TechStuff Classic: The MMORPG Story

back then? Well, this particular classic episode is called the m m O RPG Story, the massively multiplayer online role playing game story, which granted has changed a lot since two thousand twelve. There were games that have come out since then that we don't go into in this episode because we weren't able to look into the future. But we do look at the origins of the m m O RPG. Where did it come from and how did it volve? And when I say we, I mean me

and my original co host Chris Pallette. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this classic episode. So we are today going to talk about the history of massively multiplayer online role playing games, and it all actually stems back to what I was just alluding to and all of you guys out there who are big D n D fans picked up on it. I'm sure immediately we're talking about dudgeons and dragons, and it's important to talk about dungeons and dragons first to understand why M m O RPGs exist

at all. Yeah, and now there were some computer role playing games, but they weren't like what we think of today and then and really they came around right about the same time as D and D took off. So let's let's start with um, let's start with D and D first of all to kind of explain what's going on. So we're not we're not even talking about D n D online. We're actually talking about specifically about the pencil and paper and dice and all that jazz game screens,

et cetera. So back in nineteen uh, there were some some some guys who had created a war game, a miniature's war game called chain Mail. All right, now, war games are they've been around for a while, right, Yeah.

It's where you essentially have uh, figures that represent military units, or you might even have what they used to call chits, those little pieces of cardboard they had the little number they kind of look like, Um, if you haven't seen these old style things, they actually sort of look like the periodic table. They have the picture of your unit

and how many hit points it has and all that stuff. Right, So the ideas that you would try and uh out strategicize your opponent playing on a map, and the map might have even topographical elements that would indicate how you might have an advantage or disadvantage in a given situation, depending upon your unit and where your enemy is located. Right, And anyway, the whole game was this idea of you know, matching wits against an opponent. Well, chain Mail kind of

brought that down a little bit. Chain Mail was an idea of using smaller units in very specific circumstances, like say in castle or a dungeon. But then the game creators, among them a certain Gary Gygax, I feel like I've heard that name before, uh, decided that what if we were to to to change this So instead of playing you know, controlling units, you control a specific character, someone

who has a personality of background, UH, goals, motivations. UH. They have their own abilities and their own disadvantages, and you were to take on this role within an adventure, and that was the where the whole role playing game idea kind of spawned out of. You would have someone who was in charge of explaining all the environments and taking care of all the game mechanics on the back end.

That would be the dungeon master or a master. And then the players would each control a character and would try and pursue certain goals dependent upon the game itself and that character's personality. And this was kind of a radical idea at the time, back in nineteen seventy four, and uh it called I could I guess you could say it was a popular idea, particularly among high school and college students. Now, your characters when you when you

first started there, there are some elements of chance involved here. Um. When you first create your character, uh, you roll the dice to determine what the character's characteristics are. Their attributes. Yeah, like, um, for example, of strength, how strong that person is, or or how much dexterity that person has the ability to get out of the way when somebody's swinging an axe at their head. Um. Now, I haven't played D and D for about twenty years, but I remember that it

used to range between three and eighteen for normal characters. Yes, because you roll three see six sided die. Um, the thing is um with the uh uh you know that that's one aspect of it too. But the the dungeon master or game master would use a screen to hide the dungeon or whatever it is that you were going and venturing in, so you didn't really know. Unlike those other games where you could see there were mountains ahead of your characters, you could go around the mountains when

you came, Um, you'll be riding six white horses. But meanwhile, UM, in a dungeon and in D and D, you didn't necessarily know. And this is the difference in a role playing game and those other games. You are actually pretending to be you know this character, so U one of the first things I had to learn, and I when I started playing D n D, I was I think eight years old or nine years old. Um, you had to learn that you can't see what's going on, so you have to remember to ask what do I see?

What do I hear? You know, and the dungeon master might not necessarily tell you hear the click of a trap unless you ask, like, well, you just heard a clicking noise? Oh right, that clicking noises in D and D were never a good thing. Um. But you also you also had different play styles, right. You had people who would play very achievement oriented, right. They wanted to they wanted to get whatever the goal was, and it

was less about the experience of being a character. Uh. And then you had people who really kind of embraced the idea of role playing being someone else and to really kind of try and drive that aspect more than

the rules necessarily. So you you kind of had these two types subcategories of players rule rule players that were all about the statistics and and getting the good roles and getting the best equipment for their character because it would guarantee their success that kind of thing, and role players who are more interested in the personality aspects. Most most players fall somewhere within that spectrum between those two. Same thing holds true by the way of m m

O RPGs. So the only reason I even mentioned all of that is so that we have the foundation to build upon, so that we understand once we get into

m m O RPGs why they're a big deal. Well, computer role playing games have been around, like I said, about as long as uh, Dungeons and Dragons have because that was they sort of went around at um and the rise of personal computers on the desktop, uh right, right about the same time that the mid to late seventies, and they got popular in high schools and colleges, which were breeding grounds not just for role playing games but

for computer sciences. Yes, yes, that's true. Uh. The thing is, one of the reasons that that Dungeons and Dragons and other role playing games took off was because it gave you an opportunity to play a game with your friends. You weren't sitting at home on one machine interacting with the game on the machine. I mean that was fun too.

