Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

A.T. wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I do think the biggest missed opportunity of Pokemon is that there isn't a full-blown MMO. The franchise is ripe for it, but Nintendo and its partners seem averse to mixing the formula up that much.

Their current business model is selling pokemon over and over again, once a year like a sports franchise. I guess they might be worried about an MMO being a single purchase that players burn out on.

Isn't it technically twice?

Not Online!!! wrote:
Isn't it technically twice?

I'm sure Nintendo would release as often as they thought they could get away with. It works for them.

Why would they release a game in a genre that not only they have very little if any experience in, but also one that kills, murders and buries companies and franchises? WoW aside, because it's Pokemon of MMO world, every other MMO has much smaller reach than any single Pokemon game.

Most MMOs have the risk that they are either taking a game that has a singleplayer market established and try to take it into a new market of MMO, hoping that enough fans make the jump initially to get it going; or they are totally new ventures.

Pokemon has the bonus that whilst it has core games, it also has anime, cards and a huge market outside of just the games itself. So they have a vast potential to get it started. If anything, outside of the social aspects I noted above, their other issue would be having strong and robust enough code and enough servers to take the initial launch stress. They'd probably benefit greatly from an "open beta" just to try and spread out the initial load jump so that they can have as smooth a launch as possible.

Though they would never have a bug free launch; at least it would cut down on the "I want to play but I can't connect/server lag" issues that plague most mmos in launch weeks.



The other bonus is that if it sunk they've still got their regular revenue streams to fall back on. I guess the issue is with it being apparent how comparatively little of their money goes into their current games; I wonder how much the company actually holds for re-investment. It might be that they manage to remain relevant but advertising, marketing and other areas are leaching away vast sums to keep the whole structure float; or perhaps its just a cash cow leaching money out to managers; or into other projects/games/regions

Again, not seeing any advantage to launching an MMO for the company. And if they actually did, MMO fans (so people in 30-40s now) wouldn't even enjoy it anyway. Look at how limited interactions are in Splatoon games.

Nintendo is a company that loves it's family friendly reputation, so they'd have to cut communication down to keep it that way.

Cronch wrote:
Again, not seeing any advantage to launching an MMO for the company. And if they actually did, MMO fans (so people in 30-40s now) wouldn't even enjoy it anyway. Look at how limited interactions are in Splatoon games.

Nintendo is a company that loves it's family friendly reputation, so they'd have to cut communication down to keep it that way.

Also there's the MMO market as a life service before it was cool and it is allready oversaturated.

 LordofHats wrote:

If it were me? Generic "questing" and catching Pokemon would still be a primarily solo event. Someone could come along to help, but as in the Pokemon world, a player would need to catch their own mon. I see no reason to alter this from the basic formula. Contrary to the idiocy of some MMO developers, not everything in an MMO needs to be group-based. In fact, making everything in an MMO group based is generally detrimental to design. There are times where people just want to play alone, or who like being in a world full of other people they don't play with (cause some people are weird).

I think that's more or less why Nintendo isn't all that interested in the idea. This is basically how the games exist now, at least in Japan where player density is high enough that catching and questing can be a solo event, with occasional multiplayer encounters. Those encounters just happen in the real world instead of over the internet. That's part of why Go has worked as well as it has. It's helped localize players into encountering one another over more dispersed populations.

 LunarSol wrote:
It's helped localize players into encountering one another over more dispersed populations.

... at least in places with as dense a population of PokeGo players as Japan, anyway. Here I can go days without being able to access a pokestop without hopping in my car to drive to an out of the way location. And I do not live in some bumf***ville in the cracked backside of nowhere-- Dallas/Fort Worth is one of the biggest metroplexes in the world, but there's a lot of places within D/FW where Pokemon: Go is flat out unplayable.

And wouldn't you know it? You can't submit new areas to be pokestops here, and haven't been able to for years. The inadequacy and incompleteness of PokeGo is the reason why I'd love a Pokemon MMO.

Weird. I don't live in a particularly dense location and can hit 3-5 stops on about a mile loop. Even the really small town I'm from has a good selection of gyms and stops that don't take any real effort to get to. I've not seen that be an issue, but I don't doubt there's spots where the initial Ingress playerbase wasn't there to get things started. Weird you actually can't submit new stops though. I see them added all the time around here.

 Melissia wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
It's helped localize players into encountering one another over more dispersed populations.

... at least in places with as dense a population of PokeGo players as Japan, anyway. Here I can go days without being able to access a pokestop without hopping in my car to drive to an out of the way location. And I do not live in some bumf***ville in the cracked backside of nowhere-- Dallas/Fort Worth is one of the biggest metroplexes in the world, but there's a lot of places within D/FW where Pokemon: Go is flat out unplayable.

And wouldn't you know it? You can't submit new areas to be pokestops here, and haven't been able to for years. The inadequacy and incompleteness of PokeGo is the reason why I'd love a Pokemon MMO.

Huh, I never knew you were in DFW. *waves from Lake Worth*
Anyway, yeah, all the Pokestops were originally built off of Niantic's previous game's locations, that used various landmarks and points of interest on the map. If you're in an area without even so much as a single public park with a sign, or a restaurant with a particularly interesting statue, then you can definitely be out of luck.

Funny thing Bliz/Battlent just gave me a survey - what was interesting was how many times Pikachu appeared

 Lance845 wrote:

Why would you need to follow what anyone else has done?

You wouldn't *need* to follow what anyone else has done, however, reinventing the wheel is also not the best idea, no?

I don't think anyone here is saying that if there were a AAA level supported Pokemon MMO, that it needs to be a carbon copy of some other previous MMO.

