Actually I was the first to bring up every game is an RPG :P. There might be a few instances in which you can find situations when you aren’t any particular role, but you can even make up a role for yourself in those situations! In Bejeweled, you play the role of a cursor trying to swap around jewels until they match!
Anyways, I wasn’t trying to take sides, but instead just show how there is almost no set definition of what a game is or isn’t. They just are, like you say, what the developers or fanbase makes them out to be. Even technical aspects of things may contradict themselves if you keep going deeper.
Guild Wars (1) is map-based, and has a limit to the amount of players in one channel at any given time. And when you leave town to go into the field, you are actually taken to your own personal instance of the field (only you and your current party members appear in your instance). I consider it an MMO because there are various amounts of players that you can add to a friend list or guild, and chat with them no matter what map they’re in. If I really think about it, the main feature of an for me MMO is the in-game messaging system. Without that, I don’t think I would call it an MMO no matter how many people are running around the screen xD.
A Co-op, with smaller groups of players connecting through a lobby, but only a limited number of players existing in a given space, would actually be considered a Multiplayer Online Game (MOG) – nix the extra “M”. The “massively” part comes into play when hundreds+ of players exist together in the same space. This is why you don’t hear games like Call of Duty or League of Legends referred to as MMOs. Publishers understand that (incorrectly) attaching the “MMO” tag to these games would confuse much of their regular player base (and be somewhat misleading to first time players).
This cannot be right though. It should be based on players per server not game room. Because even the typical MMO’s have limits on how many players can be in one scene. Thus why instances were created. Actually there are several MMO’s that are just that lobby based, instanced based, or whatever you want to call it.
The number of players in one scene hits the nail on the head. A game isn’t an MMO just because it can group 8 or 16 or 32 players together in one instance; the first M, “massively”, means that players can interact at the same time on a much larger scale, whether portions of the game are instanced or not.
For example, one popular game type today is the MOBA, short for “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena”. The two most popular MOBAs, Dota 2 and League of Legends, each have millions of players online at the same time during peak hours. Millions are on line, and yet the games are not known as MMOBAs (adding the “massively” abbreviation) – they are simply MOBAs, because each game takes place in an instance with a limited number of players.
BEAU: A “real” MMO is defined by a good number of people (enough to make a large neighborhood, but that’s up for debate) interacting and leaving a lasting imprint on a virtual world…
BREE: To me the term massive is about how big the game feels population-wise rather than how many people are actually around… A game that lets me trade, roleplay, PvP, and otherwise interact with people on the other side of the world simply feels more massive than a huge game with loads of people but empty zones and no reason to interact with anyone…
JUSTIN: …But for me, it’s kind of a much more subjective feeling. Some MMOs feel massive and some don’t, and sometimes that has little to do with the actual numbers around me. I mean, I could be playing a game with a million people, but if most of them are in endgame zones and I’m all alone in the beginning zone, it won’t feel massive. Sometimes just the larger community surrounding the game can make an impact in making it feel massive…
SHAWN: …I’d call “massive” anything that feels massive. This usually means a persistent world with other people running around. It means a world where you can run over and join your friends without worrying about what instance or server they’re on. It means a world with little or no restrictions on group play. I’m kinda tired of studios putting the “massive” label on games with four- or six-person team limits.
TERILYNN: I always thought of the term as being “maybe more than you can shake a stick at, but definitely more than can be played with in a typical console game.”…
From the consumers perspective, just what does a genre mean to you? Imagine you have no idea what a “Massively Multiplayer Online” game is. Using your best layman judgment, what does it tell you as a description?
Massively -Okay, so… we’re talking large scale…-ish?
Massively Multiplayer - Ah… right. So I assume the game is massively based or heavily dependent on multiplayer? …Go on.
Online - Ok, cool. So I just plug in my 56k connection and I’m good to go. No more lan parties, YES!
What else does it say? Does it say anything about there by chance being large worlds? Small arenas rather? Hell, maybe it’s a card game playing 1v1 and I can play all those people online …eventually!
Clearly, “MMO” is a very ambiguous subject, rather a fancy term for “Multiplayer Game” held to a higher standard… sorta. Now then, the above questions can be answered hopefully by reviewing your title cover. All a genre means to do is categorize where on the shelf it belongs by describing your game in as few words as possible. “MMO” or any of its counterparts don’t do that efficiently enough.
I personally believe the MMO genre should be retitled to something more appropriately fitting, but not restricted by the constraints of this argument (suggested mechanics, etc). The idea being simple enough, if you have a multiplayer FPS game, It’d be an OFPS - Online first person shooter. Likewise, an MMORPG would simply become an ORPG and so forth. Very standardized and uniform.
What makes them ‘massively multiplayer’ at all? If nothing, perhaps they ought to be considered “Merely Multiplayer Online” games.
