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Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

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File:UOPlayerInteraction.jpg
Players interacting in Ultima Online.

A Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) is an online computer role-playing game (RPG) in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a fictional character (traditionally in a fantasy setting) and take control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game.

MMORPGs are immensely popular, with several commercial games reporting millions of subscribers. South Korea boasts the highest subscription numbers, with millions of users registered with the more popular games; see list of MMORPGs for the most prominent MMORPGs.


Common features

Though MMORPGs have evolved considerably, many of them share some basic characteristics.

  • Traditional Dungeons & Dragons style gameplay, including quests, monsters, and loot.
  • A system for character development, usually involving levels and experience points.
  • An economy, based on the trade of items such as weapons and armor, and a regular currency.
  • Guilds or clans, which are organizations of players, whether or not the game actively supports them.
  • Game Moderators or Game Masters (frequently abbreviated to GM), which are sometimes-compensated individuals in charge of supervising the world.

As most MMORPGs are commercial, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, players must either purchase the client software for a one-time fee or pay a monthly subscription to play. Most major MMORPGs require players to do both. By nature, "massive multiplayer" games are online, and require some sort of continuous revenue (such as monthly subscriptions) for maintenance and development. The alternate term MMGS (Massive Multiplayer Gaming Service) is also appropriate for describing MMOGs in general and MMORPGs in particular.

History

MMORPGs, as defined today, have existed since the early 1990s. However, their history extends to the late 1970s.

The first gameworlds

The beginning of the MMORPG genre can be traced to text-based (entirely non-graphical) Multi-User Domains, or MUDs, with the first being developed by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. These games ran on private servers, usually at a university, and sometimes without the knowledge of the system's administrators. Players would typically connect to the games using a TELNET client, and gameplay was similar to role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. By typing commands into a parser, players would enter a dungeon, fight monsters, gain experience, and acquire loot.

Similar games quickly surfaced during that period for the PLATO System. MUDs (and later their descendants such as MUSHes and MOOs) were sometimes wildly different from one another, but shared many basic interface elements. An example of this would be a player's means of navigating his or her character around the gameworld by typing in compass directions ("n", "se", etc.).

Many MUDs are still active, with and a number of influential MMORPG designers, such as Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, Mark Jacobs, Brian "Psychochild" Green and Damion Schubert, began as MUD developers and/or players.

Early commercial development

The first commercial MMORPG (although what constitutes "massive" requires qualification when discussing mid-1980s mainframes) was Islands of Kesmai designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. Still text-based (or, more accurately, roguelike), this game became available to consumers in 1984 for $12.00 per hour via the CompuServe online service.

The first graphical character-based interactive environment, though not actually an RPG, was Club Caribe. Although first released as Habitat in 1988, Club Caribe was introduced by LucasArts for Q-Link customers on their Commodore 64 computers. Users could interact with one another, chat and exchange items. Although very basic, its use of online avatars (already well established off-line by Ultima and other games) and combining chat and graphics was revolutionary.

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Neverwinter Nights on AOL, the first graphical MMORPG.

The first graphical MMORPG was Neverwinter Nights by designer Don Daglow and programmer Cathryn Mataga. "Neverwinter Nights" went live on AOL for PC owners in 1991 and ran through 1997. This project was personally championed and green-lighted by AOL President Steve Case. Both Club Caribe and Neverwinter Nights cost $6.00 per hour to play.

During the early-1990s, commercial use of the internet was limited by NSFNET acceptable use policies. Consequently, early online games like Legends of Future Past, Neverwinter Nights, GemStone III, Dragon's Gate, and Federation II relied heavily on proprietary services such as CompuServe, America Online, and GEnie for distribution.

Following Neverwinter Nights was The Shadow of Yserbius, a MMORPG on The Sierra Network (TSN), which ran from 1992 through 1996. The game was produced by Joe Ybarra. The Shadow of Yserbius was an hourly service, although it also offered unlimited service for $119.99 per month, until AT&T acquired TSN and rendered it strictly an hourly service. The name was then changed from TSN to the ImagiNation Network.

As NSFNET restrictions were relaxed, traditional game companies and online services began deploying games on the internet. The first commercial text-based MMORPG to make this transition to the Internet from a proprietary network provider (CompuServe, in this case) was Legends of Future Past, designed by Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. Also notable were its professional Game Masters who conducted online events. This is now a common feature. The game was offered over the Internet for $3.60 per hour in 1992 and ran until 2000.

