OXCGN – Breathing Life Into Gaming

Massive Multiplayer Console Games

by Jim Pwnage – Guest Contributor Extraordinaire

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Perhaps the ultimate MMORPG on the net - will it come to a console near you ?

Lets face it massive multiplayer role playing games, or MMORPG’s for those tech savvy among you, are sort of a big thing right about now. MMO’s such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft are converting people into gamers faster than you can say “Illidan has bitch-tits.” The genre is very quickly making gaming not only culturally acceptable, but a mainstream pass-time.

Console gaming is also very much on the rise. The current generation of consoles have managed to appeal to gamer and non-gamers alike. Regardless of the fact that the console’s library is more limited than your Grandmother’s sex appeal, the Nintendo Wii is selling like hotcakes. (Raises the question of exactly how well hotcakes do indeed sell. If you know please do drop me a line. Thinking I might be in the wrong industry.)

It is perfectly logical that attempts to merge these two beautiful creations into some sort of frankenstien-like monster would take place. So far all attempts have not achieved any level of what we, industry-types, would call “success.”

The thing is that for an MMO to succeed on a console, it is going to need to do certain things drastically different to it’s pc counterpart. So over the next few posts I will take a look at some of these changes that may need to occur, and then we will look at past failures, and the upcoming failures.

Part 1. Communications.

Voice Chat is essential to any MMORPG on a console

All mmo’s require some level of interaction with other players at some stage in the game. After all what is the point of playing with people if your going to have nothing to do with them. In PC mmo’s this is done primarily through text.

Messages to everyone in the area, everyone in your party, or everyone in your guild, as well as messages to specific players are all done via text. While chat this way can get a bit chaotic at times, you always can simply scroll back through the text to see what had been said.

Voice chat is used among small groups, normally guilds, because it is faster while in a battle. Even amongst these smaller groups things often become quite hectic as everyone speaks and unless the group has spent a lot of time together, they often forget whose voice belongs to who.

Some people take their MMORPG's VERY seriously, surprisingly many are women who express themselves through CosPlay

If this voice chat were to be taken and applied to everyone in the “general chat channel” rather than just groups, I am sure you could picture the chaos that would ensue with 100+ people all carrying on conversations. Important shreds of information, such as my site address, would be scattered and confused throughout the myriad of Chuck Norris references.

Now lets add consoles to the mix, and ignore the Playstation 3 for a second. Other than the PS3 the current consoles lack the ability to use keyboards, and Microsoft’s messenger kit is a very poor substitute. So text based communication is out instantly unless they use some fairly cumbersome time consuming menus for text input. This of course leaves us with the voice communication that I mentioned earlier.

The only way this can be done well is if you can leave and join conversations easily, and that itself is going to limit the interactivity between players. For communications to be handled well on a console, the controls almost would need to incorporate a system for joining chats, which leads us to the next problem controls.

Check in, sometime soon for the next section of my ranting.

by Jim Pwnage – Guest Contributor Extraordinaire

Filed under: Console gaming, Editorial, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | console mmorpg, cosplay, MMORPG, MMORPG's, PC mmorpg, world of warcraft, wow cosplay