Why must "MMO" always be followed by "RPG"?

[olicon]

Naturally you can't do it with sports, because only so many people can participate at once, so you can't do it. MMOFPS can be very fun. But it's much harder to make, because lag makes all the difference in the world, while most RPG-ish combat tends to be much more forgiving.

I guess there's also the social MMOs like Home or 2nd life out there, but it takes significantly more effort to play, since it relies quite a bit on user generated content, and in case of home, simply isn't there for the revenue.

 

[Savagezion]

Please don't quote-mine. You left out an integral part of my comment: "Again, the best way to describe the definition of an MMOG is by saying that the meat of the game is in and of itself an internet lobby."

I didn't say "Any game that has an instance is officially not an MMOG", I said "Any game whose core gameplay is instanced is officially not an MMOG".

What this means is...

Games such as Guild Wars, Diablo II, Call of Duty, Halo, Command & Conquer, Civilization, Darkspore, Battlefield, and Team Fortress II are not MMOGs because in order to play the primary gameplay with other people, you MUST enter an instance to do so.

While games such as World of Warcrap, Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars II, Star Wars: TOR, and Perfect World are MMOGs because the majority of their play is spent with every single person on the server/world, and instanced events are merely supplementing the core gameplay.

Ok, so it is just ignorance of how Guild Wars plays then. Guild Wars doesn't have a lobby. "Because the majority of their play is spent with every single person on the server/world, and instanced events are merely supplementing the core gameplay."
I don't know why you keep saying Guild Wars has a lobby. The only thing I can think of is the PvP staging area. (Battlegrounds) I could understand that perspective but the campaign is a totally different matter. There is no lobby. To claim a town as a lobby is just flat out wrong and completely undermining the architecture of the game. Which is why I can't help but see it as a "jab" at a dev evolving a mechanic. More specifically, the broken implementation of the instance mechanic in the old system which allowed for players being griefed and not being allowed to obtain a camp on a mob even though they are paying for that content.

 

[Cazza]

TestDrive Unlimited. MMO-Racing, not always RPG just mostly. It's what sells best.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

1) The gameplay must suck mightily. It must be combat-based. It must revolve primarily around you and your enemy taking turns to automatically slap each other across the face, mostly just to pass the time while you wait for your ability cooldowns to run out.
2) It must involve tedious amounts of grind for the sake of incremental stat increases. No exceptions. Ever.
3) It must have absolutely no interesting narrative content of any kind.
4) It must have really clunky character animation.
5) The setting must be as unoriginal as possible. Ideally a third-generation Tolkien rip-off. If you really want to push the envelope you can set it in space and rip off Star Trek instead.

1. Ok, what game isn't combat based that isn't sports or a puzzle game? Everything from Mario to Kane and Lynch has some base in combat. Though I do see your point for cooldowns announances, that is basically the laziest and easiest way to balance a game (weak attacks can be used often while heavy attacks take awhile to charge up).
2. Grind is also a simple "Plavo's Box" mechanic to keep players playing and to level up (sort of "you press button and press enough you get a cookie" trap). It is simple and effective at keeping players dropping hours, days, months, and years into your game.
3. Trying to gain an interesting narrative has been tried and failed, since it is always undermined by the fact you have several thousand "main characters" running around at any one time. Trying so far has only created disasters such as the Matrix Online or Conan Online, so nobody has tried so far has been successful.
4. MMO's are expensive to make and run, and WoW still is the most successful even though (or possibly because) it is running on a decade old graphic system. Clunkier movement just is easier for people's processors, and MMO's need every player they can get, ranging from top of the line, to two year old laptop gamers.
5. Again, investors like to make safe investments, and the biggest success has been WoW, so the only logical choice is to rip that off. They have done space (EVE online being somewhat successful, while Star Trek Online has tanked) but nobody has done a space MMO and made anything close to the mounds of cash WoW has made.

