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For my part, I saw Ultima Online as a logical next step from the MUDs I played in college in the early 90s. I was pretty far gone into a couple of TinyMUCKs back then. (I just checked and I do, in fact, still have my wiz bit on PegasusMuck.) When called on to date the start of the MMO I usually give two answers: UO was the first commercial success.
This morning I read a post by Dusty Monk where he described the forces that were working to push the Halo MMO toward "WoW in Space":
"For me personally, this was probably one of the most conflicting parts of working on Titan. Don’t get me wrong — I’d wanted to work on an MMO for as long as long as I’ve been in games, and this was the dream game of a lifetime. But while there were a few of us that had played MMO’s before WoW, by far and large, as the team grew, most of the people on the team had never played a single MMO before WoW. This led to a dilemma that the entire team struggled with throughout the lifetime of the project. And it’s a dilemma I think every team out there that’s designing an MMO today has to struggle with, and the actual point of this post, which I’m only just now actually getting around to: How much do you copy the genre leader?
Dusty's actual question is a good one, but that isn't what really caught my eye. You see, while we were building Pirates of the Burning Sea we had a similar dynamic to our team. World of Warcraft came out two years after we started, so nobody had played it.
Instead we had one designer who figured that the MMO genre started with EverQuest where most of the rest of us pegged that event at some earlier game. This guy refused to acknowledge Ultima Online as a "real" MMO despite its hundreds of thousands of subscribers and massive success. He thought even less of the games that came before it: The Realm, Meridian 59, and the thousands of MUDs.
MUDs (starting with MUD1, I guess) were the origin of the design genre. To me the distinction is important because of all the ways that MUDs break when your playerbase is counted in the tens of thousands instead of hundreds. UO was really the first game to deal with that kind of scale in the design, so it was the first "real" MMO.
It shouldn't surprise me that there are people working on MMOs today that consider World of Warcraft the first real example of this kind of game. It has thirty or fourty times the number of subscribers that EverQuest had at its peak.
That increase changed the dynamics of the game just as much as the previous 30-40x jump made EverQuest and Ultima Online different from the games that preceeded them. My only fear is that this will drive more companies into direct competition with WoW (and the $40 million plus games that are intended to compete with it) instead of toward building a nice tidy business aimed at a niche of 100,000 to 300,000 players who are craving something different.
What is your answer when you are trying to come up with the first real MMO?
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I think the problem the MMO has is this: the consumer's attitude toward MMOs is that of progression/loot, nothing else. People don't log onto an MMO to have fun, they log onto an MMO to accomplish something. People log onto games like COD4 to have fun. People play single player games to have fun. The attitude toward MMOs is not that of any other game. No matter which MMO you played, UO, EQ, or WoW, your idea of an MMO is all progression based; things like money, gear, experience. It is that rare individual that actually thinks of an MMO as anything else; story, exploration, role-playing, hanging out, or having fun.
This is a design issue that is probably near impossible to solve. In any game with multiple people in it and some type of progression it is our natural instinct to want to accumulate stuff and show off. So I guess to answer your question, the first real MMO is, the life we live everyday.
But i also think it has to do with the way mmo's have been laid out. The grind the grind grind grind.
In day one ultima online there really wasnt a "grind" Gear was more for looks, and easy to come by. About the only real grind was trying to save up for a house or castle. Other than that it was pretty simple to do wht you wanted to that day. I want to kill some orcs sure ill go do that, i want to hunt some reds sure thing. ect...
Little off topic but not really, i cant understand why games always try to be so original. If something works for goodness sakes use it. example- City of heros side kick feature. Why does any MMO after that one not have that kind of feature? Its golden, ITs one of the main reason i think Warhammer online flunked. You have a seriously intense level grind. But no way to play with your low level friends( who dont play as much.) Theres being original and there just being a little silly i think.
BN, that's exactly why I think things started with UO and, from a design perspective at least, weren't changed significantly by WoW. The MUD to UO jump had a huge impact on game design. The EQ to WoW jump, not so much.
If you want to trace WoW's ancestry directly, then it's pretty simple: WoW -> EQ -> Sojourn/Toril text MUD -> etc. But, you can argue that there have been more influences than just these games, but how much and where? Without a startling amount of honesty from the developers, we'll never be able to know for sure.
What most of us should agree on, however, is to stop the marginalization of some games. There was life before WoW, before EQ, before UO, before M59. Trying to set an arbitrary game as being "the first real (big, modern, fully 3D, million subscriber, whatever) game" often makes the implicit assumption that games previous to that one aren't as meaningful for some reason. There are lessons to be learned from many games in the past. A good designer should work outside his or her preferred games and learn from the examples out there.
My thoughts.
Many, many MMO game and player concepts were designed and addressed with by Simutronics before anyone else even really knew they existed.
To this day, there are players of both Gemstone and Dragonrealms who play every single day, pay higher than average subscriber fees and its still, albeit very powerful and engaging, text.
We could all learn MMOG lessons from Whatley and company at Simutronics.
My 2 Kronars.
Hands down, MUD's are an entirely different genre, from design, gameplay, and commercial standpoints. From a gameplay standard, WoW has more in common with AD&D than it does with the TinyMUSH's I used to play in college.
I could say, for instance, that I would call a world "massive" when its currency has a conversion into a real-world currency that players collectively (and through non-explicit agreement -- ie agreement via action) set -- that's a threshold. And then another threshold is a meta-level on top of this, when businesses are sustained through revenue generated within the world itself -- ie goldfarming.
Players did trade Simutronics goods on ebay, and I think the emergence of this effect represents a marked change in the approach toward games. But smaller things like the Mr. Bungle incident in LambdaMOO also represent social changes that are significant. And while I worked on one of Simu's games for years and so have a first hand knowledge of its systems' complexity, I couldn't say for sure that they were the first to tackle some of the eminent issues surrounding player government and massive design -- there were other large MUDs that also tackled such things.
I think my most memorable day in UO, i was robbing this dudes house. 10,000 gold!!!!! I picked it up and it weighed so much i got encumbered. I saw cor por, i giggled a little bit "silly mage im 100 str100 dex halbered warrior............3/4 of my life gone in one hit. I have never felt so helpless in a game ever. Ditch my stolen gold, and try to run....Nope and the predetor became the prey. You dont get those kind of emotions playing mmo's since today.
For instance, I'm not too sure Massive implies persistence, anymore, with how readily you can play with so many different people on Steam. Wouldn't Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead, or Team Fortress 2 count as MMOGs?
Eric, I would suggest taking a look at Aventurine's Darkfall. Once they get their servers stabilized, at least, it will be a nice indie-attempt at a UO successor.