MMORPG vs. CORPG

I keep seeing people say "this isn't an MMORPG it's a CORPG"...

Lets see:
"multiplayer computer role-playing game" - Check
"enables thousands of players to play" - Check
"an evolving virtual world" - Check

I guess you could argue the fact that since you can't actually do quests with more than 7 other people that it eludes the above definition, but I disagree. There are still thousands of people playing/trading/chatting/RPing in the towns "at the same time".

Also, on the flip side, what MMORPG's aren't competitive?

I just think it's silly everytime someone is corrected for saying MMORPG...

Toon Town.

MMORPG is more of a persistent world thing. Where everyone plays in the same world.

Yes. Let us use wikipedia as our definitive source.

The reason we call an MMORPG Massively Multiplayer is because there are thousands of people in the same game world. A MUD isn't massively multiplayer, even though it has 200 people on at a time.

GW has at most 50 people to a district, 32 in a competitive map, and 8 in a normal adventure zone. That's not massive by any stretch of the imagination.

I think the kinship you're feeling here is the multiplayer RPG portion of the game, which is highly team based and 3D, which is often associated with MMORPGs.

I had information that districts capped at 100 people per district and when the districts reached that # it then created a new one. At one time in Pre Searing Ascalon there were 161 Districts. I've seen up over 100 in some Post Searing cities as well.

To me that's a Massive # of people considering how many cities there are that people can be in as well as that doesn't take into consideration how many are out in their instances doing Quests and missions.

Morrowind enables thousands of players to play. They just all play in their own instances of the game. Thus, Morrowind is not "massively multiplayer".

Neither is GW, for the same reason. Thousands of players do not play in the same instance of the world, they all play in relatively small instances.

GW is no more an MMORPG than the Diablo II Realms were.

It certainly doesn't match the Wikipedia definition. "...to play in an evolving virtual world at the same time..." Note the use of the singular. Do thousands of players play in the same world at the same time? No. Not even close. The mere fact that some people can be in Ascalon City before the Searing and some after it at the same time breaks the central concept of an MMORPG regarding a shared virtual reality. These people are in entirely different realities.

You have to stop trying to compaire the game to other MMOs and just look at the def of MMO, it fits.

If the devs wanted to "stand out" they should have made it a specialized version of a MMO. Lets say..........MMCO, that would fit, and its still in the MMO genre. As it stands, the game is mislabled. For it to be a true Competive Online game, it must have most of the focus on PvP. This game dosent.

mmog is what i prefer

only a slim minority of people actually roleplay (according to what we commonly refer to as 'roleplaying') so why stick that word in there?

i don't roleplay...i'm just a guy sitting at a computer playing a fun game, i'm not pretending to be anything i'm not.

The point here is that you can at any point in time communicate with any other person who is playing GW at the same time you are. It doesn't matter if they are pre-searing, or on a quest or whatever...anyone who is online while you are can be talked to, no servers, to worry about

I'm using Wikipedia now and than to answer questions for the [email protected] service in the Netherlands. Always keep in mind that its an open resource encyclopedia. Its not complete and some information is subject to discussion.

What I'm missing in this definition is: in a MMORPG ALL players play on the same world AT ONCE. Meaning they all can meet, battle, pk, making parties, whatever. A good example of a MMORPG is Anarchy online. WOW is discussable since its gameplay is restricted to local servers. Guild Wars is certainly NOT a MMORPG because players dont share the same gaming environment. When leaving town they are separated in parties.

I originally wanted to declasify GW as an MMO and say that it wasn't one at all, but... it is. There is no *logical* arguement one can make to say that it is not an MMO. You can link up with *anyone* at any time. You are all using the *exact* same build of the game and are playing the same world.

Some of you argued that it is all seperate instance. Most modern MMO's use instances now. City of Heroes does it in the same fashion as Guild Wars. Does that mean CoH isn't an MMO? No.

One of you tried to compare it to Morrowind. Please, you shouldn't even be playing video games trying to make a comparison like that.

