The time has come and gone to talk about if an MMO on the console would work.  Not only have their been several released already, but we’re slated to get not one or two, but at least three in the coming year or so.  Whether you think it’s a good idea or not, they’re coming.

So instead, lets talk a little about the major challenges these mmo developers face, in bringing this genre to the living room.  And I’m going to start right away by departing from what the traditional theory on this seems to be, and say I don’t believe it’s the control scheme.

Here’s why.  For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a game in a genre that pretty much everyone has said either 1.) couldn’t be done on a console, or 2.) if it was on a console there’s no way in hell they’d play it.  The reasoning behind both of those statements was, to put it delicately, the controls would suck.  Now time will tell if the following statement is true, but I believe we’ve successfully brought an RTS to the console.  I’ve played the crap out of that game, and I’m a hardcore PC gamer, and not a big console fan.  But Halo Wars works on the XBox 360.  So when people say “Oh there’s no way you can bring an MMO control scheme over to a console”, well I just don’t believe it.  You will have to design for the console.  And by that I mean, if you design for the PC and plan on porting or adapting to fit the console, I think you fail out of the gate.   One of the reasons I think Halo Wars did manage to succeed (at least in control schemes) is that we drew a line in the sand and we said from the start we will not publish this on the PC.   So the entire game – not just control schemes –but UI elements, presentation, unit size, everything was centered around delivering on a 720 display, some four feet away.  So those games planning on shipping on both platforms have a harder job.  I hope everyone down at cryptic playing their game right now is playing it with a controller in their hands, and not a mouse and keyboard.

So if not the control scheme, then what?  Well, honestly, I believe the biggest challenge is chat.  Okay, just for a moment here, I’m going to sidebar on a little chat rant.  I am continuously amazed at how often major, triple A developers overlook the importance of their chat interface in an MMO.  Hellgate London, Age of Conan, and Warhamer all released this past year with only the barest passable excuses for chat in their games.  All three had to issue patch after patch fixing numerous bugs, and adding what should have been default functionality to their chat interfaces.  The chat panel is the primary way in which people communicate with other players in your game.  A game whose success is absolutely dependant upon players being able to communicate effectively with other players.  If you’re developing an MMO right now, I emplore you to not wait until the last 3 months of your project and then go “Oh shit, chat!  um.. throw some tabs in there, and make sure group chat works..”  Okay.  Rant done.

But why exactly is chat on the console a problem?  I mean Xbox Live has voice built right in!  We don’t have to type, people can just talk to each other!  Well if you believe that, you’re either only playing first person shooters, or you’re only raiding.  Here’s why a voice only solution won’t work.

Coordination of zone wide chatter
Zone chatter is extremely important.  Whether you use it to coordinate defense, or spam trade requests, or just to ask questions in, as annoying and inane as it may seem, for a lot of poeple that are playing your game, zone chatter is what allows them to not feel alone.  One of the lessons we should have learned from WoW that previous MMO designers didn’t grok is a huge number of people don’t want to play with other people, but they don’t want to play alone either.  There’s comfort in numbers.  And seeing other people doing other things around you, and watching that zone chatter are a huge part of encouraging that feeling that even though I want to solo, I still like being around other people.  Now different people like different things, but for the most part if your game has at least some amount of grinding in it, then watching the zone chatter is a lot like listening to talk radio to pass the time.  And that doesn’t even begin to include the real gameplay purposes of defense coordination and trade communication.  And well, if your chat solution is voice over IP, lets face it, you can’t just allow everyone in the zone to talk all the time.  Not if you plan on having more than seven players in a single zone.  So if you want to save zone wide chatter, you’ll have to come up with either a very clever voice solution, or still allow people a means to chat typographically.

Anonymity
This isn’t perhaps quite as big a concern today even as it was a year ago, partly because of the growth of voice over ip use, and partly because of the increases in women gamers, but I still believe, especially in a virtual world environment, the ability to mask your gender is extremely important.  I think the fact that MMO’s are experiencing a huge growth in women gamers is partly because they can play, interact, and be social, without feeling threatened.  I still, even now, hear stories from female gamers that the moment they joined a PUG raid, and got on voice, and people realized they really were a female, there were immediately harrassed, hit on, or just in general made to feel uncomfortable.  It’s a scary world out their folks.  A huge part of the reason we feel comfortable interacting with complete strangers in an MMO is because of the fact that the avatar and the environment provide us with a degree of anonymity.  If you make voice over IP your primary means of communication, you lose one level of that security, and you make it more difficult, not easier, for people to feel comfortable playing your game.  And I don’t think voice masking is a good answer here.  As soon as you voice mask, well then you’re basically saying “you have something to hide”.  And if you make everyone voice mask, then you lose the ability to recognize players by the sound of their voice.  So again, voice solutions alone don’t solve this problem.

What’s coming?
I think in the first round of console MMO’s, developers are most likely just going to flat out ignore these things.  I think either they’ll build something like what FFXI used, a hierarchy of pre-defined phrases you can stitch together through cascading menus, or they’ll provide group voice IP, bail on zone chatter altogether, failing to fully grasp its significance, or just implement a PC chat interface and require you to plug in a keyboard or TID.  And the players will play for awhile and then gravitate eventually back to their comfortable PC games that have a keyboard right there for them, and an interface they understand.  And the developers will harang and thrash and wonder about content or group mechanics or game play and they’ll never realize players left because they never felt like they could effectively communicate.  And yes, this is me waxing cynical, but I’ve been at this for a long time and it’s an attitude born of experience.

Solution?
Honestly, I mentioned the TID above, and I think a partial hardware solution shipped with the game might just be the answer.  Or at least part of the solution.  It used to be considered taboo to require additional hardware to ship a game, but in a post Rockband/Guitar Hero world, this just isn’t true anymore.   Decorate the thing up, integrate your gameplay into the device tightly, and bundle it with your game.  If Lips, Scene It, and You’re In the Movies can all bundle with hardware, why not your MMO?

Questions, thoughts, or rants?  Post ‘em up!  I’d love to hear them.