I like playing uh those games by myself. Also, we usually call those c RPGs computer role playing games that don't necessarily have a multiplayer element to them, right, but but the multiplayer games, both on paper and and computers, give you an opportunity to uh go through the experience with other people and which which can be fun because you never know what those other people are are going to do. And it also gives you this feeling of camaraderie.

It's pre decor if you will, and and depending upon the game, it may allow certain players to band together and oppose other players, So you can even have elements within the game where you've got a struggle between two groups of players. And if the game is designed properly, meaning that it's you know, a dynamic element to it, you might even be able to have players actually influence the course of the game's world, which is pretty tricky because you know, that's a very delicate balance to to

create when you are a developer. You don't want to make it so easy to affect the game's world that it is uh uh that that one group of players essentially dominates and makes all the determinations of where the game's world is going. At the same time, you don't want it to be so static that it feels like no matter what you do, you don't influence the outcome.

It's a really tricky balance. Well, I would I would argue that one of the things that makes UH online role playing games so much fun UH is not necessarily the high graphics elements. I think the the the element of play is most important. That's one of the things. I mean, you don't see these things, these fantastic UH animations of spells and and UH sword play and whatever else that you might happen to be engaged in when you're playing a tabletop role playing game, because imagine it.

What imagine it? It's this thing that we used to do before there was the internet. Well, I I do love looking at the amazing graphics work of some of these game studios now. But um, you know, the very first online role playing games were text based. Yeah, in fact, we can talk a little bit about them. First of all, I wanna define a couple of terms for the very

earliest games. Some of them were built on something called PLATO, which is an acronym for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. Here's the funny thing, bit Sucker pre dates pretty much all of this stuff that we're talking. Plato actually came out before D and D the tabletop game came out early sixties actually. But but PLATO was all about It was supposed to be an educational platform, which of course meant that students immediately figured out ways to play games

on it, and uh like almost immediately. This is for education. I want to kill stuff. So, um, the University of Illinois built programmed Logic for Automated Teaching operations. So it's

a platform that could run on networked computers. Now these computers are networked to one another, they are not networked into a large your network think land Party, not the Internet, right, and uh, immediately you had students start to figure out ways to create games because it meant that they could link it to other students and have a social experience on a computer, which just shows you that, you know,

we are very social creatures. The you know, the first thing we start looking at is how can we use this machine to connect to other people? So that's one acronym you need to know. Another one is MUD, which stands for multi user dungeons, not not what happens when you add water to earth um which just makes me almost go off on a brack tangent. But I'm not going to what happened to the water? Uh? So, Also with mud come a couple of other um uh topics,

or a couple other acronyms, move and mush. Have you heard about those? So a move is a move is an acronym that has an acronym in it because moves to is for mud object oriented. MUSH stands for mud users, Shared hallucination or shared hack or shared habitat or shared holiday. It really depends on who you ask. They're all pretty similar. But but these are basically the frameworks within which people

built games. Now, back in n there was a game that came out called Colossal Cave Adventure sometimes just called Adventure by William Crowther and it was a single player text based game, but it was what created the foundation for some of the multi user games that came after it. UH In ninety seven and published in seventy eight, a game called Maria came out, and now Maria was built

on top of Plato. There were other games that came out before Maria, but Maria is one of the more famous ones, and it allowed up to ten players to get together in a party and go on a dungeon crawling adventure UH. And it was created with these these

very simple vector graphics like a um. You know, you see like the green wall with a green door outline on it, and you would push a command that would knock the door open and then you might have an encounter afterward, you might find treasure, that kind of stuff. The interesting thing about it was not only did it allow up to tend people to play that that itself was interesting but it also created the dungeons um every time you played, so the dungeons were not pre generated.

They generated dynamically when you would play the game, so you would never necessarily have the same experience twice because the dungeon would be randomly created when you started. UM

and uh. So that that was sort of an early example of how people were trying to kind of port the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons or a game like D and D to a computer environment and not have it be a single player playing with computer generated characters, although there are plenty of examples of that as well. UM and Then in nineteen seventy eight, a fellow named Roy trub Shaw created the very first multi user dungeon and it was called Mud. That's why we call them

MUDs because he made it. It was he was in Essex University, and so mud became the generic term for games that were built in this way. UM and it became very very popular. And then eventually again these were on network computers. There was no Internet yet, but Trubshaw connected his game to the ARPA net in nineteen eighty, so suddenly you had essentially the ancestor to massively multiplayer online role playing games because it made it gave access to people beyond just folks who had uh the access

to those specific computers within Essex University to play. Yeah. My my notes have the game down as being called Dungeon d U N G E N. Yeah, I have it as it was called multi user Dungeon. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, but by the same same thing. I mean, that's that is where mud came from. They probably, I'm sure it was called dungeon, just as uh for shorthand the next one I have doesn't pop up till do you have

anything you wanted to mention before I go to that? Okay, So in the University of Virginia there were a couple of classmates, John Taylor and Kelton Flynn, and they created a game called The Dungeons of Kezm which was a six player game and it was also inspired by duchess and dragons and it used as key graphics to represent elements of the game. Yeah. Yeah, it's making me think of some of the old games I used to play. And they also founded a company in eighty two called

the Kezmi Company. A few years later they I'll mention it when it happens, but they would come up with another game that would be UH kind of a big influence on online role playing games in the future. UH. In any four, you had a fellow named Mark Peterson who wrote The Realm of ang Mar and UH. It was originally a kind of an offshoot of another game

