build our own mmo Jurassic Park.
The term was mmorpg it did evolve to just mmo. Why? Because mmo did fit but rpg did not. When I see the MMO label it should mean something. Same when we see mmorpg. If we start calling MOGs MMOs then MMOs will need a new label because we wont know what they are. I get the website mmorpg.com now covers more then the standard MMO and MMORPG but we dont need to redefine the label for me to be ok with reading news about a MOG here.
You will not, and CANNOT, have a single description, clarification, nor common idea, even, of what is or is not, a MMO as long as everyone is free to make it up as they go along:)
Some day there will be some type of group or regulatory body, that will try to make some type of one size fit all definition of MMO...guess what? They will fail as well.
You will not, and CANNOT, have a single description, clarification, nor common idea, even, of what is or is not, a MMO as long as everyone is free to make it up as they go along:)
Some day there will be some type of group or regulatory body, that will try to make some type of one size fit all definition of MMO...guess what? They will fail as well.
So what you're saying is MMO are just like 'cars' and 'aircraft', too complicated to define and regulate.. oh wait..
That is so outrageous a comparison...talking apples and oatmeal cookies....try again.
I still dont get the confusion. MMO: Massive amount of people need a massive space to play together online. Do that riding around in tanks, cars or on the back of a horse with a sword. It matters little. What matters is the games that started the term MMO (not talking about the RPG side of it). If you are not similar, your not an MMO, your something else. Can I give you a MOB label? How about MOBA? These names paint a picture that lets us know if we even care about the game. Maybe thats the problem.
In Everquest you had zones and people were in different zones. The world was not seamless and people were not actually playing together because they were playing in different zones. Sometimes you could be in a zone with just one group. Is that massively? Would you consider a game with many instances a world that was massive ,you wouldn't would you but a world with zones like Everquest was considered massive and it qualified as a massively online game.
How about the ability to communicate if you could speak to everyone when they were not in the same zone but you were connected through a channel that allowed people in different instances to talk to each other would that be massively?
Is there a cut off number from which you can say the world is massive like 500 and > people in a game is considered massively.
Most of us who have played older games have a definite idea about what massively is but the qualifications could change I guess.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think an important difference is that in Everquest anyone could enter the same zone provided they were on the same server?
I believe it was WoW that first popularized (invented?) the use of "instancing" where you could have two people playing on the same server standing in the same spot ("dungeon") but not occupying the same physical "space".
In many ways this was good thing; less down time, a more "dramatic" experience... the thing is game designers pretty much took the idea and ran with it.
12 years later, instancing followed to its extreme logical conclusion gave us No Man's Sky! (Sorry)
Not even close to true.
This is what happens when people ignorantly blame everything on WoW.
It does not have to be the same server either when you have what WoW does where people from a common server group could play together so being on the same server is not a qualification.
As for being able to enter the zone you had games that created different instances of the same zone like Antonica 1,2 and so on. Or when there was an overflow people were put in a waiting instance to wait to get on the server. Even Everquest could not handle large numbers before the zone crashed either.
Talking about massively being the ability to play together but strictly speaking you were not playing with all the people on the server, you could possibly play with them but you could possibly play with the people on a lobby game too.
What about a game like Skyforge not sure if this is the example I want but if a world is connected from one area to another that is it is a world similar to Everquest but you travelled to it from a lobby. You did not need to cross the zones but even dungeon crawling in WoW does not require travel so there is that.
I know what the acronym means to me but I'm just being the devil's advocate here in saying that times have changed and definitions are changing too. Nowadays there are people who follow large guilds they don't actually play a game as a member of a server but rather a guild. They play with the people they talk to on VoIP and interact with on social media and their world is not made up of the many people that are on the server that they never play with but only the people they actually play with. So whose world is massively then the world that they create with their interactions or an abstract definition whose meaning is evolving.
The qualities that are most important to me are persistent shared world and not so much an exact number of people. There should be a good mix of familiar and new people and a sensible population density for the game world and zone size. I don't think you can specifically quantify that, but extremes on either end (too sparse or densely populated) break the model.
