[Mikes]

So I guess there is a spark of hope in the sea of piss that is the MMO industry.

It's certainly a quite unusual concept.

As far as sparks of hopes go however... the MMO industry is full of them.
So far there were only 2 kinds of MMO - "sparks" that i know of however: The ones that turn out to be crap once they are released and the ones that never do get released lol.

So bear with me, but i ll take any "sparks of hope" with a "grain of salt"

[Mongoose]

As far as sparks of hopes go however... the MMO industry is full of them.
So far there were only 2 kinds of MMO - "sparks" that i know of however: The ones that turn out to be crap once they are released and the ones that never do get released lol.

Or something like Myst Online: Uru Live, which was released and canceled twice by two different publishers, yet will hopefully see continued life in the not-too-distant future as a community-driven open-source project.  There are still sparks of originality around, if you know where to look.

As for space sims specifically, I think that any number of factors could be blamed for their decline, not least of which would be the overarching decline in PC gaming for a variety of reasons.  Sadly, the fact that FS2 sold comparatively poorly despite such glowing critical acclaim probably didn't help matters.

[voidSkipper]

What was your other name?

Freespace2pilot. I imagine the post history is terribly embarrassing.

[paul1290]

So I guess there is a spark of hope in the sea of piss that is the MMO industry.

It's certainly a quite unusual concept.

As far as sparks of hopes go however... the MMO industry is full of them.
So far there were only 2 kinds of MMO - "sparks" that i know of however: The ones that turn out to be crap once they are released and the ones that never do get released lol.

So bear with me, but i ll take any "sparks of hope" with a "grain of salt"

True, its hard to be optimistic with so many potentially good game seemingly shooting themselves in the foot.

Still, I would prefer to see them try and fail rather than not try at all.

I would like to see an "Austin Meyer" come in and single handedly take on the big guys and cause us to re-think the MMO genre, and Eskil seems like a good candidate to fill the role.
(if you don't know who Austin Meyer is then go do some research on a certain flight sim called X-Plane)



I think we may see the space sim genre make a bit of a comeback, especially considering there are at least three or four space MMOs currently in the works. Again, I don't like MMOs, but they could bring some attention back to the genre.

[Divmontru]

...Nearly all of the current MMOs consist of taking the rulesets of smaller games, applying them on a scale they simply were not intended for, and trying to cover up the holes and gaps that result by throwing money at them...

  I wonder if this is why NetDevil & Codemasters unexpectedly (to me) decided to split Jumpgate Evolution into lots of relatively small servers. At fist, part of me was really disappointed to hear this, as there's something very "real" about there only being one universe. Whether or not you use the game socially to its fullest in that respect in EVE, and go traveling for hours to meet up "physically" with someone you met on a forum, the point is that one could, and that's kind of cool in the back of my mind. But maybe with JGE they're trying to, in part, create a scaled environment & avoid some of the folly that Paul's talking about.
  The addiction sating that Mikes mentioned is very true regarding reward systems, but then the prospect of also, potentially showing off the spoils of ones efforts to either a boiling throng or just the occasional, very random passerby, in game -- a realm of thousands of others, really solidifies its "value" to me, sometimes more than achieving goals around NPCs or even select few online mates who've networked into a temporary bubble together. Please note the "sometimes" in that statement 
   Much of the bashing of JGE development on the space MMO forums seems to come from either players of the Classic release who heard their favorite ship, engine, weapon, etc. got nerfed or some other change from the original they're too entrenched in to like, or just non-space sim folks with gripes like, "You mean my ship won't have turrets?" (what, do they want to control them with other joysticks or just automate them and call it ADAM because it has a stick to play with) or, "They're not lasers that travel at the speed of light and I'll have to actually estimate distances, velocities, etc.?"
   As far as the game actually ever coming out, I'm pretty sure it will at this point. I'm hearing anecdotes from impartial 3rd parties checking in on the project and sitting down to it indicating it's a largely matter of routine bug cleanup at this point without anything serious.
   There's also Taikodom with English text (beta?). I haven't played it much but I already don't like how the graphics get all cheesy on the space station when you're up close, no matter the settings. If I was absolutely obsessed with playing an MMO where you aim with your reticle, so far for me it would be that one, since at least the graphics far surpass the antiquated classic version of Jumpgate, overall

[Flipside]

I bought Spaceforce: Rogue Universe in the hope it may be ok.

Boy, I was wrong, I believe it has now earned the nickname Spacefarce.

[Mikes]

I bought Spaceforce: Rogue Universe in the hope it may be ok.

Boy, I was wrong, I believe it has now earned the nickname Spacefarce.

Ugh yeah... welcome to the club.

[captain-custard]

EVE Online is middle management that just happens to occur in space.

