User:Greeves/MMORPG History
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[edit] Main Article
The term "MMORPG" emerged in 1996 after Trip Hawkins frequently made use of the term "massively multiplayer" when explaining early graphical products to the media.[1] However, Dungeon magazine had ads published by Cyber Warrior Inc as early as 1995 describing "Rubies of Eventide" as "massively multiplayer". Although MMORPGs as defined today have only existed since the early 1990s, their history begins as early as the late 1970s.
The first MMORPGs can be traced back to entirely non-graphical text-based MUDs. The first MMORPG was developed by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. The first commercial MMORPG (although what constitutes "massive" requires qualification when discussing mid-1980s mainframes) was Islands of Kesmai designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. Still text-based (or, more accurately, roguelike), this game became available to consumers in 1984 for $12.00 per hour via the CompuServe online service.[2]
The first graphical MMORPG was Neverwinter Nights by designer Don Daglow and programmer Cathryn Mataga (not to be confused with Neverwinter Nights by BioWare). "Neverwinter Nights" went live on AOL for PC owners in 1991 and ran through 1997. This project was personally championed and green-lighted by AOL President Steve Case. Both Club Caribe and Neverwinter Nights cost $6.00 per hour to play.
Ultima Online, released in September 1997, is now credited with popularizing the genre.[3] It featured 3D isometric/third-person graphics, and was set in the already popular Ultima universe. It was also a more involved, complex game than many of its predecessors. EverQuest, launched in March 1999 by Verant Interactive (later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment), brought fantasy MMORPGs into the Western mainstream. It was the most commercially successful MMORPG in the United States for five years, and was the basis for 13 expansions (as of February 2007) and several derivative games. In 1999, following Ultima Online and EverQuest, was another hit, Asheron's Call. Together, these three games are sometimes referred to as the original "big three" of the late 1990s.
The second generation of MMORPGs, following the "big three" of the previous decade, included the medieval PvP-oriented Dark Age of Camelot, the sci-fi Anarchy Online, and Ultima Online 2. Ultima Online 2 was cancelled by Electronic Arts in March 2001, as they had decided that the market was becoming saturated and that it would be more profitable to divert resources to the original Ultima Online. RuneScape by Jagex was also released in 2001.
In 2002, Final Fantasy XI was released, which hoped to bring in fans of the extremely popular (but mostly single-player) Final Fantasy series, which was particularly popular in Japan. Like the previous Final Fantasy games, this one was playable on a console, using a handheld controller, though it bore little resemblance to gameplay in prior Final Fantasy titles. Though not the first MMORPG played on a console (which was Phantasy Star Online[4]), it was the first to allow console and PC users to play together.[5]
May 2003 saw the release of Eve Online, produced by Crowd Control Productions, which had players taking the role of spaceship pilots and had gameplay similar to the series Star Control.
The most recent generation of MMORPGs, based on arbitrary standards of graphics, gameplay, and popularity, is said to have launched in November 2004 with Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW). At the time, Sony expected to dominate the market, based on the success of the first Everquest, and decided to offer a flat monthly rate to play all of their MMORPGs including EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Star Wars Galaxies, to keep from competing with itself. However, World of Warcraft immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs.
In April 2005, ArenaNet (a subsidiary of NCSoft) successfully launched Guild Wars, introducing a new financial model which might have been partly responsible for the game's success. Though definitely an online RPG, and technically having a persistent world (despite most of the game's content being instanced), it required only a one-time purchasing fee. It was termed instead a "Competitive/Cooperative Online Role-Playing Game" (CORPG) by its developers as it had many differences to the traditional MMORPG, and is now seen by some as occupying a new niche in the MMORPG market. With three million games purchased as of December 2006,[6] Guild Wars is still continuously profitable (due to several stand-alone expansions) and can be seen as a serious competitor to World of Warcraft.