Personally would have loved to hear Raph Koster's perspective in the interview. He has some ideas about the mmoification of the internet and society that are thought provoking. One problem in our "What is an MMO" debate is that our paradigm and perspective is narrow and limiting. We're not leaving any room for evolution. We're trying to hold onto fossils in hopes that we can build our own mmo Jurassic Park.
The term was mmorpg it did evolve to just mmo. Why? Because mmo did fit but rpg did not. When I see the MMO label it should mean something. Same when we see mmorpg. If we start calling MOGs MMOs then MMOs will need a new label because we wont know what they are. I get the website mmorpg.com now covers more then the standard MMO and MMORPG but we dont need to redefine the label for me to be ok with reading news about a MOG here.
It was obviously not clearly defined in the first place. Everything is subjective.
You talk like this is some giant club where there are rules and bylaws
and protocols. It's not any of those things. The term is used as loosely
as it's defined. Make a clear concrete definition and it will to filter
games through that criteria.
What should the label mean? What does massive mean quantitatively? The phrase can't mean anything reliably until it can be clearly and concretely defined.
If everyone should be on the same "shard" or server, like RG implied, then do multiserver games even count as mmos? The game community is fragmented, in small chunks, across many isolated pockets.
I'm not seeing how this all even matters in the bigger picture. It doesn't change how games are made. It doesn't change how they're played. Some instanced lobby game being called an mmo isn't going to change how people adopt or play Pantheon. Why should it matter to you or anyone else? It's not like anyone is confused about what a game offers for features when you visit their site.
I matter little but it does irk me. Sure there is some wiggle room in what is massive. What is in a label? A mind picture that lets us know what we are dealing with. Know what said product is trying to fit into. We dont see Candy Bars try and be fine dining. I say Candy Bar and you have some expectations. Same with MMO. Someone says mmorpg I am going to take a close look. Someone says moba I dont click. I think thats the real problem. We all get wiggle room.
In Everquest you had zones and people were in different zones. The world was not seamless and people were not actually playing together because they were playing in different zones. Sometimes you could be in a zone with just one group. Is that massively? Would you consider a game with many instances a world that was massive ,you wouldn't would you but a world with zones like Everquest was considered massive and it qualified as a massively online game.
How about the ability to communicate if you could speak to everyone when they were not in the same zone but you were connected through a channel that allowed people in different instances to talk to each other would that be massively?
Is there a cut off number from which you can say the world is massive like 500 and > people in a game is considered massively.
Most of us who have played older games have a definite idea about what massively is but the qualifications could change I guess.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think an important difference is that in Everquest anyone could enter the same zone provided they were on the same server?
I believe it was WoW that first popularized (invented?) the use of "instancing" where you could have two people playing on the same server standing in the same spot ("dungeon") but not occupying the same physical "space".
In many ways this was good thing; less down time, a more "dramatic" experience... the thing is game designers pretty much took the idea and ran with it.
12 years later, instancing followed to its extreme logical conclusion gave us No Man's Sky! (Sorry)
I think it was Anarchy Online. They had instances before WoW.
Personalized dungeon were introduced by Everquest not WoW in Lost Dungeons of Norrath .
The point about the zones I already said that being able to enter a zone is not a qualifier because you can have different instances of the same zone like they do in Everquest 2,City of Heroes and WoW has people from other servers sharing your zone that belong to a server group. So you don't even have to be on the same server . Surely WoW , EQ2 and City of X qualify as MMORPGs no ?
See the point is the term MMORPG has evolved so much even the games that once fell easily into the realm of that idea which is MMORPG have features that would have been an anathema to a person who started playing MMORPG games in early 2000. Would you have accepted a game where the people playing on your server were coming from other servers? Would that not clash with the concept of identity and server pride? I would not have and yet it's a reality today.
It used to be very easy to pick out the MMO's from the pretenders. Now as the article pointed out there are so many blurred lines and it has become difficult.