called The Scepter of Goth and UH. In ninety four Peterson rewrote it and adapted it for MS DOSS, which I don't know how many of you guys remember MS DOSS. That's pre windows Um, but that was the that formed the basis of a game that ended up being found on a lot of Bolton Board systems. So if you guys heard our episode about bbs is, you know that

there used to be these communities. Still aren't in many cases, but there were these communities that were housed on individual, private individuals computers, although you could also have companies that do this too, But you could have a private end visual who would open up their computer to allow other people to dial into their computer to access files and play games. This is one of the games that was

found on a lot of bbs is. And if the bbs would allow multiple people to call in at once, if they had multiple lines that would allow for that. Then you can have people play this game simultaneously. Um. And in eight five you had the introduction of Mirror World, which was a multi user dungeon that could be run on a home computer as opposed to some you know, research institution or university's computer. Yeah. I remember the modem speeds back then. That was yeah, yeah, I've got an

interesting thing to mentioned in about that. Five was also the year that the Kezmi Corporation came out with Island of Kezmi, which again Kelton Flynn and John Taylor, and this ran on compu Serve. Yeah, I've heard of them. Yeah. So it was the first commercial multiplayer online role playing game. I don't think you could call it massive because it had a limit to how many players could play one, no more than one. Compared compared to the earlier games,

that's pretty massive. Yeah, compared to you know, the old the older Kids My game where six people could play, or even the the ten player Maria game, it's you know, it's I think it's almost ten times that. Wow. So

I'm not that stupid people, almost but not quite. An interesting game comes out interesting for a couple of reasons, because, for one thing, you can confuse it with another game by the same name, Never Winter Nights by Don Daglo and Catherine Mattega comes out has no connection at all to the Never Winter Nights game that came out by BioWare. But this game ran on A O L. And I've heard of it. I used that joke already. They and A O L used a an interesting pricing mechanism. So

this is a commercial game. You had to pay to play, and the way it worked was that you would pay six dollars an hour to play this game at three hundred bawd. And when we were talking hours, that's about how long it would take to loads to make a move. Uh. For twelve dollars an hour, you can play at twelve bad. Hey, that's just screaming fast, right, good, it's screaming all right. I don't know if it's streaming fast. And this was

the first graphics based M M O RPG. Uh. Now, do you have any you want to mention at all before we get to ninety, because then I've got the biggie. Well. I figured that we were going to talk about the the Ultimate series of games because they were important for the role playing game world. But they weren't massively multiplayer, right and that yes, that will definitely lead into a

very important discussion. So Ultima. While while we've got this development over here with the multi user games, there's still quite a bit of work being done in single player computer role playing games. Oh absolutely, they were huge and one of the one of the people who was really spiritheading this movement. We've actually we did an entire episode on him, Richard Garriott, the Lord British of the Ultimate Series.

He founded the Ultimate Series. First game was Al Kalabeth, which then eventually of which he was in college at the time. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, he actually dropped out of college because his computer game business took off so well. His dad, by the way, astronaut. Yes, dad's an astronaut. He jumps out of college, makes millions of dollars. But yeah, they were he was working with. Don't take that as a lesson, kids, I'm not saying drop out of college.

Your mileage may very Yes. Um, yeah, he was talking in one about the possibility of an online version of Ultima. Yeah. Now, all Tima was a series that he created after his first success in computer role playing games, and then Ultima UH. The original Ultimate games were kind of your standard hack and slash RPG type games where you took on the role of a character and tried to defeat some sort of massively evil villain. But after Ultima three UH, Richard

Garriott took an interesting turn. He really began to do something new with computer role playing games. He created the concept of UH. Well it didn't create the concept, but he incorporated the concept of morality and how your choices can affect gameplay and UH. In Ultima four, you took on the role of a character called the Avatar, who was supposed to be the exemplification of all the best traits in the world. He was supposed to be the

the paragon of virtue. And if you, um, if you played like a nasty person and you know, stule stuff, and you killed innocence, you could not win the game. It was impossible to win the game because in order to win the game you had to make lots of sacrifices and and be virtuous UH. And then this sort of gave a real shot in the arm to his series.

I mean, it was already popular, but then it became crazy popular, and so he continued to develop the games, and as the multi user craze continued with fairly primitive games compared to some of the the standalone games on computers, he began to turn his eye towards developing an online

version of This Ultimate World. Now. In the meantime, just before this, well while this, this whole plan for an online version of Ultima was in the earliest development phases, another game in nineties six came out called Meridian fifty nine, and that was developed by a company called Radio, which no longer exists. Um, they were, They were something of an innovator for their time. Yes, um, but if you've never heard of them, and it's because they've been closed

for for quite a while. It's one of the first massively multiplayer online role playing games ever released by a major publisher, and and a lot of the things that we associate with m m O RPGs began with this game. For one, it had a monthly subscription for a flat rate, so you would pay us a flat rate each month to play. It had a three D first person view of the world in a fantasy setting, and uh not all. In fact, a lot of m m O RPGs do

not take the first person views. Several of them take a third person view where you're either behind or or over the character you're playing. Um, but U three d O ran this game, but then it shut down. The three d O shutdown in two thousand three. It ceased to be actually they closed the game on August thirty,