ROTFWPMSL.........

[Spidey-]

Dark Prophecy is looking pretty sharp, though that seems to be all that these games have going for them

[mFuSE]

Hi,

@Mikes,

full agree. But thats how the most games work, not only MMOs ^^
Even the first console games back in the 80s gave you a bigger gun after harder bosses until the final level

I have to absolutely disagree with that i'm afraid.

MMOs are different for seveal reasons. Why ? MMOs charge monthly fees: meaning...  it would be detrimental if the game had a definite "ending", because if a player could finish it, they naturally would be inclined to "quit" and stop paying monthly fees...

Yes ... off course ... but take the comparison between a single show in the cinema and the pay-tv stuff.
And while game development is getting more and more expensive and the sales are going backwards the "single show" method isn't paying off right now ...

...Then some developpers found out it doesn't really matter whether people had "fun"... as long as you gave them "goals" to "work for". And that, pretty much, was the beginning of the end.

That is the basic idea... in later titles and especially a certain very popular one... the idea got perfected by making the early game incredibly accessible and easy to start out, while slowly but steadily increasing the amount of work it takes to reach the next milestone, the next reward...  until you finally arrive at max level and are stuck "raiding" every single night with a couple of dozen other people who mindlessly repeat the same dungeon literally dozen of times until everyone has their "gear".... which is required to start the same thing all over again in the next dungeon... a common notion at this point that you may hear from players is that they "have invested way too much time in their character to quit now ... (despite having long stopped to actually have fun lol "

... from a purely financial perspective, considering "content cost" vs. "how long it keeps players busy" ... it's of course brilliant. It also happens to be what i would consider a perversion to the concept of "gaming".

No, they are not
Take Diablo 1&2 for example. You can play them offline, you can walk trough every dungeon until there is nothing left. The only thing left to do is to play it over and over again to master nightmare difficulty and higher dungeons levels ...

Or look at Counter-Strike ... this game have no Story at all .. .still people play it over years .. even with such an outdated graphic.


But - don't get me wrong. I think i'm getting your point and i can also partially agree. But not everything with an continuous gameplay is automatically = evil


Surely WoW could have be design some other way, it should be by now and it is going to be. I'm currently not playing it right now and i never was a "hardcore gamer", i have now a 6 months break so far and i haven't seen the content of the first expansion at all, so this was my one year break. While this time there was really very little improvement for game design, but currently there is coming lot of different stuff (arena, mini games, and some other stuff apart the raid content).

Blizzard is trying what can be done to make sure their developers have something to eat - and the gaming community something to have some fun with it.
If we would talk about EA i wouldn't doubt a single second about their evil intentions ^^

Traditional games are enjoyable because of the gameplay and/or story the offer; while items anddifferent weapons may be present in a lot of games... the motive to constantly improve your items/weapons to infinity, certainly is not. In MMOs on the other hand... it's the very opposite. Becoming more powerful is the one real purpouse in the game, with storyline and gameplay being a secondary concern, if any at all.

i know some people which like to chat all day long ...
I think you have a too focused sight on this MMO stuff, there is definitely more then  only farming 24/7.
Certainly there are people who aren't doing anything else, i would never doubt that. But that are the same people who played counterstrike 24/7 or quake in earlier days. Those people have real problems with their lives, this has nothing to do with the game itself.

The basic game design of a MMO is of course something that can be played over and over again. It have to be. There is some story part in it, but you simply can't entertain the player to infinity with new content. That would be much worser than only farming new items.


If a MMO should cost monthly or not is an other question, which should everyone answer for them self.
I'm happy that Blizzard had such amazing luck with their game, this gave them the opportunity to develop games like Starcraft2 and Diablo3 at the same time at a high quality level.
When i'm looking at EA ... i get nightmares what it would be like  if they dominate the game market.


But i'm getting quite offtopic right now, sry

[Spoon]

Take Diablo 1&2 for example. You can play them offline, you can walk trough every dungeon until there is nothing left. The only thing left to do is to play it over and over again to master nightmare difficulty and higher dungeons levels ...

Or look at Counter-Strike ... this game have no Story at all .. .still people play it over years .. even with such an outdated graphic.

Big difference, those games actually require player skill.
Most MMORPG's do not. Just require more time investments.

[CP5670]

This thread belongs in the general Gaming section at this point.

The thing about MMOs is that is their basic financial model of monthly fees means that the gameplay is always going to be more grind-intensive than other types of games. The developer has an obvious incentive to design the gameplay so that it should reward time commitment over any kind of skills.