 

[Stammer]

1) The gameplay must suck mightily. It must be combat-based. It must revolve primarily around you and your enemy taking turns to automatically slap each other across the face, mostly just to pass the time while you wait for your ability cooldowns to run out.
2) It must involve tedious amounts of grind for the sake of incremental stat increases. No exceptions. Ever.
3) It must have absolutely no interesting narrative content of any kind.
4) It must have really clunky character animation.
5) The setting must be as unoriginal as possible. Ideally a third-generation Tolkien rip-off. If you really want to push the envelope you can set it in space and rip off Star Trek instead.

It's a really unheard of little game, but Final Fantasy XI isn't exactly that generic of an MMO. It came out before WoW so it has no issues with WoW-cloning. And while 1, 2, and 4 in your list do match up with it, I can't say the same thing for 3 and 5...

3. XI is one that kind of broke this rule. It debatably has an even better story than most other Final Fantasy games and it's an MMORPG. While it's true that you're one of millions of "main characters", the game takes the The Elder Scrolls approach and merely makes you an important ally to the main characters for each of the 8 stories within the game.

5. This is one that even the people I know who don't even like the game will agree with: it isn't based entirely around Tolkien's fantasy setting. Sure it has similar archetypes including humans (who are, of course, similar), elves (who in this case are well beyond forest life and in fact live in a castle kingdom where their overall story is based around front line sword-and-shield soldiers-- in fact, they have the lowest AGI and INT in the game), and dwarves (who in this case are magical creatures). They're even given different names-- Hume, Elvaan, and Tarutaru, respectively. But there's two other races: a race of cat-people called Mithra, and an all-male race that could compete with The Incredible Hulk for muscles.

And really, the only similarity between the game's environments and Tolkien's environments are that they have about the same level of technology. There's a medieval-steampunk city, a medieval castle city, a village based in the woods, a renaissance-style metropolis, an Arabic city, and lots of others.

I know this is a long post that is really stretching the limits of being on topic, but I thought I'd just clear that up.

TL;DR-- Not all MMORPG's follow those 5 rules to a tee.

 

[Therumancer]

I quite like the idea of MMOs.

However, I never actually buy or play them bacause there seems to be a bunch of unspoken rules attached to the genre. (Wait... is "MMO" a genre? Oh shut up, you know what I mean.) These laws go something like the following:
1) The gameplay must suck mightily. It must be combat-based. It must revolve primarily around you and your enemy taking turns to automatically slap each other across the face, mostly just to pass the time while you wait for your ability cooldowns to run out.
2) It must involve tedious amounts of grind for the sake of incremental stat increases. No exceptions. Ever.
3) It must have absolutely no interesting narrative content of any kind.
4) It must have really clunky character animation.
5) The setting must be as unoriginal as possible. Ideally a third-generation Tolkien rip-off. If you really want to push the envelope you can set it in space and rip off Star Trek instead.

Of course I realise that the reasoning behind this serial idiocy basically boils down to, "That's how WoW did it and WoW gets to snort diamond dust while enjoying the attentions of exotic concubines dipped in choclate, so that's how we're going to do it." But by now it should be quite clear that nobody is going to dethrone WoW by imitating WoW. Mostly because anyone who wants to play WoW is already playing WoW and has probably made a pretty significant investment in terms of time, effort and community connections.

(The one game that might defy this trend is that Old Republic thing. The idea of a fully voiced and story-driven MMO is certainly interesting. And, to quote Yahtzee, "Star Wars is the one thing over which nerds are sure to get even weirder". But I'm still not about to put money on it.)

So come on games industry. How about a bit of variety here, eh? How about some games that take the good parts of an MMO (huge world, persistant servers, large player population etc) but scrape off the shitty parts. How about say... a parkour platforming game where one faction is based around evasion while the other is focused on pursuit, and perhaps a third based on enforcing the peace. Or a co-op post-apocalyptic survival game. Or a game based around... I dunno... undersea treasure hunting or something. Anything but grinding for XP in a yet another totally-not-Middle-Earth setting populated by swimsuit models and bodybuilders running about in metallic underwear.

Hey, it might even make good business sense too. Imagine being able to tap into the teeming hordes of CoD fans with a MMO-FPS based around near-future warfare. I personally wouldn't touch the damn thing, but I bet plenty of other people would. Surely that would be a better proposition then lining up with everyone else to get comprehensively curb-stomped by Blizzard.