It comes down to whether the gameplay suits your play style. The rest is just superfluous.
For me an MMO is a single world that everyone shares. Things like servers never bothered me, because of the limits of current technology. Instanced dungeons never bothered me because its cool and immersive sometimes to be able to visit a dark dangerous and lonely place. What has always bothered me is when we have server instances, like Age of Conan where you be be on the same server but you would be in instance number 1,2,3 or 4
I just find it disheartening that after all these years the genre hasn't really evolved to allow bigger more populated servers with less instances.
We have megaservers but they are just a bunch of smaller servers that you can transfer between.
When will the MMO become truly massive?
6 or 7 figures concurrently on a single server with no world instances. I hope that will be the MMO of the not too distant future.
Well, some people truly can't let it go . . . it just seems to be the people who don't want MMO to have any meaning. Humans need systematics/classification because we use it for every single thing on the planet. It's the entire reason we can even communicate ideas to one another because we've managed to assign meanings/labels to things and have created comparatives that further allow us to differentiate entire concepts with just a word or phrase. It's the reason I can say, "cheese" and you know I'm not talking about milk despite both being part of the broader dairy product family.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason the MMORPG.com staff feel some kind of way about it is because they review more than just MMO's on this site and some people give them a hard time about it. The staff should just get over it and just do the reviews anyway even if a game isn't an MMO. It's okay, really guys, just do your reviews.
No more needs to be said. Bill and the gang talked around it, but this is the number one reason I get irked when I see the acronym used wrong. If MOBAs are massively multiplayer, then so is CoD/AoE/Starcraft/The Last of Us/Battlefield/Any other game that features multipplayer. Where's the reviews of all those titles, Bill? All of those have progression systems to the player avatar, whether persistent between sessions or relegated to the current gameplay session (in the case of the RTSs). It's funny how so many attempt to grasp at straws in order to support adding X or Y game because they like it, but have no good argument against "well, if X and Y, then A-W and also Z are MMOs too," A-W and Z being ANY other title available that allows multiplayer. And they have the audacity to say WE are the ones trying to define it using solely bias.
Using the term in the broader definition advocated renders it meaningless. It renders the name of this site meaningless.
I don't want MMORPG to mean something specific for nostalgia (what?), but because it literally makes NO sense to see it used in the broader definition. It was created to DIFFERENTIATE between two very distinct types of multiplayer. When it stops doing that, you might as well just delete the acronym from the industry.
No. Which is part of the reason we started GameSpace.
Which I've yet to create an account on out of sheer stubbornness! But there are still MMORPGs in development, as was mentioned in the article, which means there's still reason, in my opinion, to keep distinguishing them from the traditional multiplayer experience.
You started to sound like a dystopian government at its infancy.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
At the time that UO was made, there were multiplayer games (Diablo, Quake, etc) that supported 4-16 or 32. There were a multitude of online worlds/virtual worlds that tended to support up to around 250-500 in a server: Meridian 59, MUDs, stuff on the closed online services such as Neverwinter Nights.
"Massive" was actually applied to some of the latter originally; I want to say it was actually some of the online flight sims that first used the phrase "massively multiplayer." Meridian 59 marketed itself as "a graphical MUD." EA/Origin didn't want this term, because it was felt that MUDs weren't a reference point for typical gamers of the time. Hence us ending up with "massively multiplayer" as a way to contrast with "minorly multiplayer" games like Diablo and Quake. By the standards of the day, though, M59 and MUDs fit the bill despite capping around 250.
Most of us older hands were unhappy with the term, since MUD was clearly what they still were as far as were concerned. Failing that, we favored terms like online world or virtual world, or persistent state world aka PSW. My definition thereof can be found in extended form here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/insubstantial-pageants/a-definition/ and clearly rules out Diablo and Quake and yeah, CoD and Battlefield (and lots of other stuff) while clearly ruling IN things like Destiny, slither.io, and even Clash of Clans-style asynch strategy games.
