The Brave New World of MMOs

[Surf314]

MMOs will be the future of multiplayer if only someone could do them right. Think about it. Multi-player is becoming more and more important now that most people who play games have access to broadband Internet. But regular multiplayer games have distinct drawbacks. Servers have to be community provided or hosted locally on a player’s machine.These can have a wide variety of lag and stability issues, which will give significant advantages to the host and sometimes the server provider. Another issue is player interaction. Games are social by nature, but with traditional multiplayer games you are either thrown in with a bunch of people you don’t know or you have to find your own group of people before you even play. Sometimes you can get lucky and pop into a server with great people, sometimes you aren’t. This creates the need for large internet cliques which can create great communities (BRBU), but are mostly limited to who you stumble across by luck.

This brings us to MMOs and the promise they hold for the future of gaming. With an MMO, the developer can craft the player experience from beginning to end. They control the servers, they provide avenues for socializing and forming groups, and they shepherd these players from action to action. They can keep a close eye on how everyone is playing the game and fix bad experiences while adding new good ones. Truly this is the way to do things. Everyone gets thrown in together and then they divide themselves into groups to play together. It’s a smooth and logical process. Unfortunately I have yet to see a developer really understand the opportunities available to them. This article will attempt break down the key issues of MMOs to see what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.