The Ultimate MMORPG
I was just thinking of what would make the best MMORPG, and came to a conclusion - the most popular MMORPG of all time will be real life. Not our daily reality, but a computer game of Earth. Not Middle Earth, just Earth. People could interact, have skills, and do all sorts of things. But ultimately, it would be exactly modeled after real life, and people could get to be someone else. They would go to work, surf the Internet all day, perform brain surgery without all the details, and it would potentially be a valuable medium for showing people the horrors of real life - car crashes, cancer, AIDS, and others. By being someone else, you have the chance of seeing life through their eyes and instead of being healthy you might stand the chance of getting an incurable ailment and seeing the impact of it.
Any thoughts on what would be your ultimate idea of an MMORPG?
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Vatsim
Vatsim: the Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network
Vatsim is a 45,000-member mirror world founded by 54-year-old retired pilot Harv Stein in his basement in London, Ontario:
"...The idea is to provide an online facsimile of real-world commercial airline traffic. Based on Microsoft Flight Simulator and tied to the Internet by 20 donated servers scattered from Italy to Australia, Vatsim allows virtual pilots (but real people) and virtual air traffic controllers (also real people) to see each other and communicate. The result is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game patterned after the government's dullest bureaucracy."
Escapism.
Nobody likes reality.
Reminds of three things
The next two movies are coming out this year.
By all accounts, this sucks. But mainly because of the stuff it leaves out. Unlike "real life", there wasn't much to do in TSO, and not much point. I still think being able to earn actual money would be a good addition -- the economic model that grew out of it would likely force more realism.
My own idea from my last year in university -- an agent-based MMORPG. The "campaign" that I was creating was fantasy-based, but I had built in functions to allow everything to be customized via XML files.
The innovative parts of my idea were that the "world", or gamespace, actually ran distributed, with hosts being able to hold as much/little pieces of a map as they wanted. So, for instance, you might link your world to someone elses, defining the entrances/exits between them.
The characters controlled by players were agent-based, and would transparently move from host to host -- going through an exit that linked to a different world would shift your agent to start executing on the second host.
The monsters, as well, were agent-based. We had only implemented a rudimentary AI -- one that would follow characters' agents wherever they went, including from host to host.
It's still up on Sourceforge, although I haven't touched it in forever. Both the XML classes and the agent classes we were using don't work any longer. I've been doing a little Java programming again lately, working mainly on the XML bits for now, since that's quite mature. My play-by-email campaign is what got me going on this.
TSO is a Bust
I love The Sims and have turned several friends into addicts. Imagine our elation when Maxis announced an online version. The 5 of us participated in the BETA. For some unknown reason, they tainted the main context of the game and most of the great content was left out. Their initial stab and forcing an economy lacked vision and encourage cookie-cutter type businesses everywhere. This is one of the few games where the majority of players are women. I guess they weren't listening to the types of things the female players were actually doing with the offline game, cuz very little of it showed up online.
I was VERY disappointed in this release. I'm anxiously awaiting Middle Earth Online but evaluating others in case this game decides to break my heart too.
Lauren
http://redmoonrising.typepad.com/him_them_and_me/games/index.html
a very hot field
Check this out. Know some people workin' it.