Where’s the Great PvP MMORPG?
Where is the great Player-versus-Player MMORPG? It doesn’t exist… yet. There have been a few attempts at integrating PvP into a massively multiplayer game from the ground-up, and it hasn’t quite worked out just yet, at least not for an avatar-based fantasy or sci-fi game. No true PvP game has gone mainstream since MMOs hit the big time.
Does that mean players are not interested in PvP? Does that mean people who are interested in PvP prefer the quick-fix games like Counter-Strike (though I might argue that I’ve never had a quick fix of that one) to get their jollies?
Can PvP be integrated into the core of an MMO alongside all of the standard wonders in such games–quests, NPCs, an actual story? I think it can be, but it’s quite a risk to take.
There are a few games with at least some emphasis on PvP in the pipe. There’s Age of Conan around the corner and Warhammer Online a bit further off. But neither is a full PvP game. Is there no hope for those of us who fell in love with old school Ultima Online?
There’s one MMO that I know of that seems pretty legit and is trying to capture the player-controlled PvP world feeling: Darkfall. I’m really hoping they execute well and the game rocks, because I’ll be haunting the forests as an ebil (not quite evil, but definitely not friendly) avatar if it does. I got a little excited about this game after reading a post on the Lord’s of Death site.
Back to the risks. The inclination is to make a great traditional MMO, then take it further with lots of PvP options. You include the character advancement, the quests, the towns, the item progression, and all the great things you love in every other MMO.
Then you need to add open PvP, player faction systems, sieges, mounted combat, naval battles, and any other wonderful thing you can dream up that players will love to do.
Unfortunately, making a AAA massively multiplayer game is hard. It’s REALLY hard. Trying to make a AAA traditional PvE MMO then integrating PvP into its core is even harder. And more expensive.
It’s not okay to include all of the traditional elements of a World of Warcraft or EverQuest style MMO, then leave those features less polished because the focus of the game is PvP. If the features are in the game, they have to be polished.
Instead, it would be better to simplify every non-PvP system as much as possible so you can focus on PvP. Don’t make the game item-centric, don’t include raid progression, don’t riddle the world with thousands of quests, don’t make a hundred complex and deep zones. You don’t need them!
(Note: Yeah, an amazing traditional MMO with PvP at its core could be friggin’ awesome, you just don’t need all that other stuff, and it’s very time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to do either of them well, so trying to marry the two would be even more challenging).
What’s a PvP MMO all about? I’d argue that Player-versus-Player MMOs are more about social interaction than any traditional PvE MMO. It’s about status and power. It’s about making allies and keeping your enemies in check–keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. It’s about territorial control and influence. It’s about… social interactions.
So, it’s important to allow for those social interactions to occur. The systems you should focus on to make a great PvP MMO are those social systems in addition to direct PvP gameplay (combat, sieges, etc.). Guilds, player towns, player factions, realistic consequences for player actions, and giving players influence within the world to name a few.
The point is, for any game you have to stick to your guns. Focus on the most relevant features that make for an amazing Player-versus-Player experience and simplify everything else. And, you have to realize that there may be a smaller audience for such a game and plan accordingly (so don’t spend $50 million making it).
I personally believe that a great PvP MMO can get several hundred thousand subscribers in North America (maybe over a million!), but anything less than a great game is probably going to be niche, if not a complete bomb. I can’t wait for the great PvP MMORPG to come out, or to go ahead and make the thing myself if nobody else does it right.
Are there any truly great player-versus-player massively multiplayer online games out there that you know of? Any others coming soon that some of us may want to know about? I’m all ears, and I’m willing to try just about any game.
The ones who tries to get away with making the PvP centric mmorpg appears to fail. The symptoms as to how these failures surface seem to be somewhat different from game to game, but I think there is an inherit flaw in the reasoning behind focusing too much on the PvP systems. This flaw maybe can be summed up into three major aspects of brokenness.
