Is there a difference between MMORPGs and RPGs?

Thorbar

Just curious what other people's opinions are on the difference between these two genres. They get lumped in together an awful lot and personally I think this is usually a mistake. I think a MMORPG is all about interacting with other people, be it beating them in combat or gaining more experience then anyone else, or forming a community and working together or simply chatting. On the other hand I see RPGs as creating a character and then attempting to act as that character would in certain situations that occur as you play through the plot. I think the only thing these two genres share is their names and maybe some basic character building styles.

Hobbes

No real difference, only one has more players.

In most of the MMORPG's the objective is the same only there are more people doing it.

The differences I see are slightly different.

1. Only one hero in a single player. In a MMORPG your pecking order can be quite low for a while and there are people who will quite happily point that out to you.

2. 'My reality can beat up your reality'. Not everyone in the game is playing the same way. You will have people who will be fully immersed in the RPG and others talking about last nights WWF wrestling on TV. Some people will treat it like IRC with swords.

3. Good doesn't always win. Actually in most cases Evil wins more because evil is so good at what they do. Good people tend to whine a lot.

4. No save. This depends a lot on the game, but for some death can be expensive and soul destroying. Death in Neocron is cheap, in Asherons call it can be very expensive and time consuming to rescue your corpse.

Dr_Teeth

Good post Hobbes, though MMO is moving beyond the RPGish environments now. I think PS will be the beginning of a new breed of MMO games.

The vast new audience of players that CS has introduced to online FPS gaming are now ready for the next level, I think that could well be an MMO, given the advantages (in their words):

* Consistent level of quality and access.

* No need to sort through hundreds of servers.

* Continual work to improve gameplay, to work out technical issues, and to stop cheaters and grief players.

* Professionally maintained servers will offer protection from arbitrary system admin rules.

If they can get all this right it will be the only way to play FPS games in my view. I've spent years playing these games and dealing with the crappier aspects of the genre, which will hopefully all be eliminated in PS.

Teeth.

Hobbes

I need more time to type. and actually maybe more theory behind MMOG's is probably a good thing to post here.

As for your points, they still happen in MMOG's just in a different way.

* Consistent level of quality and access.

The longer the game runs, the less chance of this. In a number of games I've played server quality and stability varied from server to server.

* No need to sort through hundreds of servers.

Yep. Normally only a handful to choose from. The disadvantage of this is because your character is tied to a server depending on when you join a server determines how well you do.

Taking Darktide for example (Combat orientated Asherons Call). The major cities were owned by a couple of the major guilds. If you wanted to get anywhere you had to end up joining a side or being attacked a lot.

Likewise with Neocron. The german server, the germans pretty much control all assets on the server, it's almost impossible for smaller clans to get a look in.

The other issue is that your character stats are tied to a server, so moving to another server normally requires work (or in the case of EQ paying cash).

* Continual work to improve gameplay, to work out technical issues, and to stop cheaters and grief players.

MMOG's don't stop cheaters and grief players. Far from it. In fact I'd say grief players get to be griefers a lot longer then if you joined a CS server which would end up kicking the person.

As for cheating. It seems to fall into different gray areas.

Cheater #1 - Straight out in your face cheating. These normally get banned from the game but in most instances not before doing serious damage to the game.

Cheater #2 - Tool users. Again an example would be Asherons call that allowed the use of Portal Bots (automated characters that could cast portals to major areas on the map) and trade bots. It got to a point where the majority of the characters in some instances were bots. Other tool related cheats are killbots, skill macro's.

Each game has thier own level of justice on this. UO used to have a strict policy on what could and couldn't be used. Asherons Call were a bit more lax, and the latest stance from Neocron is 'anything goes' (I'm sure that will change).

* Professionally maintained servers will offer protection from arbitrary system admin rules.

I don't think so. Again varies from game to game. but in UO for example depending on the GM who answered your call you could be ignored, jailed, banned or the person reporting you would get in trouble.

Dr_Teeth

Yup, it's never as perfect as the games company claims it will be, however it will be a vast improvement over how FPS games are played right now. Hundreds of servers that are mostly empty or full or locked.. capricious admins who kick, ban or modify rules at will.. cheap overloaded servers.. cheaters running rampant.. I can't wait to get away from all that.

Teeth.

Thorbar

Well I doubt we'll get away from cheaters with planetside. Due to the persistant nature of the game its possible to sell characters and items for real money. Now most companies frown on this and I think they do bans in everquest for it. Because people can get money there's suddenly a huge incentive to cheat/exploit and create uber characters that they can sell off. The other side of the coin is that they developers actually give a ****e about cheating and will put in a good effort to stomp out new cheats as they arrive unlike the likes of Valve and iD. The popularity of Legend of Mir (which was a utter ****e by today's standards) amoung CS players last year proves Teeth's point that there's defo a huge market there, whether planetside can successfully tap this remains to be seen.

Dr_Teeth

There is no money or items or economy in PS. And the characters are easy to level-up in comparison to other MMOs so I can't see there being a trade in accounts. The major cheating I see happening would be aimbots and radars.

Aimbots can be checked for in software pretty well (the server can sample the input of a player looking for any suspiciously perfect accuracy) and also, all the weapons are modelled using Cone of Fire - so there's no uber accuracy benefit to using an aimbot.

As for users of radars (tools that point out a cloaked player, or people on the other side of a wall/hill) they will be much harder to spot, but I'm sure the admins will be watching any player who has a complaint made against them in that regard. Patches will be brought out quickly to stop any of this, that's what my subscription fee is there for!

Another important thing is that when they ban a player, they will have the option to ban by account. Once banned the player will have to buy a new copy of the game, not just find a different server. They could even ban the users credit card number from being used to pay for PS and other Sony MMOs if they wanted.

Teeth.

Thorbar

If it takes more then a week or two to get a perfectly balanced and kitted out character, people will be willing to buy em. I remember seeing L 20-30 chars being sold for everquest. I hope to god you're right tho. I think buying in-game money/characters is cheating not to mind stupid.