Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the i rst major example in 1991, it was Richard Garriott's (aka Lord British)
massively multiplayer online role playing game
Ultima Online
in 1997
that cemented the genre as well as the acronym MMORPG.
MMORPGs resemble other RPGs, but literally tens of thousands of players
can access the game at once. Though a player can play with or against
friends, the player will encounter many other players in the game world.
These games feature high-level interaction through chat or even audio
(via Adobe Connect, for example).
The development of MUDs and MMORPGs led other genres of games
to go the MMO route.
Quake III Arena
(1999) and
Unreal Tournament
(1999) are MMOFPS (massively multiplayer online i rst-person shooters).
Blizzard's
StarCraft
series are MMO versions of real-time strategy (RTS)
games. Recently, web-based BMOGs (browser-based multiplayer online
games) have increasingly appeared.
Don Diekneite is a video game
composer, sound designer and
voice director. His work can
be heard in a wide variety of
interactive titles from arcade
games in the early nineties to the
recently released
Rift
, a highly
acclaimed large-scale MMO that
went live in March 2011.
“
Audio design (music, sound ef ects, ambience, voice-over)
in any game must account for two primary constraints:
unpredictability and repetition. h ese constraints come into
play to a greater or lesser degree depending on the game.
Simple games like
Tetris
or
Angry Birds
for example have a
certain amount of predictability in that you know what is going
to happen, you just don't know when. In a large scale MMO
like
Rift
however, knowing what events will happen and when
they might happen is as unpredictable as it gets.
Literally hundreds of players can be together in the same
environment all with dif erent weapons and abilities. h
ey can
