This year promises to be the start of a big push to put MMOs onto consoles. Previously we’ve only had games such as Everquest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI Online which, to be fair, haven’t been massive successes on the consoles.
This year will see the first few games sneak onto consoles. It’s unclear at the moment which ones will make it, but games such as DC Universe Online, Freerealms and Age of Conan are all threatening to release on consoles sometime soon. The age of console MMOs is upon us, but what does that mean?
The benefits of putting MMOs onto consoles are clear; there are tens of million of each of the current generation consoles out in the wild and that’s a hard market to ignore. The only games that come close to World of Warcraft with their sales are console games such as Call of Duty. You’d be mad not to chase the market.
A successful console MMO has it’s problems. The most important being the problem of patching. If you need to fix a problem or add new content to a PC game you just need to run it through your internal quality control; if you want to patch a game that is on PC as well as a console then you also need to put the patch through the QA process of the console, which will be either Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft. Not only is this out of your control but it’s a separate stage of external testing that you really shouldn’t do before you’ve completed your own testing. This is a problem in MMOs, imagine a bug in Eve that could cause havoc on the market. CCP can test this as quickly as they need to by throwing resources at it and get a tentative patch out the next day that if not fixes the problem at least stops it getting worse. Having to put a patch through weeks of official testing could destroy a game’s economy...
The other problem is one of control, or at least controls. All the consoles will take a USB keyboard, but they’re really not the normal usage. A console game needs to be played from the sofa, and both the xbox and the PS3 have keyboards that clip onto their controllers. The 360 one is nice, but I haven’t yet received my PS3 one to review it. I’m assuming it works as well as you’d be dumb to release such a product that didn’t work. So that’s typing assumed to be OK for chat, but most MMOs are very heavily into the F1 through 10 model which really isn’t going to sit well with the console crowd. You can’t demand that they have the keypad add-ons because most people don’t, and so you need to reinvent your control method to use at most two analogue sticks, two analogue switches that have two buttons above them, a d-pad, four buttons labeled Y, B, A and X or Triangle, Circle, X and Square and finally a select or back button and one marked start. That’s not a lot of controls. D pads work well for selecting abilities (see games such as Oblivion). You can’t have the same control style between both games, which is where a project such as the 360 version of Age of Conan gets interesting. You can have 4 reliable or 8 dodgy directions on the d-pads (both suck for the diagonals) and a number of shift-key like alternatives based on which keys you sacrifice to the task. At this point I’m asking awkward questions about how I rearranged my basic 10 slots in LORTO tonight because of getting a few more levels and how much it really changes my play style. How much will console gamers put up with that?
The problem gets worse when you consider FPS games. On a console a game will help you aim somewhat in an attempt to get past the analogue stick not being as accurate as a keyboard and mouse. Imagine a cross platform game that lets you play with one set of people with assisted aim and one set with uber-accurate mouse control. To be fair this has been done before with games such as Shadowrun, but imagine it on a successful game.
This is where it gets nasty. We have patch problems, cross server problems and UI problems. I can’t see everybody getting along fine in a world that has to deal with all those issues and so can only think that there may be a gap between PC MMO players and console MMO players. If you can’t get the patches out at the same time, get the UIs to match or even create a level playing field when it comes to shooting each other.
I think the patch issue will prevent the others from getting in the way; we’re not going to get as far as shared servers in MMOs purely because patching will be a pain. You couldn’t run Eve, War, WoW or EQ2 that way and expect to fix bugs quickly enough.
I’m a big MMO fan, you can probably tell since I record a podcast on the subject each week. If you listen to the show you’ll also know I’m a fan of console games and want them to both be successful.
The problem is I’m not sure they will be. I fear that a split will arise from separate servers between the PC and the console crowds. If we can’t play on the same servers then what happens to game mechanics? If we split between the two conceptual platforms then who wins? PCs or Consoles? The answer is who has the most numbers at the end. We could really see a change in the market from slightly changing attitudes.
If console MMOs take off they have the potential to outnumber the PC crowd, but will the games be different enough to cause a problem?
I have no idea.
posted @ Monday, January 19, 2009 1:10 AM