Tag: server

The Changing Face of MMOs

Posted on by Gazimoff

gaz_mountdoom

Sometimes, MMO commentary feels cyclical. Back in 2014, we were musing how Blizzard’s cancellation of Titan signalled an end to the grand MMO genre. Now that Daybreak Games has shoved EverQuest Next out of a similar airlock, the same opinion is doing the rounds (although with a little less doom-mongering this time around). Some existing MMOs are continuing to hold steady, while others (like WildStar) are faltering. Meanwhile, the market feels dominated by semi-persistent quasi-MMOs, and  Eastern imports that have an established record.

This in itself is not surprising. A high-quality MMO with mass-market appeal is incredibly expensive to produce today, with budgets typically breaking $100 million. They’re also incredibly time-consuming to produce, often taking seven years or more. It’s no wonder these games look dated when they finally launch, considering the age of some of the technology.

On top of that, MMO genre veterans are some of the most fickle and divisive fans in existence. We simply can’t decide on what we want. Sandbox or theme park, PvP or PvE, directed or open-ended, instanced or open world. Each possible parameter has its cult of adherents that would willingly put anything that doesn’t measure up to fire and the sword. And woe betide any studio or publisher that slips up, as your transgressions – however minor – will always be brought up.

But here’s the flip-side: MMOs are like a second home to many of us. We sink years into these games, building friendships and lives in these digital realms. When the studio makes a design choice that shatters that world, or a publisher decides to pull the plug, of course you’re going to feel bitter about it. Now repeat that time and again over ten or fifteen years, and it’s no wonder that the genre’s created the personification of cynicism. It gets tiring to put down new roots again and again, and I honestly don’t blame people for wanting the perfect game to do it in.

Brutally, it’s unlikely that we’ll see another grand MMO, at least for now. Bill Murphy has an op-ed over at MMORPG.com, with some great insight into this changing landscape from the developer point-of-view. As Syp points out over at Bio Break, we’re likely in a contracting phase, where publishers avoid investing in the genre. The next wave of MMOs is likely to be from small, independent studios that focus on a particular niche aspect – titles like Crowfall (disclaimer: I backed the Kickstarter), Camelot Unchained and so on. Ardwulf makes a point on this – the advent of Unity 5 is helping studios to do the heavy lifting on the engine front, allowing them to focus on mechanics, systems and settings. The same is true of the Unreal Engine, powering small shooters and survival sandboxes alike. Where the infamous Hero Engine failed, others are picking up the slack.

So, where next? As Syl at MMO Gypsy put it, MMOs are here to stay, although the form that they take might well be different. They’ll certainly be smaller in size and scope, requiring less investment, fewer people and a shorter time to build – much like how EVE Online and Runescape started some fifteen years ago. The kind of games that start out small, but could grow to build a legacy.

I also think that battlegrounds and arenas will vanish as an aspect of MMOs. Over the next year we’ve got Gigantic, Battleborn, Paragon, and Overwatch, all fighting it out to become the next big competitive brawler. With all these offering to scratch a similar itch, is it worth trying to build that inside of an MMO, complete with all the inherent arguments about balance, seasons, and gear issues?

Radically, I think that the future may involve the player taking more control than ever before. Much as we used to run Quake servers in days gone by, and Minecraft servers more recently, I think we’ll start to see MMOs adopt some form of roll-your-own server. Don’t like the rules set in Ark: Survival Evolved? Rent one for a few dollars, and choose your own. It’s not that far-fetched to see this evolve into a hub-and-spoke model, using a central area to congregate with other players, and your own back yard to mess around with as you want.

So there you have it. The future of MMO gaming: tightly controlled and regulated PvP arenas on the one hand; quasi-MMOs that build persistent online experiences to established game types on the other; and fragmented, diverse, small-scale and experimental online experiences in the third, gripping hand. Nothing grand for a good ten years, unless it rises up from the small stuff organically. And huge community involvement, from building your own pocket dimensions, to designing new costumes, weapons, and more besides.

Cynical? Pah. I’m too old to be cynical.

 

The Growing Yet Shrinking World

Posted on by Gazimoff

One of the signs a game is on the decline is when servers are switched off. It doesn’t matter if they’re called realms, shards or any one of a number of different descriptions – mergers and closures are a sure-fire sign that a MMO’s playerbase is shrinking.

