Ekim's Gamer View: Strength in Numbers

Michel "Ekim" Veilleux
2003-03-21

I came upon some news this week that kind of shocked me (not really in a good way). Actually it seemed to shock more than just little old me. I hate to single out a name when talking negatively, but in this case I just have to speak out. Maybe the developers will come to their senses before it's too late… then again maybe not. Let's talk about the newly announced MMORPG : Wish.

First mistake

Oh, sorry. According to Wish's FAQ, I should call Wish an UMMORPG (Short * ahem * for Ultra Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Again according to the game's FAQ on their web site, this is what makes Wish so special. In essence, the term "Ultra" stands for supporting "tens of thousands" of players on a single server instead of segmenting them into smaller clusters of communities scattered among many servers. A few weeks ago I spoke of segmenting the MMORPG genre further to allow different types of sub-genre. But this is no such thing.

The first three FAQ questions go to great lengths define and sell this "new category" they claim to have created, which is strange to say the least. Is this really what they hope to sell the game with? Will the single most convincing feature of Wish be the fact that I can play with tens of thousands of players on the same server?

Too "Ultra" big?

First, Wish will not be the first game to try and put tens of thousands of players together on a single server. If I may, I'll direct Wish's developer's (Mutable Realms) attention to a little faithful game called Anarchy Online. When it came out and went live, AO only had one server. According to Funcom at the time, the servers could house 30,000 players all at once. Despite AO's technical failures, the problem isn't really whether today's available technology can take tens of thousands of players on a single server or not. The fact remains that even at launch AO's population never really soared enough to warrant a 30K players server.

Which brings me to the second point. With what happened to a high profile MMORPGs like AC2 or Earth & Beyond, I think it should be more than obvious to anyone that it would be a mistake to even hope such high numbers for a game coming from a little known developer. In the present time, MMORPGs are facing a problem far more threatening than the number of players that can play on a single server. In fact, the problem IS the number of potential players. The genre needs new ideas, not new numbers. Putting more people on one server is nothing new.

Finally, why would we even need to be this many in one place? So we can ignore more people? I fail to see the need, but then again maybe it's just me. In all my time with DAoC, where you have a maximum of "only" 1000 players per realm at any given time, I can tell you that it always seemed pretty crowded to me. Yes, perhaps this was because of the smaller landmass available, but everything is relative to the number of players. Which means that's Wish's landmass sure needs to be "Ultra" Huge to support the "Ultra" high numbers they want to attract.

The more the merrier

Then again with even ten thousand people on one server, how many friends would one have? How many enemies? I remember reading something interesting about how some lonely people tend to be even lonelier in large crowds. Could it be that the more people you add to the mix, the less likely we are of finding good people to play with? It certainly could turn out that way. The scale of online RPGs go from the small groups of NWN players up to the large scale skirmishes of DAoC, and I really don't believe that there is a need for anything much higher… Not yet at any rate.

If Wish's single defining feature is the number of players that can play together, then I urge the developer to reconsider their strategy, or else - and this goes for any MMORPG currently in development - they might have a hard time finding enough players to fill the void that will be their world. There are already too many games in development that are like this to hope for any of them to succeed based only on the number of players they might allow online together.

This might seem harsh, but I'm trying to be constructive. If Wish has some other elements worth mentioning, please do so and please put the "Ultra" peg to the waste basket. It could be a nice little feature down the road IF the game is successful, but in the mean time it should not be the game's major selling point. Please show us what your game really has in its heart. Give us something really special and unique, something new. Putti