Finally, there has been significant competition (and potential for profit) among free-to-play MMORPGs. Two of the most successful of these are Silkroad Online, by the publisher Joymax, and MapleStory by Wizet. Both of these games are by Korean publishers and generate revenue by selling in-game "enhancements", and due to their free nature have accumulated huge numbers of registered accounts over the years, with a majority of them from East Asia.
[edit] History Article
The term "MMORPG" emerged in 1996 after Trip Hawkins frequently made use of the term "massively multiplayer" when explaining early graphical products to the media.[7] However, Dungeon magazine had ads published by Cyber Warrior Inc as early as 1995 describing "Rubies of Eventide" as "massively multiplayer". Although MMORPGs as defined today have only existed since the early 1990s, their history begins as early as the late 1970s.
[edit] The first gameworlds
The beginning of the MMORPG genre can be traced to text-based (entirely non-graphical) MUDs, with the first being developed by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. These games ran on private servers, usually at a university, and sometimes without the knowledge of the system's administrators. Players would typically connect to the games using a TELNET client, and gameplay was similar to role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. By typing commands into a parser, players would enter a dungeon, fight monsters, gain experience, and acquire loot.[8]
Similar games quickly surfaced during that period for the PLATO System. MUDs (and later their descendants such as MUSHes and MOOs) were sometimes wildly different from one another, but shared many basic interface elements. An example of this would be a player's means of navigating his or her character around the gameworld by typing in compass directions ("n", "se", etc.).
Many MUDs are still active and a number of influential MMORPG designers, such as Brad McQuaid,[9] Mark Jacobs, and Brian "Psychochild" Green, began as MUD developers and/or players.
[edit] Early commercial development
The first commercial MMORPG (although what constitutes "massive" requires qualification when discussing mid-1980s mainframes) was Islands of Kesmai designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. Still text-based (or, more accurately, roguelike), this game became available to consumers in 1984 for $12.00 per hour via the CompuServe online service.[2]
The first graphical character-based interactive environment, though not actually an RPG, was Club Caribe. Although first released as Habitat in 1988, Club Caribe was introduced by LucasArts for Q-Link customers on their Commodore 64 computers. Users could interact with one another, chat and exchange items.[10] Although very basic, its use of online avatars (already well established off-line by Ultima and other games) and combining chat and graphics was revolutionary.
The first graphical MMORPG was Neverwinter Nights by designer Don Daglow and programmer Cathryn Mataga (not to be confused with Neverwinter Nights by BioWare). "Neverwinter Nights" went live on AOL for PC owners in 1991 and ran through 1997. This project was personally championed and green-lighted by AOL President Steve Case. Both Club Caribe and Neverwinter Nights cost $6.00 per hour to play.
During the early-1990s, commercial use of the internet was limited by NSFNET acceptable use policies. Consequently, early online games like Legends of Future Past, Neverwinter Nights, GemStone III, Dragon's Gate, and Federation II relied heavily on proprietary services such as CompuServe, America Online, and GEnie for distribution.
Following Neverwinter Nights was The Shadow of Yserbius, a MMORPG on The Sierra Network (TSN), which ran from 1992 through 1996. The game was produced by Joe Ybarra. The Shadow of Yserbius was an hourly service, although it also offered unlimited service for $119.99 per month, until AT&T acquired TSN and rendered it strictly an hourly service. The name was then changed from TSN to the ImagiNation Network.
[edit] Commercial MMORPGs on the Internet
As NSFNET restrictions were relaxed, traditional game companies and online services began deploying games on the internet. The first commercial text-based MMORPG to make this transition to the Internet from a proprietary network provider (CompuServe, in this case) was Legends of Future Past, designed by Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. The game utilized a staff of professional Game Masters who conducted online events, and was originally offered at $6.00 per hour in 1992.[11]
Access to the Internet, forming a global playerbase, caused game companies to grow in popularity and accumulate truly massive numbers. With this global access to paying customers, there also came a surge in profitability for game companies.