World-wide MMORPGs

Meridian 59, launched by 3DO in late 1996, was one of the first modern MMORPGs. It was the first Internet game from a major publisher, the first to be covered in the major game magazines, and the first to introduce the flat monthly subscription fee. Most significantly, however, and another first for online RPGs, was its 3D engine, allowing players to experience the game world through the eyes of their characters. A cult following quickly grew for Meridian 59 that still exists today.

The Realm Online was another successful early Internet MMORPG, launched by Sierra Online. Although released just after Meridian 59, the beta was active several months before. The Realm Online had fully animated 2D graphics, both in and out of combat situations. This made it accessible to a wider audience compared to more text-based games or the graphical MUDs on which it was based. Also, its gameplay and interface were already familiar to those accustomed to the graphical adventure games earlier popularised by Sierra. Like many of its predecessors, The Realm Online only featured simple turn-based combat, however, it did feature a huge number (for the time) of visual character customization options. It, too, is still running.

Ultima Online, released in September 1997, is now credited with popularizing the genre. It featured 3D isometric/third-person graphics, and was set in the already popular Ultima universe. It was also a more involved, complex game than many of its predecessors.

Meanwhile, commercial online gaming was becoming extraordinarily popular in South Korea. Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, designed by Jake Song, was commercially released in 1996 and eventually gained over one million subscribers. Song's next game, Lineage (1998), enjoyed even greater success gaining millions of subscribers in Korea and Taiwan. This helped to secure developer NCsoft's dominance in the global MMORPG market for several years.

File:EverQuest - The Temple of Solusek Ro.jpg
EverQuest drove MMORPGs into the Western mainstream.

EverQuest, launched in March 1999 by Verant Interactive (later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment), brought fantasy MMORPGs into the Western mainstream. It was the most commercially successful MMORPG in the United States for five years, and was the basis for eleven expansions (as of March 2006) and several derivative games. TIME magazine and other non-gaming media featured stories on EverQuest, often focusing on the controversies and social questions spawned by its popularity.[citation needed] In 1999, after the releases of Ultima Online and EverQuest was another hit, Asheron's Call. Together, these three games are sometimes referred as the original "big three" of the late 1990s.

MMORPGs in the new millennium

By the turn of the century, game companies were eager to capitalize on the new market. The concept of massively multiplayer online games expanded into new video game genres around this time, though RPGs, with their ability to "suck in" the player, were (and are) still the most financially promising.

The next generation of MMORPGs, following the "big three" of the previous decade, was to include the medieval PvP-oriented Dark Age of Camelot, the sci-fi Anarchy Online, and Ultima Online 2, along with two or three others which either never were completed or failed to capture significant market share.[citation needed] Anarchy released first in June 2001, but immediately had crippling technical problems, mostly due to an inability to handle the huge playerbase. Camelot launched smoothly four months later, introducing "Realm vs. Realm" PvP and other innovations, but still never attained the media attention or fame garnered by the previous "big three", which were still running strongly. Ultima Online 2, while greatly anticipated by its community, was cancelled when Electronic Arts decided that it would be more profitable to instead concentrate on the first Ultima Online. Growth of the 'big three' nearly plateaued, and some began to believe that the market had possibly been saturated.

Of course, developers didn't stop trying, and dozens of MMORPGs continued to be produced.

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Final Fantasy XI The first MMO to allow console and PC gamers to play together

In 2002, Final Fantasy XI was released, which hoped to bring in fans of the extremely popular (but mostly single-player) Final Fantasy series, which was particularly popular in Japan. Like the previous Final Fantasy games, this one was playable on a console, using a handheld controller, but bore little resemblance to gameplay in prior Final Fantasy titles. Though not the first console MMORPG (this was probably Phantasy Star Online, for the Dreamcast), FFXI was the first online game capable of supporting both console and PC users simultaneously(except for the private servers of phantasy star online; on this server dreamcast- and pc players could play together, later also gamecube and xbox players of the phantasy star online games). It was also notable for randomly selecting servers for new player-characters (instead of letting players pick for themselves), a practice which was highly criticized, but resulted (intentionally[citation needed]) in game worlds in which players would regularly interact and play the game with both English and Japanese. Final Fantasy XI still persists as one of the leading MMORPGs on the market to date.

Also released in 2002 was the sprite-based Ragnarok Online, produced by Korean company Gravity Corp.. Unbeknownst to many Western players, the game took Asia by storm, as Lineage had done. Gravity once claimed that there were 17 million subscribers of the game, though this number may not be entirely reliable.

