MMORPG vs. CORPG - Page 2 - Guild Wars Forums

Manderlock · May 06, 2005, 01:55 PM // 13:55

Aye, and I agree that this game is diferent from most of the crap that is called MMO, but that dosent mean that this game isnt a MMO.

EnDinG · May 06, 2005, 01:58 PM // 13:58

*Finishes reading thread.*
*Opens Guild Wars website.*
*Clicks on FAQ's.*
*Clicks on Game FAQ."
*Copies section.*
*Pastes section.*

Here you go people, this is directly from their website, with them labeling not as an MMO.

Quote:

Is Guild Wars an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)?

Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences. Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest.
Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. In Guild Wars much of the tedium of traveling through the world has been eliminated. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they have previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.

Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-vs-guild warfare or the international tournament. Engaging in combat is always the player's choice, however; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.

Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world -- they are not divided onto different servers or shards -- so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world.

Manderlock · May 06, 2005, 02:04 PM // 14:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by EnDinG

*Finishes reading thread.*
*Opens Guild Wars website.*
*Clicks on FAQ's.*
*Clicks on Game FAQ."
*Copies section.*
*Pastes section.*

Here you go people, this is directly from their website, with them labeling not as an MMO.

Heh, if youve read the whole thread you know that I think that CO just dosent fit this game. Alos considering that CO was *made up* about 6 months ago just dosent cut it for me.

Harry Voyager · May 06, 2005, 02:08 PM // 14:08

To be technically accurate, only one or two MMOs (Eve) actually have the entire populous active in the same world. The vast majorety of them are set up in sharded parallel worlds, and merely because they have a few thousand people on a single server network, does not mean that they can have a few thousand people interact with eachother. Anyone remember the Warrior protest in WoW? Basically a group of disgruntled warriors got together and brought down a server by packing a couple hundred people into one node. Even Eve, one of the best load balanced games I've encountered, gets massively laggy when you've got 200 people slugging it out.

Guild Wars has neatly sidestepped all of that by making everything instanced, with unit caps. This is also what allows them to have different players be at different times along the story line, and alows them to use a sell by chapter business model. It is really very innovative, and I expect it to become widely copied, but that does not make it no a massively multiplayer game; rather it is a new method of managing the problems that come from makign a game massively multiplayer.

Harry Voyager

Addendum: Re: EnDinG: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. If you call a tail a leg, it's still a tail.

Jackell · May 06, 2005, 02:11 PM // 14:11

Wow, I kinda laughed while reading this topic, but you know what, I'm gonna jump in!

It's not the definition of MMORPG, but what that phrase has come to mean to the people, that the devs made CORPG, to try and break old notions.

MMORPG has come to mean thousands of people. That if your walking down the street your likely to run into anyone at any time. And your all just playing to see what the devs have hooked in around the next corner.

But, Guild Wars has a HIGH emphasis on PvP, more so than the other ones out there, and plays differently than those. It doesn't really mean what the term MMORPG has come to mean, so why not title it something different?

Hell, this works a lot like Diablo 2, but no one says "I got Diablo 2, It's an MMORPG." They say "Yeah, it's Diablo 2. You can play it on-line."

Manderlock · May 06, 2005, 02:17 PM // 14:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harry Voyager

To be technically accurate, only one or two MMOs (Eve) actually have the entire populous active in the same world. The vast majorety of them are set up in sharded parallel worlds, and merely because they have a few thousand people on a single server network, does not mean that they can have a few thousand people interact with eachother. Anyone remember the Warrior protest in WoW? Basically a group of disgruntled warriors got together and brought down a server by packing a couple hundred people into one node. Even Eve, one of the best load balanced games I've encountered, gets massively laggy when you've got 200 people slugging it out.

Guild Wars has neatly sidestepped all of that by making everything instanced, with unit caps. This is also what allows them to have different players be at different times along the story line, and alows them to use a sell by chapter business model. It is really very innovative, and I expect it to become widely copied, but that does not make it no a massively multiplayer game; rather it is a new method of managing the problems that come from makign a game massively multiplayer.

Harry Voyager

Addendum: Re: EnDinG: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. If you call a tail a leg, it's still a tail.

Im going to use that little saying to streghthen my own argument. The devs can call a MMO a CO but its really just MMO.

