D'Arcy wrote:
What, then, is the point of playing with a Massive amount of other people? You don't need a central server to slaughter AI critters either alone or with a small group of friends.
Because instancing isn't single player games set aside from the main multiplayer one. It's areas set aside where you can be in the game world without having the logistics problems of having a finite amount of content being absorbed by a large amount of people at the same time.
Frankly, I think that article is completely off-base and borderline idiotic. It is based on the Raph Koster school of thought, where the virtual world is more important than the game that goes on within it.
Newer generation MMO's, which by all indications are becoming gigantic hits, are making these innovations that value fun over realism in their worlds. This article seems to completely ignore the fact that these are video games designed to be entertaining and fun rather than a scientific exercise in creating virtual worlds.
I plain and simple would not ever play an online game with permanent death. Would it do most of the things mentioned in the article? Sure it would. But it's not
fun to the average gamer. How many times would you play Morrowind if you had to start over every time you died?
Instancing would be even more of a requirement in that world, since you'd have more new characters running around. Overcrowding forces camping, which nobody likes, not to mention a host of other problems. If there is a better solution for this than instancing, I've yet to see it.
This article makes me think of Star Wars Galaxies in far too many ways, and that game is the straw that broke this camel's back. For me, I'm done with "virtual worlds".
If you want a successful MMO you need to design the world around the game the players play, not vice-versa. If game developers look at every feature they put into new MMO's with the first question being "Is this fun?", we're on the right track... and the latest pair of them seems to have been developed with that approach.