Though, it could be a lost-in-translation issue. English has a very taxonomic convention, where adding an adjective can wildly distinguish a term, such that all ‘Department Stores’ are ‘Stores’, but not all ‘Stores’ are ‘Department Stores’. The same logic applies to MMORPGs vs. mere Multiplayer RPGs, a nuance that may not have been carried in the translation to other markets (or the reverse, a general idea that became specific when translated to English). Thanks to international markets and a lack of talented translators, the end result is that you could easily see games with a descriptor that seems to defy convention.
This a problem not unique to games. We have “science fiction” that is more of an aesthetic theme than a genre, and “soap operas” that deliberately have almost nothing to do with opera. One must surely dread organizing the cacophony of terms used to describe music (‘house’, ‘grunge’, ‘dubstep’), where the meaning of the words has little to do with the music’s instrumental composition.
When in doubt, perhaps your best bet as a developer is simply to take note of the games your product superficially resembles, in the market you’re likely to release in, and borrow their descriptors. Stealth RPG hybrid? Sure. Story-driven first-person platformer? Of course! Tactical fantasy yak shooter? Naturally!
. You are taking definitions from the web based on what the stereotype for MMO means. MMO is Massive Multiplayer Online. Let us do this and break the words down.
-Massive- meaning many, or very large. Could be game size, game content, and or player base. (Nothing stating it needs to be all on one world, or at the same time)
**-Multiplayer- ** meaning you connect with other online users either socially via chats or by game play, actual in game playing. Cane be Co-Op or PvP.
-Online- meaning there has to be some kind of server running to have the content open.
Now if you break these words down and make a new meaning based on logic and usage of English and not a stereotype, this is roughly what I get.
MMO- an application ran online via a network configuration and hosts many (non exact number) connections to one or many servers. Allowing usage of these connections to later connect to each other over the Internet.
MMO’s have no definite number to reach to be considered MMO. Neither are required to meet a specific genre of game play. If I were to play one vs one online, 16 vs 16, or 100 randoms running around, if the player base is quite “Massive” and some of the elements are there to make it a connection based game, then it could be a MMO.
If my game reaches 1+ Million online players and only 64 can play at a time with each other I will still call it an MMO. If I were to play WOW and only seen 64 players ever on screen at a time will you try to claim it too is not an MMO? Think about the logic here. throw traditional MMO out the window. Were going from 3 letters here and there meaning together and on their own. Breaking it down.
BTW: Most MMO’s have server restrictions on how many can be on that server at once. So look at this workflow.
Traditional MMO- severs full you use another server to play game.
Lobby MMO- servers are full use another server to access game. Severs are open but a room is full use another room. The difference is Lobby based MMO’s would have set limits directly from the menu and not wait for you to lag out in game. also in lobby I can talk to everyone online in that server like in traditional MMO’s. I can also talk to my friends and others in other games or from the lobby while I am in game or they are via PM tags or whatever else global tags they use. Essentially a chat based game could be an MMO if it was just a large global chat room for the World to use. If it is labeled as some kind of game then well there you have it. A bunch of games could be titled as MMO if they ignored the stereotypes…
That’s a fine definition for the word “massive.” On its own, it makes perfect sense. However, for the purposes of our discussion, the word is part of a term which already has its own generally established definition (however flexible that definition may be – see my post above).
Try thinking about it this way. A “soap box”, literally, must be made from actual soap, right? Well, of course that isn’t right! People in the English speaking world understand the term to have a different definition than “a box made out of soap”.
Now, the same logic applies to that first “M” in “MMO”. You can define the term “massively” quite succinctly, separately from the “multiplayer online” part, but when those words are used together, the definition shifts in most people’s minds to the general understanding of the term “MMO”, one which has evolved over the past 15 or so years. And I think this is where you’re finding a disconnect with other posters.
If the players cannot all interact on a scale greater than 16 vs. 16, then it won’t fall under the definition that most people understand. That should be clear from the responses in this thread. If they can interact in the hundreds, however, then I imagine you’re on more solid ground.
In WoW, players can interact with each other on a scale in the thousands, even if some instances have 64 or fewer players. Game characters can chat, change instances, group, buy and sell, and affect the world around them on a rather large scale. This is what distinguishes that particular “MMO” from other “massive” but completely instanced games like Call of Duty.
If your game is that successful, then you rock as a developer, and congratulations! But would 64 players per world be enough to constitute an “MMO”?
Who knows. It’s possible, although I suspect most users would probably expect potential interaction with hundreds or thousands once that second “M” is added to the description. From their perspective, it doesn’t matter how many other people are playing at home – that has no impact on their game. What matters to them, per the expectation of an “MMO” experience, is how many people are playing in their world.
