Gamespy's MMOG Article

Games
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http://www.gamespy.com/amdmmog/week1/

I’m curious as to what people think of this new series of articles, the first one focusing on the beginning of MMOGs, since I find parts of it somewhat contentious and filled with exceptions to create a rule, the glorification of Raph Koster for instance, or the narrow definition of a massively multiplayer online game (in the world according to Raph).

By the late eighties, companies such as Sierra Online had persistent worlds that they maintained on their own proprietary networks. Services such as Sierra Online’s Sierra Network (later known as the Imagination Network) and GEnie offered multiplayer graphical games such as Yserbius and Air Warrior, but these games were not technically on the Internet – you logged on to proprietary networks to play. They also had a very different business model than the flat fees we expect today

So apparently this doesn’t make Air Warrior for instance massively multiplayer. Just, um, mediocrely multiplayer.

Here’s the instance of the thinking:

A lot of people define massively multiplayer as meaning a certain number of players that can be held in one copy of the world … in one shard if you like. Meridian 59 capped at only 250, which is actually the limit for text-based MUDs as well.

By that definition, Meridian 59 is not massively multiplayer. It was part of a small explosion of projects that were all going on around the same time. (Quoted from Koster, who is quoted in the article)

This does nothing to explain what massively multiplayer really means in the World According to Koster. Over 250? In essence, he said “a lot of dumb people equate massively multiplayer to numbers, so since Meridian 59 only could do 250, it wasn’t massively multiplayer, by some weird logic I just came up with.”

Aside from the silly disagreement on who came up with the phrase “massively multiplayer,” the main point of contention here is that earlier mulitplayer games are dismissed as being massively multiplayer because… well we’re not quite sure. They can’t hold more than 250 I guess. So… anything that Raph didn’t work on is immediately disqualified. Then of course M59 and it’s “semi-massively multiplayer” and UO come along and everything changes. Confirmed Kill, Warbirds, Gemstone, Island of Kesmai (well technically not graphical), AW, etc - those don’t count for a hill of beans.

GameSpy: Was Meridian 59 the first attempt at a massively multiplayer game?
Koster: That depends on how you define massively multiplayer.
GameSpy: Was it the first attempt at a persistent world?
Koster: That depends on how you define persistent.

This conversation has asshole written all over it. No, I don’t mean the Gamespy interviewer.

Sorry if I’m being rude or pedantic or far-reaching, it just fumes me to think that all that time I was playing, reporting on, participating in, and contributing to a part of the great online industry from the 80s onwards that games that were massive as they got until another leap of technology pushed it forward, suddenly coined a new phrase and paradigm, when everyone else without much of an ego just saw it as a logical extension of the growth of the online games industry.

But I guess Raph is God now so I suppose he gets to act the part.

— Alan

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Oh I suppose I should post my conflict of interest here:

I do contract work for a “massively” multiplayer online game company.

— Alan

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But since you’re a contractor, your opinion doesn’t really count.

:)

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Probably not :)

I guess I was a bit too angry just now so… I think everything I said was pretty accurate.

Maybe I’m jealous of Raph. That must be it. I want to bear your children.

— Alan

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If the article wants to be a complete look at MMOs, it probably should have included the text-based games. I dunno – I think they could have skipped everything before UO and just gone with UO and EQ as inspiring the current MMO industry. Merdian 59 didn’t get the game industry excited. UO did, and then EQ sealed the deal when it became mega-popular without the backing of a strong brand, like Ultima.

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Man, I really have to disagree with you, Alan. I’m hardly Raph Koster’s biggest fan, but I read the article totally differently. First off, it doesn’t look like it’s Raph defining certain games (AW, etc.) as “not MMOGs,” it’s the guy who wrote the article. What makes you think it was Raph? I also disagree with your reading that it idolizes Raph’s games and no others. The article puts up M59–a game Raph did not work on–as the first true MMOG.