1 - The Mastery Problem becomes too powerful.
2 - Bottomfeeding becomes too useful.
3 - The motivational structure for participating in general takes damage over time from 1 and 2.
The one that seems to elude peoples arguments is number 3 in this list. For example back in good old Ultima Online we could go adventuring in relative safety in some of the dungeons, in the world where PvP was part of daily gaming you were a hero who could defeat almost any PKer in a fair fight. The problem there is that your illussion shatters randomly when some other player figures out how to get the upper hand and exploits the advantage.
Random illussion shattering is in general a bad thing. The average player will take that hit a certain number of times before quitting.
So now comes the new design challenge, to make game systems which are illussion-shatter-proof. Several successful developers have been to make the basic game free from PvP, then add some PvP enabled content which is voluntary. And now you are back where you started.
The way I would try to get PvP done right is by enabling a whole series of game systems which basically enables players to join a war effort, kindof like enlisting in an army. Players are generally neutral, but the side of the conflict which is in need of more troops will pay better its soldiers better. Once part of the army the soldiers would need to fight over objectives which never become the property of the players, but which enables the soldiers to gain rank and “quest rewards” from within the army organisation.
But this goes back to the matter where a world without civilians the value of rank in an army isnt worth more than kills are worth in Counter Strike. So you have to give the civilians their own content, and that will be rather similar to World of Warcraft.
A true PVP MMO will not emerge. I think there are two reasons.
1. PVP in an MMO is a niche. Not enough people want to be in a FFA PVP environment to make a traditional subscription based MMO pay.
2. Most people that want FFA PVP want Wolf vs. Sheep play. That’s fine if you are a wolf, not so fun if you are a sheep. In any environment, I’d assert that most people will fall into the sheep category, either by amount of effort, money, or skill they bring to the table. In the long term, where is the fun in being the sheep? No sheep = no fun for the wolves. They move on. Say what you will, PVPer’s aren’t known for long attention spans.
Add to that the fact that the PVP communities that I see are prone to belittlement, name-calling, and griefing, and I don’t see a large enough group of people who want to sign up for that long-term to support it.
Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong (thanks, Dennis Miller).
I know that you’re primarily focusing on the blood and magic MMOs, but EVE is doing a masterful job of making a truely PvP game in every sense of the word. I only play it off and on, but I’m always amazed by the level of social complexity in their world. I suppose it doesn’t have traditional walk-around avatars, levels, and raid content, but it has much more interesting PvP related intrigue and politics. In fact, I think the true test of a successfull PvP MMO could be whether you find it interesting to read the in-game news. That is to say, whether the player created storylines are able to be rich and compelling beyond the usual PvP server e-peen forum wars.
I agree with Genda.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. EVE Online has the single best model for PvP that I think you can have.
Social complexity, (walk-around coming soon™…) roles that even new players can play, and serious implications in the bigger world.
You couldn’t ask for more.
You guys kind of prove my point #1. I love EVE, myself. I don’t play EVE just because of the time commitment. But if EVE is the best example of a well-executed PVP game, it’s easy to see that as a niche. Their subscriptions are about 2-3% of what World of Warcraft’s is. That’s less than the churn rate of WoW, if you believe the reports that they turn about 5% of their subs a month.
I think you need to look at EVE as a success, because it is. It’s just a successful niche in the big picture though.
I want to know where the great PvE MMO is. Not a PvP fan at all.
I agree that wolf and sheep PvP can’t exist anymore. From one of my other posts:
But, I think I have solutions that can make a full PvP world possible, just not in the completely imbalanced sense that old school UO was. It’s absolutely possible to make a great PvP game, it’s just difficult, expensive, and risky.