Commercially speaking, I would think they would want at least some of the "traditional elements" of an MMO, to give veteran MMO players a sense of familiarity. Just use those elements in new or different ways. My earlier comment was more a train of thought than a "real" idea. . . Its just that I basically cannot think of an MMO that DOESNT have a white-green-blue-purple-weird purple-gold leveling scheme for item rarity, and I was typing up some idle musings on how could a game universe like Pokemon make use of such a scheme.

I think if you are going to make a Pokemon MMO then you should build it to appeal primarily to the millions of pokemon players. And that means building each element to build the best pokemon experience. I cannot think of a single reason why tiered rarity equipment would do anything for the pokemon experience.

It would certainly make MMO players feel more comfortable. But it would make it less pokemon and more wow. At which point why the hell did you make a pokemon game?

 Lance845 wrote:
I think if you are going to make a Pokemon MMO then you should build it to appeal primarily to the millions of pokemon players. And that means building each element to build the best pokemon experience. I cannot think of a single reason why tiered rarity equipment would do anything for the pokemon experience.

It would certainly make MMO players feel more comfortable. But it would make it less pokemon and more wow. At which point why the hell did you make a pokemon game?

I would agree with this. Items shouldn't be the focus of a Pokemon game. Pokemon should, though there's probably room in there for cosmetic items. People love that gak.

Some itemization makes sense, items are an important part of strategy in the handheld games. Plus TMs, HMs and such, but if we're racing for rare drops we've missed the point. Pokemon should be rare, maybe with challenging quests to capture unique or distinct Pokemon. Personally I'd seize the change to create a whole new stats and battle system, one that could provide a wider viability to a wider range of Pokemon. So many are solely limited by specific move pool or stat limitations. I'd design systems to redress that.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
I think if you are going to make a Pokemon MMO then you should build it to appeal primarily to the millions of pokemon players. And that means building each element to build the best pokemon experience. I cannot think of a single reason why tiered rarity equipment would do anything for the pokemon experience.

It would certainly make MMO players feel more comfortable. But it would make it less pokemon and more wow. At which point why the hell did you make a pokemon game?

I would agree with this. Items shouldn't be the focus of a Pokemon game. Pokemon should, though there's probably room in there for cosmetic items. People love that gak.

Some itemization makes sense, items are an important part of strategy in the handheld games. Plus TMs, HMs and such, but if we're racing for rare drops we've missed the point. Pokemon should be rare, maybe with challenging quests to capture unique or distinct Pokemon. Personally I'd seize the change to create a whole new stats and battle system, one that could provide a wider viability to a wider range of Pokemon. So many are solely limited by specific move pool or stat limitations. I'd design systems to redress that.

I'd rather see Nintendo not go the liveservice MMO subscription / monetization route.
Atleast one company should stay as far away as possible before that bubble detonates in everyone elses face.

PoGo is the Pokemon MMO already.

Just without the accessibility that most MMOs have.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Huh, I never knew you were in DFW. *waves from Lake Worth*

*waves from down south*

I like D/FW.

Depends what you mean by accessibility. By most metrics, PoGo is more accessible than most MMOs (no monthly fees, straightforward gameplay, maps that are familiar from outside of the gameworld etc).

Unless you mean wheelchair access.

 Daba wrote:
Depends what you mean by accessibility. By most metrics, PoGo is more accessible than most MMOs (no monthly fees, straightforward gameplay, maps that are familiar from outside of the gameworld etc).

Unless you mean wheelchair access.

And, most importantly perhaps, it is played using a piece of tech that pretty much everybody owns without any need for hardware considerations.

Pokemon go is an overly simplistic game with none of the depth I’d expect from a real MMO. It’s a mobile game with an emphasis on mobile. It’s only real good idea is the GPS aspect. It’s mechanics are otherwise so basic it effectively plays itself.

 Daba wrote:
Depends what you mean by accessibility.

Being able to play it no matter where you live. There's a lot of places in the world where you simply cannot play it for long, you'll run out of resources because there are no pokestops nearby.

 LordofHats wrote:
Pokemon go is an overly simplistic game with none of the depth I’d expect from a real MMO. It’s a mobile game with an emphasis on mobile. It’s only real good idea is the GPS aspect. It’s mechanics are otherwise so basic it effectively plays itself.

Combat wise its much closer to an MMO than the normal Pokemon battle engine. I've started to prefer it, but only really because every single Pokemon doesn't know Earthquake.

Pokemon go isnt even an actual game. It has no gameplay so its not a game. Or what few game play elements it does have are so simplistic its like "playing" LIFE.

Calling pokemon go a game is being extremely liberal with the definition of games.

 LunarSol wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Pokemon go is an overly simplistic game with none of the depth I’d expect from a real MMO. It’s a mobile game with an emphasis on mobile. It’s only real good idea is the GPS aspect. It’s mechanics are otherwise so basic it effectively plays itself.

Combat wise its much closer to an MMO than the normal Pokemon battle engine. I've started to prefer it, but only really because every single Pokemon doesn't know Earthquake.

Has the battle engine changed since release? That’s not how I remember it.

 LordofHats wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Pokemon go is an overly simplistic game with none of the depth I’d expect from a real MMO. It’s a mobile game with an emphasis on mobile. It’s only real good idea is the GPS aspect. It’s mechanics are otherwise so basic it effectively plays itself.

Combat wise its much closer to an MMO than the normal Pokemon battle engine. I've started to prefer it, but only really because every single Pokemon doesn't know Earthquake.

Has the battle engine changed since release? That’s not how I remember it.

Not tremendously. You still have a quick attack that charges up to a heavy attack with the ability to dodge in raids (and block now that they've implemented proper PvP). There's a little more to it now, as in PvP battles they've added little mini games to increase the damage on your heavy attacks. The sensation of having a passive quick attack while waiting for your "cooldown" to become available still feels rather MMO to me.