first of two. From what I have, yeah, well the game itself still continued because what happened was in February Meridian fifty nine was turned over to the original technical developers, which were a couple of brothers who have opened the game to the public for no charge to the player. So there it's running on two servers in the United States. But yeah, I love the name of the company though, Near Death Studios. Yeah, it's it's just as the game

is when it's running on two servers. Yeah, but it's but it's interesting that it's still you know, this shows that the people who adopt these games can be very passionate, and even when a studio itself is in financial trouble, people want those games to continue, which is somewhat problematic because how do you keep this going when the in order to run the game, you actually do have to spend real money because you're about electricity costs, you're talking

about server costs, you're talking about you know, you might have to have space for that machine. It's uh, it's tough. And UM that's not the only time that has happened by log shot. But so at that same time, Richard Garriott and the folks over at Origin and later Electronic Cards were working on Ultimate Online. Yeah. Ultimate Online was

apparently originally supposed to go on. Now, keeping in mind the time frame we were originally talking about for that when I met when I brought it up, we were very much in the online service provider world and Sierra had its own network it was working on, but they ended up shutting it down. Um, and Ultimate Online became a an Internet m M RPG, which UH was probably better for uh for everyone involved, because it gave you

a much wider audience. I got to actually see this game and action when it was in its alf A build before it even opened up to the beta world. Uh. And UH because um, Richard Garrett came down to a science fiction convention that I go to a lot, Dragon

Con in Atlanta. So Richard Garrett used to be a very frequent guest a dragon Con, and in fact he and I kind of struck up a bit of a friendship and we would chat about the games and stuff, and he would show me the games that were in development, including Ultimate Online, and it was really a neat thing. It was a it was a kind of a new idea. It was building on that work that other people have done in in previous generations of multi user dungeons, but on a huge scale, and also created a much more

dynamic world. So Ultimate Online had a world where, in theory anyway, you had ecosystems that could actually be affected by player behavior. So, for example, let's say that you are in a forest and you decide one day that you are the bunny slayer, and you go on a bunny slaying rampage and you hack can slash every bunny you can find. Well, there's a limited number of bunnies for a given amount of time, and as you start

slaying these bunnies, there are other consequences. For example, there are also wolves in the forest, and now all the bunnies are gone, which means that the food source for the wolves are gone. You know, they no longer have their normal food source, so they might actually venture out of the forest and start to attack villagers. So you could actually, inadvertently, while slaying bunnies, as any good hero would want to do, bring terror and and and hardship

upon a village because these wolves are now attacking people. Uh. On the flip side, if you were you know, Wolf's Bane, and you were going out into the woods to slay every single wolf you saw, the bunny population might explode. And bunnies are everywhere almost like triples. Yeah, that's just a small example of what was dynamically supposed to happen in the world. Uh. And and to some degree it did work like that, although there were definitely some issues

as well. It didn't always work exactly the way people had planned. And also player behavior really really changed that world quite a bit. Yeah. If you, uh, if you've played recent mmorpg more recent MMO RPGs and been annoyed at the fact that there are people who are playing the game just apparently to make other people miserable, called griefers. Yeah, uh,

that started pretty much with the dawn of mmrpgs. Yeah. Now, there were people who would lurk just outside of starting areas and waylay characters, and uh, sometimes they would just do it just to do it. You know it wasn't They knew you probably were not carrying anything of value on you. There was no reason to really attack you. There's no real benefit, and yet they would do it because they're jerks. Um it. Meanwhile, and there were a lot of other problems. There were people who were finding

ways to cheat the system. In fact, there was a monumental event. So the game launches in ninety seven. Well, August of the game has its first monumental event. August. What happened? Oh was it ninth? Oh, I've got eighth, but but you know what I'm talking about right, Well, and there was an assassination, yes, of Lord British himself. Now here's the thing. Lord British is uh normally in the game was invulnerable to attack. But um uh, there was an in game appearance of Lord British that happened

during the beta testing of Ultimate Online. So the game had not gone gold yet, it was still but it was open to players who were in the beta program. And uh so Lord British was showing up during uh an event in order to kind of stress test the servers. The idea was that if Lord British is there, then most of the beta players are going to be logged on, and this will help the origin and determine all well their servers can hold up to the strain of a

lot of people playing at one time. And then, depending upon whom you ask, uh, something went terribly wrong. Either it was a computer issue or a human issue. And it's kind of kind of hard to uh to say what, although I think I know what it really happened. What happened is that the server crashed, server reboots. Richard Garriott is there as Lord British. Server reboots and resets Lord British,

turning off his invulnerability flag. Richard Garriott does not think he needs, does not realize this, and does not turn the invulnerability flag back on. And then there was a character called Reins who testing out this theory, attacked Lord British and killed him. He was also he was not the player behind Rains was already kind of a notorious on the servers because he was known for x bloyding bugs as opposed to reporting bugs. He was a software

consultant from what I understand, so um uh. It was also supposedly one of the earliest griefers in the beta program, so he was one of these people I was talking about in a way, so, uh yeah, they were. He was already kind of on thin ice, so that it was an amusing situation and it was an irritating situation, and uh they you know. The game also even had little humorous responses and references to this when it went gold. But yeah, that was one of those memorable moments in

m m O RPG history. Chris and I will have more to say about how to play games online with a whole bunch of other Yahoo's in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So Ultimate Online ends up being the very first MMO RPG to hit one thousand subscribers. It's really successful early on in in the in these early early days of

the m m O RPG. Yeah. But the next one that I have is it's going to put it to Shane even are you talking about the one from Variant Interactive later Sony Online Entertainment, premiered in ever Crack, Yes, also known as ever Request or Rest or never Rest. Yeah, lots of different names for this. Yeah, this was again. And what's also interesting is so far Maridy in fifty nine Ultimate Online Request, all three fantasy based role playing games. Yes,

EverQuest launches and it is a massive success. Uh. It was in development at the same time as Ultima Online, had a very different look from Ultima Online, although similar setting in the sense of it's the Sword and Sorcery realm.