Re: EVE Online
It’s a very good PvP game. It’s also a completely different feeling than an avatar-based MMO. Yeah, the ship’s basically an avatar, but I’m talking about adventuring on the ground vs. in space. I’ve played it a few times now, and I always give up because I don’t have the time to commit to it, and it always bothers me that I can’t really catch up to people because I haven’t paid for my subscription for as long as them (takes 2-3 months to even get anywhere in the game, by which time I burn out because it’s not fun yet).
Well, I’m glad the Darkfall post only got you a little excited. It is still a lot of big talk and no beta in sight at this point, seven years after it was announced. Their site says the game will allow anything short of live child birth, so I am not surprised they are never there yet because they are probably bogged down in a completely over ambitious feature set.
Every time I visit their site, my first thought is, “No! Simplify! Get a good core game out, then worry about sea battles and all the extras!” That is the dev post I want to see from them. Something about shedding the extras for later and getting a good, clean, if somewhat simple, version of the game finished and released. One sure path to failure in a project, in my experience, is the insistence that every feature be available in the 1.0 version.
On EVE, which I knew had to make the comments, the EVE mafia being all seeing and all knowing, I’ve actually been back for my second run at the game for a year now. I have found that I could come up with short term goals for the game that were fulfilling enough that I did not mind the big time frame for getting to my ultimate goal. But, it is also a game where you can spend a lot of time planning things in a spreadsheet, which I enjoy as well.
EVE Online is a great PvP game… its just so boring…
Right now I’m looking toward Battlefield Heroes to take First Person Shooters to the next step (where Planetside and Tabula Rasa failed). An FPS game where the rounds you play on maps affect the overall balance of power which is tracked on the website. I know not everyone likes twitch play, but I think PvP games are better suited for it than the current spate of MMOs. FPS Twitch play and turn based play (card games) are the two extremes that I feel work best in PvP, current MMOs live somewhere in the middle where you can run around like a twitch game but your abilities are mostly turn/timer based… its just never felt right to me.
EVE Online was only able to accomplish what it did because it didn’t focus on player avatars. Its PVP requires a massive game world (over 5000 systems in the galaxy), and the assets will never be there to build a traditional walking-on-dirt MMO on that scale. The price of depth of gameplay will be “teh shiney” for a long time to come, and is the reason I have difficulty wrapping my head around Darkfall’s aforementioned feature list.
I concur with the mob who says EVE is the best PvP MMO out there. Not only that, but it’s easy to see that its PvP aspect will continue to improve with factional warfare and a return to more intricate political maneuvering after the Great War, pushing the bar ever higher for whatever will come next.
What would the idea behind making a full PvP world possible look like?
I personally believe balanced pvp where players strive towards killing each other is impossible. The only way to get around this impossibility is to make the objectives of the enemies partially orthogonal, which basically means everyone is allowed to win on their own terms.
Anyone currently playing EVE Online? I may give it another shot after my current MafiaMatrix character gets killed since Age of Conan looks like it’ll need to work out a lot of teething issues before I’ll play it.
I’m a huge EVE fan but not currently playing. Ironically I’m not a big PvP fan. I’d truly love an EVE-like universe minus the PvP. It’s probably worthy of a trip to the shrink, but the PvP in EVE I usually run into is stylistically reminiscent of school yard bullies.
I just started Eve a little less than 2 months ago and I’m rather enjoying it. That said — I’m a complete PvE mission runner as of yet. Got in to a battleship on Monday and have been running Level 4 missions since then. Done some mining and protecting friends who were mining from rats, but even though someone came in a couple of times and made like he was gonna steal trying to bait us into attacking him, he didn’t actually do it so I didn’t get to open fire.
I’ve seen some pvp taking place, but mostly just suicide ganks. I’ve not been even to lowsec yet, much less nullsec. got a friend playing who’s got lower SP than I have but he’s in a null-sec corp/alliance so they ferried him down. From what he says though, if he stays in his corp’s soverignty then it’s just like hi-sec. He’s not been part of any pvp gangs yet either.