In 1995, Starwave Corporation (an early internet company funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) launched Castle Infinity. It was a fully graphic side-scrolling world with persistent visitors and events. Players would create their own 3-piece avatars called "SCHTICK Figures" which stood for 'Simplified Character Heuristic Technology Integrating Cartoon Kinematics.' Just a few months into its commercial launch, Starwave was acquired by the Disney Corporation. Disney made an exploratory effort to transform the project into "Castle Hercules" based on the current major animated feature. Ultimately, the Castle Infinity project was abandoned. However, there have been several attempts to salvage it, and the entire online world is still free and available to this day.
Meridian 59, launched by 3DO in late 1996, was one of the first Internet MMORPGs. It was the first Internet game from a major publisher, the first to be covered in the major game magazines, and the first to introduce the flat monthly subscription fee. Most significantly, however, and another first for online RPGs, was its 3D engine, allowing players to experience the game world through the eyes of their characters. A cult following quickly grew for Meridian 59 that still exists today.
The Realm Online was another successful early Internet MMORPG, launched by Sierra Online. Although released just after Meridian 59, the beta was active several months before. The Realm Online had fully animated 2D graphics, both in and out of combat situations, which made it accessible to a wider audience compared to more text-based games or the graphical MUDs on which it was based. Also, its gameplay and interface were already familiar to those accustomed to the graphical adventure games earlier popularised by Sierra. Like many of its predecessors, The Realm Online only featured simple turn-based combat, however, it did feature a huge number (for the time) of visual character customization options. It, too, is still running.
Ultima Online, released in September 1997, is now credited with popularizing the genre.[12] It featured 3D isometric/third-person graphics, and was set in the already popular Ultima universe. It was also a more involved, complex game than many of its predecessors.
Meanwhile, commercial online gaming was becoming extraordinarily popular in South Korea. Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, designed by Jake Song, was commercially released in 1996 and eventually gained over one million subscribers. Song's next game, Lineage (1998), enjoyed even greater success gaining millions of subscribers in Korea and Taiwan. This helped to secure developer NCsoft's dominance in the global MMORPG market for several years.
EverQuest, launched in March 1999 by Verant Interactive (later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment), brought fantasy MMORPGs into the Western mainstream. It was the most commercially successful MMORPG in the United States for five years, and was the basis for 13 expansions (as of February 2007) and several derivative games.
In 1999, following Ultima Online and EverQuest, was another hit, Asheron's Call. Together, these three games are sometimes referred to as the original "big three" of the late 1990s.
[edit] Second generation MMORPGs
By the turn of the century, game companies were eager to capitalize on the new market. The concept of massively multiplayer online games expanded into new video game genres around this time, though RPGs, with their ability to "suck in" the player, were (and still are) the most financially promising.
The next generation of MMORPGs, following the "big three" of the previous decade, was to include the medieval PvP-oriented Dark Age of Camelot, the sci-fi Anarchy Online, and Ultima Online 2. Anarchy Online, released first in June 2001, was saddled with crippling technical problems upon its release, mostly due to an inability to handle the huge playerbase. Dark Age of Camelot launched smoothly four months later, introducing "Realm vs. Realm" PvP and other innovations, but still never attained the media attention or fame garnered by the previous "big three", which were still running strongly. Ultima Online 2 was cancelled by Electronic Arts in March 2001, as they had decided that the market was becoming saturated and that it would be more profitable to divert resources to the original Ultima Online. RuneScape by Jagex was also released in 2001.
In 2002, Final Fantasy XI was released, which hoped to bring in fans of the extremely popular (but mostly single-player) Final Fantasy series, which was particularly popular in Japan. Like the previous Final Fantasy games, this one was playable on a console, using a handheld controller, though it bore little resemblance to gameplay in prior Final Fantasy titles. Though not the first MMORPG played on a console (which was Phantasy Star Online[13]), it was the first to allow console and PC users to play together.[14] It was also notable for randomly selecting servers for new player-characters (instead of letting players pick for themselves), a practice which was highly criticized, although they have recently stopped this practice.[15] The game persists as one of the leading MMORPGs on the market to date.
