An interesting article that touches on some fundamental points in today's game industry.
However I have to agree with the posters who say 'multiplayer' and 'teaming' are not necessarily the same thing. Does anyone remember the space combat MMO
Black Prophecy? It was pitched mainly at the Freespace/Tachyon/Freelancer/Privateer audience, and while it did have a teaming facility, pretty much everyone played solo, and when not flying instanced missions or fighting in PvP deathmatches, players only encountered other players parked around space stations, or in open PvP zones, and in the chat channels.
Did that make the game any less of an MMO?
Not at all - in the case of Black Prophecy, there were no classes, so no specific roles (no tanks, healers etc). Everyone was a combat pilot, and their playstyle came down to how they chose to allocate combat skill points and ship gear as they levelled their character. So while it's true that teaming
can be at the heart of an MMO, I wouldn't say it's the defining characteristic of
all MMOs. MMORPGs though, that's a different matter...
I also don't think the MMO as a genre is 'dying'. I do however believe it's adapting to changes in the market in much the same way as living organisms adapt to changes in their environments. And as with nature, some can't adapt and die out, others adapt to a stimulus that appears stable but then changes again...etc etc.
Bottom line is, the games will go where the money is, just as living creatures go where the energy is. That doesn't necessarily mean quality, or variety, just...success. And generally speaking, the most successful strategies (whether digitial or organic) are generic ones. The 'jack of all trades' solution. i.e. they don't excel at anything, but they do do most things ok.
Specialism is always a high risk strategy - when it works, your specialisation is king of the roost, but it doesn't take much external change to knock a specialist off that top perch.
City of Heroes was a specialist game. Of all the MMOs I've played, I've never encountered such a dedicated, driven, and faithful playerbase as I have with CoH. That's pretty much a defining characteristic of the specialist mindset. Generic thinking will quickly move on to some other samey-game, but specialists either can't adapt, or (in our case
) absolutely stubbornly
refuse to change, because we
know we had something we loved, and we very much want it back thank you very much!
The fault with MMOs in general is as much with the consumers as it is with the manufacturers - just as it is with the film and tv industry. On the one hand, if there's no demand for something, it won't sell. But on the other, demand
can be manipulated by simply not offering a large choice.
Or at least that's how it used to be.
Like I said, the MMO genre isn't 'dying' - it's adapting to change. And one such change is one the developers couldn't foresee : social networking. It's ironic really, because while I said earlier that teaming isn't essential for an MMO, Zoey is quite right to stress how important teaming is. But I'm not talking teaming ingame...I mean teaming
outside of the gameworld.
There's a new power out there, and it's changing the world. It's not a 'superpower' - it's 'peoplepower'. Why are there so many Kickstarter games projects? Because Kickstarter is the environment where specialists are the norm! The huge publishing companies need generic ideas and games so they can make their profits from wide appeal. But Kickstarter is the laser beam to their floodlight : where the large companies dislike specialist thinking and would crush it if they could, it's the exact target market that Kickstarter projects love.
Adaptation always finds a balance in the end, because a healthy environment needs both generalists
and specialists to flourish. Just as the natural world has both cockroaches and Monarch butterflies, so the MMO world will eventually find its own balance between large company products like 'Fantasy Boobclone CXXXVIII' and smaller, specialist titles like...well, like 'City of Heroes'