[Unknown Target]

The fundamental reason games aren't good as they were back in the days of say, FS2, is because games couldn't rely on graphics to sell. Bluntly put, everyone had dismal graphics, so everything hinged on the gameplay. Now people will just buy anything that's shiny and then complain that it isn't fun. What needs to happen is that really good graphics must become universally accessible by anyone to remove their importance, and then games will be forced to rely on gameplay once again to prove their dominance.

Not true; you're only able to say that because of A) rosy memories of the past, and B) you're comparing old games to the graphical powerhouses of today. Back then, games were STILL sold on graphics; one of Freespace 2's oft-touted features was it's amazing (for the time) graphics, especially it's display of nebulae. Same with Half Life and Unreal Tournament and all those old games.


Honestly, I think one of the reasons the space sim genre is dead is because, in a small way, the FSOpen community unwittingly killed it. Why would I go out and buy a new space game that is in all probability quite ****ty, when I can stay home and download a ton of new content for free?
Also, most space games these days are trying to be too much for too many people; you don't see a game like Freespace anymore, where it's just bang bang the bad guy's dead, next misson; no, almost every space game that comes out tries to have an expansive universe, free world trading, RPG elements, atmospheric transitions - and in every area, all of them fall flat because none was refined enough to actually be any FUN. Freespace 2 wasn't new or original - it just took the best of the genre and refined it to what was then perfection.

[karajorma]

The genre was already dead long before FS2_Open came along.

I will agree that FS2_Open may have played some small part in keeping it dead though.

[Mikes]

wasn't new or original - it just took the best of the genre and refined it to what was then perfection.

I would argue that such a statement is oversimplifying a lot...

Freespace 2 especially did innovate quite radically in several areas...  aside from being utterly groundbreaking visually and technologically (for its time)....

I don't recall a spaceshooter featuring a storyline that so elaborately pointed out the trappings of hubris and overconfidence as FS2 did.
I don't recall another spaceshooter that combined a large degree of the tactical depth - which granted, could already be found in Tie-Fighter - with such powerful immersiveness as FS2.
I don't recall a spaceshooter featuring such an overpowering atmosphere of melancholy and hoplessness.... EVER.

Reducing the genre, or even just Freespace to "bang bang next mission" is really incredibly short sighted. And seriously ? The reason why I can not enjoy more modern games like X3 or its likes is for this very reason. They offer very little "real" well designed content. While i can see the merits of a sandbox game... all the elaborate sandboxes that we were presented with and especially the X series, with their trading opportunities and RPG elements really fall flat when you start looking for tactical depth, mission design, storyline, atmosphere or in several cases even basic combat gameplay et cetera.

If someone asks me why the space genre "could be considered dead"... then from my perspective there really is no other answer except that there wasn't a single game released after the glorydays of Freespace, Wing Commander or X-Wing/Tie-Fighter or even I-War that was even remotely matching up as far as gameplay, atmosphere and story goes. (Freelancer maybe... might be considered to match up storywise, but gameplaywise it was quite far removed from what we could consider "classic" space-sim combat gameplay). You have to keep in mind,... the "real classics" of the genre didn't just offer a very unique gameplay experience (that simply isn't there anymore in any newer game), they also carved out their niche with very unqiue and very elaborately crafted stories. X-Wing/Tie-Fighter of course had the Star-Wars bonus, Wing Commander still is the king of "story presentation" in a game even to date... there is no single modern game that even remotely can match the effort that went into Wing Commanders "presentation" back in the day... (and no, especially not CnC... it may also have life-actors... but when compared to the all around powerful integration and sheer amount that Wing Commander offered it is quite pathetic really lol) and FS2 did what WC did with its presentation through sheer atmosphere.

So yeah... it kinda is as simple as that... spacesims are dead because all the newer games really sucked in comparison. Chris Roberts was visionary... Volition was Visionary.... the people that made I-War were visionary and created such an elaborate universe as well .... and well Lucasarts had the good old Star-Trek bonus... but today we simply don't have visionaries that build whole universes with a passion and tell a story within them.... what we have today is a bunch of professionals trying to make a quick buck off whatever they think can occopuy the masses... and as shown with MMOs, it doesn't necessarily have to be fun either, s long as it keeps people busy.

Freespace wasn't so cool "just because you blew stuff up"...
Wing Commander certainly wasn't so cool "just because you "bang bang" killed some cats"...

No.. what the "old classics"... like Freespace, Wing Commander, I-War and (even tho it came with a "stock universe) X-Wing/Tie Fighter had in common was that you could really see and feel the love and passion that had gone into making them what they are... and that includes gameplay, immersion, storyline as well as attention to detail and an elaborate universe to give the action some context and meaning that goes way beyond simplistic and in my opinion frankly quite ignorant reductions like "bang bang next mission".

They don't make games like that anymore.