MMO= Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online

Now that dosent mean that it has to have crap load of people on it, it just means that the game has to be massive. This game is massive, and i doubt that anyone would disagree with that.

Again, if they had just called it a MMO no one would have though any different. No one would have been screaming "THIS IS NOT A MMO".

Jackell · May 06, 2005, 02:19 PM // 14:19

I know I put my two cents in already, but I have to put two more in.

THis argument is totally hilarious.

Talus · May 06, 2005, 02:38 PM // 14:38

All I know is, I like Guild Wars better than any MMORPG I've ever played. That's all I care about.

Epinephrine · May 06, 2005, 02:45 PM // 14:45

Seems like we've had this argument. "Massively" is very different from "massive" - it is modifying the word multiplayer, and since the game is not "massively multiplayer" it isn't an MMO. Eight people in an instance is not "massively multiplayer", and the weak argument that there are tons of people online in instances is no better than saying that there are tons of people online playing chess. Chess isn't an MMO. The only parts that are close to being MMO are the towns.

madog · May 06, 2005, 02:51 PM // 14:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cerixus

That's my point exactly. When I posted this, I had just read 3 or 4 posts where people simply mentioned the term MMORPG and others jumped down their throats all "You n00b this isn't an MMORPG!!!". I don't really care what it's classified as; it's awesome.

As for Wikipedia not being a valid resource, that's great... but how come you all continued to use that definition to argue the point and nobody posted another definition?

True, people should lighten up. MMORPG or not, GW is competing with MMORPG games like WoW more than it is non Massively Multiplater CRPGs.

Manderlock · May 06, 2005, 02:54 PM // 14:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Epinephrine

Seems like we've had this argument. "Massively" is very different from "massive" - it is modifying the word multiplayer, and since the game is not "massively multiplayer" it isn't an MMO. Eight people in an instance is not "massively multiplayer", and the weak argument that there are tons of people online in instances is no better than saying that there are tons of people online playing chess. Chess isn't an MMO. The only parts that are close to being MMO are the towns.

MMO= Massive(ly) (oh look, its in paragraphs) Multiplayer Online

adam.skinner · May 06, 2005, 03:31 PM // 15:31

I think to understand the term, you have to look at the roots of the first MMORPGs. These roots are MUDs.

A mud is a text game run via telnet. It'd typically have between 30 and 200 people on at any given time, with a decent population being around 60-80. This doesn't qualify the game as "Massive", but it does share an important factor with a present-day MMORPGs: a single game world. I realise that within each game there are different "shards" or servers, but each one of those is large enough to be considered massive in and of it's own right.

GW doesn't have a single game world. It has many small staging areas (called towns), and each one of those staging areas is the size of a meduim sized mud. The thing is, there is no action going on in there. No gameplay. Just group forming, prep, and trade. The actual *game* exists outside of this realm. You can't walk into a zone in see 300 people in it, all camping mobs or running around. It's that "persistance" which is integral to the MMO experience. GW has absolutely no persistance. It's all instanced. You can't even drop an item in a district.

It is one of the things that we love about GW (instancing, protection from griefers and camping) that ends up seperating it from an MMORPG. By taking away your possibility to interact with people (and hence them with you), they take away the Massively Multiplayer aspect of the game.

There is some meaningful crossover though. You can have a guild, and this guild can communicate via channels. You can even organize a meeting pretty easily by going to a common district, and there will be a fair amount of people in that district already. But is a big chat room an MMORPG? Is IRC an MMO? Is our very own image battle thread an MMO game? Depends on how many people are playing =) If that thread were an ongoing story, would that make it an MMORPG?

*shrug* I don't think GW qualifies as an MMORPG. While it does share some essential characteristics (character building, group forming, intra-zone chat) it lacks the "massive multiplayer" aspect of the game.

-- EDIT --

Quote:

Now that dosent mean that it has to have crap load of people on it, it just means that the game has to be massive. This game is massive, and i doubt that anyone would disagree with that.

A massive game world doesn't mean the game is Massively Multiplayer. There are plenty of games that can be played online with more than one player that have a massive game world. Look at NWN. It's the amount of players that matters.

EnDinG · May 09, 2005, 04:37 PM // 16:37

Heres a good question... What would you call Savage?