No game is immune to the effects of a variable playerbase. Subscriber numbers can fluctuate dramatically from when a game is launched to when it’s finally mothballed. The reasons for mergers can vary: a server with only a handful of players on it can feel empty and desolate, while an under-utilised server may be closed to reduce costs. They’re a staple part of every MMO game’s lifecycle once the post-launch rush has died down and the number of people logging in starts to dwindle.

So how has Warcraft managed to survive without a single server merger since launch while every other game since has been forced to go through it? What makes this game so unique? Arguably it’s the most successful, but that doesn’t make it immune to the changing habits of fickle consumers.

The mysterious thing is servers have merged. Just not in the way you’d normally expect.

Out With The Old

If we timewarp back to early 2005, Warcraft was a very different landscape. We had no dungeon finder, no cross-realm dungeons or battlegrounds. Each realm was its own isolated world, unconnected to any others in its battlegroup. This doesn’t mean that our little realm was a single computer running all by itself – by contrast, there were a whole collection of servers powering our experience.

While there was a Realm Server and database to house all our characters, hold all the Auctionhouse data and manage all the chat channels, there’s also a whole bunch of other boxes as well. The ones we’ve all experienced are the continent servers – these track our movements as well as the monsters and NPCs, govern the loot that we gain and a host of other things. There were times when a continent and everyone on it would vanish into the ocean – that’s when this little box fell over. If you remember early Burning Crusade you’ll remember how many times Outland used to disappear completely.

Of course, the diagram above is heavily simplified, but you get the idea. There’s much more going on behind the scenes. Unless you’re a networking fanatic though, that level of detail would probably bore you to tears.

In With the New

This is all well and good, but how have things changed? And how has it allowed Blizzard to reduce their number of servers? The trick lies in new features that have proven to be incredibly popular.

When cross-realm battlegrounds were introduced they were a godsend. Players were quickly and easily able to find others to fight against, meaning that it didn’t matter if your server had low population as long as your battlegroup had enough players. Arenas were an extension of this, matching groups of players across servers in order to do battle.

The new Looking-For-Dungeon tool moves even further in this direction. Instead of waiting around in a city to try and form a group, players are collected together from across the battlegroup and formed into automatically balanced groups. There are a few hiccups but by and large the system works.

What does this mean? Well, firstly there’s the practical aspects – for almost everything that relies on other people there’s the option of cross-server play.This provides the illusion of a server being busier than it actually is – if you’re able to carry out basic PvP and PvE experiences, you’ll be relatively content with the game.

It also benefits from a technical point of view. By moving the instance and battleground servers into their own discrete clusters, Blizzard can get away with having fewer servers and just balancing the load between them. It’s a clever design – not only do you deliver in-game benefits, but you reduce your server footprint as well.

Virtual Shrink-Rays

Once Cataclysm launches and dies down it’s likely that Blizzard will look for further experience improvements rather than merge servers. There are a couple of obvious things that they could do almost immediately, and I’m almost certain they’re considering them:

  • Cross-realm Raids – tired of getting groups for the weekly raid or the loot piñata? Chances are that some time in the future we’ll be able to queue for a 10-man in the same way we do 5-mans now.
  • Battlegroup Auction houses – I often hear about how this realm or that one has a terrible economy because of it’s low population. By opening the markets up, prices should normalise and people shouldn’t feel the need to transfer just to get reasonable prices.
  • Virtual Northrend and Outland – instead of running continents on two separate servers, place them on the same physical box but as virtual entities. It’s commonly done and would be a way to make low-population continents more efficient to support.

It means that the only thing left untouched is the questing and levelling experience. While refer-a-friend will help pull people together, it’s not necessary in order to quest. There’s the odd group quest thrown in here and there, but they’re mostly inside instances these days. The elite creature wandering outside is now more of an oddity than a regular occurrence.

I think that Blizzard understands how much we attach to our server identity, and how hard we work to find a good home for our characters. As a result of their efforts to improve the ways in which we can play together, they’ve managed to hold off carrying out server mergers for much longer than most.

One day it’s inevitable. Realms will merge, servers will get powered down. For now though, their work seems to be holding that threat at bay.