And uh, yeah, it was one of those games where eventually, if you were talking about an M M O RPG, you were talking either about Ultimate Online or ever Request, and EverQuest popularity skyrocketed that that might be a and and understatement in some ways, and and people would play it for hours and hours and and and lose track of time, and there were divorces and well, and also it was you know, they had the benefit of seeing what was not working on Ultimate Online and building out

their world so that it could limit these problems as much as possible. Some problems are hard to get around because they are human generated, and it's hard to create systems that prevent human behavior from happening. Humans are very good at figuring out ways to get around systems so that they can be jerks. Uh, it's just true. We're you know, we're like, hey, I really wanted to to to do this one thing. The game's not letting me but I bet if I try it this way, it'll work.

So yeah, Quest launches. But another game also fairly popular, not nearly as popular as ever Quest Launch, is called Asheron's Call Yep, yep. That one was from Turbine Entertainment, later on taken over by Microsoft an Ashuran's Call. Uh another fantasy game. Yeah, yeah, it had. It had sort

of a different system though, uh to it. It was sort of a loyalty system where you would basically, um, there were It was sort of like a lord and vassals kind of situation where um, the lord was expected to be good to his I assume there were ladies too, But basically in in this role, the person at the top of the pyramid is supposed to be expected to be good to their people, um, for which they would be rewarded and the people would be able to support their uh, the person at the top of the pyramid.

So it was supposed to kind of like feudalism. Yeah, it was really supposed to work out in the game, and apparently it was sort of a limited success. It was a different, a very different kind of system than than anyone else had had. There are a couple of games that really tried to break the mold. UM, and that was one of them. And and they they've all

met with varying degrees of success. UM. Two thousand was an interesting year because that's when Lucas Arts announced, uh, that it was developing a game that initially I was very very eager to get my hands on, called Star Wars Galaxies. So it's announced in two thousand and the original launch date was going to be in two thousand one,

but it was delayed until two thousand three. Uh. The game, UH, the setting of the game first of all set in the Star Wars universe obviously, but the actual setting of the game was set after the events of Episode four often just called Star Wars, also known as a New Hope, So and you hope justin it's so death Stars blown up. That's when the game is set. And you could actually encounter character from the films as you played the game. UM. But there were a lot of issues people had with

this game. There was some gameplay issues, there were some story issues. There were people who were very upset that the Jedi system was kind of weird and Star Wars Galaxies in order to be a Jedi, you know, keep in mind set during the original trilogy, not a Jedi.

In that original trilogy, you essentially had Luke and then you had you know, Jonnith Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, and you had Yoda, and then as far as you knew that was that was it was Obi Wan in the first film, but then he dies spoiler alert, and so, um, you didn't have that any Jedi running around. I mean, the idea was that Darth Vader had gone

and and pretty much killed all the rest of them. So, because you know, they wanted the game to be true to the lore of Star Wars as much as possible, they did not want it to be easy to go out and create a Jedi, because if it were, then everyone would go out and create a Jedi, and then you'd suddenly you have a Star Wars universe where a hundred thousand Jedi are running around. I wouldn't feel like

Star Wars. So what they did was they created a system that was difficult to discover how to unlock the Jedi. It was almost, ah, it seemed almost random, like there was this list of criteria you had to complete and the list was never made public. But uh so the game launched in two thousand three, the first the first person to unlock the Jedi slot character did it within

I think four months after the game launched. Uh. They later on change the requirements for becoming a Jedi and made it a quest that you could take, so that you would have a very specific pathway you could take in order to become a Jedi, because people were saying Star Wars. The coolest people in Star Wars are the Jedi. They have They're the ones who have all the really cool powers. They have the light sabers. These guys are awesome, and you're making it impossible for me to find out

how to play one. So it's a very frustrating experience for people. Well, these problems continued, among other issues, including things like reefers and cheaters that sort of stuff, and the game was ultimately shut down in twenty eleven, partially because there was another Star Wars game on the horizon, but we'll get to that in a little bit. Yeah, I was a little surprised that you didn't mention Dark

Age of Camelot in two thousand one. Well that's because because the Star Wars Galaxies was originally But yeah, in two thousand one, dark Age of Camelot came out, and that was that was an interesting game too because that focused a lot on player versus player gameplay and it was specifically set within the the world of King Arthur theory and legend. Yeah another fantasy, but um but yeah,

very specific fantasy though, that's true. The the interesting thing about this is that you had games where player versus player combat was possible because a lot of people wanted to have the ability to test their characters against other people's characters and play against them. There were other games that really stressed uh uh player cooperation, and some did not even allow player versus player interaction. You had to

you could not attack another player. Uh. Some games tried to split the difference where within certain regions there was no way you could attack another player. If you ventured outside of those regions, outside those safe zones, then you could attack or be attacked by other players. And uh.

