The single player MMORPG

[Don]

From all the time I play MMORPGs I've noticed a few things:

1. Most people play the game by themselves or with very few other people.
2. Everyone besides yourself probably sucks.
3. Despite #2, people need to put up with idiots because you can't solo for the best loots.

So why not just have a single player MMOPRG. Take a template like WoW or any other mainstream MMORPG (which is pretty much all based off of WoW anyway). You'd play the game single player and your party member would consist of random computer controlled bots. Optionally throw in something like FF12's gambits or maybe make better bots more likely to show up if you repeatedly wipe to some boss, though looking at the difficulty of the average MMORPG usually as long as your bots know how to attack something and don't stand in fire the entire time they'll probably be okay. For raids, your raid will consist of you plus some number of bots, but you can substitute your own characters in place of bots (they'd still be controlled by AI but presumably be better equipped) so there's a reason to play as more than one character. The game can be optionally multiplayerable in raids/instances up to say 4 players or whatever is convenient to do (the number obviously can't be too big or you end up having to recreate the whole infrastructure for a server). Your raid bots can be geared up so that they won't be always useless. New DLC can be released in the standard 'loot + 1' fashion. The game can also support PvP if you feel like doing that.

The quality of this game would be no worse than the generic sub MMORPG that flopped and went to F2P. Since this game is really single player this means you don't really have to worry about balance at least in the PvE side, so this means you can fire about 99% of the developers of your staff who otherwise would just be changing number from 1 to 0 and then back to 1 again. If people don't mind paying $15/month grinding out dailys or raiding the same old thing about you'd think they'll be perfectly fine doing this in a single player version because everyone hates their guildmates anyway, as this game obviously won't have a monthly charge and we know being cheap is enough to win a lot of people over. The biggest problem would probably be testing the difficulty of this initially, as you don't want something like the Rallos Zek raid in EQ1 where your computer controlled allies immediately totally owns the boss without any help from your whatsoever. I imagine you'd make it something like any interactive element does way more damage on you (because your bot friends aren't expected to handle them), but once you die the boss does greatly increased damage so that you can't just hide somewhere while your bots do all the work. It'd probably end up something like Dynasty Warriors where your computer allies are strong but pretty much can never kill the key NPCs without you helping. As far as I know the LFR system in WoW is working very well and that's basically raids so simple that any random collection of 25 guys can beat it, so instead of paying $15/month to beat some stuff any random collection of 25 guys can beat it why not just pay nothing per month to beat the same stuff with you and a random collection of bots? Note that this game can also be very hard if you want it to be, and again since the game is actually single player you don't have to worry about people whining they can't beat the ultra impossible hardcore mode where if you blinked at the wrong time you instantly lose.

Now, I have no idea how competitive this game will be against other RPGs (though Dragon Age feels quite similar to a MMORPG in turns of style already), but there's got to be a market for this stuff if people are willing to pay $15/month to beat content so simple that any random 25 guys can beat it especially when you're not charging $15/month.

[Flip]

I'll admit i stopped reading half way through so i could reply real fast before i have to roll out, but i will read the rest soon.

Your topic itself is what is appealing to me about a game like Diablo. You can solo almost as effectively (sometimes more so) than with a group. BUT, i like being in a big world of other players for those times that i do want to group or trade or show off my phat loots.

A single player game like Skyrim is awesome,but it would be more fun with real people... even if i dont want to play with them. There is something about the economy that it creates or the random cool people you come across. I've never got sucked into a large MMO, and solo'ability is a large reason for that. No one has really mastered the balance that is needed for solo people to play just as well as groups (which makes sense). Diablo is really the only game that has come close and its obviously not a real MMO by anyone standards.

[Don]

Well Diablo is a game where you can argue the game is often strictly harder playing with other people just due to scaling factors (e.g. Diablo 3 on Inferno enemy gets +5% damage and +105% HP per player beyond the first initially), which is why it's not a great multiplayer game because once you figured out the mechanics, playing with other people is actually the 'hard mode' so to speak. Of course I've heard a lot of guys swear they hate everyone in their own guild and would punch them in the face if they ever met but they got no choice because you sure can't get the phat lewt by yourself even if you're the best player in the world. In WoW we see that there is now a raiding mode that essentially takes 25 random guys together and put them against some relatively trivial bosses for phat lewt and apparently this is a huge hit. So I think people like the epic nature of having big battles and whatnot but they don't necessarily like the fact that with an epic sized roster you're going to have a lot of deadweight and headcases too, so why not just skip this step completely? There are some top WoW guilds that are raiding only 10 man now and that's a very small unit of people relative to the traditional raids but people still have fun doing it. So I think raiding by yourself (with bots) and optionally say 4-5 more human players would work.