Also released in 2002 was the sprite-based MMO Ragnarok Online, produced by Korean company Gravity Corp. Unknown to many Western players, the game took Asia by storm as Lineage had done. The publisher has claimed in excess of 25 million subscribers of the game, although this number is based upon a quantity of registered users (rather than active subscribers, as typically used by Western game publishers).[16]
May 2003 saw the release of Eve Online, produced by Crowd Control Productions, which had players taking the role of spaceship pilots and had gameplay similar to the series Star Control. Though not the first space MMORPG (DarkSpace was released in 2001), Eve was able to achieve lasting success. One of the reasons for its success may have been the game's design, in which all subscribers play in one unshared universe as a result the natural partitioning of the game universe into solar systems connected by stargates. This partitioning allows the world to be divided up in such a way that one or more solar systems run on different servers,while still maintaining a single coherent world.
In October 2003, Lineage II (NCsoft's sequel to Lineage) became the latest MMORPG to achieve huge success across Asia. It received the Presidential Award at the 2003 Korean Game awards, and is now the second most popular MMORPG in the world. As of the first half of 2005 Lineage II counted over 2.25 million subscribers worldwide, with servers in Japan, China, North America, Taiwan, and Europe, once the popularity of the game had surged in the West.
In April 2004, NCSoft produced another significant title, City of Heroes. Though it introduced no major innovations in gameplay, it featured an extreme number of possible visual character appearances, and its comic-book superhero theme made it stand out.
[edit] Current Generation MMORPGs
The most recent generation of MMORPGs, based on arbitrary standards of graphics, gameplay, and popularity, is said to have launched in November 2004 with Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest II and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW). At the time, Sony expected to dominate the market, based on the success of the first Everquest, and decided to offer a flat monthly rate to play all of their MMORPGs including EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Star Wars Galaxies, to keep from competing with itself. However, World of Warcraft immediately overtook all of these games upon release, and indeed became so popular that it dwarfed all previous monthly-fee MMORPGs. At present, WoW is one of the most played games in North America, and the most played MMORPG worldwide, with a total of over 8 million customers. With the release of these newer games, subscriptions began to decline for many older MMORPGs, even the year-old Lineage II, and in particular Everquest 1. The current MMORPG market has World of Warcraft in a position similar to the position of Dungeons & Dragons in the tabletop RPG market, with both games' market share being greater than 50% of the overall market.
In April 2005, ArenaNet (a subsidiary of NCSoft) successfully launched Guild Wars, introducing a new financial model which might have been partly responsible for the game's success. Though definitely an online RPG, and technically having a persistent world (despite most of the game's content being instanced), it required only a one-time purchasing fee. It was also designed to be "winnable", more or less, as developers wouldn't profit from customers' prolonged playtime. Other differences compared to traditional MMORPGs included strictly PvP-only areas, a relatively short playtime requirement to access end-game content, instant world travel, and strategic PvP. For these differences it was termed instead a "Competitive/Cooperative Online Role-Playing Game" (CORPG) by its developers, and is now seen by some as occupying a new niche in the MMORPG market. With three million games purchased as of December '06,[17] Guild Wars is still continuously profitable (due to several stand-alone expansions) and can be seen as a serious competitor to WoW.
Finally, there has been significant competition (and potential for profit) among free-to-play MMORPGs. Two of the most successful of these are Silkroad Online, by the publisher Joymax, and MapleStory by Wizet. Both of these games are by Korean publishers and generate revenue by selling in-game "enhancements", and due to their free nature have accumulated huge numbers of registered accounts over the years, with a majority of them from East Asia.