May 2003 saw the release of Eve Online, produced by Crowd Control Productions, which had players taking the role of spaceship pilots and had gameplay similar to the cult series Star Control. Though not the first space MMORPG ("Earth and Beyond" was released in September 2002), Eve was able to achieve lasting success. One of the reasons for its success must have been the game's design, in which very few objects are actually modelled on the screen at any given time (often the player is alone in space, or fighting targets too far away to see). This allowed the game to perform well even with only one unsharded universe.]

In October 2003, Lineage II (NCsoft's sequel to Lineage) became the latest MMORPG to achieve huge success across Asia. It received the Presidential Award at the 2003 Korean Game awards, and is now the second most popular MMORPG in the world. As of the first half of 2005 Lineage II counted over 2.25 million subscribers worldwide, with servers in Japan, China, North America, Taiwan, and Europe, once the popularity of the game had surged in the West. However, the last "chronicle" or major installment for the game, Chronicle 5, went live on August 1, 2006. Game officials have announced that there will be no further chronicles for the game, fueling speculation about the sequel, Lineage III.

Modern MMORPGs

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World of WarCraft is the most widely played game in North America, and one of the most popular MMORPG's to date. A raid group of horde-factioned players can be seen here on their mounts.

The most recent generation of MMORPGs, based on standards of graphics, gameplay, and popularity, is said to have launched in April 2004 with NCSoft's City of Heroes, which was based on a comic-book superhero theme instead of the usual fantasy or science-fiction. This was followed in November 2004, with Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft. At the time, Sony expected to dominate the market, based on the success of the first Everquest, and decided to offer a flat monthly rate to play all of their MMORPGs including EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Star Wars Galaxies, to keep from competing with itself. However, World of Warcraft immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs. At present, WoW is one of the most played games in North America, and the most played American MMORPG, with a total of over 7 million customers worldwide. With the release of these newer games, subscriptions began to decline for many older MMORPGs, even the year-old Lineage II, and in particular Everquest 1. The current MMORPG market has World of Warcraft in a position similar to the position of Dungeons & Dragons in the tabletop RPG market, with both games' market share being greater than 50% of the overall market.

In April 2005, Guild Wars launched successfully, introducing a new financial model which might have been partly responsible for its success. Though definitely an online RPG, and technically having a persistent world (despite most of the game's content being instanced), it required only a one-time purchasing fee. It was also designed to be "winnable", more or less, as developers wouldn't profit from customers' prolongued playtime. Other differences compared to traditional MMORPGs included strictly PvP-only areas, a relatively short playtime requirement to access end-game content, and instant world travel. For these differences it was termed instead a "Competitive/Cooperative Online Role-Playing Game" (CORPG) by its developers, and is now seen by some as occupying a new niche in the MMORPG market.

Finally, despite WoW's domination in the pay-MMORPG market, there still has been significant competition (and potential for profit) among free MMORPGs. A good example of a profitable free MMORPG is the Korean MapleStory, a side-scroller developed by Wizet, which features purchasable in-game "enhancements". Due to its free nature, the game is said to have more than 50 million players in all of its many versions, with the majority of them from East Asia.

Academic attention

MMORPGs have begun to attract significant academic attention, notably in the fields of economics and psychology. Edward Castronova specializes in the study of virtual worlds (MUDs, MMOGs, and similar concepts). Most of his writings, including "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier" (2001), have examined relationships between real world economies and synthetic economies.

With the growing popularity of the genre, a growing number of psychologists and sociologists study the actions and interactions of the players in such games. One of the most famous of these researchers is Sherry Turkle. Another researcher is Nick Yee who has surveyed more than 35,000 MMORPG players over the past few years, focusing on psychological and sociological aspects of these games. His research can be found at The Daedalus Project.

Independent development

Daimonin is one of the independent efforts to create a free MMORPG.

Many small teams of programmers and artists have tried to create their own MMORPGs. The average MMORPG project takes three to four years and large investments of money to create. Independent development, or game development not run by any company, usually takes longer due to lack of developer's time, manpower or money. Additionally, the long-term lack of funding required for running MMORPG servers may lead to the abandonment of the project.

However, many smaller developers are producing games with pay to play graphics, gameplay and features. Only time will tell if these games can afford to run.

Sometimes these independent games are free-to-play, but will confer in-game privileges to paying customers.