That said, "minorly multiplayer" has raised the bar on concurrent users gradually, until 250 is a common cap. They've also added persistent character state (CoD levelling, for example). The thing that has tended to be missing is a simulated persistent world. These days, a LOT of things have acquired the characteristics of virtual worlds, including much of social media; AR games like Ingress or Pokemon GO; and mirror world applications like Yelp or Google Maps. All of these were considered to be under the broader "metaverse" umbrella generally, back in 2006 when we did the Metaverse Roadmap Summit at Stanford: http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf -- metaverse sounds overly cyberpunk until you realize that what is meant is roughly "technologies that all run against a virtual world server." (It's worth looking at some of the predictions from then, and substituting "social media" for "virtual world" and seeing how much of it has come true: http://www.3pointd.com/20060505/metaverse-forecasts/ )
To address a sidebar: instancing was used extensively in EverQuest after Lost Dungeons of Norrath, though it was field tested before that in earlier content. It was present in Anarchy Online. But it was also present in text MUDs such as Medievia (in fact, as instanced procedurally generated zones!) probably by the mid 90s. WoW's use of it was almost certainly directly inspired by EQ, as was so much else in WoW.
1. "MMO" is an acronym for "MMORPG" - This defintion would exclude games that does not have RPG (playing the role of a character) but are still massively mulitplayer.
2. "MMO" is a common label for all games that are massively multiplayer, where massively is defined as a massive amount of players in the same world.
3. "MMO" is a label describing massively as any game where any player can meet another player either in the world(shard/server) or through lobby.
--------
Whatever the defintion is or will become, I think it would be nice to have some tag labels on all these games because "MMO" just doesn't describe anything anymore.
A game with virtual world and rpg is different from a game focused on single player rpg story in a world is different from a lobby game with character progression is different from a pvp game which usually have little character progression is different from a builder focused game with temporary character progression in a temporary world.
Although I liked destiny 1 it was/is just a glorified lobby game. I'm going to laugh at the mods on this forum who are so desperate to promote a mmo that they resort to calling games like destiny mmo's.
Yes I'm going to laugh when they realise that destiny 2 is not much different from destinty 1 when it come to calling the game an mmo.
Ah wait, the devs are calling it an mmo just like the Bioware were saying swtor was a true open world mmo of which the mods on these forums promoted till release.
I guess they need to promote the devs ideas as much as possible if they want to get paid but don't take many of us as fools thinking we believe this shit.
I don't understand why this is an argument. Laser is an acronym how about we start calling leds lasers because we don't want to use the acronym it already is. What an odd argument. Oh wait we can create new language to fit the new "thing", Nope let's just use already existing language so no one has a clue as to what we are talking about. Cars are now trucks and buses. Don't use truck or bus every again because reasons...
OK, so we have Richard Garriott clearing stating that the term MMO is all about the number of players in the same reality (instance / world).
We have Raph Koster stating that the term MMO was used to identify games that supported more players in the same persistent world than standard multiplayer games (minorly multiplayer) where the current common cap is 250.
Then we have English comprehension of the term "massively multiplayer online", which tells us the word "massively" applies to the word "multiplayer", so again, its all about the number of players who can play together at the same time and that number is massively bigger than standard multiplayer.
So, whilst there is no absolute figure, it is clear that the number of players in the same world is the key and that number has to be massively bigger than standard online multiplayer games. For me, that means massively bigger than 128 (common cap for multiplayer games like battlefield), so I'd set it as 500+ or 1000+ in the same world.
That rules out Destiny and The Division. It rules out mobas. It rules out standard FPS's like COD and Battlefield. It rules out survival games like DayZ. It rules in games like UO, WoW, LotRO, EQ etc.
So, can we say argument over on the definition now? Can we stop calling Destiny and The Division MMOs? I don't care if this site writes articles on games from other genres, that's fine and the articles are interesting and it's fun to see what features other genres have that could be applied to MMOs. Just, stop calling them MMOs; they aren't. I get really excited when I hear that a new AAA MMO is being developed by a Western company, but then halfway through your article it turns out you're lying and not writing about an MMO. That always leaves me feeling disappointed and it hurts your credibility.
