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MMORTS: Doomed to Failure?
By Cameron Sorden | March 12, 2008
SAGA was in the news today because they’ve announced that they’re going to be offering a free-to-play version of their game. If you haven’t heard of SAGA, it’s one of the new hybrid MMOG games– in this case, MMORTS, or massively multiplayer online real-time strategy. I should say right off the bat that despite my hardcore interest in gaming, I’ve never been much of an RTS fan. I’m always far too fond of the base-building and resource collection aspects, so that my enemies are usually storming in on me with an army while I’m still building my third guardsman. But at least my base looks nice and I have lots of resources while I’m getting stomped into the ground, right? You can probably tell that Civilization is more my speed than Starcraft.
Anyway, I think I tend to be somewhat of an oddity in our crowd. A lot of people (and most of my RL friends) love RTS games. It seems perfectly natural to take that one step further into an MMORTS with all the recent buzz about online games and genre combinations. I did at least give SAGA the old college try a few months ago in beta, and I came away from it without being terribly impressed, even aside from my personal dislike for RTS. It just didn’t do it for me. But RTS fans don’t think it’s all that great either. Boomjack tried it too, and also didn’t enjoy his time there (neither the first nor the second time he tried to get into it).
It’s not really surprising to me that this is the first major foray into MMORTS territory (there’s another MMORTS on the radar called Beyond Protocol, which also looks sketchy), because it seems to me like it’s a rather problematic genre. Given that I’m not an RTS fan, I can’t pretend to have given the MMORTS issue a lot of thought, but it seems like a poor fit for the persistent online genre.
Consider that the point of RTS games revolve around these activities: establishing a base, expanding your territory (for additional resources), and destroying your opponents. That’s the basic premise of every RTS game. It’s simply not fun unless you’re fighting with your opponents over limited resources. It’s in the best interest of the player to expand as quickly as possible and keep their opponents driven into the dirt.
Therefore, an RTS in a persistent setting seems like it wouldn’t work all that well. After the first few weeks or the first few months, you would have a dominant player emerge, or more likely a dominant guild, and there would be literally no chance of stopping them. They’d have too many resources, too much momentum, and be too aggressive at driving potential threats into the ground (after all, map dominance is the goal). You would be stuck in the endgame of a normal RTS game, where a player has all the resources and the opponents are vanquished, except that the game doesn’t end. It just keeps going, with really nothing for the high end players to do except effortlessly destroy new entrants. How terribly boring.
The problem inherent to MMORTS is that I don’t really see many ways you could fix that without violating the basic principles of what RTS games are or how they work (which means you wouldn’t really have an RTS), or unless you had periodic game wipes and territory resets so the race could start over (which is really just normal RTS on a larger and longer timescale). Personally, I think I’d rather have an RTS game that was over in 2 hours. Imagine how much it would suck to drag your loss out over a number of months once it’s clear that you’re losing. Can you say, “snowball effect?”
Another problem is that in all RTS games, the players begin the race at the same time. That way, it’s all about the player’s skill, build strategy, and resource hunting abilities and everyone starts on the same level. In an online setting, that’s very unrealistic. Players have different schedules and are able to play different amounts. In a competitive RTS environment, how do you give players with more time something meaningful to do without unbalancing the game for slower players? That issue aside, what do you do with late entrants? If someone comes into an RTS game and tries to start their base building at the midway point, they’d have no chance against those who have been there for a long time. It seems like any attempt to offset for an online setting would throw balance out the window. How do you establish a baseline of what a three-month late entrant should get so that they could be competitive with earlier players without being unbalanced? If you do manage to do that, where’s the incentive not to come in at the 11th hour and use your superior skills to smack around everyone who’s been actively playing for months?
There are way too many problems here for my taste. Maybe I just haven’t given the issue enough thought, but for the most part, it seems like traditional RTS is wildly superior to any implementation of MMORTS I can conceptualize. Even if you could pull it off, I can’t imagine it being more popular than a normal RTS game.
As far as I’m concerned, it seems like the MMORTS genre is doomed to failure– at least if it’s any incarnation of the current RTS we know and love.
Topics: game design, mmorts, reviews |
March 12th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Crash-merge the two genres, and only horror can result…
But there’s plenty of clever things that could be done that might make it work. Anything from a dollop of EVE’s 0.0 territorial sovereignty to eliminating base-building and running small warbands of developing characters claiming fixed NPC buildings.
The “easy” thing to do would be to do the MMO as a glorified lobby-cum-overmap. Dull, but it would at least maintain the core RTS mechanics intact and keep out the suck.
It’ll be interesting to see how THQ/Relic handle all these issues on the CoHO MMO they’re working on. Will that be the first AAA title?
March 12th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
If you think about it, there are some ways that the RPG’s and RTS’s are similar, at least in PC.
RPG: you go killing things for loot and exp to get better at killing things.
RTS: you get resources from the environment and use these to make more units (more HP?) and get highter in the tech level (advanced skills?)