Then there was another way of doing this where games would create specific servers where if you would log on to certain servers, they'd be player friendly in the sense that you are not going to be attacked by any other player because that's the kind of server it is, and other servers or player versus player servers where it's anything goes and lots of different experimentation during this time to find out what what's the right way of going

about it, and to this day companies are still experimenting with that. It also had the people in the game, the characters in the game UH as part of a basically specific tribes UM basically the the Uh, the English, the Norse, and the Celtic groups when and each of them had specific attributes at which they excelled UM. For example, the the Celts were particularly good at magic UM and UM. The Norse were better at melee combat UM. And that's

something again. These systems, if you'll notice, these systems are the kinds of things that are pretty common across all of the the current mm O RPGs, but it's sort of like they're being rolled out game by game and people are UM. They're sort of picking up to the point where it's they take a, B, C, D and E, where before they were just sort of a well, this is an okay game, but look at this one thing.

It's so cool. UM. Two thousand one was also an Anarchy Online launched as a science fiction based game, So breaking the Mold I mean, Star Wars Galaxies had not come out yet. It had been announced, but it hadn't come out. And you could also argue that Star Wars is in fact a fantasy science fiction. I would not argue against that. I think it's both. I think that when most of the explanations for the technology within Star Wars really boiled down to magic, it pretty much just fantasy.

Well yeah, but the thing, ye well, a lightsabers a magic sword, it really is. But u blasters and lands feeders or technology, which is when yeah, yeah, okay, all right, it's got the trappings of science fiction. It's a fantasy exactly. Anarchy Online was science fiction based. It had some pretty major technical issues when it launched, and had particular problems

handling large loads of players. So if a lot of people tried to play on one server, there were a lot of issues with lag and and and server stability. So it had some issues when it launched. There's still a lot of people who really loved that game, but

there were a lot of problems with it. It did have several expansions, though, and this is when this is the period in which you started to see a lot of that Ever, Quest was infamous for the expansion that I think sixteen different expansions came out Forever Quest, So that's you know, and these were ways to increase the appeal of the game to the long time players who had pretty much achieved everything they could do within the

base game. Now why why would they keep playing? And remember these games are based on not just a purchase price, but a monthly subscription, and so you want to try and keep those players around as long as possible. Well, one way to do that is to release expansions that continue to engage players even after they have completed, you know, the massive percentage of the base game. Well. Uh, in two thousand two, we saw the launch of Final Fantasy

eleven online. Uh yeah, so it launched in in Japan on the PlayStation two and at that time, so it was available on multiple platforms. In fact, that was a big deal. It was a massively multiplayer online game that was supporting platforms across various kinds of machines. So it wasn't you know, you didn't have to just play the game on one particular computer. In fact, the same servers were supporting the game for multiple platforms. And you might say, well,

you know, so what's the big deal about consoles. Well, keep in mind that consoles for the most part, don't necessarily have keyboards, and so if you want to talk, this is part of the online multiplayer experience. You want to communicate with your your teammates to achieve whatever goals to slay the dragon or to break into the fortress or whatever that you're trying to accomplish them, or to irritate people, uh, taunt people. You need to be able

to communicate with one another. And so now they're starting to figure out ways convenient ways to do that to make that happen in two thousand three. Uh and by the way, there are a lot of games that can come out over in Asia that fall into this category that I'm not really going to talk about. I'm telling mostly about the ones that were playing in the Western hemisphere, um because that's where the majority of our listeners are from. But in two thousand three, Ube Soft launches a game

called Shadow Bain and Shadow Bain. The interesting thing to me about Shadow Bain was that the idea behind it was that the game's events would not be pregenerated quests because for a lot of these m M O RPGs, you create a character. There are certain quests within the world that exists and have existed for everyone that you can go and complete. So your buddy can go and they get a quest from this person, Hey, this in is full of rats. I need you to clean it out.

And your buddy goes in and cleans out all the rats, and then you go to that same person that persusays, hey, this in is full of rats. I needed to clean them out. Then you can go and clean out all the rats. Um Shadow Bain was different. It depended upon the players to generate the content and the events within the game that would affect everyone, which is pretty cool. It's also putting a lot of responsibility on the backs of the players, So I can't tell you exactly how

well it works because I never played Shadow Bain. I just thought it was interesting to try and go about making a game in that way. I have played in games where the game content was supposed to be player generated, and I gotta tell you, for every cool event that happens,

there's about twenty hours of nothing happening. Hey it's Jonathan again from you know the present, just letting you guys know that we have a little bit more to say about m m O RPGs, But before we get into that, I'm just this rate is just not going well for me. All Right, We're gonna take a quick break and thank our sponsor. And the early two thousands is also when we start talking about people trading real money for stuff

in games and spawning its own economy. Of course, that that became a problem for a lot of people, you know, gold farming as they call it. Yeah, so you had it's kind of crazy coming across many platforms in many games. Yeah, you had the willing to pay real money to get in game resources to make their players stronger within the game, which is kind of interesting because you think you could be using that real money to get you real resources

to make you happier in real life. But people were deriving so much pleasure from the games themselves that they wanted to uh to to deck out their characters with the best stuff that they could possibly get. And in some cases it wasn't like some cases it was so that they could show off. Some cases, it was so that they could take advantage of other players more effectively.