Being an MMO should be something to aspire to. A persistent virtual world with 500+ concurrent users in it is something we rarely see and should excite us. We just need MMOs to start designing features specifically for 100+ people and then investing in the tech to support it. They don't need to be hardcore features, you don't even need to be grouped, just features that support / encourage as many people as possible (imagine large-scale public quests or rifts, or pvp areas that actually support large numbers).
I don't understand why this is an argument. Laser is an acronym how about we start calling leds lasers because we don't want to use the acronym it already is. What an odd argument. Oh wait we can create new language to fit the new "thing", Nope let's just use already existing language so no one has a clue as to what we are talking about. Cars are now trucks and buses. Don't use truck or bus every again because reasons...
Things are not always as we believe
This is an LED laser, I have one and it can cut through 1 1/2" stainless steel.
Things come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. MMO's too it seems
OK, so we have Richard Garriott clearing stating that the term MMO is all about the number of players in the same reality (instance / world).
We have Raph Koster stating that the term MMO was used to identify games that supported more players in the same persistent world than standard multiplayer games (minorly multiplayer) where the current common cap is 250.
Then we have English comprehension of the term "massively multiplayer online", which tells us the word "massively" applies to the word "multiplayer", so again, its all about the number of players who can play together at the same time and that number is massively bigger than standard multiplayer.
So, whilst there is no absolute figure, it is clear that the number of players in the same world is the key and that number has to be massively bigger than standard online multiplayer games. For me, that means massively bigger than 128 (common cap for multiplayer games like battlefield), so I'd set it as 500+ or 1000+ in the same world.
That rules out Destiny and The Division. It rules out mobas. It rules out standard FPS's like COD and Battlefield. It rules out survival games like DayZ. It rules in games like UO, WoW, LotRO, EQ etc.
So, can we say argument over on the definition now? Can we stop calling Destiny and The Division MMOs? I don't care if this site writes articles on games from other genres, that's fine and the articles are interesting and it's fun to see what features other genres have that could be applied to MMOs. Just, stop calling them MMOs; they aren't. I get really excited when I hear that a new AAA MMO is being developed by a Western company, but then halfway through your article it turns out you're lying and not writing about an MMO. That always leaves me feeling disappointed and it hurts your credibility.
Being an MMO should be something to aspire to. A persistent virtual world with 500+ concurrent users in it is something we rarely see and should excite us. We just need MMOs to start designing features specifically for 100+ people and then investing in the tech to support it. They don't need to be hardcore features, you don't even need to be grouped, just features that support / encourage as many people as possible (imagine large-scale public quests or rifts, or pvp areas that actually support large numbers).
well written camel .. Agree 100% from a similar thread .. ill paste my response here ..
The MMORPG genre was DEFINED by UO, EQ ,DAOC, AO, AC and a few others ..
All these games that literally DEFINED the Genre and industry have one thing in common ..
They all supported Thousands of players at the SAME time in the SAME persistent world ..
Now if these games literrally DEFINED the genre and set the standards
for what an MMOPRG is .. Why would anyone think Destiny 1 or 2 is an MMO
... .. its just not .. its multi player coop game and there is nothing
wrong with that ..
But Destiny 2 will have the same effect on the MMO industry as Destiny 1 did ..
None , Zero...not a factor just like its predesccessor
so .... UO------EQ------DAOC-----AO-----AC-----Destiny
one of these things is not like the others ..........Which is it ?
I don't understand why this is an argument. Laser is an acronym how about we start calling leds lasers because we don't want to use the acronym it already is. What an odd argument. Oh wait we can create new language to fit the new "thing", Nope let's just use already existing language so no one has a clue as to what we are talking about. Cars are now trucks and buses. Don't use truck or bus every again because reasons...
Things are not always as we believe
This is an LED laser, I have one and it can cut through 1 1/2" stainless steel.
