Monthly fees. Why pay a monthly fee to play a FPS when you can play for free after you purchase the client.
The cost of entry into the market is high.
There is an awful lot of competition in the genre.
A company would have to get a license for a known IP or they would have a difficult time getting past the name brand of games like Halo and COD.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
Then yes the limitations are graphics based and lag caused by the time taken for the information to travle to and from client to server...evne fractions of a second matte rin a twitch based game.
There it is, in a less than perfectly spelled nutshell. Queued "die roll" based to hit/damage MMO combat can handle 400-500ms lag. FPS based games cannot. No way, no how. And with dozens of players onscreen, 500 ms lag would be a godsend.
The server couldn't handle dozens of twitch based foes, and most certainly no home PC made could handle it in an acceptable manner.
Single player games even have issues with enemies number of that scale on your PC, and the PC already knows where those enemies are going! Dozens of unpredictable players over the internet? Nuh uh.
Eve can do it because positioning and vector don't have to be perfect, and a sudden change in either is unlikely to change whether another ship hits you or not. The die is rolled at that given instance the weapon is fired.
With twitch, you can't have a system like that. Somebody chucks a grenade at you while you're running. If the die is rolled, it will arc toward you no matter what(like Eve). If there's no die roll, the server has to constantly know exactly where you are at the point the grenade goes off. This takes more resources than any current system is capable of for massive numbers of players.
They tried the fpsmmo thing with the NGE in SWG years ago, and we all know how well that worked out. But even today, most mmos have major trouble with lag when you get 100 people or so in a given area. I think we are still a few years away technologically.
You have got to be kidding right? You think that SWG had FPS combat? That made me LOL hard !!!!
No SWG certainly did not have FPS combat - the only two large scale FPSers have been PlanetSide and World War 2 Online.
They tried the fpsmmo thing with the NGE in SWG years ago, and we all know how well that worked out. But even today, most mmos have major trouble with lag when you get 100 people or so in a given area. I think we are still a few years away technologically.
You have got to be kidding right? You think that SWG had FPS combat? That made me LOL hard !!!!
No SWG certainly did not have FPS combat - the only two large scale FPSers have been PlanetSide and World War 2 Online.
To be fair, JtL was somewhat twitch based. It was also a terrific example of why massive twitch based MMO's aren't really viable, at the moment, anyway. PvP in JtL was... just plain horrible for a number of reasons.
But yes, NGE-SWG on the ground was still die roll based, only difference being is you had to click away at your opponent and auto-follow.
Monthly fees. Why pay a monthly fee to play a FPS when you can play for free after you purchase the client.
The cost of entry into the market is high.
There is an awful lot of competition in the genre.
A company would have to get a license for a known IP or they would have a difficult time getting past the name brand of games like Halo and COD.
I think this is a great point. FPS gamers are not used to paying subscription fees like RPG players are after over a decade of MMORPGs. Why would they want to, when they can play online matches for free. Not to mention that these games are arguably better shooters than Planetside or APB as far as the basic are concerned.
The first step is to make these games just as good as the basic stuff as other FPS games.
IMO, one of the best things to happen to MMOs in the past year or two has been the widespread acceptance of varied payment structures. It used to be that MMO meant buy the boy, pay per month, pay for expansions. That is no longer the case. I believe that MMOFPS games can benefit from adopting a different model.
How I would do it:
Free: Basically an unlimited trial. Players only have access to the most basic weapons. They can be passengers on vehicles but cannot drive/pilot them. This gets a lot of grunts on the field for big battles.
Buy the Box: Full game. Can access all the weapons, vehicles, etc.
Microtransactions: Things that don't directly affect the balance of the game. Cosmetic upgrades for armor/weapons/vehicles. Clan creation. Allow F2P players to purchase content in pieces (ability to drive a specific vehicle or use a specific weapon). Stuff like that.
This accomplishes a few things:
1. Gets a lot of people into the game so you can have those massive battles that really are the difference between a regular FPS and a MMOFPS. The main appeal of a game like this is having 300v300v300 wars that have meaning, instead of 32v32 firefights that have no greater meaning.
