Post by Morreion on Nov 4, 2014 17:57:30 GMT -5
The Think Tank: What will MMOs look like a decade from now? (Massively)
Brianna Royce:
I've been playing MMOs for 17 years, and some days it seems the genre has changed so much in that time, and other days it seems it hasn't changed very much at all. I don't think that MMOs will be dramatically different in 10 years. The MMOs from 10 years ago are still recognizably MMOs, many of them still playable and wonderful, and many new MMOs wouldn't have been particularly out of place in 2004, so why should MMOs in 2024 be so different? Change for MMOs, even with a behemoth like WoW, is incremental and plodding. I fully expect to see a more fleshed-out genre, better AI that can actually do what designers wish it could, better and less exploitative business models, better cross-platform and mobile play, better ways of keeping wildly diverse playerbases happy, better ways of incorporating other genres without driving away people like me who by then will have been MMOing for 27 years (!).
MJ Guthrie:
I've never really been one to speculate; I like to see things unfold around me and be surprised by a story or ending I didn't anticipate. That's what drew me into MMORPGs in the first place! I do, however, see virtual reality becoming a bigger component and more mainstream in our games. I also see games branching out to keep players engaged in various ways, from different platforms for mobility to more tie-ins so you can accomplish parts of the game and keep in touch with it even when not physically logged in.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that procedural generation will replace dev-crafted content. Content is what makes MMOs so expensive, it's what makes players desert them after they devour content much faster than it can be produced. Procedural generation- the ability for computer programs to auto-generate a variety of content- will create near-infinite content without all of the time and expense, and will incidentally bring back virtual worlds / sandboxes at the same time.
Interestingly enough, Anarchy Online in 2001 started MMO procedural content by generating random mission 'dungeons' (hallways & cave complexes). Take a look at No Man's Sky to see how far procedural generation has come since then.
Brianna Royce:
I've been playing MMOs for 17 years, and some days it seems the genre has changed so much in that time, and other days it seems it hasn't changed very much at all. I don't think that MMOs will be dramatically different in 10 years. The MMOs from 10 years ago are still recognizably MMOs, many of them still playable and wonderful, and many new MMOs wouldn't have been particularly out of place in 2004, so why should MMOs in 2024 be so different? Change for MMOs, even with a behemoth like WoW, is incremental and plodding. I fully expect to see a more fleshed-out genre, better AI that can actually do what designers wish it could, better and less exploitative business models, better cross-platform and mobile play, better ways of keeping wildly diverse playerbases happy, better ways of incorporating other genres without driving away people like me who by then will have been MMOing for 27 years (!).
MJ Guthrie:
I've never really been one to speculate; I like to see things unfold around me and be surprised by a story or ending I didn't anticipate. That's what drew me into MMORPGs in the first place! I do, however, see virtual reality becoming a bigger component and more mainstream in our games. I also see games branching out to keep players engaged in various ways, from different platforms for mobility to more tie-ins so you can accomplish parts of the game and keep in touch with it even when not physically logged in.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that procedural generation will replace dev-crafted content. Content is what makes MMOs so expensive, it's what makes players desert them after they devour content much faster than it can be produced. Procedural generation- the ability for computer programs to auto-generate a variety of content- will create near-infinite content without all of the time and expense, and will incidentally bring back virtual worlds / sandboxes at the same time.
Interestingly enough, Anarchy Online in 2001 started MMO procedural content by generating random mission 'dungeons' (hallways & cave complexes). Take a look at No Man's Sky to see how far procedural generation has come since then.