Things come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. MMO's too it seems
Hey that's my truck at the bottom
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
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I don't understand why this is an argument. Laser is an acronym how about we start calling leds lasers because we don't want to use the acronym it already is. What an odd argument. Oh wait we can create new language to fit the new "thing", Nope let's just use already existing language so no one has a clue as to what we are talking about. Cars are now trucks and buses. Don't use truck or bus every again because reasons...
Things are not always as we believe
This is an LED laser, I have one and it can cut through 1 1/2" stainless steel.
Things come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. MMO's too it seems
Pick up/work truck
Transport Truck
Short Bus
Travel Liner Bus
Family Truck
Hey that's my truck at the bottom
Fixed it for you =-) Kinda like MMO, MMORPG, MOBA, MOG. They all mean something. Same with the labels I put in your post. When you say truck, that would be like me saying video game.
Comments
See lol back to cash shops =-)
The term was mmorpg it did evolve to just mmo. Why? Because mmo did fit but rpg did not. When I see the MMO label it should mean something. Same when we see mmorpg. If we start calling MOGs MMOs then MMOs will need a new label because we wont know what they are. I get the website mmorpg.com now covers more then the standard MMO and MMORPG but we dont need to redefine the label for me to be ok with reading news about a MOG here.
You will not, and CANNOT, have a single description, clarification, nor common idea, even, of what is or is not, a MMO as long as everyone is free to make it up as they go along:)
Some day there will be some type of group or regulatory body, that will try to make some type of one size fit all definition of MMO...guess what? They will fail as well.
That is so outrageous a comparison...talking apples and oatmeal cookies....try again.
Not even close to true.
This is what happens when people ignorantly blame everything on WoW.
Several MMOs had instancing before WoW.
As for being able to enter the zone you had games that created different instances of the same zone like Antonica 1,2 and so on. Or when there was an overflow people were put in a waiting instance to wait to get on the server. Even Everquest could not handle large numbers before the zone crashed either.
Talking about massively being the ability to play together but strictly speaking you were not playing with all the people on the server, you could possibly play with them but you could possibly play with the people on a lobby game too.
What about a game like Skyforge not sure if this is the example I want but if a world is connected from one area to another that is it is a world similar to Everquest but you travelled to it from a lobby. You did not need to cross the zones but even dungeon crawling in WoW does not require travel so there is that.
I know what the acronym means to me but I'm just being the devil's advocate here in saying that times have changed and definitions are changing too. Nowadays there are people who follow large guilds they don't actually play a game as a member of a server but rather a guild. They play with the people they talk to on VoIP and interact with on social media and their world is not made up of the many people that are on the server that they never play with but only the people they actually play with. So whose world is massively then the world that they create with their interactions or an abstract definition whose meaning is evolving.
I matter little but it does irk me. Sure there is some wiggle room in what is massive. What is in a label? A mind picture that lets us know what we are dealing with. Know what said product is trying to fit into. We dont see Candy Bars try and be fine dining. I say Candy Bar and you have some expectations. Same with MMO. Someone says mmorpg I am going to take a close look. Someone says moba I dont click. I think thats the real problem. We all get wiggle room.
I think it was Anarchy Online. They had instances before WoW.
Personalized dungeon were introduced by Everquest not WoW in Lost Dungeons of Norrath .
The point about the zones I already said that being able to enter a zone is not a qualifier because you can have different instances of the same zone like they do in Everquest 2,City of Heroes and WoW has people from other servers sharing your zone that belong to a server group. So you don't even have to be on the same server . Surely WoW , EQ2 and City of X qualify as MMORPGs no ?
See the point is the term MMORPG has evolved so much even the games that once fell easily into the realm of that idea which is MMORPG have features that would have been an anathema to a person who started playing MMORPG games in early 2000. Would you have accepted a game where the people playing on your server were coming from other servers? Would that not clash with the concept of identity and server pride? I would not have and yet it's a reality today.
It comes down to whether the gameplay suits your play style. The rest is just superfluous.
