- There is no need for a server infrastructure. The game can run fully locally. The dev don’t have to set up any network, can simply distribute and patch his game on Steam.
- There is no need for hacking or RMT security and GMs to restore damage done by hackers or account thieves. Cheats and known hacks can be ignored, since the hacker of a single player game can only hack his own game on his own computer and no one has to care for that.
- There is no need to manage toxicity and trolling. Every (non-family) multiplayer have annoying players. The devs have to set up filters and employ GMs who handle tickets in an MMO, while this cannot exist in a game where you are the only player or play with your family.
- The game can have difficulty settings deciding how hard it is for the player to progress the story (even set to zero, just watch the story). The player can skip hard encounters without problems to others.
- The game World can change by the actions of the player without affecting (non-family) players. In MMOs the World is the same for everyone, so if you kill a mob or build a structure, it’s dead/built for everyone, affecting their story or forcing them to play make-believe (it was 9 years ago, and the Keristrassa-nonsense is a still living memory). Alternatively they can phase or instance the players to prevent them meeting with other players who are at different parts of the story, kind of defeating the point of the MMO.
- The game can have puzzle elements: tasks that are simple to perform, but hard to figure out. Sure, some players will choose to spoil their fun by looking up spoilers, but it’s their problem. In a multi-player game, teammates force players to look up strategies and exclude players who come “unprepared”.
Most of the above problems (except the last) are generic MMO problems, not related to being story-MMOs. But Story-single player games doesn’t have them and they have the story. So the very same story content could be released for much less production and near-zero upkeep cost as a single player game. A solo-SWTOR could be created from 10-20% of the money spent on developing and maintaining SWTOR while providing the same or better single-player, story experience.
Only two kinds of games have enough added value over a single player to warrant the extreme cost extra of making a massively multiplayer online game:
- Massive PvP where the actual content is trying to beat other players, for example EVE Online, PUBG or Overwatch (the last two are MMO, just not MMORPG)
- Massive cooperative games where players do stuff together, like WoW raiding
The above doesn’t mean that an MMORPG can’t have story-quests as filler. But such content can’t be the selling point. If you are saying “play MMO X instead of WoW because it has a better story”, you are wrong and should be saying “play single player game X when not raiding in WoW”. That would make both X and WoW more profitable than trying to make MMO X.
I have to wonder after reading this post if you simply didn’t remove the “massive” part of the MMORPG moniker and wound up describing an MORPG. Friends and family would never make any game Massive and would relegate it to a locally served game with maybe 12-24 players at most. With no server infrastructure your game experience would rely on the upstream capability of the host and would severely limit the amount of data that players could share between each other.
@Gevlon
What’s your opinion on game developers who design their games so they can be modded? One look at how successful a game like Skyrim has become, simply because of the amazing mod community that exists around it, says that it is possible to maintain a healthy revenue stream over a long period of time without the need for microtransactions or other questionable revenue schemes. It cost 85 million to develop Skyrim, yet to date it has seen 1.4 Billion in total revenue over its lifespan. Imagine an MMORPG that allowed players to mod the game in such a way.
LikeLike
@Mank: I wouldn’t call moddable games “games” at all, rather “game engines” which are then used by the developers of the “real games”, the mods themselves.
Ergo, when someone played the Defense of Ancients map on Warcraft 3, he was playing DotA and not W3, W3 was just an underlying engine.
LikeLike
I agree with you completely.
WoW, as an experiment, as a “Take the ideas we’ve seen before, fix what we think are dead end dogmas, and add our own ideas.” has been a huge success, but that cycle is done. It’s all downhill for the MMORPG genre as a “Game for everyone.” from here on out.
That said, you are making a sizeable error: It’s not massively more overhead for a game to be client-server instead of just client. Sure, it’s easier to be just client… but if your design removes all the abusable parts… player controlled economy (Note: I did NOT say “player driven economy.” You can have an economy that is responsive to player actions, but not controlled by them.) Asymmetric World PvP, and… of course, the “player driven economy” side shows, botting and RMT. Of course, you need to have increased presence in the competitive parts like PvP and cooperative raiding, but that’s where you charge the subs.
What the MMO part brings is a more dynamic backdrop to the game, a larger world that you can see, but aren’t really affected by if you don’t want to be. This is highly desired by players. The world is still “there” when you are logged out, and you can use that even in an essentially single player game. For example, whenever I log into Subnautica, I immediately check the Bioreactor to make sure it has enough Gel Sacks loaded up into it (Potatoes are so passe… Once you go Gel Sack, you don’t go back!) Even as I’m doing it, I think “It will have exactly as many as it had when I stopped the game… No need to check.” But I do it anyway. The single player world just feels sterile.
LikeLike
@Smokeman: even if server isn’t that expensive, it’s vulnerable to troublemakers, while a solo client is not.
The “World is sterile” can be fixed in single player: when you start the game, it quickly calculates what happened while you are away and your reactors are empty if you were away for long. Many idle games have “offline progression”
LikeLike
This absolutely resonates with me. I’ve been bouncing around MMOs largely because the multiplayer experience in most now revolves around me playing solo in a sea of players or grinding raids. MMORPGs have the capacity for emergent storytelling and player interaction that no other genre can compare with. And what to do they do with that capacity? Turn them into single player games.
@Mank – PvP you would still want the massive element. PvE, yeah you could just do a less massive MORPG. There are fun events you could involve larger than raid numbers though. Activities like public quests and world bosses. They still need to be done better, but Guild Wars 2 is a reasonable example of this in action.
LikeLike
@Smokeman: even if server isn’t that expensive, it’s vulnerable to troublemakers, while a solo client is not.
Oh true! If ALL you wanted to make was a single player story game. I was thinking along the lines of a variant of F2P, where the story part of the game is the free part, and the players converted to the raiding or PvP side would already be familiar with the system and ready to pay the sub. Essentially, the story game is marketing. The raiding game and the PvP game would be separate games… you don’t HAVE to do the story one first. But they would have the same look and feel, and be part of a “franchise.”
LikeLike
Im a bit of fan of Idle games, games where is little interaction and alot of automation. They tell a story. As a single player game, its very good for story telling. All the years, there is only one idle game what has mild success on making game a massively multiplayer(http://bart.vanhauwaert.org/less/) but many others have failed. Reasons are mostly the same as MMORPG-s. If game is competive, then what skill you compete? Being idle has very little interactions over time, its a very hard to measure skill. MMORPG-s are slowly transformed a idle game, where just logging in and doing daily click is enough to progress. And they have very same problem, how to measure idling skill.
Ok, lets have a simple skill as example, lets say simple clicks. Someone played whole year the game and accumulated alot of game clicks, newcomer comes and is year worth of clicks behind. Its easy to see, that there is no chance for latecomers to get even with top. There must be some kind of reset mechanic, what allows to even everyone out. Seasons, matchups, timed instances. Something what allows players to be on exactly equal. Eve is a good example where the even ground is lost, players who have the resources hold the resource production and newcomers have little(well, gevlon make a influence there) or no ways to compete with them. Even, they have the power to influence the gameplay with devs to make game even better for them.
There are ways to make idle game a massive multiplayer. Remove competition. If everyone works on same goal without competing with eachother, then it can be massively multiplayer. From a perspective of a story telling, its a lot less interesting game. Minecraft is a good example, that it can be done.
LikeLike