Why so many games pretend to be an MMOFPS?

#1 You're right in that the art department usually takes a lot of budget.

The problem is that imitation is a safe investment with predictable returns. People continue to pay for point/shoot FPS games with some minor innovation.

Also, MMOFPS is a hard game to make, engineering wise. Any MMO has it's areas where it sacrifices: Polygon count, sound quality, unit clipping, zoning, lag/responsiveness, texture sizes, But with an FPS, all of those things are important. You will have a LOT of trouble pitching a game that doesn't look "next-gen-y." These kinds of games have a stigma of benchmarking new technology, so if you try to show the HIGHEST bar of excellence in the visuals, you won't have leftover budget to make the server architecture as sweet as you'd like, or you can't develop deep game-play mechanics.

It takes SO MUCH work to make a game look breathtaking, and anyone who's been through the production cycle knows that the longest stretch and highest amount of man hours are poured into the art.

Then to expect to constantly create more content to keep up with player demands (every good MMO needs additional content)? It's just not realistic. If you start the bar high, you have to maintain that level

#2 It's a safe investment yes but it's also a slap in the face for a decent part of the potential customers (i know i'm not in the majority but it's still a decent pi slice) who end up NOT buying those new next gen games simply because more of the same with a shinier skin doesn't interest me.

(hell i bought more indy games the past 6 months than in the past 6 years)

Sadly most of the indy studios do not have the financial shoulders to offer what i would call a "grand" project.

And those who have the shoulders, are unwilling to risk it.

#3 Hmmm... I have to disagree a bit here. I'm willing to state that MW1/2 are indeed MMOFPS by definition, and if they're not, then they're missing the mark by less than an inch.

They have both level and achievement systems, inventory (but really, most games do), character customization (through the weapons), and character persistence. They have guild support (clans by any other name is still the same) as well, and communication between players.

It's true that the instances don't hold many people, but that's also a gameplay decision. I think that, if anything, the only thing that makes MW1/2 miss the mark would be that there are no maps that connect the maps- like a base with different exits that would lead to the lobby to connect with other players and be brought into those instances. Outside of that, it's not too far off at all.

Quote:If you start the bar high, you have to maintain that level

Add to that the fact that your style dictates more than just how pretty the game is. Daniel mentioned how the majority of the budget is taken up by art, which naturally means that gameplay isn't getting as much money as it sometimes needs to, but that's not the whole story either. The more realistic your art style, the less of a lifespan it has, which means it gets more of an advertising blitz in order to make more money. It also lowers the amount of other stuff you can code for. If all your cycles are being throwing at shaders and polys and physics, then there's only so much to use for AI. Only recently have developers been finding more cycles to throw at AI and NPCs, due mainly because of the explosion of power in the GPUs.

Quote:And those who have the shoulders, are unwilling to risk it.

And here's where I get to defend a point I make myself a lot of times ;) There's actually a good reason for this: Experiments are best made by small(ish) teams that have a low exposure to risk. If Activision makes a huge leap of faith on gameplay in a AAA title and loses, then they take a huge hit, whereas an Indie team can take the same risk and make it a success. The overhead and profit margins are all different at those two scales, so where you can spend two months making some quirky game and sell it and make $20,000 and be like "damn, that sold great!", Activision would be calling it a negative, even if only one of their people worked on it. Beyond that one person, they have more overhead in rent, utilities, admin and tech support, management, etc.

That's also why giants like Activision don't usually move into the "smaller" spaces that Indies inhabit, unless they have something that is sure to have mass appeal, which they can offer everywhere in order to get that return on investment they need to stay alive.

Smaller creatures are always more agile than larger ones, so this situation is completely natural :)

#4 I really feel like people need to put their money where their mouth is. Either the mantra is "Game-play is everything" or it's "Everything is important." You can't have it both ways.

Now, I'm not claiming anyone in particular has this contradiction, but the indie community at large tends to be fragmented. A lot of studios, and in fact the studios making waves and winning awards, tend to champion the game-play experience in a way that AAA developers can't. However, consumers are still holding them to the aesthetic standards of AAA games, unfairly.

Your comment about indies not being able to offer a "grand project" kinda hits at what I'm talking about. These days it's rare to blend really tight game-play with high production value, and instead it's trying to become the standard. The whole "Go big or go home" mentality shouldn't apply to artistic fields, especially ones which are primarily labors of love.

In terms of MMOFPS, the indie community is ripe to become the progenitor of this kind of genre, but the first few experiments aren't going to be grand, nor are they going to be AAA quality visuals. However, if you really like the game-play, you better be supporting them!

#5 Oh i'm not bashing on the indy community, as a wanna be game designe r myself, I have the highest respect on the work done by indy developpers; but to make a "true" MMOFPS, would require huge server infrastructures that most Indy studios can't really finance.

And once an indy studio sold its soul to a big company like EA or UbiSoft, it isn't really an indy studio anymore :)


The way I see things is that the Artworks can be a very iterative process, one can design a game and use temporary arts (stickmens? colored cubes?) and focuse on the gameplay, the arts can always be refined later on or alongside, it doesn't really impact the gameplay if the arts are not final or will be redone later.