For me an MMO is a single world that everyone shares. Things like servers never bothered me, because of the limits of current technology. Instanced dungeons never bothered me because its cool and immersive sometimes to be able to visit a dark dangerous and lonely place. What has always bothered me is when we have server instances, like Age of Conan where you be be on the same server but you would be in instance number 1,2,3 or 4
I just find it disheartening that after all these years the genre hasn't really evolved to allow bigger more populated servers with less instances.
We have megaservers but they are just a bunch of smaller servers that you can transfer between.
When will the MMO become truly massive?
6 or 7 figures concurrently on a single server with no world instances. I hope that will be the MMO of the not too distant future.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
No more needs to be said. Bill and the gang talked around it, but this is the number one reason I get irked when I see the acronym used wrong. If MOBAs are massively multiplayer, then so is CoD/AoE/Starcraft/The Last of Us/Battlefield/Any other game that features multipplayer. Where's the reviews of all those titles, Bill? All of those have progression systems to the player avatar, whether persistent between sessions or relegated to the current gameplay session (in the case of the RTSs). It's funny how so many attempt to grasp at straws in order to support adding X or Y game because they like it, but have no good argument against "well, if X and Y, then A-W and also Z are MMOs too," A-W and Z being ANY other title available that allows multiplayer. And they have the audacity to say WE are the ones trying to define it using solely bias.
Using the term in the broader definition advocated renders it meaningless. It renders the name of this site meaningless.
I don't want MMORPG to mean something specific for nostalgia (what?), but because it literally makes NO sense to see it used in the broader definition. It was created to DIFFERENTIATE between two very distinct types of multiplayer. When it stops doing that, you might as well just delete the acronym from the industry.
Is that really what MMORPG.com wants?
No. Which is part of the reason we started GameSpace.
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It's mildly entertaining to see you wet yourself every time I say it.
~~ postlarval ~~
Which I've yet to create an account on out of sheer stubbornness! But there are still MMORPGs in development, as was mentioned in the article, which means there's still reason, in my opinion, to keep distinguishing them from the traditional multiplayer experience.
"Massive" was actually applied to some of the latter originally; I want to say it was actually some of the online flight sims that first used the phrase "massively multiplayer." Meridian 59 marketed itself as "a graphical MUD." EA/Origin didn't want this term, because it was felt that MUDs weren't a reference point for typical gamers of the time. Hence us ending up with "massively multiplayer" as a way to contrast with "minorly multiplayer" games like Diablo and Quake. By the standards of the day, though, M59 and MUDs fit the bill despite capping around 250.
Most of us older hands were unhappy with the term, since MUD was clearly what they still were as far as were concerned. Failing that, we favored terms like online world or virtual world, or persistent state world aka PSW. My definition thereof can be found in extended form here: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/insubstantial-pageants/a-definition/ and clearly rules out Diablo and Quake and yeah, CoD and Battlefield (and lots of other stuff) while clearly ruling IN things like Destiny, slither.io, and even Clash of Clans-style asynch strategy games.
That said, "minorly multiplayer" has raised the bar on concurrent users gradually, until 250 is a common cap. They've also added persistent character state (CoD levelling, for example). The thing that has tended to be missing is a simulated persistent world. These days, a LOT of things have acquired the characteristics of virtual worlds, including much of social media; AR games like Ingress or Pokemon GO; and mirror world applications like Yelp or Google Maps. All of these were considered to be under the broader "metaverse" umbrella generally, back in 2006 when we did the Metaverse Roadmap Summit at Stanford: http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf -- metaverse sounds overly cyberpunk until you realize that what is meant is roughly "technologies that all run against a virtual world server." (It's worth looking at some of the predictions from then, and substituting "social media" for "virtual world" and seeing how much of it has come true: http://www.3pointd.com/20060505/metaverse-forecasts/ )
To address a sidebar: instancing was used extensively in EverQuest after Lost Dungeons of Norrath, though it was field tested before that in earlier content. It was present in Anarchy Online. But it was also present in text MUDs such as Medievia (in fact, as instanced procedurally generated zones!) probably by the mid 90s. WoW's use of it was almost certainly directly inspired by EQ, as was so much else in WoW.
