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MMO + FPS = "the circle of suck"
Pilnkplonk
Member Posts: 1,532
Firefall's (and WoW's, Diablo II's and WC3's) Mark Kern talks about mmo fpss, why they all suck and why Firefall might finally not suck!
“I used to draw what I’d call “The Circle of Suck”. Tabula Rasa came out and Hellgate: London came out, and I drew one circle that said “MMO gameplay.” I drew another circle that said, “shooter gameplay.” Where they intersect – that little sliver – is full of suck.”
“We were trying to blend the two genres, but it wasn’t fun. So [with Firefall] we picked one or the other. Let’s get the shooting right, and selectively add in the MMO elements. Let’s take the idea of open world sandbox play and feature hundreds of players instead of four or eight player co-op. Let’s take towns, crafting and resources and combine it all together. And that group would be a much more fun game when we started playing it than anything we’d tried before.”
Your thoughts? Is he full of BS or is he onto something?
Comments
Great article, i fully support the guy behind it. But then again i'll rather go the mmoprg that use properly some of the fps gameplay *caught GW2 caught*. But for that article alone i'll go check what you have done there guys.
He sounds full of bull to me. At it's core Firefall isn't doing anything that hasn't already been done multiple times and the articles just sounds like a way to say all other MMOFPS suck apart from this one.
His formula is giving me goosebumps.
But I'lle believe it when I see it. You talk the talk, you walk the walk.
Could you point me to some that don't actually suck? I'd really like to try them out.
What a lot of obsolute tosh!
Where MMOs and FPSs meet is the Circle of Zen! It is the Nirvana of gaming.
You want an example ? Have a play of the original PlanetSide and then see what they are doing with PlanetSide 2.
With an MMO and FPS blended you get the depth and longevity of gameplay of an MMO with the thrill and adrenalin of an FPS shooter.
Add full looting to FPS gameplay like in Darkfall and you get a real serious kick out of killing or stopping yourself being killed. Death becomes meaningful finally. Dakfall does have it limitations though.
I wish for nothing less than the total iradication of EQ clone combat in MMOs. It is boring and makes all MMOs seem the same. It was only introduced because the internet at the time (late 90's early 00's) could not cope with an MMO using a real time combat system.
Tabula Rasa was not an FPS in any sense of the term. Firefall is an over the shoulder shooter, not a true FPS, it is a hybrid and I don't have very high hopes for it but it is still going to be a whole lot more fun that playing something like WOW with its old tired and boring combat system.
Go play PlanetSide now and then come back and say MMOs and FPSs do not go well together. It was developed early 2000's and released 2003 yet managed to do what very few other MMOs have ever done - decent combat. The only other true FPS MMO is World War 2 Online and that is even older so not really up to todays standards.
Heh, you should actually read the article, man... or even the quotes in OP.
The argument is that all the recent MMO+FPS attempts SO FAR sucked and Kern tried to see why this turned out to be so. He came to the conclusion that those games begun as MMOs first and then tried to add FPS elements. So they decided to go the other way around by making Firefall an excellent FPS first and foremost and THEN see how much MMO they can add to it.
It seems they're quite surprised themselves how well it's going so far. At the moment it has pretty much all the features of what we'd consider a fully proper mmo game and then some.
I must put my hand up to only reading the article afterwards
But PlanetSide is still a decent MMOFPS or even an MMORPG, Tabula Rasa and HellGate were bad examples.
Yeah, Planetside was probably the only really good mmofps and I suspect that it's exactly because they started with full fps mechanics and then added persistent world and objectives to it... so FF team might be on a good track after all?
TR and HG started from the opposite direction. They began with classical WoW-like tab-targetting thing, looked at it and asked "how can we twist this into something more FPS-like?" Imo FPS gameplay + MMO game structure = win but we'll have to see, as always...
Open world MMOs and FPS don't match up for a single reason: servers can't handle the stress of hundreds of players in a single area without hardlocking.
There's a solution to these problems, but this adds other even worse problems. You can for example pass the hit-detection to the client-side, so that the server doesn't have to calculate it, but then people start to develop aimbots and other stuff.
So, either I'm playing shooters on "guarded" servers with limited number of players per map, or I'm playing a open world MMO with hardlocking and hundreds of players.
And yes I know that Planetside got it somewhat working, but it aswell had to deal with hacks, and please don't start to talk about the crap that is Darkfall in that regard.
Also... playerskill can be added into the game with tactics, targetcalling, etc, etc...
Well that's why open world is currently PvE only. There has been some guarded talk of open world territorial PvP in the future but we'll have to see if it's really practical, for all the reasons you mentioned. In fact, I'm really curious if GW2 will manage to pull their massive PVP through. Imo this will be the true test whether today's net technology is up to this task.
We'll see...
The problem is, on paper that's sounds different, but it actually the same thing other developers do. They build the MMO around FPS mechanics. Look at Darkfall and MO. The FPS is the mechanics, the MMO part is around themPhilosophy of MMO Game Design
Uhhmm... Planetside?
bullcrap.
DF did it and it worked fine for them, and they did it with one of the largest open world in the mmo market. there have been many 100s vs 100s fights in DF and as long as your comp could handle it and your connection was good it war perfectly acceptable preformance.
FPS +mmo can work, you just gotta know what the hell you are doing.
Of what is quoted in OP doesn't make me want to agree but reading the article for myself I agree with these:
"Mark reckons massively multiplayer games need to evolve dramatically if they’re to be successful. “We’ve got to break out of the mould.”
"According to Mark, creative indies might be MMO’s saving grace: “Gamers are ready to try different things. It’s time to take risks and I’m really looking towards the independents to try that."
Basically games that blended the two in the past that failed because of the wrong features they brought in from the MMO side. It isn't so much that combining the two you always get crap as result.
I would add Necron as a MMORPGFPS that didn't suck but I'm biased. At least it's not shut down...
Well the article talks about the process of designing a mmofps, rather than the end result. It advocates exactly the opposite to how DF and MO were designed. Both of those games began their designs as mmorpgs first and foremost and during the process the devs tried to see how much of FPS can they place on top of it without the engine or the gameplay breaking down.
Firefall is attempting a different direction. They begun as straight multiplayer shooter and when they realized that this basic part of the game is working, they explored how much mmo functionality they can add. So far they have a persistent, event-driven world instead of standard instanced mission runs.
Now they're even talking about adding open world PvP since they realized that their engine and gameplay can handle it.
So, designing such massive games is a series of baby steps, but the real question is where to start that journey from, mmorpg or fps? They're attempting to iterate their way from fps rather than mmorpg as used to be customary. Imo, they might be onto something - first check whether everything is really working from a technical perspective and then see if you can add to it.
Sounds a bit better than Global Agenda in my opinion, let's wait and see.