To go back on the advertisement "fraud" that is practised those days, a lot of new FPS games advertise themselve as "Massively Multiplayer" when they really aren't.

In a game like global agenda, yes there are persistence elements, but the game itself is still a very classic 8vs8 FPS game with no real sense of persistence or place beyon the "arena" your team plays in.

Most MMORPGs today try to push forward instanced systems because they are easier to scale up and require less maintenance, but this isn't what the core concept of an MMORPG is supposed to stand for, and likewise, an MMOFPS, which is supposed to take those same concepts and adapt them to an FPS game style.

As for supporting them, well the first project of this kind to emerge will definitely get my full attention :)

#6

Quote:The way I see things is that the Artworks can be a very iterative process, one can design a game and use temporary arts (stickmens? colored cubes?) and focuse on the gameplay, the arts can always be refined later on or alongside, it doesn't really impact the gameplay if the arts are not final or will be redone later.

My personal opinion is that gameplay supersedes art, period. Think of Tetris. Graphics? Think of Civ I, II, III, IV ... gameplay started out great, and pretty much stayed the same, only the graphics improved over time.

Getting back to the original topic:

Quote:Hmmm... I have to disagree a bit here. I'm willing to state that MW1/2 are indeed MMOFPS by definition, and if they're not, then they're missing the mark by less than an inch.

They have both level and achievement systems, inventory (but really, most games do), character customization (through the weapons), and character persistence. They have guild support (clans by any other name is still the same) as well, and communication between players.

MMOFPS MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE FIRST PERSON SHOOTER

Level and achievement systems, inventory, character customization, character persistence, guild support, and communication between players do NOT come into that definition anywhere. Therefore, I have to agree with Kyrah, these are NOT MMOFPS games, by definition. To fit the definition of MMOFPS you simply need lots of people online at the same time shooting at each other. No persistence, no levels, no guilds, etc, etc.

By that same token, RPGFO.com is a MMORPG. Lots of people online roleplaying. Massive (many) Multiplayer (people) Online (online) Role Playing Game (pretending to be characters).

#7 i do wonder what's going on server/network wise, some older games used to be able to handle massive 64vs64 games, and that was on old hardware with crappy internet connections.

where would be the harm to at least code the game so in the event someone has the infrastructure to run 128 or 256 player servers and maps, they could.

#8

Quote:To fit the definition of MMOFPS you simply need lots of people online at the same time shooting at each other. No persistence, no levels, no guilds, etc, etc.

They deliver on that, with persistence to boot. Not to the level of MAG, but WoW doesn't deliver server populations like Eve Online does either.

#9 Technically not, it's yes to many players playing, and a no to the sense of being in the same place.

What i feel is they are stretching the "massively multiplayer" term to encompass their whole userbase, but then , every successful FPS game become a massively multiplayer.

Massively multiplayer means that peoples play together, in the same game world, at the same time, it isn't simply a measurement of how big is your userbase.

Planetside and World war 2 online are the current holders of this title. MAG comes very close but not enough because it's still a "game room" fps game.

There has to be a sense that all players (or at least all the players in the same world region) are participating in the same game.

#10

Quote:What i feel is they are stretching the "massively multiplayer" term to encompass their whole userbase, but then , every successful FPS game become a massively multiplayer.

Well, the assertion that MW1/2 qualify as an MMO is mine, not theirs. I think the only thing they lack is a level that represents the lobby that others can interact in without combat (basically, a 3d skinning of the chat channel). Otherwise, the rest comes down to semantics and architectural limitations.

#11 What about server architectures that erase this sense of "rooms" ?

#12

Quote:What about server architectures that erase this sense of "rooms" ?

I would really like to see this become the future of the 'MMOFPS', rather than the MAG-style of shoving more players into each map. At some point you get diminishing returns - people have said about MAG that most of the time it doesn't really feel massive, because the action is split up.

I thought about this back in the early stages of designing my game - the idea of having a 'campaign' running as multiple servers, each with their own small scenario playing out, but all affecting each other in real-time, and with players flowing between them dynamically. So a game going on in the airport might end with a victory for side A - suddenly airstrikes become available to side A in other servers in the campaign, playing out battles in different parts of the city. And the players formerly fighting over the airport are freed to reinforce other fights going on. Enhancing that sense of massiveness, you'd have the ability to radio chat between servers - so you could get a sense of the big-picture of all the different fights going on at the same time.

Combine that with a bit of an over-world server where each side can launch attacks on locations (when an attack is launched, enemy players get a chance to swap over to defending it), and you'd basically have MMOish gameplay - but there's no need to have 250 players in the same space at the same time.

#13 Yes that would be quite a sight, but i have no idea how this would work on a technical side, i've been reading a bit on how World of warcraft move players from server to server, but it's still quite... difficult to grasp.

#14 @Daniel: Sounds like a big game of Risk, with the FPS players determining the win/loss conditions ;)

#15 @Ted : Global Agenda is working on pretty much that, complete with the hex map.

There is an interesting articlre about the server structure used by EVE Online for their "single universe" system.

It's quite interesting, even if their system work extremely well because of the space setting, which conveniently hides a LOT of the inner workings.

http://www.massively.com/2008/09/28/eve-evolved-eve-onlines-server-model/