Its a mix of a RTS and RPG. You can't call that an MMO, but you can't call it a RTS or an RPG. Just like GW, its a brand new type of game style that deserves its OWN section, not one that people think it should have. If the designers wish to call it something that you think is wrong, well its too bad your not making the game then uh?

dugman · May 09, 2005, 08:51 PM // 20:51

While I agree that Guild Wars is different from typical MMORPGs because all the action zones are instanced, I do not think that distinction alone means it should qualify as something other than an MMORPG. PvP is irrelevant to the discussion, since there are some MMORPGs that have a lot of PvP and others that don't.

For one thing, I disagree with some of the posts above that say the word "Massively" refers only to the size of the game population in an instance. Really, the word Massively has been, I feel, misplaced grammatically since most people would say it should refer to the size of the game WORLD in addition to the total player population.

Diablo 2, for instance, does have many thousands of people playing it simultaneously. But clearly Guild Wars is set apart from Diablo 2 in large part because of the sheer size of the game world and story line. Guild Wars setting and scope are much closer to standard MMORPGs than a single/standard multiplayer RPG like Diablo 2 or Neverwinter Nights. Staging areas in Guild Wars are small towns within the game's normal interface, as opposed to say Diablo 2 where players meet in an out-of-game chat channel, etc, to form teams. Additionally, players in one instance of Diablo 2 can not contact other players playing Diablo 2, whereas any player in Guild Wars can contact any other player in-game any time, even though they're in separate instances.

Likewise you can't argue it's doesn't qualify as a computer RPG. Remember that the standard for a game being a computer RPG does NOT include players "roleplaying in character". There are, basically, no computer games where the majority of players actually roleplay their characters, so that standard is far too high. Rather, computer RPGs basically just have to include elements of RPGs, such as character development with an experience system or skill point system, a degree of avatar customization, and the ability to interact with a larger storyline and campaign setting.

So Guild Wars definitely resembles a standard MMORPG much more closely than it does a smaller scale game like Diablo. Nor does it strongly resemble a small player base game like a MUD. It is, for all practical purposes, an MMORPG, whether some people above want to call it that or not.

My two cents.

Sideways · May 09, 2005, 08:53 PM // 20:53

Yeah, GW is not an MMORPG.

I won't dare classify it, but I can tell you what it isn't. :P

***EDIT

Actually, I did just have a thought to further my argument.

If you have played Diablo, Diablo 2, Diablo 2:LoD, or Sacred... let me ask you the following;

Did you consider any of those titles to be MMORPGs?

Thousands of people play them.

People can play in teams of 2-16 (depending on the game), and can play together.

But would you consider any of those games to be MMORPGs?

I sure as heck wouldn't.

And Guild Wars is basically the same sort of game... they just eliminate the frustration of having to create your own server in-game.

dugman · May 09, 2005, 09:54 PM // 21:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sideways

...If you have played Diablo, Diablo 2, Diablo 2:LoD, or Sacred... let me ask you the following;

Did you consider any of those titles to be MMORPGs?

Thousands of people play them.

People can play in teams of 2-16 (depending on the game), and can play together.

But would you consider any of those games to be MMORPGs?

I sure as heck wouldn't.

And Guild Wars is basically the same sort of game... they just eliminate the frustration of having to create your own server in-game.

There are key differences between Guild Wars and Diablo 2 that make Guild Wars an MMORPG and Diablo 2 not:

- Everyone is on the same world server and can communicate in-game with anyone else at any time. In Diablo, you can only communicate with other Diablo players out of game, aside from the people in your party of course.

- The game is centrally controlled. All permanent changes to the game world are controlled by the development team. So the game world isn't mod-able, and every time you enter an instance it is generated the same way for all players. Diablo by contrast is controlled by individual players' machines, any two of whom might have very different customizations built in.

- Quests and other content can be added and patched real time in Guild Wars, and such changes immediately affect all players of the game everywhere. Diablo games are individually created, so are not all the same version or even necessarilly the same content or fully compatible.

- The guild wars map and content at release are larger than Diablo 2 at release. Size alone does not an MMORPG make, but it helps.