Some of the best-established independent projects are AWplanet, Crossfire, Daimonin, RuneScape, Endless Online, Star Wars Combine, Eternal Lands, Dream Blue Online and Planeshift. Some independent MMORPG projects are completely open source, such as Daimonin, while others like Planeshift feature proprietary content made with an open-source game engine. The developers of Endless Online have also released development information with details about their coding.

The WorldForge project has been active since 1998 and formed a community of independent developers who are working on creating framework for a number of open-source MMORPGs.

Browser-based MMORPGs

With the success of the MMORPG genre in recent years, several multiplayer games played in web browsers have also begun using the MMORPG moniker. This largely text-based sub-genre developed from old BBS games and pre-dates the modern idea of an MMORPG. Browser-based MMORPGs are usually simpler games than their stand-alone counterparts, typically involving turn-based play and simple strategies (e.g. "build a large army, then attack other players for gold"), though there are many interesting variations on the popular themes to be found. Many of these games are more like turn-based strategy games or wargames than role-playing games. In Planetarion players control planets and fleets of ships; in Kings of Chaos the player commands an army rather than a single player character. In Pardus, the player controls a character who owns a spaceship and gains experience points through trading or fighting, in a way similar to the classic game Elite. In BattleMaster, the game world never "resets", so that some player realms have existed for more than 5 real years while other realms be formed and destroyed by players, virtually giving the game its own developing history as lived and written all by the players. In Cyber-Wars players can hack each other and create viruses.

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Legend of the Green Dragon is an example of a text-based MMORPG accessible with a web browser.

One of the earliest examples of a browser-based MMORPG is Archmage, which dates back to early 1999. Currently, a popular browser-based MMORPG, Kings of Chaos, boasts a player population numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Its popularity is primarily fuelled by a reciprocal link clicking system where users give each other more soldiers by clicking on their friends' unique links, taking advantage of the small world phenomenon to spread word of the game across the world. Some examples of click based MMORPG's are Legend of the Green Dragon and World of Phaos, whose code is open source, allowing anyone to create their own game server. Another browser-based MMORPG, Kingdom of Loathing, is entirely satirical. Some of the more popular of these have become profitable through user subscriptions.

Not all browser-based MMORPGs are turn-based text games. More recently, faster computers and the Java programming language have allowed the introduction of graphical browser-based MMORPGs such as RuneScape, produced by Jagex, which are more similar to standalone MMORPGs.

In addition, Macromedia's introduction of Shockwave 3D and the MUS Multiuser Server in 2001 makes it possible to create 3D browser-based MMORPGs based on the Shockwave plug-in.

Genre challenges

By their nature, MMORPGs require significant resources for both development and maintenance.

To create a large virtual game-space, one needs to employ artists to design a large number of areas (and possibly creatures, characters, weapons, spaceships...) and also a team of programmers to turn those designs into a digital "reality". A new modern MMORPG would also require innovative game design, and a large number of 3D models and animations.

MMORPGs must also include reliable systems for a number of vital tasks. The program must be able to handle and verify a large number of connections; prevent cheating; and apply changes (bug fixes or added content) to the game. A system for recording the game's data at regular intervals, without stopping the game, is also a plus.

Maintenance requires sufficient servers and bandwidth, and a dedicated support staff. Insufficient resources for maintenance lead to lag and frustration for the players, and can severely damage the reputation of a game, especially at launch. Care must also be taken to ensure that player population remains at an acceptable level by adding or removing servers ("shards"). Peer-to-peer MMORPGs could theoretically work cheaply and efficiently in regulating server load, but practical issues such as asymmetrical network bandwidth and CPU-hungry rendering engines make them a difficult proposition. Additionally, they would probably become vulnerable to other problems including new possibilities for cheating.

Cheating in online games

Main article: Cheating in online games

Cheating is a major challenge for game developers and legitimate players. Exploiting is a form of cheating involving the use of a flaw in the game mechanics to gain unfair advantage. Depending on the nature of the exploit, developers can address the exploits within a short time through patches and updates. Even when fixed, exploiting can still be an issue, as exploiters may still have the advantage or items they gained before the patch was released. Depending on the nature of the exploit, a rollback may be needed just to counter the effects. Twinking may also be seen as another form of cheating.