My question for this forum and thread: why care so much about the classification?

My reply for this thread: I like the term ORPG. Online Roleplaying Game. Or the term OAG. Online Adventure Game.
Are any of you geniuses going to correct me? ^.^

three points in regards to the original post:

1. Wikipedia is not a credible source of information. Don't believe me? Just look up their biased definition of "Starforce".

2. Guild Wars does not have an evolving world.

3. Guild Wars is not an MMORPG

At least yer 1 for 3, better average than most.

We can draw the conclusion that Guild Wars can not be classified as in a single category. So your all wrong if you keep trying to argue its either a CORPG or an MMORPG when it meets conditions of both and when you have no idea how to dig up a 100% correct definition when there are none. Maybe a commonly accepted definition of an MMORPG. But that differs from everyone in this thread.

So its a new brand. Woot.

That's my point exactly. When I posted this, I had just read 3 or 4 posts where people simply mentioned the term MMORPG and others jumped down their throats all "You n00b this isn't an MMORPG!!!". I don't really care what it's classified as; it's awesome.

As for Wikipedia not being a valid resource, that's great... but how come you all continued to use that definition to argue the point and nobody posted another definition?

So Diablo II is an MMORPG as well, eh?

Again, the game is not labled correctly. MMO fits, Co dosent. I agree, there is no real argument here. Some people would just arguee with a fence post. The dev MADE UP this title, that doesnt change what the game is.


As I said in my post above, stop trying to compaire it to other games. This game is a MMO no matter what the dev title it to hieghten the intrest in the game. Honestly, if they had just called it what it is (a MMO) there would be no argument.

I think they have a good reason to avoid calling it an MMO, actually. They intend to avoid some of the pitfalls of "standard" MMO design (lewt, grind, gank) and take the game in a different design direction entirely.

And as far as I can see, once the main body of the new arrivals hit 20 and have a look around, they've largely been very sucessful at creating something entirely new--it just doesn't LOOK that way until after you've ascended and seen what a game without levels and lewt and grinding and pk-ing and ebaying looks and feels like.

The GW team has demonstrated that GW easily has the capability of becoming a "MMO" at any time at the end of the beta, when they spawned monsters in the cities.

Aye, and I agree that this game is diferent from most of the crap that is called MMO, but that dosent mean that this game isnt a MMO.

*Finishes reading thread.*
*Opens Guild Wars website.*
*Clicks on FAQ's.*
*Clicks on Game FAQ."
*Copies section.*
*Pastes section.*

Here you go people, this is directly from their website, with them labeling not as an MMO.

Heh, if youve read the whole thread you know that I think that CO just dosent fit this game. Alos considering that CO was *made up* about 6 months ago just dosent cut it for me.

To be technically accurate, only one or two MMOs (Eve) actually have the entire populous active in the same world. The vast majorety of them are set up in sharded parallel worlds, and merely because they have a few thousand people on a single server network, does not mean that they can have a few thousand people interact with eachother. Anyone remember the Warrior protest in WoW? Basically a group of disgruntled warriors got together and brought down a server by packing a couple hundred people into one node. Even Eve, one of the best load balanced games I've encountered, gets massively laggy when you've got 200 people slugging it out.

Guild Wars has neatly sidestepped all of that by making everything instanced, with unit caps. This is also what allows them to have different players be at different times along the story line, and alows them to use a sell by chapter business model. It is really very innovative, and I expect it to become widely copied, but that does not make it no a massively multiplayer game; rather it is a new method of managing the problems that come from makign a game massively multiplayer.

Harry Voyager

Addendum: Re: EnDinG: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. If you call a tail a leg, it's still a tail.

Wow, I kinda laughed while reading this topic, but you know what, I'm gonna jump in!

It's not the definition of MMORPG, but what that phrase has come to mean to the people, that the devs made CORPG, to try and break old notions.

MMORPG has come to mean thousands of people. That if your walking down the street your likely to run into anyone at any time. And your all just playing to see what the devs have hooked in around the next corner.