Another friend who plays has done some pvp as a tackler in an interceptor. Sometimes he and his gang win, sometimes they don’t. Or sometimes they win but he’s destroyed anyway. Fortunately for him it’s all corp provided ships for that, so it’s not too big a deal to him. I think if I were in such a corp I’d probably focus that direction also.
As it is, I’m in a very small hi-sec non-allied corp of IRL friends and former co-workers. And none of them really want to pvp, they just want to fly around nad look at the scenery and make things go boom in missions from time to time. And frankly, I’m about as carebear as that too. PvP I may do later, but not until I have accumulated isk so that I don’t mind losing up to a battleship.
Last I checked on the Eve boards it was estimated that about 75% of Eve’s players are like that also — never leaving hi-sec space, just being miners, traders, and mission runners. And while the other 25% are in low-sec, it’s estimated that half of those are support personnel to the people that actually go out and do all the PvP, so it doesn’t sound like there’s really all that much pvp overall anyway other than a few random soloers in low-sec, the occasional wardec in hi-sec and then roaming gangs here and there in null sec.
The large scale fleet battles that look so nice in the promo vids happen quite rarely. They do happen, but not as often as those who talk them up might make it seem. (My 2 friends I mentioned are in one of the larger alliances and so they know what’s going on in null sec with GS and BoB and such and they’ve not mentioned any fleet events at all).
There’s my 0.02 isk
I tried EVE. I would try it again if CCP paid me.
Well now that Activision is combined with Blizzard maybe a Call of Duty MMO will come out and fulfill all your dreams. In general I like the PvP systems in WoW and I think Warhammer will refine them into something more acceptable to hardcore PvP fans. It’s funny but after playing arenas and battlegrounds in WoW I now refuse to play a MMO that doesn’t have good PvP (sorry LOTR) but I wouldn’t play a game that was purely focused on PvP either.
I like item centric DIKU MMOs that have PvP systems which recognize a gear advantage but also counterbalances it in serious PvP situations like arenas or sieges. WoW has the matching system for arenas (still a bit flawed) and War will have things like increasing guard spawns and levels for the losing side. The gear advantage is necessary in any game with world based PvP I think or else greifing runs wild and will kill your playerbase (UO). I should be able to easily kill 3 griefers that have never done anything in the game but kill low level players. A pure PvP game where items don’t matter is always going to have problems with griefers who have no attachments to their characters and are mostly concerned with making other players miserable.
I would vote that Asheron’s Call was heavily PvP based on Darktide. It was the most fun I had in ages; being able to dodge spells was a great idea. World of Warcraft was always RNG and horribly confined PvP, but I loved the old days of trying to zone into Molten Core or even Naxxramas, only to have a 40 on 40 war–it’s a shame PvP was never truly refined there and was frequently luck based.
Still, you’re right. There is no true PvP game, and most games who have PvP systems need a severe rehash of their system. Or their games are just failures in other departments. Warhammer looks terrible even though it’s PvP focused; after playing the beta and experiencing the awkward controls and engine, I’m not sure it’ll be half as good as I’d hope.
@JC: The thing about EVE, and how much PVP it has, is that different people have different definitions of PVP. If I am cornering a market on a certain good in a corner of the EVE universe, I consider that PVP. I am engaging in a competitive, sometimes realtime, activity against other players, and gaining benefit by inconveniencing them. It absolutely is “PVP” in a literal sense, we just aren’t shooting lasers at each other or hacking each other with swords.
But when you take that view, you then have to conclude that a vast majority of the interaction in EVE is PVP, even in empire space.
To me that is the essence of a “PVP _MMO_”–players are always working with or against each other, even when they aren’t fighting. And no game that I have seen has captured that essence better than EVE. If to someone else “PVP” means personal combat and twitch gameplay, then probably they won’t enjoy EVE at all. But there are games out there to satisfy that urge as well.
Hey try shadowbane
the guild wars are sweet
easy leveling
21 classes
12 races
Good community
and it pretty fun