There are differences but most (like the fact that you are a group instead of a single person) can be ignored, one can’t thought.
In a RTS, resources are limited.
Think about how would be playing at wow if resources were completely limited, that is, Goldshire, there are 1000 kobolds, when those have been killed, there isn’t any spawn. Unplayable.
I suppose it could be more playable if you put respawning resources and also if you give low-use to buildings, being fixed in a point isn’t good, still, i don’t see where the fun is, it’s simply go killing whenever you see someone else? (thinking about it, isn’t that PVP?)
March 13th, 2008 at 6:19 am
There are plenty of ways in which an MMORTS can be done without balance issues. At some point you have to sacrifice a bit of realism to attain them, perhaps, but then again, if a person is going to complain that much about realism in a game then perhaps they have other more pressing issues they need to attend to.
In relation to limited resources this does not have to be the case. All resources can be unlimited as they are in every MMO I’ve ever played. More specifically these resources would just have to have rarities attached to them so “spawn” rates on rarer nodes are longer/there are less of them.
This would not be unlike the way that Silver veins in WoW are a rare “spawn” of tin veins.
The problem with unlimited resources based on rarity then instantly becomes one of balance. One guild/person can take over a map and simply hog all the resources, no matter how rare they may be he still ends up getting them every time they appear.
This also brings about the “new player problem” in which new players are able to be beaten on by the simply better prepared, longer time players who have built up bases.
Balance is the key here, specifically balance of the resource and “technology” economy. In most RTS games there are levels of “technology” which can be upgraded. That is you can upgrade a level 1 “tower” to a level 2 “outpost” which costs resources but has higher “HP” and does more damage.
In an MMORTS you simply make this technology more freely available to new players over time.
To give an example, let’s assume there is a high end group/guild/person who has built up a strong base and continuously researches the newest technologies. As time passes this technology would simply become part of day to day life not just for the people under control of that kingdom, but for the entire world. This would mean that the resource cost for these “level 2″ buildings would decrease and would immediately be available to all new players as well without having to build their level 1 counterparts because the technology is no longer new to them.
In this way new players can build bases, if not equal to, at least enough so that they can reasonably hold on long enough to build themselves up further to truly compete with the higher end players.
The problem of resource herding still exists by one group that has a pre-dominant control of the map, but it is not so large anymore and can also be dealt with in any number of ways. One such way is raw materials need to be sold to “NPC” manufacturers that can turn it into the workable resource for a price. And, only raw materials can be traded/sold amongst players.
In this way you create a circle that traps even the strongest kingdoms into needing other players to control parts of the map so they can sell between themselves to have money to build better bases.
Another way of alleviating new player issues would be to have a new game tutorial which plays itself like a single mission of a single player RTS. In this tutorial mission new players are not only introduced to the game, but depending on how well they complete it are given bonus raw materials at the start of the game. These bonuses can be gradually increased as time goes on so that a newer player who does the tutorial at the same level as an older player will start the game off with more resources than the older player did.
This handling of matters does not interfere with the older player, who has had extra time to play and has far surpassed what the new player has gained by the “bonus bump” from the tutorial and the new player is now given a fair chance at building up a base.
Anyway, that’s just what popped into my head on how to fix some of the issues brought up. There are plenty of other issues to deal with, but all of them can be overcome if a little bit of time is put into designing the game properly. I don’t think an MMORTS is doomed to failure if done right. Whether anyone does do it right, however, remains to be seen.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:26 am
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March 13th, 2008 at 8:01 am
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March 13th, 2008 at 9:37 am
There is already a MMORTS game in the market: Shattered Galaxy.
The game is marketed as: the world’s first published massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game, combines the excitement of real-time strategy with the character development of role-playing in a persistent online world.
It’s not even new (about 2-3 years old).
And it’s pretty good. No perfect but pretty good. They did solve many problem with the genre.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Well you talk a LOT for someone who hasn’t played any games in this 10 year old genre apart from one in stage one BETA. Unlike MMORPG and similar genres with a more traditional approach to the game bar the MMO aspect ( ie I am here to game n win alone), MMORTS can encompass most types of gamer and, in fact, flourishes for it. The biggest hurdle to the genre is the MMO cooperation needed to maintain a Virtual MMORTS type world, with politics, espionage. resource location,creation and management all forming part of the strategy.
Serious attempts to neuter these last hurdles to success are underway and possibly may succeed. Cant wait until some folk who have played MMORTS for the period deserving to judge gameplay come forward and post here. Can I copy this to my forum and link to here for comments?
March 13th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I always talk a lot. Whether it’s valuable or not is up to you.
Like I said, I’m not much of an RTS guy. Clearly, I don’t know all of what’s on the market. The things I brought up were just the problems I would expect that the developers would have to address (as they have in various ways, apparently). That said, I think the fact that I haven’t heard of most of these says a little something about a 10-year old genre.