2. Allows people to support the game in chunks as they feel. Perhaps a player doesn't think it's worth it for them to spend $60 to buy the full game, but they can justify spending $15-20 to unlock a sniper rifle and the ability to fly a bomber.
3. Doesn't have the scary subscription. I think this is a big turn-off to most FPS gamers, so getting rid of it can do a lot to draw them in.
Top MMOs: Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, EVE Online, Planetside Played: Pretty much everything at one point or another
Comments
Monthly fees. Why pay a monthly fee to play a FPS when you can play for free after you purchase the client.
The cost of entry into the market is high.
There is an awful lot of competition in the genre.
A company would have to get a license for a known IP or they would have a difficult time getting past the name brand of games like Halo and COD.
--John Ruskin
There it is, in a less than perfectly spelled nutshell. Queued "die roll" based to hit/damage MMO combat can handle 400-500ms lag. FPS based games cannot. No way, no how. And with dozens of players onscreen, 500 ms lag would be a godsend.
The server couldn't handle dozens of twitch based foes, and most certainly no home PC made could handle it in an acceptable manner.
Single player games even have issues with enemies number of that scale on your PC, and the PC already knows where those enemies are going! Dozens of unpredictable players over the internet? Nuh uh.
Eve can do it because positioning and vector don't have to be perfect, and a sudden change in either is unlikely to change whether another ship hits you or not. The die is rolled at that given instance the weapon is fired.
With twitch, you can't have a system like that. Somebody chucks a grenade at you while you're running. If the die is rolled, it will arc toward you no matter what(like Eve). If there's no die roll, the server has to constantly know exactly where you are at the point the grenade goes off. This takes more resources than any current system is capable of for massive numbers of players.
Darkfall is pretty much a massive, unlimited player, fps MMO
Remember Old School Ultima Online
You have got to be kidding right? You think that SWG had FPS combat? That made me LOL hard !!!!
No SWG certainly did not have FPS combat - the only two large scale FPSers have been PlanetSide and World War 2 Online.
To be fair, JtL was somewhat twitch based. It was also a terrific example of why massive twitch based MMO's aren't really viable, at the moment, anyway. PvP in JtL was... just plain horrible for a number of reasons.
But yes, NGE-SWG on the ground was still die roll based, only difference being is you had to click away at your opponent and auto-follow.
I think this is a great point. FPS gamers are not used to paying subscription fees like RPG players are after over a decade of MMORPGs. Why would they want to, when they can play online matches for free. Not to mention that these games are arguably better shooters than Planetside or APB as far as the basic are concerned.
The first step is to make these games just as good as the basic stuff as other FPS games.
IMO, one of the best things to happen to MMOs in the past year or two has been the widespread acceptance of varied payment structures. It used to be that MMO meant buy the boy, pay per month, pay for expansions. That is no longer the case. I believe that MMOFPS games can benefit from adopting a different model.
How I would do it:
Free: Basically an unlimited trial. Players only have access to the most basic weapons. They can be passengers on vehicles but cannot drive/pilot them. This gets a lot of grunts on the field for big battles.
Buy the Box: Full game. Can access all the weapons, vehicles, etc.
Microtransactions: Things that don't directly affect the balance of the game. Cosmetic upgrades for armor/weapons/vehicles. Clan creation. Allow F2P players to purchase content in pieces (ability to drive a specific vehicle or use a specific weapon). Stuff like that.
This accomplishes a few things:
1. Gets a lot of people into the game so you can have those massive battles that really are the difference between a regular FPS and a MMOFPS. The main appeal of a game like this is having 300v300v300 wars that have meaning, instead of 32v32 firefights that have no greater meaning.
2. Allows people to support the game in chunks as they feel. Perhaps a player doesn't think it's worth it for them to spend $60 to buy the full game, but they can justify spending $15-20 to unlock a sniper rifle and the ability to fly a bomber.
3. Doesn't have the scary subscription. I think this is a big turn-off to most FPS gamers, so getting rid of it can do a lot to draw them in.
Top MMOs: Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, EVE Online, Planetside
Played: Pretty much everything at one point or another