After publishing I realized I focused mostly on core and social systems that would be needed in a Next Generation MMO.

While I would say that these 3 features are not necessarily going to make a game a Next Gen MMO they definitely can make or break ones experience with a game.  So in this way they are very important and if not really fleshed out for release they should be near the top of the list for the first few bug and content patches.

 Gear - Modifiable all the way!

This does not mean that all gear in the game needs to be modifiable in some way.  There just needs to be modular gear for most if not all levels.  This would allow a player to get a piece of gear for one item slot and update it as they level and not having to replace it every couple of levels for better stats.

3 games at the moment come to mind with something like this.

The most limited one is WoW, with jewel crafting sockets.  Some gear like this starts to become available once you hit level 60+ content since jewel crafting was first introduced with The Burning Crusade expansion that ran levels 60-70.

The second most limited is EVE-Online, actually that is how the entire games plays.  You either upgrade ships which are new complete sets of gear so to speak and then mod it out with different modules.  The modules each confer some sort of bonus which is then modified by the character’s trained skill and then there can also be a ship based bonus to 1 or more parameters.  With the exception of Strategic Cruisers there is no way to really customize your look or design in the game.  Then again that does not really matter since the point of the game usually seems to be who can kill who first.

Now there is ToR and it has at this time the best system for this that I have seen yet.  I really like just getting “orange” gear while leveling for my characters and their companions so I don’t have to do the hunt for the next piece of gear every other level to keep my stats near the content difficulty curve.

As a bonus you don’t look like a clown most of the time.

Crafting – Let me play the game not stand around waving my hands.

This topic and the next one Market Systems are some of the topics that I am the most vocal about in almost all games I play.  I like to make things.  I always have and always will even if the system is a major pain in the ass I will at least kick the tires on the system before deciding whether it is an activity I actually want to to do in the game or ignore.  Honestly the games with the better crafting systems end up being the games I play more often.  I know I am not a typical hardcore MMO gamer in this facet but it is definitely a facet of the MMO universe that Casual players end up participating in more.  Usually because this is one of the few systems they can actually get some sort of progression out of.  Well in most games except WoW.

I am completely disgusted with the crafting system in WoW and have been for a while now actually.  I have new hopes each patch/expansion and they are quickly crushed under the piss poor design of what materials are required and how to acquire them.  I am looking at Chaos Orbs and Dream Cloth at the moment, Titansteel while annoying at least was available.  This point of contention feeds into the next topic but as it relates to crafting.  All crafting materials need to be BoE or tradable/marketable.

Additionally Crafting materials should not usually be acquired through raiding, and if they are available in raids then all levels of raiding should have access to them no matter what iLevel the pattern is.  I am specifically referring to LFR for this part.  I have been annoyed by the raid drop only pattern and crafting material since Burning Crusade when I really started to get into the nuts and bolts of MMOs.  I started playing WoW about 8 months before tBC launched and started playing MMOs in general a few months before that with EVE-Online.

Now EVE-Online’s crafting and market system are at least an order of magnitude if not more complicated than WoW’s Crafting system.  However there is one majorly important difference between them.  In even I set up one or more production queues limited by a few character skills and I set the order and forget about it until I get a notification that my production run is done.  This is done in “real time” so simple stuff takes seconds – minutes and capital ships take Days-Weeks to complete one run.  However in the mean time you can be playing the game while your queue is processed.  I like this set and forget style many times more than the EQ, WoW, LotRO, Rift, every other EQ/WoW clone in existence style of stand around have the character wave their hands and boom 10-120 seconds later Item is done.

ToR has a system in the middle between WoW and EVE.  Your companions/crew does all of your crafting and gathering for you so once you get more than one companion you can always have them working in the background while your character and your OT/OH/DPS companion is out helping you.  This system more than almost any other thing in ToR is what has kept me playing it to the exclusion of almost all other games at the moment.

In this area I think the initial crafting system that ToR uses is similar to what should be the starting point for a crafting system in the next generation of MMOs.  It allows you to gather materials actively in the game environment or passively by sending dormant crew members out to gather for a predetermined amount of in-game currency.  The crafting process is passive in the background so you can continue to play with out “hearthing” back to town to stand in front of a forge or what ever special crafting place you need.

Market Systems – They are a game unto themselves make the user interface reflect that.

I will be brief and blunt about this.  Every MMO I have played with the exception of 1 has a really shitty in game market system with the default interface.  The only reason Warcraft’s AH is usable is by using one of 2 add ons,  Auctioneer or Auctionator.  I have not played Rift since add ons were added to the game so can’t speak of any auction based add ons there.

I like how Auctionator shows listings of the same price, the ultimate auction interface would be a mix of the 2 add ons.  The only default Market interface that I like that is not a user created addon is the market interface for EVE-Online.  CCP has made many mistakes IMO on many topics, most to support a philosophy of game play that I do not really enjoy.  It is one of the reason that I am only going to support my game time by buying PLEX in their market to burn through the 3-4B isk I still have in game.