Feel free to re-blog or backlink as you like.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
@Brandon: design the game so that for every investment in resource collection there is a balancing overhead of player time. So yes, a single player could spam the entire world map with resource collection sub-bases, but they would then have to spend 25×8 refitting repairing or refuelling their sub-bases, and ferrying the resulting resources back to markets or refining centres.
With the twin issues of resource logistics, and simple geometry, securing the border of any large territorial empire against attack becomes very hard.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Shattered Galaxy has been around since 2001, Mankind since 1998. Others notable atm have been around 2005 onwards. There are 3-4 in active beta atm. Numbers were higher 2000-2005, but tech wasn’t up to it imo. Mankind, at its peak, gives subscription figures in the tens of thousands. Not bad numbers for the millennium. Many gamers entering the market now were still in education back then. Be nice if the numbers return enough to warrant some financial investment.
March 14th, 2008 at 1:27 am
How do MMORTS handle the offline player situation?
With a MMORPG, when you are offline your character despawns and is safe, but in an MMORTS (as I understand it) you don’t have so much a “character” as a collection of units and structures.
With a 2 hour RTS game I know I can be there for the whole time, and see it through .. but with a RTS game which plays out over days or weeks or longer then not only will I have to sleep sometime, but I might even occasionally be away for days at a time.
How do MMORTS games handle this?
March 14th, 2008 at 3:21 am
A variety of methods - some successful, some not. The least successful can still work with high player numbers, the issue becomes significant with dropping players. Beyond Protocol has a homeworld lockdown and enemy morale hit for offline but its by no means defined in stone yet - they prefer soft caps to code solutions. SAGA for example has a sandbox homecity area and you venture into PvE and PvP areas. Older MMORTS handled this less well - and this hurt the community as the numbers dwindled.
Come check out mmortsgamers.com for the full list. We are redoing the game lists so forgive the text dump format atm - no point making it pretty whilst replacing lol.
Also - we have hybrid MMORTS/RPG with avatars such as Dreamlords. Also most MMORTS have units that gain experience, like levelling up en masse. Most handle this by pure combat but some. like SAGA, have PvE quests to boost units.
March 14th, 2008 at 7:05 am
It seems that your train of thought of the genre, is “thinking in the box”. There are a couple of strategies that can be employed in development to overcome the obstacles you stated. .ON the monitor to the left of the one I am using to write this, I have an application running that overcomes most of the issues you brought to light.
“The Far Reaches of Space” http://www.thefarreachesofspace.com/
does just that, overcomes many of the shortfalls that you stated, can be boiled down to a few points:
1) How do you get a players presence to be persistent, even though their play of the game may be less the 5% (1 hour) of a given day, or how does a player have a fighting chance of success, while only logging on every few days?
2) How do you get a player’s assets to behave as they would, when the player is not present?
These are questions that were answered in the fundamental design of Far Reaches. I am not going to give away all the secrets, but, I will say that we have addressed most of these issues, and while we are in Beta, continue to refine processes the maintain a fundamental balance.
that’s the key, not a “great god” but an environment, that enforces balance, and prevents one or more players running away with ‘world’ dominance.
I invite you to give far reaches a try, it’s free to play, and we value the input of all players
March 14th, 2008 at 9:02 am
@Garumoo; EVE, which has been accused of being an MMORTS depending on how it’s squinted at, gives base-style distructible assets (Player Operated Stations, essentially) a 24 hour “reinforced mode” timer. If they are attacked and “destroyed” the owning corporation/alliance has ~24 hours to respond before a final structure-destroying assault can take place.
Essentially it makes the defense of persistent assets a responsibility distributed across the player’s corporation. A player only directly owns their ships, not “buildings”, even though they are set up and administered by players with special roles.
It is possible for players to create their own single-member corporations and control POS assets personally, but if they come under attack their response has to be either to dismantle the infrastructure, or get a lot of friends, quickly.
If a single player is disconnected, their assets in space (a ship and its drones) disappear immediately if not engaged in player combat, otherwise they presist for several minutes - cruel for players suffering a genuine connectivity glitch, but necessary to avoid constant logoffski metagaming.
Of all the MMORPG models currently in use, EVE’s seems one that could “jump tracks” from a single to multiple avatar environment without a great deal of pain. It would place persistent control of territory and capital resources on a much longer timescale than we’re accustomed to in RTSs, but to my taste that’s no bad thing.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
And the conversation continues here n elsewhere like the games don’t exist. I can sit here and give huge amounts of guessed at critique for WoW - largely based on my inability to understand how a game with so few few risks can become so popular, grind has its fans it seems. But it would be a far more worthy critique if I gave the MMO aspect some time and played the game for a few months. I know its not sexy for blogs and headlines but MMO deserves more than the traditional box turns up Friday n review write by Monday. What would be very interesting and would get a feed spot on my site would be a MMORTS foray blog. Take 4-5 hard core gamers from other genres and watch daily posts like real journalism. I offered this on my site and i think the thought of actual work scared of my members. But in game blogs would be the next level of reviews imo. Hell - if someone did that, I might play a MMORPG(rind) and do similar.