There seem to be a few different views on this.
1. "MMO" is an acronym for "MMORPG" - This defintion would exclude games that does not have RPG (playing the role of a character) but are still massively mulitplayer.
2. "MMO" is a common label for all games that are massively multiplayer, where massively is defined as a massive amount of players in the same world.
3. "MMO" is a label describing massively as any game where any player can meet another player either in the world(shard/server) or through lobby.
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Whatever the defintion is or will become, I think it would be nice to have some tag labels on all these games because "MMO" just doesn't describe anything anymore.
A game with virtual world and rpg is different from a game focused on single player rpg story in a world is different from a lobby game with character progression is different from a pvp game which usually have little character progression is different from a builder focused game with temporary character progression in a temporary world.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Yes I'm going to laugh when they realise that destiny 2 is not much different from destinty 1 when it come to calling the game an mmo.
Ah wait, the devs are calling it an mmo just like the Bioware were saying swtor was a true open world mmo of which the mods on these forums promoted till release.
I guess they need to promote the devs ideas as much as possible if they want to get paid but don't take many of us as fools thinking we believe this shit.
We have Raph Koster stating that the term MMO was used to identify games that supported more players in the same persistent world than standard multiplayer games (minorly multiplayer) where the current common cap is 250.
Then we have English comprehension of the term "massively multiplayer online", which tells us the word "massively" applies to the word "multiplayer", so again, its all about the number of players who can play together at the same time and that number is massively bigger than standard multiplayer.
So, whilst there is no absolute figure, it is clear that the number of players in the same world is the key and that number has to be massively bigger than standard online multiplayer games. For me, that means massively bigger than 128 (common cap for multiplayer games like battlefield), so I'd set it as 500+ or 1000+ in the same world.
That rules out Destiny and The Division. It rules out mobas. It rules out standard FPS's like COD and Battlefield. It rules out survival games like DayZ. It rules in games like UO, WoW, LotRO, EQ etc.
So, can we say argument over on the definition now? Can we stop calling Destiny and The Division MMOs? I don't care if this site writes articles on games from other genres, that's fine and the articles are interesting and it's fun to see what features other genres have that could be applied to MMOs. Just, stop calling them MMOs; they aren't. I get really excited when I hear that a new AAA MMO is being developed by a Western company, but then halfway through your article it turns out you're lying and not writing about an MMO. That always leaves me feeling disappointed and it hurts your credibility.
Being an MMO should be something to aspire to. A persistent virtual world with 500+ concurrent users in it is something we rarely see and should excite us. We just need MMOs to start designing features specifically for 100+ people and then investing in the tech to support it. They don't need to be hardcore features, you don't even need to be grouped, just features that support / encourage as many people as possible (imagine large-scale public quests or rifts, or pvp areas that actually support large numbers).
Things are not always as we believe
This is an LED laser, I have one and it can cut through 1 1/2" stainless steel.
Things come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. MMO's too it seems
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
well written camel .. Agree 100% from a similar thread .. ill paste my response here ..
The MMORPG genre was DEFINED by UO, EQ ,DAOC, AO, AC and a few others ..
All these games that literally DEFINED the Genre and industry have one thing in common ..
They all supported Thousands of players at the SAME time in the SAME persistent world ..
Now if these games literrally DEFINED the genre and set the standards
for what an MMOPRG is .. Why would anyone think Destiny 1 or 2 is an MMO
... .. its just not .. its multi player coop game and there is nothing
wrong with that ..
But Destiny 2 will have the same effect on the MMO industry as Destiny 1 did ..
None , Zero...not a factor just like its predesccessor
so .... UO------EQ------DAOC-----AO-----AC-----Destiny
one of these things is not like the others ..........Which is it ?
Hey that's my truck at the bottom
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Fixed it for you =-) Kinda like MMO, MMORPG, MOBA, MOG. They all mean something. Same with the labels I put in your post. When you say truck, that would be like me saying video game.