[Flipside]

It's also a question of perception, it's like trying to drive a car with only a windscreen with current technology, it's fine as long as you are on an open road, but 3D oriented combat, such as takes place in the air or in space, really requires 3D spatial awareness, so all those dreams of skimming along the surface of a vast destroyer, hotly in pursuit of an enemy fighter that is doing the same, ducking under outcroppings, etc, is very difficult when you can't really get a feel of the size of your ship, we've all 'bounced' because we mis-interpreted distances and sizes in FS2, though, to be honest, shadowing, if implemented, will do a great deal to help this situation.

That's why there's so much debate about FOV in FS2, because, I think, people are trying to compensate for that problem. The ideal way to play a Space Sim is in something like a Hemispherical, or even Spherical imaging environment, where you can glance around at will and take stock of your environment.

That's why a lot of Space-based games now take the 'Above and Behind' approach, rather than the 'in-cockpit' one, maybe advances in the ability to place you 'inside' the game will help encourage more development in this area.

[Mikes]

It's also a question of perception, it's like trying to drive a car with only a windscreen with current technology, it's fine as long as you are on an open road, but 3D oriented combat, such as takes place in the air or in space, really requires 3D spatial awareness, so all those dreams of skimming along the surface of a vast destroyer, hotly in pursuit of an enemy fighter that is doing the same, ducking under outcroppings, etc, is very difficult when you can't really get a feel of the size of your ship, we've all 'bounced' because we mis-interpreted distances and sizes in FS2, though, to be honest, shadowing, if implemented, will do a great deal to help this situation.

That's why there's so much debate about FOV in FS2, because, I think, people are trying to compensate for that problem. The ideal way to play a Space Sim is in something like a Hemispherical, or even Spherical imaging environment, where you can glance around at will and take stock of your environment.

That's why a lot of Space-based games now take the 'Above and Behind' approach, rather than the 'in-cockpit' one, maybe advances in the ability to place you 'inside' the game will help encourage more development in this area.

That's a quite unique viewpoint... but i can't say that anything you say there really has had any impact (pun;) ) on me LOL.

If anything then i prefer the 1st person perspective due greater immersiveness... i.e. a feeling of being "in the thick of things" instead of just being an observer.

I know the AI flies into capital ships for entirely different reasons... but seriously... i don't recall ever noticing any of the problems you write about there, not back in the day as i was literally running the trench in X-Wing, flying close passes on Shivan capitals or flying through Carriers landing decks in Wing Commander... nor in recent memmory either and certainly not while running the Hades/Saturn trenches in ST:Reborn or PI, nor the station tunnel run in PI... nor any of the close countless close encounters with Shivans or other capital ships either. Quite the contrary... if anything i find the 1st person makes it quite easy and convenient to perfectly time actions like  the close in bomb drop and last second evasion during bombing runs LOL.

So.. eh in short... what the heck are you talking about again ?

And what about the countless first person shooters that get released nowadays ? Seriously... i believe... if anything, 3rd person is a way to show off a nice player character/ship model. Or i'd think that kinda was the idea as i first saw the technique in the original Tomb Raider anyways lol.

[Flipside]

Freespace 2 compensates for this by having very slow top speeds, slower than a moderately powerful car, and in X-Wing, you'll find you are nowhere near as close to stuff as you think you are because of the Field of View, you aren't actually skimming anything, they just use a very narrow view angle, so you think you are approaching walls sooner than you actually are.

Bear in mind that the Scorpion goes at the 'breakneck' speed of 252km/h or, about 150 mph. That's slower than a fair percentage of cars in Need for Speed. Can you imagine trying to fly something that does, say Mach 1, around 1224 Mph, near a ship in Freespace?

[karajorma]

wasn't new or original - it just took the best of the genre and refined it to what was then perfection.

I would argue that such a statement is oversimplifying a lot...

I suspect UT is talking about the technical details when he says best of the genre. They really did do that. And the SCP have added most of the ones they missed since then.

[BloodEagle]

Yikes, Exploding Topic with Great Walls of Text. 

---------------

MMORPGs as they currently are resemble jobs, not games. The only way to make them fun is to move away from the current 'click-and-wait' system (see: grind) and move toward original DnD style gameplay mechanics. I.e., free-roaming world(s) (see: climb skill), actual quests, the ability to freaking kill anything (with consequences, of course), DMs, faster leveling, PERMA-DEATH.

-----

I disagree with the notion that FSO killed or helped to kill the Space Sim genre. The simple fact of the matter is that there hasn't been a single real innovation in the gameplay mechanics since Descent. Combine this with the poor quality of storylines and dialogue that seems to pervade the entire gaming industry, and you end up getting the exact same thing in worse condition (quality-wise) with every rendition.