The nice thing about being single player is that if gamers do not meaningfully interact with each other competitvely then you don't really have to worry about people whining XYZ is too hard or too easy which seems to be what ties up the most resources in a MMORPG. You can have 4 or 5 guys who play on super duper hardcore mode that yields extra uber loot + 3 coexist with the guys who is playing with 24 imaginary friends which is roughly the same as the 24 guys he does LFR in WoW whom he'll never see again after this raid because the game is still ultimately single player. It'll probably be easier to tune this game anyway since most of your players are actually bots so you know exactly what they'll do, and if you assume you have at most one group worth of real players that's basically just tuning a group level encounter in MMORPG which is significantly easier than a raid due to having less people involved.

[SineSwiper]

*cough* Dark Souls *cough*

[Shrinweck]

Your three points in the beginning of your post are basically how everyone on the planet lives their actual real life.

Also Kingdom of Amalur was essentially a single player MMORPG (Kill X, go here, do this twenty times, go somewhere else, repeat) and had what looked like a fun skill tree to progress through but I just could not get into it. The mechanics just aren't the same alone.

[Don]

For a game to be modeled like a MMORPG it'd have to be pretty trivial solo and you only need to join other people (or bots) when going for the instances/raids so I don't think Dark Soul qualifies. It sounds more like EQ1 than any modern MMORPG and while EQ1 is a MMORPG too, it's certainly not the kind that'd be popular today (ridiculously hard everything and pretty much no chance on your own).

I don't honestly see why raiding with 24 guys you're likely to never see again against a watered down version of a boss that can be defeated by any collection of 25 individuals is any different than playing a single player game with 24 bots on your side. Likewise WoW's group content is pretty much a 5 man party with 4 guys you're likely to never meet again fighting a watered down boss that any random 5 guys can beat. I've gone through groups where nobody said anything the entire game except for 'thanks' at the end of the group. Is that the magical interaction that can only be captured online but not single player? Sure the game could be optionally multiplayer if you have friends you want to play with. That's perfectly fine, but it seems like people overwhelmingly view interacting with other people as a nuisance that's only tolerated because you can't get the best loot by yourself, so why not just do it yourself? I have played with plenty of lousy players, and when I win I don't really think "that was awesome how we managed to overcome pure stupidity", it's more like 'whew glad I don't have to do this again'. And this 'single player' game does not necessarily have to be easy, either. It can obviously be stupidly hard (usage of difficulty levels would be useful here) and maybe it is actually awesome when you and your 4 friends beat the super duper ultra hardcore mode.

As an aside if you're designing such a game you obviously do not need guys sitting around with ! on top of their head unless you're going for a 100% authentic experience, though that model works for Diablo 3 so maybe an authentic experience is just the thing. You probably wouldn't stretch out the leveling stuff for too long. Nobody really likes that kind of stuff anyway even in real MMORPGs, and since it'd presumably be difficult to do any kind of PvP in a game designed for single player you should only have enough single player to slap on a 'lots of hours of gameplay' label. The meat of the game is most likely the equivalent of instances and raids since you already have F2P if you want to just solo trivial stuff that yields trivial loot while seeing the experience bar go up.

[kali o.]

...meh, "single player" MMORPGs are what is wrong with MMOs nowadays. The genre has pandered to a themepark style, so essentially, we have what is basically a single player game with loose player/community involvement, mostly solo treadmills and some token group activities. Honestly about as immersive as CoD or Diablo.

It's not that playing by yourself is a bad thing for MMOs (it can be good), it's just that for a *real* MMO, that solo play NEEDS to effect the world, community, economy, etc. For example, if you are scavenging the game world for resources: you should be a viable target for robbing (pvp), exploring or otherwise expending effort/skill (alternatively, playing the market), you should be taking away a measurable & finite commodity from the game, payoff in a way that is unique to your toon/avatar, etc. If things like that are not present, I'd argue it amounts to a very shallow experience with no measurable world/community involvement (essentially, true "solo play").

I'd argue that the MMO genre has de-evolved, since the likes of Ultima Online or EVE. Is that a bad thing? It is if you like what made MMOs special. From a profit standpoint, I'd point out that most recent MMOs since WoW have fizzled. I think what we are really seeing is ALL games moving towards including a multiplayer aspect...that's probably a cool thing...but are they really MMOs? I don't think so, at least not how I define them.