Some people just wanted you know, they really like playing the game, and they just wanted to have the coolest stuff that they could get for their character, and they relatedn't have the time or the inclination to go get it themselves. Because sometimes you're talking about items that would drop only if you killed a certain monster and not always.

You know, it wouldn't always drop. So in other words, you might have to face off against this particularly powerful creature and use a lot of your resources like health potions or whatever, in order to take the creature down. And then the creature drops items, and it may even be that you know, it's only a certain percentage of the time will it drop the item you're specifically looking for.

To make it more complicated, you would have games where other players could pick up an item when it dropped, and so it may only drop that one item, But then there's fifty people all trying to grab it at the same time and there's only one instance of that item. Well, then you know that would cause problems too, because you have people who would camp out waiting for a monster to regenerate in order for them to go in and try and farm out this particular item, and it for

some people it was worthwhile. For others, they just said, this doesn't make the game fun. If I'm just you know, competing against all these people to wait for this one monster to loads so I can get this one item, you know, this feels more like work than a game, and that became a problem for some people. It's still a problem today depending upon how the game handles items.

There are a lot of games now that will drop items that are specific only to that one character, so that each character that is participating and say a raid, all has access to the same general stuff. But if they take it, it does not get removed from the other person's game. So if if we are banding together and we take down a monster and that monster drops twenty gold, you get to pick up twenty gold. I get to pick up twenty gold, and it's not like the twenty gold only exists for the two of us.

So anyway, moving on to two thousand four, which is a big year and m m O RPGs again, I'm surprised you didn't mention eve Online, which also debuted into Yeah, I thought about that and then I didn't. Do you want to say anything about eval Online is still very popular. Um it's uh. It's made by a European company UM named CCP games and very predominantly male too from what I understand. Um, but yeah, it's a it's a big um still very very popular with space exploration and basically

space combat. Um, whereas in the Star Wars games you might actually be a character and you know, on your feet, and most of what I've seen of viv Online is uh space based, so you know, you have your ship and you're doing stuff. Um, and there's there's interstellar commerce and that kind of thing. Um. Obviously I've never played, but it's I do know some people who do, and they really love it so and it's it's kind a big following, which is why I thought, you know, you

should mention it. It's you know, always again one of us nice to see a game that does not necessarily

just fall into the sword and sorcery realm. So next we have in two thousand four three games that three among the many games that came out, three big ones request to which you know, because ever Quest, even with the expansion packs, was starting to show its age, and EverQuest two was an opportunity for Well to sell more copies of games for one thing, but also to update the the graphics and game engine beyond what an expansion pat could do, and so Request To launches, City of

Heroes launches, and now you've got the superhero supervillain kind of games launching, which was a neat um, a neat expansion on M m O RPGs. And then the big game that is on the tip of everyone's tongue when they talk about M m O RPGs, World of Warcraft, which I think you cannot describe anything other than phenomenal success. I mean it was, it was a true phenomenon. There are over ten million people playing the game. I remember when Ultimate Online launched, it was a big deal when

they hit a hundred thousand subscribers. Now we're talking about ten million people playing this game, and it even it even I know that the largest number I've seen attributed to it was a couple from a couple of years ago now, but recording this in where they had hit twelve million at one point, maybe even thirteen. So it is declined in the past year or two, but not

it's still going. Yeah, there there are plenty of people who still play and uh and the expansion packs have really continued the development of that world so much so that they destroyed it at one point, cataclysm completely uh turned the world upside down, and uh it upsets some players because things changed so dramatically. But the whole point of it was that the player base for for Wow was made up a lot a lot of the player base.

We're old time players who have been playing forever, and you know, you have to keep making things interesting and adding a new realm every now and then, and upping the level cap by five only goes so far, and so there have been some calculated risks of really shaking the game up in order to keep long time players around and interested, because now they've got you know, even places that seemed familiar are now new to them. Uh.

For new players, that was a little confusing. So you'd ask, like a level seventy eight character, Hey, how do I get to such and such? Like, Uh, well, I can tell you how you used to be able to get there, I don't know how you get there now. Um they left at the barrel, should have taken on the left. And Albuquerque. Uh So yeah, that those games, all three

of those games were made a big impact. And you know, it was at this point that you really started to see some real competition between games because there are only so many gamers out there who want to play online role playing games, and yeah, and subscriptions can start to rack up. I mean, these are not necessarily cheap and maybe somewhere in the realm of you know, twenty to thirty dollars a month, twenty three dollars a month to play, and you know, you start playing multiple games, you only

have so much time to dedicate each game. So the competition was pretty fierce. World of Warcraft ran with this and did really well. Two thousand eight. There was a game that launched that you know in other games again, launched between two thousand and four and two. Guild Wars is a good one, that's actually a really good example. Or D and D Online dn D Online, which changed from and it's not the only one. In fact, the

one I'm about to mention also did this. D n D Online and Age of Conan, which launched in two thousand eight. Both of those were games that you would pay for originally and you did a monthly subscription. Both of those games also came out with free to play models, where you could play the game for free, but you would not have access to all the content and depending upon the way the game model was like an age