So really in just about every respect Guild Wars is consistent with MMORPGs. The only difference is in how the mission zones are instanced, but that does not preclude it from being an MMORPG. It's far closer to an MMORPG than a single-player/multiplayer game like Diablo 2.

Jordster · May 10, 2005, 12:54 AM // 00:54

This game is definitely it's own genre.

It is NOT an MMO as the above poster believes.

Massively Multiplayer implies that players will play in a single, massive world (even if there are muliple shards).

As soon as you leave town, you are not in a massive world anymore. You are in your own world, with perhaps a couple of your friends or random people who you're adventuring with.

If you've ever played an MMORPG, playing GW for 20 minutes will be enough to make you understand why this game is simply not in the same genre.

That's not a bad thing. The MMORPG market is arguably super-saturated. Creating a new genre with notable similarities to MMORPGs was an excellent idea. It allows people to play without monthly fees, and without the time commitment associated with MMORPGs.

In conclusion - No, GW is NOT and MMORPG, but that's not a bad thing at all. There are plenty of MMORPGs out there if that's your thing, but if it's not, GW just might be the game for you.

May 06, 2005, 02:08 PM // 14:08	#24
Harry Voyager Pre-Searing Cadet Join Date: May 2005	To be technically accurate, only one or two MMOs (Eve) actually have the entire populous active in the same world. The vast majorety of them are set up in sharded parallel worlds, and merely because they have a few thousand people on a single server network, does not mean that they can have a few thousand people interact with eachother. Anyone remember the Warrior protest in WoW? Basically a group of disgruntled warriors got together and brought down a server by packing a couple hundred people into one node. Even Eve, one of the best load balanced games I've encountered, gets massively laggy when you've got 200 people slugging it out. Guild Wars has neatly sidestepped all of that by making everything instanced, with unit caps. This is also what allows them to have different players be at different times along the story line, and alows them to use a sell by chapter business model. It is really very innovative, and I expect it to become widely copied, but that does not make it no a massively multiplayer game; rather it is a new method of managing the problems that come from makign a game massively multiplayer. Harry Voyager Addendum: Re: EnDinG: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. If you call a tail a leg, it's still a tail. Last edited by Harry Voyager; May 06, 2005 at 02:10 PM // 14:10.. Reason: Addendum

May 09, 2005, 04:37 PM // 16:37	#33
EnDinG Keyboard + Mouse > Pen Join Date: Apr 2005 Profession: Mo/W	Heres a good question... What would you call Savage? Its a mix of a RTS and RPG. You can't call that an MMO, but you can't call it a RTS or an RPG. Just like GW, its a brand new type of game style that deserves its OWN section, not one that people think it should have. If the designers wish to call it something that you think is wrong, well its too bad your not making the game then uh? __________________

May 09, 2005, 08:53 PM // 20:53	#35
Sideways Academy Page Join Date: May 2005 Location: Calgary, AB - Soviet Canuckistan	Yeah, GW is not an MMORPG. I won't dare classify it, but I can tell you what it isn't. :P **EDIT Actually, I did just have a thought to further my argument. If you have played Diablo, Diablo 2, Diablo 2:LoD, or Sacred... let me ask you the following; Did you consider any of those titles to be MMORPGs? Thousands of people play them. People can play in teams of 2-16 (depending on the game), and can play together. But would you consider any of those games to be MMORPGs? I sure as heck wouldn't. And Guild Wars is basically the same sort of game... they just eliminate the frustration of having to create your own server in-game. Last edited by Sideways; May 09, 2005 at 08:55 PM // 20:55..*

May 06, 2005, 01:55 PM // 13:55	#21
Manderlock Wilds Pathfinder Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: TX Guild: Crimson ScS Profession: W/N	Aye, and I agree that this game is diferent from most of the crap that is called MMO, but that dosent mean that this game isnt a MMO.

May 06, 2005, 02:11 PM // 14:11	#25
Jackell Krytan Explorer Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Buffalo NY Guild: None at the moment Profession: R/E	Wow, I kinda laughed while reading this topic, but you know what, I'm gonna jump in! It's not the definition of MMORPG, but what that phrase has come to mean to the people, that the devs made CORPG, to try and break old notions. MMORPG has come to mean thousands of people. That if your walking down the street your likely to run into anyone at any time. And your all just playing to see what the devs have hooked in around the next corner. But, Guild Wars has a HIGH emphasis on PvP, more so than the other ones out there, and plays differently than those. It doesn't really mean what the term MMORPG has come to mean, so why not title it something different? Hell, this works a lot like Diablo 2, but no one says "I got Diablo 2, It's an MMORPG." They say "Yeah, it's Diablo 2. You can play it on-line."