So... thoughts? Would anyone else like to see some non-RPG MMOs?

Well there are non-RPG MMOs, things like "Team Fortress 2" and various large scale shooter games. Some products like "War Rock" even tried to maintain a constantly persistant world (but that game failed).

Truth be told RPG players are legion, and there is a huge market for RPGs out there. Truthfully I think the MMORPG market was insturmental in more or less murdering both paper and pencil RPGs and single player RPG games which are becoming increasingly obscure. RPGS are not for everyone mind you, and as a result you'll find games of other sorts attempted in an MMO format but they so far haven't been that successful.

As far as some of the claims like "MMORPGS not having a story" well, that's not true. It's just many players rarely bother to pay attention to it and the game lore. In other cases like the quality of graphics, MMOs by their nature tend to last a long time when they succeed, so what is good graphics when they first come out definatly shows it's age after a few years. It's also noteworthy that a persistant world requires a LOT of things to be rendered at the same time, this limits the amount of detail that can be added to any specific model without causing massive lag. The thing to consider is that the game is tracking thousands upon thousands of variables, not just what your doing at any given time. All so if say 10 guys in the same zone want to run through your field of view you'll actually see them and what they are doing.

When it comes to the grind and so on, the problem is simply put content. Nobody can generate enough quality content to keep players experiencing unique things at a high rate of advancement, alongside tons of other players. Heck, people tend to see all the content in even a large MMO inside of a month or two. A hundred hour game/storyline seems like a lot, and it is by single player standards, but not for an MMO that seeks to sustain people playing for hours every day for years on end. As a result the trick of an MMO is to pace it, so people will hopefully have fun repeting the same content. Of course that's not for everyone.

The lack of more action based mechanics in MMOs is both for purposes of stat management which is fun for RPG players, but also to try and keep things balanced so someone with a connection advantage won't have an overwhelming advantage. It also creates mechanics that can be fairly predictable so in cases where serious cheating is suspected the situations can be analyzed and addressed. There isn't that much of a "I'm just that good, and these newbs all suck" defense when a GM can just look at the characters, crunch the numbers, check some battle logs, and tell what was going on. This means that things like "aimbotting" and the like aren't all that viable in MMORPGs, even if people do find various ways of cheating and exploiting.

I doubt any of these answers will make you happy, but there are good reasons why things have developed the way they are, and why things are liable to remain this way for the foreseeable future.

"Old Republic" doesn't seem like it's going to be all that differant from WoW as far as fundemental playstyle goes, at least not going by the gameplay footage I was looking at. It's big "change" is both having a companion system (like "Star Trek Online", and the seemingly defunct "Gods and Heroes"), and in adding voicework to the quest chains so you don't need to read all the text to know what's going on. Sort of like what "Age Of Conan" promised but was unable to deliver beyond the tutorial area.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

MMO racing has been done twice by Test Drive Unlimited. To a rather decent effect. Cruising the gigantic island and coming upon players in the middle of nowhere was great. The only really real issues were the core mechanics of the game. The MMOs parts worked very well. Sadly, with racing games, you can't really have "teamwork", so there's no nothing like raids or any real incentive to work together.

 

[veloper]

[ Well there are non-RPG MMOs, things like "Team Fortress 2" and various large scale shooter games.

TF2 is in no way a MMO.
It's multiplayer, but nowhere near enough players on a map to call it Massive multiplayer.

A first person shooter with online capabilites is still just called a FPS in short, because there's very few that don't do multiplayer.

The lack of more action based mechanics in MMOs is both for purposes of stat management which is fun for RPG players, but also to try and keep things balanced so someone with a connection advantage won't have an overwhelming advantage.

And that's pretty much the reason. Slow mechanics offset the greater burden of massive multiplayer on servers, on the internet connection and the personal computer.

Then there's also the level progression to keep people hooked and not just leave your expensive project after a month. It's the only thing that has worked sofar.
Most people use MMO and MMORPG interchangeably.