His responses to questions like “Is M59 the first massively multiplayer game?” are reasonable IMO–MMOG is not a term that has a strict hard-and-fast definition. Raph says that many people define MMOG as a game that has lots of players, and 250 is probably too few to make the cut, as it were. I would tend to agree with him–250 is a lot of players, but there’s a big difference between 250 players and 2,500 players. I don’t know where exactly I would draw the line, and I’m sure it’s fuzzy, but there’s no question in my mind that, say, 16 players is not massively multiplayer, but 1,000 definitely is. Is 250? I would say no, I guess you would say yes. I would imagine most people would say no, but maybe I only think that because it’s what I would say. Even Rich Vogel seems to admit that M59 wasn’t really massively mulitplayer, though it was a big step in that direction.

Anyway, to me, your post just reads kind of petulant. Nobody is saying that the games you worked on or reported on or whatever weren’t groundbreaking and important and fun to play. They’re just not in the same league as something like UO or EQ. Not through any lack of talent, just through lack of technology and precedents, I’m sure.

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I think it’s ludicrous to say that 250 people simultaneously playing a game isn’t a “massively multiplayer” game. Especially since it was the creators of that game that first used the term “massively multiplayer” to describe it.

What about Sierra’s The Realm, as well? That was another pre-UO MMORPG.

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Yeah, I don’t know why Raph wanted to not include those games. Neverwinter Nights is another.

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As another data point, I’d say 250 is MMOG. That would be 250 people all logged into the same world. Each of those 250 could take their character (ship, car or whatever) and interact with any of the 249 people on the screen. Maybe it’s just because I’m a software engineer but 250 sounds like MMOG numbers to me.

Of course, any big operation would have to have more than one game going on at a time.

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As another data point, I’d say 250 is MMOG. That would be 250 people all logged into the same world. Each of those 250 could take their character (ship, car or whatever) and interact with any of the 249 people on the screen. Maybe it’s just because I’m a software engineer but 250 sounds like MMOG numbers to me.

Of course, any big operation would have to have more than one game going on at a time.[/quote]

The reality of MMOGs is that you hardly ever see 250 players at one time anyway, so using 250 as a cutoff point is an arbitary figure that doesn’t reflect the player experience anyway. I’d play DAoC and the server would hit 1800 players, but I’d see 30-40 maybe. That was my MMOG experience – seeing 30 players at once. What difference did it make to me if there were another 220 players or 1770 players logged onto the game world?

I dunno – maybe Raph was just in an argumentative mood.

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Because if there are 30 players on your screen and only 220 in the rest of the world, that means that the rest of the world is either (a) very small; or (b) very thinly populated, for a MMOG. A game with 2,500 players on at once is clearly a very different experience than one with 250 people on at once. Given equal population densities, it’s ten times as large; or, given equal size, it has ten times the population density. Any way you slice it, the 2500-person game gives you a much “bigger” and cooler experience than the 250-person one, all other things being equal.

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The “250” number is made up for muds (at least diku and lpmuds, as much as my fuzzy memory can recall) – there were a handful of muds back in the early 90’s that regularily had more than 250 players. (Some google searching reveals Sojourn, Medieva, and batmud all handled around 500 or so just fine).

Still not 2500, of course, but worth mentioning.

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Because if there are 30 players on your screen and only 220 in the rest of the world, that means that the rest of the world is either (a) very small; or (b) very thinly populated, for a MMOG. A game with 2,500 players on at once is clearly a very different experience than one with 250 people on at once. Given equal population densities, it’s ten times as large; or, given equal size, it has ten times the population density. Any way you slice it, the 2500-person game gives you a much “bigger” and cooler experience than the 250-person one, all other things being equal.[/quote]

Yeah, but in my experience in these games all that matters is how many players I see around me. I’ve played on DAoC servers when there are 1800 online and 600 online, and there’s not a huge difference. Yeah, I see fewer players when there are 600 online, but it isn’t always that noticeable. My gameplay experience isn’t a whole lot different.

Anyway, who cares? If Raph wants to insist on M59 not being an MMOG, he’s probably in the minority on that definition.