What I find strange in the traditional type MMO’s you seem to interact more with NPC’s and AI than the actual other players online. Most of the literal interaction is text based. I find this to be odd for a game type that is suppose to pride itself in Online user interaction.
It’s just another intuitive game mechanic used to channel users toward progression. Don’t think anything of it, there are plenty of offline games out there that do this.
What people have come to expect from an ‘MMO’ far exceeds what ‘MMO’ actually describes itself to be in bare bones, logically speaking. That’s what this whole thread/debate is about. I’m reasonably certain anyone discussing the topic could tell you what the public has come to expect from a modern MMO and closely resemble your opinion among many countless others; But again, that isn’t the sole point of our discussion. Review the OP.
From what I’ve gathered, the purpose of this thread was to point out an issue in public perception. It’s been addressed. Now what?
Naturally this is where the conversation should have started.
I suspect a few folks use the abbreviation MMO to imply massive scale to their game’s design, game world, mythos, story, anticipated player base, etc. At one-time or another, I fantasized over the 100,000 monthly subscribers that I would have in my imaginary game world. Developing a MMO appeared very tempting. Sigh. Today, I wouldn’t use the abbreviation MMO if you paid me (even though my game is geared to support a 256 or more concurrent players). Simply too many preconceptions and expectations associated with it. I’ve seen MMO Thread after MMO Thread instantly decimated with negative and discouraging comments.
I’ll just stick with terms Multiplayer, Cooperative, and Open World. I anticipate all future Game Dev Engines will support large scale networking out-of-box, if they’re not doing so now. When that time comes, MMO will resume its original understanding for nostalgia’s sake. With social media integration, one can achieve the social aspects of the MMO Forerunners without large scale network support in-game. In fact, I would encourage some form of WWW integration even in a Single Player Game. I’m personally looking forward to newer multiplayer paradigms such as HLA and Multi-Genre/One-World Multiplayer games.
Yes, as I mentioned we have learned a ton on 3 letters in this thread and got a nice debate going and even gained some new insight. This thread gained more than I thought it would I think we need more of these type threads. They are off topic on the forum overall, but informative and we managed to keep cooler heads about us.
I’ve worked on a couple of MMO’s, one a 3rd person RPG and another a sporting one (yes, really, and don’t ask it was rubbish!).
Just because a lot of people are playing a games does not mean that game is an MMO. Take the example of an FPS game from the original post, these are a “Multiplayer Online Games” but not “Massively Multiplayer Online Games” and the reason is simple.
With that FPS you load the game, get to the menu, open the lobby browser, set what gameplay type you’re looking for, find a server (or it matchmarkes or whatever) then you connect to that server with a fixed limit to the number of players in it. You play, you win/lose, you finish and you disconnect. So you weren’t online, you found a server and went online, you played online, you disconnected going offline again.
With an MMO you load the game, and go online into a central connected world where you character data is stored persistently online in that - and only that - online world. Once you’re there the online world might be broken up into pieces based on distance (for example) but at any time it’s possible for you to travel from where you are to anywhere else in that world and encounter other players without too many artificial boundaries. There’s no logging off and finding another server for example, you’re not limited to 32 or 64 other players, the number you see will fluctuate based only how many there happen to be within that particular area. When you logoff you character is (usually) no longer instanced in the world and it’s state, your equipment/health/details, are persistently stored in the games database. It is the authority regarding who you are and what you’ve got, not the slim copy which might be cached locally on your machine.
That’s the basic difference for an FPS or 3rd person type of game. Other game type blur the boundaries and allow for offline progression, but even then it’s usually a requirement to be online at the same time so that the data can be persisted/synced online.
Just my thoughts on it having worked on a couple and dealt with the server, gameplay and database tech’ behind them, it’s how we differentiated them and from speaking to others it’s how I think a lot of people would.
I agree that a Persistent World is a key factor for MMOs. I’m adding Persistent to my list of alternative MMO words - hehe. I believe that Persistent Worlds or Persistent Level Maps can also be implemented for games of smaller network scale and this is what I aim to achieve in my game.
I’m not sure that a persistent world is required to call a game an MMO.
What if there was a game like battlefield for example… but with larger maps and with massive 1000 vs 1000 player battles that would only last for a few hours (I know that’s kinda crazy… but let’s just say that exists for the sake of the argument).
Wouldn’t you say that’s some kind of MMO?
To me it seems like it completely depends on how many players you can potentially see (and interact with) on your screen at the same time in the same world. If it’s under 100 then I personally wouldn’t call it an MMO.
But remember once you leave the game after whatever team wins your still connected online. You still see the other rooms opened, and can chat with everyone in lobby or in game if you PM them. So you never disconnect. You also can chat with thousands of player while in the lobby depending on how many are online or in game. i also happened to notice these type games anymore have factions, clans, guilds, or whatever you want to call them. these terms are well known for games related to MMO’s.
