MMORTS oyunlarının başarılı olmasını engelleyen şey nedir? [kapalı]

Hepimiz biliyoruz, ticari olarak başarılı MMORTS oyunları yaratma girişimleri olduğunu, ancak hepsinin başarısız olduğunu. Başarısızlıkla, oyun dünyasında pek popüler olmadıklarını kastediyorum. Neden?

MMORTS nedir?

It's like an RTS (a real-time strategy; Rome: Total war, Stronghold, StarCraft, WarCraft) but has an MMO component, meaning that you not only build your economy and industry, but you get to compete with other players doing just that in real time.

This interests me because I'm trying to make a game that is similar to an MMORTS as well.

Summary: what are the reasons that are stopping the MMORTS genre from evolving?

Update

İlgilenenler için, bu problemler ve birkaç diğerleri ile olası çözüm hakkında bir yazı yazdım. Adresinde bulabilirsinizmy blog.

@JoshPetrie hit a lot of it on the nose, but I'll add a little to it as well.

Bazı arkadaşlar ve ben bir süre önce gerçek bir MMORTS yapmak istedik ve özellikleri, bir hikayeyi ve birkaç başka şeyi içeren genel bir oyun tasarımı taslağı oluşturma sürecinden geçtik. Devlet MMO, tür için çok zor zorluklar sunuyor.

Örneğin, çevrimdışı olmak ne demektir? Bütün bir medeniyet nasıl çevrim dışı hale gelir? Ve oyuncuların başka bir oyuncu tarafından aceleye alınmak üzereyken oturumu kapatmasını engellemek nedir? Çevrimdışıyken sahip olduğunuz ülkeye ne olur? Binalarınız hala orada mı? İnsanlar sizinle ticaret yapabilir mi? Sana saldırmak

Kalıcı hedefler nelerdir? Uzun vadede oyunun amacı nedir? Büyük bir ordu kurmak? Bir medeniyet inşa etmek? Bunu hangi amaç için yapıyorsun? Diğer insanlarla savaşmak için mi? Nerede? Nasıl?

Tüm medeniyetiniz yok edilirse ne olur? Bu ne anlama geliyor? Canlandırıyor musun? Baştan başlamak zorunda mısın? Bu muhtemelen sinir bozucu olurdu.

Büyük medeniyetlere sahip gazileri yeni oyuncuları yok etmekten ne alıkoyacak? Yeni oyuncu nedir? Dünya sadece sürekli genişliyor mu? Ne kadar toprak aldın? Diğer oyuncuları fethettiğinizde, onların topraklarını alıyor musunuz?

Üstelik, listelenenlere benzer bir şekilde, RTS’yi ısrarcı bir duruma getirerek ortaya çıkan daha birçok soru var. Ve bu, MMO yönlerine ve orada ortaya çıkan sorunlara bile değinmiyor. RTS, tür şimdi olduğu gibi kalıcı bir MMO ortamı için yapılmamıştır.

Now, I will tell you, we came up with solutions for most of the above, so it isn't impossible. In fact, I would still be interested in some day seeing if I could get this to work. If anyone is interested in the solutions to some of these, I can do a write-up outside of this answer if you leave a comment. This answer, however, is long enough as it is...

MMOs have significantly higher infrastructure and ongoing maintenance costs than non-MMO games, primarily because most MMOs also include a heavy element of persistence, and in the interest of ensuring integrity it's the developers or publishers who typically shoulder that burden.

Because of that, it's important to ask how the player will benefit from making the game in question an MMO. The business benefits are fairly obvious: extra income from subscriptions or microtransactions, et cetera. But those benefits only apply if you have players, and players will want to have fun, so it's important that your players can have more fun because your game is an MMO. Otherwise, it's likely not worth the overhead to add the MMO aspect to the game.

Thus, I would content that the reason you don't see a lot of high-profile commercial MMORTS attempts (at all, let alone successful ones) are because the RTS genre doesn't necessarily get that much more fun when you scale the gameplay scope up to include hundreds and hundreds of other players.

Many RTS games revolve around building mechanics, which perforce roots a player to a specific region of the world. RPGs can be more fun as MMOs because a player can explore the world more freely, and thus encounter and interact with other live players in a more emergent fashion. The fact that players remain relatively fixed in the world in most RTS limits the number of other players any given player may interact with.

The other major aspect of RTS games is unit control and coordination. Through this mechanism a player might be given more freedom to wander the world and encounter others, but unless the player is going to move all their units in one big swarm you have a serious problem with their attention being split (which implies some interesting technical challenges in terms of the amount of data that must be reported as well) between various groups of units that are scouting, attacking, et cetera over huge areas.

Probably you don't see may successful MMO RTS games because nobody has found a great way to make the critical parts of the RTS game type work within a massively-multiplayer scope in a way that actually adds to the fun of the game.

There has been a commercial MMO RTS released in Korea nearly 8 years ago, but it was essentially MMORPG + RTS.

MMORPG part of the game was you controlling a "General", fully customizable and you can go to town, talk to people in a massive world.

RTS part of the game was when you engaged other player Generals. The game screen changes to a full RTS.

Other player generals, not in the fight, can spectate but with a new game screen.

I am not sure if this game was a huge success but at the time it had several thousand players, and had in game items.

With regards to a MMORTS, I'd imagine it would consume insane amount of bandwith. And like KTash mentioned, there's so many design questions in regards to persistence, however I am more concerned with how you would possibly be able to control entire army in the real world with thousands of other player's army.

4-6 player RTS's in games like War 3 or Starcraft can have a 20-30 minute play time.

RTS play typically has a couple ways it can go, because of the tiering of units:

1. 0 min~10 min: Initial building and rush opportunity (usually lowest tier units). If game ends here, it was a "rush" victory
2. 10 min~20 min: Sustained attack and expansion thwarting, if game ends here it'll be with mid-tier units
3. 20 min~30 min or later: Epic battle with top tier units.

RTS games have short games, and the victor is decided early on due to key strategic mistakes or loss of a group of units, or just huge disparity in skill level.

So, how can an RTS work as an MMO? Slow time down? Then it'd be more boring, and probably difficult to sustain your audience (if your partner leaves or is afk for 5 min in an RTS you could lose the game. What if your partner were afk for 3 weeks in an MMO rts?).