he basic issue is one of speed. FPS games offer speed, action, and fastest finger fun. MMOs offer slower, turn-based action, with nary a trigger finger to be found. There are other differences of course… (RPG elements, equipment, social interaction, etc.) but at the core, it’s about speed. There have been attempts by game makers to bridge these gaps, transcend the genres and get followers of one to join the other. Notables include Planetside
http://planetside.station.sony.com/ , and the soon to be released Huxley
http://www.webzengames.com/Game/Huxley/ . The latter, yet to be proven, the former, well, former.
The issue: there are technical challenges to getting the two concepts to work together: massive numbers of players and fast paced action are just very difficult to make happen together. The problem lies centrally around the concept and need for a centralized game server (or bunch of game servers) to respond VERY quickly to actions that gamers want to take, fast as they want to feel it! Of course the server has trouble handling more than say, 32 or 64 players because of CPU power or bandwidth. And a worse problem: if it is a centralized server the latency (Ping) times to players in different parts of the country will vary VASTLY from, say 20ms to 500ms (all on broadband equipment).
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately, looking at many different game engine technologies.
Project Darkstar by Sun Microsystems intrigues me greatly, as it is clearly a powerful and greatly easy to use game engine, targeted towards MMO games.
http://www.sun.com/2006-0328/feature/index.jsp http://games-darkstar.dev.java.net/ Meanwhile, Garage Games Torque engine has been used in countless games including many FPS titles such as Tribes & Tribes 2.
http://www.garagegames.com/developer/torque/tge/ There are other game engines out there, and the trend is just like Darkstar and Garage games: keeping the genres apart. We as gamers are all waiting for that engine, those games, that play and feel like an MMO, but are fast and furiously fun like an FPS. I can barely wait to see what Huxley will do!
In the meantime, we can still enjoy Battlefield 2!
http://www.ea.com/official/battlefield/battlefield2/us/home.jsp And the rumor mill has it that Battlefield 2142 will have large amounts of RPG to it! Very cool!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-DnK-d_sp0 http://www.gameshark.com/pc/games/6159/Battlefield-2142.htm Tytus
