Lord DarkShayde, MMO is a buzzword. MMO doesn't make a difference when you only ever meet a few players at a time in any given session, and it's all instanced anyways. If your party enters a dungeon and gets it's own private instance, what difference does the MMO part make? You might as well be playing a something like Icewind Dale at a Lan Party.
What difference does it make if there are 64 or 6400 if I never see these guys? They are in other zones, doing other quests, and when I come across them, they are just passing by on the road on their to or from town. They extra players really don't add anything to the experience.
It's like an amusement part. They are just other people waiting in line to ride the repeating quests. The level reqs are just a replacement for the 'you must be THIS tall' signs. ;)
This sums it all up! Seriously i read that and said "Amen brother". Lets be honest.... do i want to interact with all 50000000 people who play world of warcraft? fuck no, most of them are tard nuggets or under the age of 12 and training to be a tard nugget! But I do want to interact with the world and realize that I am part of something bigger. I dont need to have 5000 memorable relationships but I think the current model is certainly limiting. It helps to favor ease of play rather than cooperation and coordination.
The designer will never be able to generate enough content to cope with the population of the game. For example if you are supposed to destroy some computer terminals, but some other people are there and destroyed them first, you are forced sit there until they rematerialized, so you could destroy them again. Bottlenecks.
Phasing dramatically reduces this. You create multiple copies of the same zone based on population. And as we get better with dynamically created content this will be even less of an issue. GW2 and Rift are on the right track IMHO.
I still consider Ultima Online the best MMORPG of all times. Played it many times, with many characters and in different guilds so I can have a varied view of the game.
What made UO the best:
1) You can play alone. You will feel the danger of playing alone, like when robbed by a band of thiefs, but you are not "overwhelmed" like in other mmorpgs where groups kill easily the solitaire players. The solitaire hero, here, can live.
2) Trading system. Impressive, functional, it works, many objects to be created, and USEFUL. All working perfectly and high interaction between the players.
3) Social fun. You play chess with your guild friends, have a virtual beer at the tavern, just spend an hour chatting about useless things or wandering around the town with a girl. ANYWAY, it's social, it works, it's a kind of The Sims inside a Medieval Combat game.
4) Level CAP. you reach maximum stats easily... it's not like EVE online where you have to play for months and months and months and newbies are totally useless. After you reach maximum stats you are not supreme. You have high stats in something and low stats in something else. ANYWAY, you are not HUGE. You can still be killed by newbies and that's the cool part of the game.
The secret to generating a lot of content is to stop trying to make everything kick so much ass. Well designed play can be mixed and matched freely, and content like art and music and levels can actually be slapped together with great effect. Just make sure you use these resources in the way they are built for. Don't loop annoying songs for extended periods. In fact, with music just fish with dynamite. Tons of extremely basic songs, throw out a bunch. Done. Art? Low poly, weak graphics. Lots of reuse. Levels? Make 'em funish, piece by piece. Section not fun? Try something else right there. Again, fish with dynamite. It's really not that hard to make the game look and sound and feel cool if you keep a consistent style. Me? I use procedural generation.