Oh, and perhaps a bit more on topic, I think Don's idea is lame. Most people hate MMO "gameplay" (grind, click, grind, click, grind). Most people like MMOs (whether they admit it or not) for the barbie aspect (collecting/dressing up) and epeen (showing it off). If other players are not there to appreciate their dolls, the limited magic in modern MMOs entirely disappear.

[Shrinweck]

Most people like MMOs (whether they admit it or not) for the barbie aspect (collecting/dressing up) and epeen (showing it off). If other players are not there to appreciate their dolls, the limited magic in modern MMOs entirely disappear.

This is basically how I see the genre. Honestly one of the biggest things I like about MMOs is that they require so little attention that I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks while playing them and very rarely need to go back and re-listen to something I've missed. It's just like how I watched shitty television while I did my homework in middle school. MMOs are essentially the shitty sitcom version of gaming. SWTOR came close to bucking this trend with story that was actually interesting enough for me to always pause what I had going on iTunes before a story conversation... but as we all know that content was dwarfed by what was just filler.

EVE is probably the best on paper MMORPG that I've ever put a bunch hours into... it's too bad that it's unplayable in terms of enjoyment by yourself after a certain point. Branching out at this point basically mandates getting heavily involved with a guild... something that I don't have much of an urge to do with strangers.

[Don]

I don't see how you can say collecting/epeen is an appeal to modern MMORPG when MMORPG is clearly going toward the 'everyone can have everything model'. If everyone has your sword of uberness what's the point to show off? Showing off is only meaningful if there's a certain rarity to the items in the first place. You sure won't find that in a game like WoW. I'm not saying this game will be good or I even want to play it. I'm saying why hasn't someone figured out you can just cut out all the server infrastructure and provide a single player equivalent for significantly less cost? I'd say more players are of the ProgressQuest type players who only logs on to see their character going from stat X to X+1 than the loot collector, since games like WoW are pretty much devoid of any meaningful uniqueness in loot. I really can't imagine a guy will pay $15/month solely to show off his heroic sword that has 8 more item levels than the same exact looking sword everyone else got from playing with 24 random strangers. Yes I know there are people who try to show off their DPS or HP but that almost never works. People get impressed if you have something unique looking. People really don't seem to be impressed by the fact that you have 1K more HP than the average joe. Achievement points are probably a loose but tangible way to measure power, but have you ever been impressed just because someone has 10294 achievement points?

I never quite understand that there's this massive gap in the Diablo-clones and the single MMORPG genre. You can count on one hand the number of good Diablo clones in the last 10 years, and you might even be able to count all Diablo clones in the last 10 years in one hand. There's a flood of RTS and FPS games out there and most of them are bad, but they get made because these games are viewed as popular. Yet these two genres (and single player MMORPG is probably very similar to Diablo to begin with) are certainly very profitable (Diablo makes a ton of money) and we don't even have cheap knockoffs at all.

[Don]

While competiton is not some kind of guaranteed toward improvement, I do think some genres can be more competitive than they're right now. It's usually said that MMORPG have a high cost to entry, but if most people are essentially playing a single player game then you can strip out most of the server infrastructure and the cost has to go down, and more variety means more likely for something different to come up that you might enjoy. Sega is probably the most aggressive at the Diablo clone (PSO, PSO2, PSU, Shining Force Neo, Shining Force Exa, and probably a few more I forgot). Perhaps they can't match Blizzard at their own game but with all these attempts they did come up with an interesting game. Certainly the avatar customization in PSO is far beyond Diablo, and Neo/Exa manages to intergrate the story relatively well for a Diablo clone, and these games are a refreshing take on the Diablo formula. Torchlight is another example of a decent take on the genre. But after these two you can't even find a bad Diablo clone. Not saying you should try to buy bad games but it's like everyone just gave up and concede the Diablo-clone category to Blizzard, and then we have Diablo 3 which is pretty darn bad too and I'd say this is no game seriously challenged Diablo 2 in the last 10 years or so. So I'd argue the Diablo genre also devolved due to a lack of competition.

[SineSwiper]

Most people like MMOs (whether they admit it or not) for the barbie aspect (collecting/dressing up) and epeen (showing it off). If other players are not there to appreciate their dolls, the limited magic in modern MMOs entirely disappear.

You mean like Farmville? Or other games where the act of collecting stuff is essentially the game? This is also a problem with MMOs. It should be a lot more exciting than that. Not "1... 2... 3... 4... dead... loot corpse... move to next one..."