For the starting place on the market system for a next-gen MMO it will need to have features similar to either EVE’s set up or one of the 2 auction add ons for WoW.  Other market/resource systems really will need an entire post of their own to do the topic justice.

I wanted to get this follow up to my earlier post so I could clear my plate so to speak before moving on to some other topics and these topics in greater detail.

This is going to be a pie in the sky post where I will list the features and or systems that in my opinion will need to be present in an MMO at release to be considered a MMO of the next generation.  There is the potential for a current generation MMO to transition into a Next-Gen MMO through patching but then that MMO will be a transitory MMO present and part of both generations rather than being of only either generation.

Servers?  What are Servers?

After writing the title and thinking about how to say it I realized that there will still need to be a few “meta” servers/settings but not as we see them to day, i.e. no Elune, Farstriders, Sentinels, ect….  The servers of TNG will be PVP, PVE, RP-PVE, RP-PVP with language specifications of the standard form of communication between players.

To my knowledge at the moment there is only one MMO that really does something like this now and it is EVE-Online.  However due to the steep learning curve and other in game factors EVE has not really become mainstream.  Griefing Bottom feeder behavior being the normally accepted method of play there is the main one.

Player Based Rewards

To borrow a bit from the matrix here is a modified quote.  I grabbed the quote from IMDB before modification.

Spoon boy: Do not try and reward the Character. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no Character.
Neo: There is no Character?
Spoon boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the Character that is rewarded, it is only the Player.

This is extremely important when a company owns more than one online game or a game that encourages multiple accounts do to some in-game limit or restriction.  I shake my fist in anger at Turbine on this one especially as Turbine points for LotRO is different from Turbine points for DDO.  Turbine get your shit in order and converge your systems.

Several games sets are already set up in a way that will eventually allow for this type of reward system.

• Battle.Net 2.0
• Sony Station
• EA Origin
• Steam
• XBox Live
• Play Station Network

I am sure there are a few others but these are the ones that quickly come to mind.  The more options, rewards and setting that are set at the meta-account level and not the individual game level the longer and more likely companies will keep some form of subscription revenue for their projects, this is doubly so if you have cross game rewards or rewards earned for current and other games at the same time.  We are already very familiar with this type of set-up for the collector’s editions of Blizzard products having something for each of the games currently on Battle.Net at time of launch.

KISS Logistics

As in Keep It Simple Stupid Logistics.  This is a vague need but is critical in current and future games, it is how easy to use and powerful are the tools built into the game to ease working together.  The bare minimum of yes we can have groups, raids and guilds is not enough anymore.  Rift’s dynamic open world group/raid system was a step in the right direction but was sometime a real pain in the ass (PITA).  As hot as the flames in the flame ware about the Looking For Group and Looking For Raid systems in World of Warcraft are those are 2 very powerful and useful systems to have available to a games player base.   Most WoW players in some ways rightfully decry how horrible it has made the community, because it allows for PA Internet Fuckwad Theory which is correct for the most part.  However this is the one advantage of the One or Few Worlds and Infinite Shards setup mentioned in the first requirement.

The Looking for Guild System in WoW was also a nice addition to the game and not spamming General/Trade/LF (Guild/Group) channels.  It is a system much like how EVE-Online works for Corporation Recruitment the equivalent of Guilds in most games.  However it is a single search system where the player looks for a guild and applies.  This really needs to be expanded to be bi-directional search especially after the Gamer Tag System is implemented, this then allows both the player and guild to post their interest in being recruited or applied to.  Then officers in the guild can search to see who is looking for a new guild and see who has time availability that matches the guild so they can recruit from both in server and cross server.  This actually leads into another big requirement for a true Next Generation MMO.

Player-centric Organization

Essentially what this means is that groups, guilds, any other organization in-game is made of players and not characters.  This also means that the player can belong to many guilds, yes this is technically true today because the guild structure is tied to the character but that is so EQ-esque.  This would allow the player to be in multiple guilds and see chat of each at the same time, just a new channel per guild.  Yes /g will not be as simple anymore but then those can be preferences per chat window if need be.  There will need to be iteration on this of course but it is something needed in future games.

Grouping Graph

This could be as simple as EVE-Online’s current Alliance/Corporation setup which is a tree or something completely new that allows guilds or other player organizations to map out their relationships with one another and allow for dynamic shared/combined guild chat channels.  You could then have the same large group of players that have their characters organized by what they want to do with them,  PVE, RP, PVP but still communicate no matter what Toon/World/Shard they are on.   The more tools to simply bring people together the better, just as long as it is not forced and can be opted into not out of.

Well this is a good start, I will go into more detail on each of these in future posts.  I wanted to get the general concepts out there first before getting deep in to examples and or ways some of these could be incorporated into existing games that I am familiar with.