But, Guild Wars has a HIGH emphasis on PvP, more so than the other ones out there, and plays differently than those. It doesn't really mean what the term MMORPG has come to mean, so why not title it something different?

Hell, this works a lot like Diablo 2, but no one says "I got Diablo 2, It's an MMORPG." They say "Yeah, it's Diablo 2. You can play it on-line."

Im going to use that little saying to streghthen my own argument. The devs can call a MMO a CO but its really just MMO.

MMO= Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online

Now that dosent mean that it has to have crap load of people on it, it just means that the game has to be massive. This game is massive, and i doubt that anyone would disagree with that.

Again, if they had just called it a MMO no one would have though any different. No one would have been screaming "THIS IS NOT A MMO".

I know I put my two cents in already, but I have to put two more in.

THis argument is totally hilarious.

All I know is, I like Guild Wars better than any MMORPG I've ever played. That's all I care about.

Seems like we've had this argument. "Massively" is very different from "massive" - it is modifying the word multiplayer, and since the game is not "massively multiplayer" it isn't an MMO. Eight people in an instance is not "massively multiplayer", and the weak argument that there are tons of people online in instances is no better than saying that there are tons of people online playing chess. Chess isn't an MMO. The only parts that are close to being MMO are the towns.

True, people should lighten up. MMORPG or not, GW is competing with MMORPG games like WoW more than it is non Massively Multiplater CRPGs.

MMO= Massive(ly) (oh look, its in paragraphs) Multiplayer Online

I think to understand the term, you have to look at the roots of the first MMORPGs. These roots are MUDs.

A mud is a text game run via telnet. It'd typically have between 30 and 200 people on at any given time, with a decent population being around 60-80. This doesn't qualify the game as "Massive", but it does share an important factor with a present-day MMORPGs: a single game world. I realise that within each game there are different "shards" or servers, but each one of those is large enough to be considered massive in and of it's own right.

GW doesn't have a single game world. It has many small staging areas (called towns), and each one of those staging areas is the size of a meduim sized mud. The thing is, there is no action going on in there. No gameplay. Just group forming, prep, and trade. The actual *game* exists outside of this realm. You can't walk into a zone in see 300 people in it, all camping mobs or running around. It's that "persistance" which is integral to the MMO experience. GW has absolutely no persistance. It's all instanced. You can't even drop an item in a district.

It is one of the things that we love about GW (instancing, protection from griefers and camping) that ends up seperating it from an MMORPG. By taking away your possibility to interact with people (and hence them with you), they take away the Massively Multiplayer aspect of the game.

There is some meaningful crossover though. You can have a guild, and this guild can communicate via channels. You can even organize a meeting pretty easily by going to a common district, and there will be a fair amount of people in that district already. But is a big chat room an MMORPG? Is IRC an MMO? Is our very own image battle thread an MMO game? Depends on how many people are playing =) If that thread were an ongoing story, would that make it an MMORPG?

*shrug* I don't think GW qualifies as an MMORPG. While it does share some essential characteristics (character building, group forming, intra-zone chat) it lacks the "massive multiplayer" aspect of the game.

-- EDIT --

A massive game world doesn't mean the game is Massively Multiplayer. There are plenty of games that can be played online with more than one player that have a massive game world. Look at NWN. It's the amount of players that matters.

Heres a good question... What would you call Savage?

Its a mix of a RTS and RPG. You can't call that an MMO, but you can't call it a RTS or an RPG. Just like GW, its a brand new type of game style that deserves its OWN section, not one that people think it should have. If the designers wish to call it something that you think is wrong, well its too bad your not making the game then uh?

While I agree that Guild Wars is different from typical MMORPGs because all the action zones are instanced, I do not think that distinction alone means it should qualify as something other than an MMORPG. PvP is irrelevant to the discussion, since there are some MMORPGs that have a lot of PvP and others that don't.

