The Digital Continuum: Conflict evolution

Conflict is at the core of just about everything. This is particularly true of MMOs, and why almost each and every single one of them is driven by conflict of some variety. For the most part that conflict is or results in combat, and as we all know, combat is probably the one thing you do most in your game of choice.

So where's it all headed?

In recent years the quest for improved fluidity in combat -- more than ever before actually -- has steered design direction in more and more MMOs. Just take a look at the combat in DDO Unlimited, Age of Conan, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, All Points Bulletin and DC Universe Online and you'll see what I'm getting at.

It may not stuff an entire virtual continent into a single (or at least seemingly single) zone ala World of Warcraft, but to most peoples' surprise Champions Online is constituted of some surprisingly vast zones. Still, the speed and range of movement both in and out of combat go far beyond what's happening in World of Warcraft – and that's the key difference.

Technology plays a significant role in what can or cannot be accomplished in an online game featuring a massive and persistent world. This goes triple for combat, which acts as a lynch pin and thus as a driving force of many a design. Yet with this forceful progression, designers are bound to hit some snags.

A game like All Points Bulletin runs into these annoying limitations when its designers choose a speedy and savage combat experience rather than opting to slow things down. Except that, the further dialed back combat becomes, the larger its virtual acreage can grow. And if that weren't enough to consider, land size and visual fidelity also reside on a sliding scale. So here's the problem: Going full bore with visuals and combat results in a fractured game world filled with loading screens. This results in a constant balancing act between combat pacing, visuals and virtual space.

For all intents and purposes, it appears as though gamers looking for fast-paced combat in expansive worlds that are also chocked full of detail, are simply out of luck. Well, they are and they aren't; it just depends on patience and time. Given a healthy length of time, the upper limits of zone size, combat speed and visual fidelity will most definitely increase. And as that happens, it's very likely that new design concepts will begin to proliferate the massively multiplayer online space.

Crawl, walk, run; that's the order in which we learn to move around as children. The same can be said of MMO combat since the late nineties, and right now it's somewhere between walking and running. Upcoming waves of games are doing some very exciting things with combat. What's next is being able to create worlds with this combat consisting of dynamically connected zones, which don't require several load screens. That's how I see the next five or so years of this genre expanding. Eventually, the tech will catch up to the point where we'll be dealing with a variety of distinctly different genres.

We're already edging up onto the era where "MMORPG" or even "MMO" is becoming a less viable way to describe these games. Personally, I can't wait to see what happens when server and client tech get beyond the barrier that's been keeping heretofore unknown gaming experiences from all of us.