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“Playing games on proprietary servers was a major step toward modern MMOGs, but it was not the same thing.”

I got to there and then I knew what Alan was mad about. That’s a silly statement. Running on proprietary servers isn’t much different than running on the internet on, get this, proprietary servers! Just because you’ve got an ISP that’s your connection to the world now instead of GEnie or Sierra Network or whatever you dialed up back then doesn’t mean these games weren’t MMOGs.

Steven Kent is usually a LOT better than this. It seems like a lot of grandstanding to me and is as self-important as the Top 25 thing they did last week.

Of course, they got a thread on Qt3 with a link so mission accomplished!

–Dave

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I see things a bit differently. I argued a bit about this several months ago (maybe close to a year ago) here with a somewhat different but related position.

I don’t see a game with 251 current users being Massive. Massive means BIG, LOTS, heavily populated. Is a village called TinyAss, Nowhere with its 251 people a massive population?

I don’t think there have been any Massively Multiplayer games using any other than a self-serving, self-promoting, bullshit usage for “massive”.

The very term reeks of marketing. And now apparently Gamespy is adding some Political flavors. Fuck that.

As I said many moons ago, when technology upgrades we’ll have to talk about the Ultra Massive Multiplayer Games. Then comes the Super Deluxe Ultra Multiplayer Games. Then the Ultimate Super-Amazing…

Call the games what they really are… Village-sized Multiplayer Games. When they reach 5000 concurrent users they can be Town-sized Multiplayer Games. And so on.

Fuck the bullshit terms. Fuck the marketing. And Fuck the egos.

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I was a bit angry because it wasn’t just Kent, Koster is implying that ~250 person games don’t get the “massively multiplayer title” because they have 250 as a limit. This pretty much eliminates anything before UO, since no graphical game could get that high (simultaneous players at once). He doesn’t ever (or more correctly, he is not quoted as saying) what is the massively multiplayer limit. 500? 1000? Obviously it’s supposed to be a large number, but how do you define it?

Koster goes on to dismiss M59 as not being massively multiplayer or persistent - while arguing the case how it didn’t deserve the massively multiplayer title - thereby implying in the article and therefore his statements that UO, which he was involved in, was the Holy Grail and he is King Arthur, King of the Britons. Worse, the other games don’t count because they were on pay services. Your game doesn’t deserve the dignity since you had to pay $12.50 an hour to play (me on C$S playing British Legends or Island of Kesmai).

Part of it is that I feel that Koster practically - though maybe not intentionally - bemeans or belittles all earlier semi-massively-multiplayer games or whatever you want to call them, and the article helps very much.

I didn’t work for any of these companies (the company I work for is not mentioned in the series, though Raph Koster did have comment positively on it about a year ago or so). It’s just frustrating he brushes the heirs to his glory so.

— Alan

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Thousands of players online is kind of misleading since in EQ I never saw more than 40 or 50 players in one zone (well maybe in the second or third month in, in Najena camping the Sow boots about 90 in zone!). And the couple months I played UO I never saw more than 20 or 30 people at the same time. The most I’ve ever seen was probably DAoC in a siege with about 100 + on screen (LAG ON DIALUP!!!).

anyways…

etc

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Well your dialup is only part of the problem; you could have a T-1 and there’d still be lag, because the game engine cannot handle that many on-screen characters at once - even the beefiest of computers would lag. That’s one the reasons why you never see that many online, because either it’s not healthy to have that many on in the first place, or software biasing routines reduce the ones that are in your field of vision.

— Alan

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Or the writer interpreted it wrong. For all we know, Raph talked about all the early games and the writer chose not to include any of it.

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  1. The term massively multiplayer is one of convenience, started in 1994 by ICI and Dale Addink to describe their Air Warrior clone (not in Meridian 59, BTW, as the article claims). It was used to separate those games from the 2 to 16 players retail Hybrids that were popping up, such as Quake. It adequately describes the situation, though it is not perfect.

  2. Get over yourself.