Shabahh Kerensky, on 30 May 2015 - 11:59 PM, said:
No they're not. There's nothing massive about those games. An mmo is capable of handling a crap ton of players on a large server all part of a big persistent world. Firefall is an mmo, not fricken TF2. You might as well call any multiplayer game that has more than 5 people on a server an mmo.
Seriously when did TF2 start being called an mmo?
Do you actually think MMORPGs consume more processing power than massive shooting games? They don't. Most MMORPGs, WoW and FF14 included, all use location polling. They check the location of the character, to the boss or NPC enemy, check what its doing, its status read the player's inputs, then garish them with all sorts of animations to give the illusion its hitting or being hit. The truth is, its actually glorified disco dancing, the algorithms are closer to Dance Dance Revolution. There are very few MMORPGs that actually use collision physics, Monster Hunter and Phantasy Star Online among them, and the reason most MMORPGs don't use collision physics is that collision physics are processor intensive. EVE Online for example, has a massive persistant world, but it has no collision physics, like the kind you might expect from Star Citizen.
Games like War Thunder and especially World of Warships, not only use collision physics, but ballistic, flight and movement physics, which makes them extensively processor intensive. I consider them massive, because there are still thousands of players in one massive server cluster, and you have a matchmaking algorithm that works to create matches for all of them. This is not an online game with many servers, choose the server and where dozens play in that server. In addition to the massive clustering of players, truly massive games have social networking properties that enable you to communicate to any player in that cluster and manage organizations. And also quite important is the persistant storage status of the player. The player's status isn't stored on the local machine, like game consoles, but online, with passwords and user account ownership and security. The player's status evolves and has his persistant state continually updated.
For me the definition of a massive game starts with:
Massive numbers of players in a server cluster.
Online ownership of player account
Online dynamic persistance of player status
Large scale matchmaking
Network social interaction among players of that server
Subscription or "Freemium" F2P ecosystems
MMORPGs are just one form of massive game. Others include MOBAs like League of Legends and DotA 2, and MMORTS like Clash of Clans.
What is mentioned in the opening post of this thread, applies as much as World of Tanks as it does to World of Warcraft, but further on, even to games like League of Legends and Clash of Clans.
Edited by Anjian, 31 May 2015 - 02:44 AM.