of Conan. You could switch from a free account to a paid account and then you would get access to all the premium content. D n D Online had a system where you could pay money for in game credits and use those in game credits to unlock areas of the game. Uh So, yeah, it was it was experimenting with different ways to get players engaged with the game and enough so that they'd be willing to pay to play the whole thing. And I don't know how successful

that was, honestly. I mean it's It's not the only time we've seen that too. We've also seen online role playing games where if you pay real money you get access to in game resources. Um. And this is also carried over into casual games. We've seen that. When we had our episode about casual games, we talked about games where you can pay cash to get an advantage in the game freemium freemium. And it's also a fairly controversial approach because you've got gamers who are saying this takes

skill out of it. If I just have deep enough pockets, I can get an advantage over everyone else in the game, and it has no bearing on whether I play the game well or not, and you know there's something to that. But guess what, that's what real life is about too. I hate to tell you. For real life, if you have a lot of money, you can make up for a basic lack of skills. As it turns out, you

can hire people who have skills for you. Uh. And then I wanted to end my discussion anyway on a game that launched in um sort of like tail in twenty eleven into into it's a little game called Star Wars the Old Republic. We have finally reached the one m m O rpg I actually play. I have not played any other m m O rpg. I've seen them developed, I've you know, I've played on someone else's account just to get a feel for it, but I've never actually

got an account myself. I mean, I did play a little bit of dn D online for about a couple of months. But what you you wrote an article for the site, Yes, and as that, I created an account so I could play it so I could get a better understanding of how it worked. So Star Wars the Older of like the reason. There are a couple of reasons why I wanted to play it. One is that my hatred for Star Wars has not gotten that out of hand yet. The prequels really did a number on me.

People don't don't get me started, please don't. But but I still despite all that, I still loved the Star Wars universe, and I really love the Knights of the Old Republic games, which are set up almost four thousand years before the original trilogy. Uh Star Wars the Old Republic is set about thirty years before the original trilogy, So there are no characters from the original trilogy or any of the the Star Wars movies that are in

the games. The games You're You're in, You're You're encountering you know, ancestors several generations removed from anyone in the

the film series. The nice thing about that is that you don't have to worry about impacting the world so much that the movies could not have happened right, because that was one of the problems, is that you want this rich world that Lucas created that people find so interesting and compelling, but they didn't want to create it in such a way that if you did one set of actions, you you invalidate what happens in the movies. Because then you've just invalidated the reason why everyone loves

it in in the first place. So that's a tricky balance. Well, by setting it years before the events of the films, you kind of take that causation away. And uh, the Nights of the Old Republic games were a lot of fun for me, So I wanted to play this and I ended up getting an count and I do play. Uh. The character, my main character in case you're all wondering, is an imperial agent. You can play either as the

imperial side or the rebels side. It's not the same as the movies and on depending on which side you're you're on, you can play light side or dark side, So you could be a light side Imperial agent if you wanted to be. I'm not. I played dark side. Yeah. Every time I can't I can't I play, I choose

the dark side option. Um. And so anyway, it's a really fun game set in the Star Wars universe, and I've been having a blast with it, and it makes me think that if I had had a broadband connection earlier, I probably would have gotten into M M O RPGs earlier. Now the way I play it, I play it more as a single player kind of experience, and I only occasionally team up with people because I just haven't made that many friends on on Star Wars the Old Republic yet.

But who knows, maybe after this podcast goes live, folks will track me down and be like, hey, man, I'll help you out. You're having trouble taking that Mandalorian down. And I will say, yes, yes, I am. That guy is tough and he's really irritating me. So yeah, they're They're scads of other games that we haven't mentioned, some very high profile games, dozens like Halo games, and yeah, and there are other games that are There are other

games that are massively multiplayer. Fact, I'd argue that the the Halo games fit in this where there's not role playing involved, but it is a massively multiplayer online game, so you can have a lot of people playing at once even though they're not necessarily role playing. Yeah, it's it's funny because I think in a way, some of them and some of it's fuzzy to be honest, Um, there are different degrees of the role playing involved. When you're playing you,

is that really playing a role? Yeah? So so, and again there are people who get into the role playing and there are people who despise the role playing. And sometimes you'll have companies create servers just for role players so that the role players can be all you know. The hardcore gamers might say that's all hippie dippy, So the role players gonna be all hippie dipping on their own servers, and everyone who's just you know, who just wants to play the game can be on their servers.

I like a balance between the two, So I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't I don't really identify myself with either group. So anyway, that's kind of a bird's eye view the history of m m O RPGs. We really have dungeons and dragons to thank for it, all right, guys,

that wraps up the classic episode. The m m O RPG story would have been fun to cover things like Elder Scrolls Online, which has had its share of ups and downs, or even the onslaught of massive multiplayer online role playing games slash shooters, stuff like Destiny and how that has fared. That's also heading s ups and downs since the debut. But maybe I'll do a follow up episode at some point to kind of give an update as to what has happened with M m O RPGs

and related games since two thousand and twelve. It's certainly set the ground for a lot of online play, and we're seeing more and more versions of online games these days, everything from pub G to other role playing games. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why not right me, because if you just hold it in your heart, I'm not gonna know. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter.

The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Do not forget. For goodness sakes, we have an Instagram account. Go follow it and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot Com.