The King is Back

If there's one game that sits at the heart of Trembling Hand, it's Dan Bunten's M.U.L.E. It's equal parts psychology, strategy, economics, and game theory; it's the quintessential multiplayer game. That the game hasn't been matched in 25 years is inexplicable, but it looks like we'll get to play an official version again soon: Dan's daughter Melanie has secured the rights and is working on some remakes, including an iPhone version. Raph Koster has the skinny.

I implore you to check out the original in the meantime. World of M.U.L.E. seems to be a hub for MULErs, and you can find some strategy tips here. Or just dive into the online version here.

On Betas, Champions and Lifetime offers Lost

You gotta admit, Cryptic have balls. Imagine, not only offering a lifetime subscription to Champions Online where you have to sign on the dotted line before you've even seen the game, but then retracting the offer before the listed end date.

Add to that their 'open' beta, which wasn't technically open at all - thus inspiring perplexing headlines such as "Open beta fully opens for Champions Online".

As Dave mentioned to me, it's like Cryptic occupy some kind of strange Bizzaro world of their own. Oddly appropriate, methinks.

Update: And they're back! So Cryptic have common sense when it comes to PR too!

Open Beta, My Arse

I honestly don't know what irritates me more:

• That open betas are now more of a marketing tool than an actual beta test;
  
  
• That Cryptic can have the nerve to call this an 'open beta', when it's restricted to subscribers to that shockingly redundant relic of the 1990s internet, FilePlanet;
  
  
• That this means one has to pay to ostensibly test a game or;
  
  
• That much of the gaming press just lap it all up*.

Seriously, folks. We need to start demanding more - of developers, publishers and the gaming press. We need open betas to be actually open and actually betas. If an MMO wants to run a free trial, call it such. If they want to charge gullible folk for engaging in their beta testing, let them state that up front - and not call it 'open'.

And we need the gaming press to exercise a little due dilligence from time to time and actually call things as they are, not as the press release calls it.

*Credit where credit's due. BluesNews, ever the gaming news hound, got it right. And, as much as it shocks me to say, so did GameSpy - even declaring its relationship with FilePlanet. That's one gaming site I ceased frequenting long ago due to its fairly banal insights into PC and MMO gaming. Maybe I should give it some more credit and visit more often?...

Light Cycles

Got to disagree with Tom Chick on this (although, when have I ever agreed with him?).

Call me old fashioned, but this is deeply cool:



This, not so much:



TRON is still a wondrous representation of cyberspace, where the very laws of 'nature' are those that pertain to code, not particles. The low polygons, inertia-free movement and Gauraud shading were all essential to that vision. Making it more 'real' makes it more intuitive, but making it unreal was what originally made it unique.

Why Does it Need to be Massive?

MMOs, they're all the rage with the kids, but how important, really, is the 'massive' in MMO? Not so much these days.

For those who solo - which appears to be a goodly proportion of MMO-ers - the 'massive' doesn't really mean squat. Give them the same world, the same quests, and run it offline, and they'd scarcely know the difference. Heck, call it Oblivion. Oh, there's the odd player economy/auction house and crafting, sure, but these features aren't the core features they once were, if upcoming games are anything to go by.

If you're partial to a bit of group questing, the 'massive' means a bit more - but not really that much more. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest the average number of players in a party/group/team across most well-known MMOs is somewhere around three or four. The median is probably even less - perhaps two or three. That's not so massive (although I'd love to know the true numbers).

What about pick-up-groups? Where are you to find your ad hoc teammates if not in-world? Well, any 'massive' lobby can replace that feature and then drop you in to your own private world. Heck, the 'massive' part of City of Heroes is pretty much a bloody big lobby for finding teams to run the instanced missions.

Even if you're part of a guild and regularly run through content with them, that's not necessarily 'massive'. You could have a small shard with only a couple of hundred players in it - including all your guild mates - and besides the aforementioned player economy and crafted items, you'd hardly tell it was different from a 10,000 pop server.

Player housing, cities, politics? Nicely 'massive', but again, not proving popular in many of the new wave of MMOs.

Ah, what about PvP? Surely you need a 'massive' population to provide you with fodder? Not necessarily. Steam is 'massive'. Team Fortress 2 isn't. But TF2 can handle a similar number of combatants as many instanced MMO battlefields. Heck, Warhammer Online was often a bloody big lobby for scenarios.

RvR? Ahhh. Now we have something worthy of the title 'massive'. But what proportion of MMO-ers are into open RvR? I'd wager it's not the drawcard for the majority. Besides, you could easily have a strategic RvR map with individual 'non-massive' ('tiny'?) instanced battles, and you'd be pretty close to existing RvR in many ways.

Not So Massive

Massive used to mean something. Back in the days of Ultima Online, something new was afoot. Multiplayer games had been around for a while, but UO was a new kind of thing (well, not that new if you were into MUDs).

UO, and the first generation of MMOs, like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies, were paragons of 'massive'. Their signature features were remotely hosted persistant sandbox worlds and the idea was that players would populate and shape the outcome of these worlds. This is why crafting was such a big deal, even if it's become a bit of a pale mockery today. Then came the theme park, and many of the sandbox features fell out of favour - and with them, much of what was essential to the 'massive' in MMO.

Today's MMOs are still 'massive', but they could easily be 'tiny' and many people would either never notice, or not complain. When it comes to future MMOs, the 'massive' is even less important.

MMOs in years to come could move even further away from the 'massive' - and such a move might even be a Good Thing. Sure, 'massive' will continue to appeal to some, and I hearily endorse a pluralism of games catering to a broad spectrum of tastes. But I caution current MMO enthusiasts about clinging to the 'massive' for the sake of an acronym.

Consider a game with a 'massive' lobby where you do your shopping, train up your character and find your team - or even survey the strategic map. Then you launch in to a 'tiny' instanced encounter that caters to your current fancy. It could be a PvE mission, a PvP battlefield or an RvR engagement etc. Such a game wouldn't be lumbered with the hosting burdens of a 'massive' game, and it could better tailor content - and difficulty - to the teams as they enter the world. It could even include more randomised content, so you don't get situations where you know precisely where the mission objective is or the spawn points are. Kind of like Left4Dead. Furthermore, it could more easily cater for the large proportion of solo players by scaling to their needs. I call it an MTMO (Massively Tiny Multiplayer Online).

Would such a game be that much different from an MMO? What would it lack that you crave from current MMOs?