Thread: Ganking MMO*s
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Old 08-07-2007, 03:16 PM   #14
shadowfyr
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
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Re: Ganking MMO*s

Sadly, I think people are being delusional if they think they can drag any real numbers *back* to text muds. Sure, in some ways they can be more interesting, but unless you are talking about pure RP games, most fail at immersion. Probably 20% of the places I have been on the one I play at, I don't know what the places in it look like. Why? Because they are dangerous, I was in a group, and healing, so had no time to look at any of it, never mind close enough to find hidden things, etc. Graphical ones, unless you are fighting something 50 feet tall, and can't see around it, even in a fight, you can notice things you wouldn't have otherwise. Immersion is higher "period". And that is what, on the most basic level, the games have always been about.

The only things keeping them from making more complex quests, faster area design, and managing how people play better (like RP enforcement), is that there is *still* a gap between writing, even bad writing, and graphics design. That gap is shrinking though. Not fast mind you, it might be 20+ years, or more, before a combination of game mechanics techniques, hardware and easilly written "code" for quests reaches a point where its that easy, but its happening. Some things like Neverwinter *almost* do it already. Premade mobs, fairly easy design, by placing premade objects, fairly straight forward scripting, etc. The only thing it isn't designed for, and can't do, is run a game with the shear size and complexity of a mud (or MMO). I think, inevitably, text is going to end up where it started, in the books, scrolls, or what ever you "find" in the games, not in the interface. Even speach, if they ever manage to make a more human sounding system that can fit on a sound card, as standard hardware, would pretty much make the need for text bubbles go away. And while most MMOs have chat channels, some muds don't even allow them, so its not hard to imagine those going away too.

When it all true 3D (not hard to imagine, since someone has developed a *real* hologram system they are testing, all speach is actually sounds (not impossible either), and designing a new area becomes as relatively simple as telling something, "Here is the contours of the area, lets drop a wall with an arch in it at the entry, and put Ghouls behind it.." Well, it doesn't look too good for muds. And, as I said, the only issue is how long it takes to get there, not "if" they get there.

OT: Man that 3D trick is neat. Normal holograms use lasers to "make" interference patterns, then record those patterns on film. This one uses a standard graphics card, just like the ones we play MMOs with, to calculate what the interference patterns *should* be, uses a laser to generate the calculated pattern, then splashes the result onto a surface. Result, it looks like the objects are literally sitting on top of your desk. Monocrome at the moment, but the designer plans to work on one that uses red, green and blue lasers to make a full color one, once he gets a production version of the current one on the market. Imagine combining it with the "existing", multilayer trick someone else is coming up with, to make a true 3D LCD display for computers... Some amazing stuff coming up in the near future.
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