Argentum Online
Just when you think you know about most of the MMORPGs out there, along comes something like Argentum Online, developed on a shoestring budget in Argentina — and celebrating its sixth anniversary! It looks like they are running some sort of server test right now, but the history page describes the game as having peaked at thousands of players. It looks like it was always run for free.
There’s even an Argentum Online 2 in development, though it looks like it is still fairly early in the process.
I think it’s safe to say that the formerly difficult server technology is increasingly less so, at least for staging up a modest game. We’ve already seen exponential growth in the number of MMOs and virtual worlds out there — but once anyone can set one up with fairly little effort, how many will there be?
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We are the future. And we want your collections to be accessible online. And we want them indexed on search engines so we can find them. I’m sitting here in the Wallingford Chocolati (chocolate, espresso, and wireless. … Argentum Online Just when you think you know about most of the MMORPGs out there, along comes something like Argentum Online, developed on a shoestring budget in Argentina and celebrating its sixth anniversary! It looks like they are running some
Argentum, but nobody’s perfect.
I dunno but I hope its a really big number. Something on the order of the number of Chinese restaurants in Toronto sounds like a good start to me 😉
It’s still not the easiest thing in the world. But it’ll get there, one day. You should look into programs like Realm Crafter, Raph.
Now, not that Realm Crafter is a working MMO solution by any standards. I think I read that they were having trouble keeping the servers stable with 20 people online, and the program itself isn’t much more than “enter value here for sword swing damage” and “import model file here”, etc. It’s clunky, it’s broken, it’s generally programmed in an astoundingly poor manner, and it’s generally programmed in an astoundingly poor manner in Blitz Basic.
But the point is, more and more people are trying their hands at this kind of thing. Multiverse, for example. And people ARE interested.
Eventually there WILL be some kind of quick ‘n easy MMO creation program that works well enough to allow people to set up a decent MMO with fairly little effort (well… as little as you can imagine.. art and such still won’t come out of thin air if you intend your game to be unique or look good at all).
Although, this won’t be for a long time. I don’t think it’ll happen before 2012 (five years, I’m not predicting the end of the world). And I doubt a real solid toy will evolve even by that time. It took ten years from UO inspiring EVERYONE to want to make a MMO to get to the point where we are – with a few generally unusable tools of varying complexity and functionality out there for people to play with.
But once there is, things will only change a bit. Most of the MMOs that get produced with stock graphics and two shakily working skills will fall by the wayside, without many people even noticing. They won’t get any mainstream attention, or any attention really at all.
On the plus side, it’ll allow some people to have a chance they wouldn’t have had otherwise, and a very low percentage of games will really shine through. Sort of like IPY, among the thousands of random UO servers that nobody has EVER heard about.
So, in short, quit being snobby about user created content. 😛
There’s another upside that you may like, by the way. The way I see it, when we break open whatever seal it is that allows MMOs to be produced rather easily (pestilence?), people will come to appreciate the “AAA”, professionally produced product more than they do right now.
When ten “MMOCrafter” games are released a month, I imagine we’ll hear a bit less complaining about the game that just had $30m spent on it “but still has some problems”. Unlike now, where that game has its grave dug and headstone inscribed the second people step into *beta* and it’s not fully polished.
One of the guys I interviewed at my previous job had been working on a commercial MMO in Brazil, prior to moving to Australia. There’s all kinds of stuff out there. It might be interesting to see if someone can build an exhaustive encyclopedia of everything that’s ever launched, in any language.
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Now that you noticed Argentum, you might as well check Regnum Online, another MMORPG from Argentina (it just got out of beta two days ago, after countless years of development).
Both Argentum and Regnum went through great pains to be released. If both are the only success cases (in the case of Argentum, it was a pretty popular game in latin america and Spain) we have here out of the many people I heard wanted to do an MMO, I wouldn’t worry about “when everybody can start an MMORPG” for the time being :).
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MudConnect lists approx 1700 text MUDs. (From what I’ve heard, 1/2 to 2/3 of them are dead links.)
So, that’s 600(?) text MUDs for a user base or 50K-200K? I’ve heard numbers as high as 400K. (No one is sure exactly many how many text MUD players there are. I’m guestimating it to be 10x peak current usage, where PCU is estimated by looking at the most popular text MUDs and assuming the comprise half the market.)
In other words, if it’s easy to make a MMORPG (aka: just as easy as setting up a Diku clone), then there will be one MMORPG per 83-333 people!
90%(?) of those 600 text MUDs have 5 (or fewer) players on at a time.
The 5-10 most popular have 500-ish players at a time.
Mike, that’s proably true, but it is harder for text-muds to distinguish themselves from others by looks alone. So I don’t think you can apply what happened with text-MUDs to graphical ones.
It’s possible. There are far more people who want to make their own MMO. The only stumbling block to an easy setup would be art, most likely.
That being the case, more and more people will inevitably rush to provide art solutions to the people using e-z MMO programs. Sort of like what Multiverse is planning with their art marketplace, or simply individuals setting up websites and selling the same art to 500 people. Not to mention that I’m sure any program like that will come with a set of stock graphics.
I sincerely doubt that, at the peak of any upcoming make-your-own-mmo craze, most will even have 5 players online at a time.
In reality, server programming has never been that hard if you weren’t trying to do too much. Meridian 59‘s server is actually surprisingly simple. It just took a few programmers with the proper discipline. Of course, M59 is now over 10 years old, so you could probably do a bit better today given the more generous power of modern servers. (In fact, you can’t even buy the computers [glorified desktops more than servers] today.)
But, as I said, the problem is in trying to do too much. Having a single-world, trying to handle too many simultaneous users, not calculating bandwidth usage, etc., are all pitfalls to watch out for in building a smaller-scale server. Also, people with some MUD programming background will probably be able to handle server programming well. I built a simple text MUD server in Python, and used some of that code to start a graphical MUD server as a personal side project.
My thoughts.
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