By Dimorphic
With the recent announcement of the new Knights of the Old Republic game being an MMO, the question begun swirling in my head as to whether or not an MMO would work on a console, specifically the Xbox 360.
When you look at MMO games, they are normally PC based, server dedicated, massive online worlds in which players pay a monthly fee to play (like our yearly Live sub), and install vast amounts of information on a HDD, then stream off of it.
There are several things right there that do not lend themselves to an MMO title on the Xbox 360. First things first, the servers.
Whil we are seeing a few games these days on the Xbox 360 coming out with dedicated servers (Frontlines and Battlefield: Bad Company), they are still nowhere near common place on Xbox Live, no matter how requested or even needed they might be. An MMO needs several servers to run off, specific to the region that the player is playing the game. This mimimises lag experienced by the players and gives them a far smoother and more secure session.
There is however a way around this. Do what Frontlines has done and create your own dedicated servers. The problem here though is that you are not running the game through Microsoft and as such do not have their quality control at your disposal. EA run their own servers, much to the distain of many gamers due to the unreliability of them. Though if it was created properly there would not be much of a problem there.
So after tackling the server issue, we move onto the HDD issue.
No Xbox 360 games stream information off of the hard-drive. None. The reason for this is because of the Core console (now the Arcade SKU), which does not come bundled with a HDD. The reasoning behind this decision was to give people with lower disposable income streams a viable option when it came to buying an Xbox 360. The problem with that is that all games need to be able to run on all console SKUs, and as such HDD streaming isn’t an option. Moreso than that, the 20GB standard HDD that most people have is not nearly big enough to hold the data needed to run an MMO. So you begin to look at different ways to work it.
Multiple discs isn’t really an option for an online game, because you will be travelling so much and so often around the world that switching discs would happen far too often. This is probably the biggest problem with an MMO on the Xbox 360. The DVD discs our games are distributed on are not large enough to house the data and the problems with the hard-drive has been explained above. For a developer to make an MMO work on the 360, this is the biggest issue standing in their way.
The next question would be subscription costs. We already in Australian pay around $80 a year for our Xbox Live Gold subscription and if an MMO was to also ask for subscription fees it would turn a lot of people off. There may however not be a way around this problem. The developer needs money to keep running the servers and patching and updating the game and these fees are the best way to do that. Perhaps a lower fee, maybe $30 for an entire year or something like that would limit the impact on our wallets, though that is down to the individual developer.
Also the player base is a concern. MMOs need huge amounts of players, thousands and thousands to get the full experience. If an MMO was to be created on a console, would it draw the amount of players needed? Cross-platforming is a good option here to boost numbers, as long as the lag factor is taken into account.
The exception to all the so far presented problems is Final Fantasy XI (online). This requires a HDD and a 5GB HDD install, however the install also includes all so far released updates and takes around 2 hours + to fully install. It also doesn’t require an Xbox Live Gold account to play, though you have to pay for subscription to FFXI per month. While not requiring Gold to play the game is an okay bonus, many of us have Gold so we can play the plethora of other online console games, so we are paying for both subscriptions and it gets quite expensive. The game is also cross-platform enabled, so you can play with people on the PS3 and PC.
There are a number of issues to consider when producing a console based MMO game and these are probably large reasons as to why we do not see many console MMO games. Knights of the Old Republic started as a console RPG and has now moved to the MMO genre, the question is will it keep its console roots or head to greener MMO PC pastures? The thing that will be moving it along are the issues discussed above, and it to me at least just dosen’t seem viable to create console Massivley Multiplayer Online games.
Before I read the article I was like, “Why wouldn’t it work? Wouldn’t be the same as a pc” but you have raised good points so I don’t know if it work. An issue you don’t raise is how do people communicate to each other on the xbox, if you use a keyboard to type then you might as well use a pc. Maybe everyone can just talk to each other by head set?
Anyway.
If however everything is set up then it would probably be better then pc because you can get to your game quicker and you get to play from your couch or bed instead of sitting at your desktop computer or laptop.
New 60GB HDD and you can install games on your console with the new update that’s coming. =)