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May 19th, 2008 @ 11:24
Speaking to CVG, EA Mythic creative director Paul Barnet has predicted that a leftfield company like Nintendo will be the first to popularise MMOs on consoles.
“You would have to build something very console centric from the get-go,” he said. “I think probably the best chance of someone doing something like that is Nintendo - doing something crazy that no one expects.”
Barnet’s currently working on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning for EA, and believes traditional MMO developers are chasing a WoW-shaped goal, one that obviously doesn’t fit on consoles.
“The number-one problem of a developer of an MMO these days is it’s very hard to be creative and keep your eye on the target when almost everyone has only ever played one of these games and it dominates their thinking,” he said.
Quite why no one’s made a “proper” console MMO yet is completely beyond us, frankly. Sort it out, development people. Also, why did Nintendo never do a Pokemon MMO? Mental.
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May 19th, 2008 at 11:50 am
There’s been some talk of the new Animal Crossing being a sort of ’social networking MMO thing’.
Sony are doing a number of console-based MMOs, are they not? Some with NCSoft, even.
I can’t imagine them catching on, tbh.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:54 am
NCsoft’s doing a few for PS3, yeah. I don’t understand why there isn’t an MMO on 360. It’s retarded. Live’s mature, the machine can handle it easily. It makes no sense that no one’s “cracked it”.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Aren’t MMOs difficult to get onto the 360 due to Microsoft’s insistence on ‘owning’ everything Live! related? I think it’s more a culture thing more than anything else.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Yeah maybe on the MS thing, although as far as I’m aware there isn’t a single 360 online-only title in development. They worked on that True Fantasy Online for Xbox for a bit, innit, then scrapped it.
But surely MS must see this as one of the most important genre’s to get right? It’s print-money action.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Well, there’s the 360 versions of Final Fantasy XI and Phantasy Star Universe. And that Conan thing’s coming to the 360 too. But I think everyone’s pretty much wary of the whole “if you’re not WoW, you’re dead” thing atm. Especially on consoles where the whole concept is basically unproven.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Perhaps because most of the XBox player base doesn’t find MMO’s that attractive. When most are playing “run and gun”, adrenaline pumped games and “teabagging” corpses, I believe there isn’t that much of an appeal to be quietly pushing sequences of hotkeys and delivering timed attacks.
If a MMO succeeds on the console space, it will be something akin to Maplestory and not WoW. Real simple, real fast, and easily discardable.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Oh! the STEREOTYPES!
lol.
Seriously. Do you think that MS say to themselves; “We don’t want to grow our userbase. We want to keep our loyal fans and let the PC users stay in the less lucrative for us PC market.”???
May 19th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
That’s what I mean, innit. It’ll definitely require a different type of game. Something like WoW definitely wouldn’t work. I just find it a bit baffling that no one’s done it yet.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Every time Microsoft start doing one, they ultimate end up canning it.
True Fantasy, that Marvel online thing… No staying power.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I always figured MMOs on consoles were a bad idea. You want to be selling a ton of games rather than having users shelling out a fairly minimal monthly payment and playing hardly any other games.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I reckon an ARG as opposed to an MMO would be best. Pure PvP, so you could just dip in and out whenever you wanted to. No massive raids/dungeons, etc. And a contemporary setting. With vampires. And…
May 19th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
The PC market is less lucrative? Hum, that doesn’t sound OS right. There’s an entire ecosystem in the PC that makes it much more lucrative and appealing than the Xbox.
And games ensure another foothold in OS preference. I much rather have Linux - but then I would be very limited. So I stick with Windows.
I don’t see Microsoft in a big hurry to make that transition. Some games definately sell PC’s, and more importantly, sell OS’s…
That’s why you see Sony betting on MMO’s and Microsoft, for better of worse, sticking their guns to Live “Anywhere” and Games For Windows…
May 19th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
What’s that new GTA MMO thingy I wrote something about a while back? That’s PC/360/PS3.
The Agency or something? Free to play, decent looking graffs, you know the one. What is it?!
May 19th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Crime-craft, that’s the fella! http://www.videogaming247.com/2008/04/14/vogster-announces-gta-style-free-to-play-mmo-crimecraft-for-pc-and-consoles/
May 19th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The RTW’s thing’s APB.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Ah, yes
May 19th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
“The PC market is less lucrative? Hum, that doesn’t sound OS right. There’s an entire ecosystem in the PC that makes it much more lucrative and appealing than the Xbox.”
I suppose you could be right…
But I think that it depends on how realistic MS are with the PC market.
They could say; ‘in order to play our PC games, people need to buy a £199 copy of Windows Vista, so we’ll focus on that.’
Or they could say; ‘the vast majority of people who want to play our PC games will get a cracked copy of Vista, and just download the game for free. It’s a better idea to force these guys to buy a £199 piece of hardware in addition to their home PC, that we can continually update with firmware in order to stop them playing cracked games.’
It’s a close one…
May 19th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I knew I was good for something!
May 19th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Hum, not likely. The people who know how to crack, or even bother cracking their OS’s are not that many. Or should I say, there is a lot of people that aren’t tech-savvy and are willing enough to pay for the OS and the original copy (Crysis was as much a victim of piracy as a victim of prohibitive system specs).
The hardcore pirates are not that many, or significative.
But before we delve any further: Nintendo has the best shot? WTF? They can’t get their sh1t straight when it comes to setting up a reliable online environment on their console (Super Smash Bros anyone?), how the hell will they nail an MMO? Only if all the players are in the same room, I guess…