Third-party programs may be used to automate in-game actions, often with such efficiency that it gives users a huge advantage. Botting is a term for a player using a script that could automate progress through the game without them actually playing the game. Farmers, if they are unable to use exploits, will use such methods to harvest ingame currency or materials from the game world around the clock. They often sell the currency and items they earn via eBay or other commerce sites, thus further unbalancing the game's economy. This gives players a chance to make their way into the upper tiers of the system without following the logic originally intended by the designers.

Some third party programs are released with code in them to capture and relay account details back to the author, enabling them to steal virtual possessions from the account or impersonate the rightful owner to perpetrate confidence tricks and other scams. These are often packaged, trojan-like, with seemingly-innocuous software tools for easier distribution amongst unsuspecting users.

Even more subtle methods are known to be used to cheat; depending on the way the game handles certain aspects of gameplay the client can be modified, either on disk, directly in memory, or on the wire as data passes between the client and server. So far as the server does not verify the veracity of client data or, ideally, take care of important calculations server-side, this can be used to modify values such as character health or armour, speed up movement, or change other aspects of the game to the cheater's advantage. There are programs that have been designed to prevent external programs from running during a game, such as GameGuard. The integrity of client files can also be checked each time the game is loaded, although of course there are usually methods to bypass or disable these protection programs.

Private servers

Single-client based graphic MMORPGs may have private servers or server emulators. Private servers are mostly run by volunteers, therefore most of them are free. However, some private servers may wish for people to donate money, sometimes in exchange for a bonus in the game. Private servers remain markedly less popular than the official servers, with player numbers usually in the hundreds, though popular private servers may reach up to one or two thousand online players and even up to ten thousand in terms of player registrations. EQEmu is a server emulator for EverQuest, others exist for World of Warcraft, Lineage II, Ultima Online, Ragnarok Online, and many other MMORPGs.

In China as well as many other Asian countries the use of private servers is more prevalent. Most Chinese MMORPG players are aware of the existence of private servers. The reasons for this are the relatively high fees for official servers and the availability of 100MB/s fiber optic internet connections, which can be as cheap as US$30 a month. As a result, the costs of running a server in China are remarkably low. In one instance, a private server had more than 50 000 players registered. Some even have 1000 accounts in 1 day (the opening day). Among such cases are Mu Online which is one of the most popular private server games in the world, with thousands of private servers. Private servers have significantly damaged the commercial MMORPG development. Many gamers in China feel the companies that developed MMORPGs purposefully made the leveling progress advance slowly so more money could be made off the gamers. Most of the private servers have placed a faster experience rate, allowing players to progress through the game faster than on retail servers, though there are often a variety of in-game bugs present that are not prevalent in official servers.

As the MMORPG market becomes more competitive, innovation in new releases is becoming a necessity; it would be financial suicide to release another simple hack and slash MMORPG, no matter how pretty it looked. So, MMORPGs, as long as they are being produced, will be continuously evolving.

One (arguable) MMORPG trend is "tie-ins" with successful movie licenses. The most recent example of this is The Matrix Online, based on the Matrix trilogy of films; the earliest possibly was Star Wars Galaxies. Though neither of these titles was a great financial success, mainly due to their divergence from the original property and poor gameplay, further tie-in games will very likely still be produced. This process is also apparently being applied in reverse, with James Cameron designing a MMORPG that will precede the movie (Project 880) it is tied to. [1]

A controversial trend which merits much greater discussion is the trading of real currency for game currency, sometimes supported by the game providers.

One near-future trend could be the introduction of player-created content into the games. Some MMOGs already rely heavily on player created content, from animations to complete buildings with player-created textures and architecture - examples include Second Life and the noncombat RPG A Tale in the Desert. However, these games are very different from the far more popular "standard" MMORPGs revolving around combat and limited character tradeskills. Player-created content in these games would be in the form of areas to explore, missions to carry out and specific weapons and armor to use (see one planned expansion here: [2]). Whether or not this becomes mainstream is anyone's guess. Some games in development, such as Trials of Ascension are making player-created content a major aspect of the game.

Also possible in the near future is the widespread introduction of MMOG software engines, which are generic tools that make it much easier for individuals (or small teams) to produce their own MMOGs (including MMORPGs) for profit. Some examples of this kind of engine are Multiverse and Realm Crafter. The engine First Star online was released in 2001 but did not gain widespread popularity.

Some predict[citation needed] that a new rush of independent MMOG development, spurred on by these new software engines, will result in successful "mods" for MMORPGs, similar to what has happened with the FPS genre (see Counter-Strike).

See also

References

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