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Perhaps we should look a bit towards Star Citizen.

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Dec 30, 2015 Phaserlight link
Touché.
Dec 30, 2015 incarnate link
Misunderstandings abound here, I see. No, Elite is not a CORPG. Elite IS a MMO. Everyone plays in a single persistent instance of universe. This is even more pronounced since the Powerplay update. The actions of one player affect the same world that everyone else is in. The concept of "32 players per instance" only kicks in if too many players are in the same star system at once.

I think that's pretty neat.

But, no, it does not make it an MMO.

The term "Massively Multiplayer Online RPG" was coined to describe titles like Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest, and so on (Richard Garriott created the term to describe Ultima Online, we were already well into engine development on this game at the time when he did, and I was grateful that someone had come up with a term). People forget that it was defined to refer to a very specific type of game, and that it really didn't mean "every game with a large population". One of the early creators of Farmville told me at dinner earlier this year that it was an MMO, and he's a really nice guy so I didn't say anything, but I had a bit of a quiet facepalm moment.

Especially for a modern MMO, the simple litmus test is "can your 200-person guild fly into a single location, together, and all see / interact with each other, and be seen by others in that location". This is true of the games I listed above. It's also true of VO (believe it or not, we tested sectors to about 500 people, back prior to release in 2004).

Anything that instances at 32 players is still a CORPG, albeit one that is much more elegant about how those players can impact the shared game universe. I'm not being negative about this kind of design at all, it's a great idea in many ways. It makes things so much easier to plan on instancing and never having to deal with, say, an overwhelming number of people showing up in Dau L10 at the same time. It reduces server cost dramatically, both on bandwidth and CPU usage, and is architecturally super-easy to scale. Hell, if you push the instance hosting mostly off onto peer-to-peer, you can almost do it for free.

We also have instancing as an emergency measure. But not built into the gameplay (outside of the training sectors). If we regularly needed to have 500 people on Dau L10, it would get a dedicated server, lock-step traffic patterns near the station, and offloaded GPGPU physics, and still support it. When we started working on this game, I considered all these different architecture options, but I wanted the possibility of massive battles with large numbers of players. And although our popularity has never enabled that, it's not a goal I've ever given up on.

Some people may think this is all definition hair-splitting if the common user experience is roughly similar. I can understand that, but as someone who spent a vast amount of time trying to build something to really be an MMO (with the scary, massive technical complexity and requirements that are added), I can tell you that developers like us, or Blizzard, or CCP will beg to differ on "it all being the same". What's most important is that there be some real gameplay that justifies that difference (genuinely large-scale interaction), which CCP/Blizzard/others definitely have, and we do not at present.

That said, VO is also a pretty good game in its own way. The advantage of being low key graphic-wise is that it works on mobile, and on older machines. You can actually target those people who can't afford to buy $300 video cards. Different kind of crowd, but a much wider crowd than the hard core gamers with money to burn.

Also, it should be understood that art-asset differences ("ship/station/asteroid graphics"), while significant, are one of the easiest things to update. Which is why I don't stress a lot about that comparison in particular. We can update the PC version pretty easily, keep mobile running on the current assets, and raise our graphical bar without impacting usage-scalability at all. We just.. don't really have the people to make the new assets right now. But, on the upside, we do have a shiny new engine to put them in, which is the more time-consuming investment (not easy to scale, or outsource, unlike assets).

Anyway, it's great that there are lots of cool space games now, and lots of inspiring changes taking place in the genre.

This has all wandered pretty far afield from the OP of "hey, let's add walking around in stations!", which I think has been answered. So, I'm going to lock this for now..