For one thing, I disagree with some of the posts above that say the word "Massively" refers only to the size of the game population in an instance. Really, the word Massively has been, I feel, misplaced grammatically since most people would say it should refer to the size of the game WORLD in addition to the total player population.

Diablo 2, for instance, does have many thousands of people playing it simultaneously. But clearly Guild Wars is set apart from Diablo 2 in large part because of the sheer size of the game world and story line. Guild Wars setting and scope are much closer to standard MMORPGs than a single/standard multiplayer RPG like Diablo 2 or Neverwinter Nights. Staging areas in Guild Wars are small towns within the game's normal interface, as opposed to say Diablo 2 where players meet in an out-of-game chat channel, etc, to form teams. Additionally, players in one instance of Diablo 2 can not contact other players playing Diablo 2, whereas any player in Guild Wars can contact any other player in-game any time, even though they're in separate instances.

Likewise you can't argue it's doesn't qualify as a computer RPG. Remember that the standard for a game being a computer RPG does NOT include players "roleplaying in character". There are, basically, no computer games where the majority of players actually roleplay their characters, so that standard is far too high. Rather, computer RPGs basically just have to include elements of RPGs, such as character development with an experience system or skill point system, a degree of avatar customization, and the ability to interact with a larger storyline and campaign setting.

So Guild Wars definitely resembles a standard MMORPG much more closely than it does a smaller scale game like Diablo. Nor does it strongly resemble a small player base game like a MUD. It is, for all practical purposes, an MMORPG, whether some people above want to call it that or not.

My two cents.

Yeah, GW is not an MMORPG.

I won't dare classify it, but I can tell you what it isn't. :P


***EDIT

Actually, I did just have a thought to further my argument.

If you have played Diablo, Diablo 2, Diablo 2:LoD, or Sacred... let me ask you the following;

Did you consider any of those titles to be MMORPGs?

Thousands of people play them.

People can play in teams of 2-16 (depending on the game), and can play together.

But would you consider any of those games to be MMORPGs?

I sure as heck wouldn't.

And Guild Wars is basically the same sort of game... they just eliminate the frustration of having to create your own server in-game.

There are key differences between Guild Wars and Diablo 2 that make Guild Wars an MMORPG and Diablo 2 not:

- Everyone is on the same world server and can communicate in-game with anyone else at any time. In Diablo, you can only communicate with other Diablo players out of game, aside from the people in your party of course.

- The game is centrally controlled. All permanent changes to the game world are controlled by the development team. So the game world isn't mod-able, and every time you enter an instance it is generated the same way for all players. Diablo by contrast is controlled by individual players' machines, any two of whom might have very different customizations built in.

- Quests and other content can be added and patched real time in Guild Wars, and such changes immediately affect all players of the game everywhere. Diablo games are individually created, so are not all the same version or even necessarilly the same content or fully compatible.

- The guild wars map and content at release are larger than Diablo 2 at release. Size alone does not an MMORPG make, but it helps.


So really in just about every respect Guild Wars is consistent with MMORPGs. The only difference is in how the mission zones are instanced, but that does not preclude it from being an MMORPG. It's far closer to an MMORPG than a single-player/multiplayer game like Diablo 2.

This game is definitely it's own genre.

It is NOT an MMO as the above poster believes.

Massively Multiplayer implies that players will play in a single, massive world (even if there are muliple shards).

As soon as you leave town, you are not in a massive world anymore. You are in your own world, with perhaps a couple of your friends or random people who you're adventuring with.

If you've ever played an MMORPG, playing GW for 20 minutes will be enough to make you understand why this game is simply not in the same genre.

That's not a bad thing. The MMORPG market is arguably super-saturated. Creating a new genre with notable similarities to MMORPGs was an excellent idea. It allows people to play without monthly fees, and without the time commitment associated with MMORPGs.

In conclusion - No, GW is NOT and MMORPG, but that's not a bad thing at all. There are plenty of MMORPGs out there if that's your thing, but if it's not, GW just might be the game for you.