May 06, 2005, 02:19 PM // 14:19	#27
Jackell Krytan Explorer Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Buffalo NY Guild: None at the moment Profession: R/E	I know I put my two cents in already, but I have to put two more in. THis argument is totally hilarious.

May 06, 2005, 02:38 PM // 14:38	#28
Talus Frost Gate Guardian Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Hamilton, ON Profession: E/Me	All I know is, I like Guild Wars better than any MMORPG I've ever played. That's all I care about.

May 06, 2005, 02:45 PM // 14:45	#29
Epinephrine Master of Beasts Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Ottawa, Canada Guild: Servants of Fortuna [SoF]	Seems like we've had this argument. "Massively" is very different from "massive" - it is modifying the word multiplayer, and since the game is not "massively multiplayer" it isn't an MMO. Eight people in an instance is not "massively multiplayer", and the weak argument that there are tons of people online in instances is no better than saying that there are tons of people online playing chess. Chess isn't an MMO. The only parts that are close to being MMO are the towns.

May 09, 2005, 08:51 PM // 20:51	#34
dugman Pre-Searing Cadet Join Date: May 2005	While I agree that Guild Wars is different from typical MMORPGs because all the action zones are instanced, I do not think that distinction alone means it should qualify as something other than an MMORPG. PvP is irrelevant to the discussion, since there are some MMORPGs that have a lot of PvP and others that don't. For one thing, I disagree with some of the posts above that say the word "Massively" refers only to the size of the game population in an instance. Really, the word Massively has been, I feel, misplaced grammatically since most people would say it should refer to the size of the game WORLD in addition to the total player population. Diablo 2, for instance, does have many thousands of people playing it simultaneously. But clearly Guild Wars is set apart from Diablo 2 in large part because of the sheer size of the game world and story line. Guild Wars setting and scope are much closer to standard MMORPGs than a single/standard multiplayer RPG like Diablo 2 or Neverwinter Nights. Staging areas in Guild Wars are small towns within the game's normal interface, as opposed to say Diablo 2 where players meet in an out-of-game chat channel, etc, to form teams. Additionally, players in one instance of Diablo 2 can not contact other players playing Diablo 2, whereas any player in Guild Wars can contact any other player in-game any time, even though they're in separate instances. Likewise you can't argue it's doesn't qualify as a computer RPG. Remember that the standard for a game being a computer RPG does NOT include players "roleplaying in character". There are, basically, no computer games where the majority of players actually roleplay their characters, so that standard is far too high. Rather, computer RPGs basically just have to include elements of RPGs, such as character development with an experience system or skill point system, a degree of avatar customization, and the ability to interact with a larger storyline and campaign setting. So Guild Wars definitely resembles a standard MMORPG much more closely than it does a smaller scale game like Diablo. Nor does it strongly resemble a small player base game like a MUD. It is, for all practical purposes, an MMORPG, whether some people above want to call it that or not. My two cents.

May 10, 2005, 12:54 AM // 00:54	#37
Jordster Pre-Searing Cadet Join Date: May 2005	This game is definitely it's own genre. It is NOT an MMO as the above poster believes. Massively Multiplayer implies that players will play in a single, massive world (even if there are muliple shards). As soon as you leave town, you are not in a massive world anymore. You are in your own world, with perhaps a couple of your friends or random people who you're adventuring with. If you've ever played an MMORPG, playing GW for 20 minutes will be enough to make you understand why this game is simply not in the same genre. That's not a bad thing. The MMORPG market is arguably super-saturated. Creating a new genre with notable similarities to MMORPGs was an excellent idea. It allows people to play without monthly fees, and without the time commitment associated with MMORPGs. In conclusion - No, GW is NOT and MMORPG, but that's not a bad thing at all. There are plenty of MMORPGs out there if that's your thing, but if it's not, GW just might be the game for you.