MMORPGs

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about MMORPGs and how one might be able to create a successful browser-based one that does not depend on Flash. It’s a pretty tricky situation, really. Although you can cleverly use AJAX and CSS to create a party-based, co-operative against computerised enemies that occurs in “real time” that only works well for the battles themselves. We can easily add live chat to the system between guilds, parties, friends and perhaps world channels but that’s also only a part of the multi-player experience. Another key part is being able to navigate the world and come across other players on your way who you can optionally communicate with or assist. So without these visual representations of players moving about you really lose a lot of the multi-player feel that is present in Flash-based and non-browser MMORPGs. Furthermore it’s really quite tough to create strong emotions and feels for different places inside the game without linking the visuals with audio. Facebook’s in-browser chat service does not depend on Flash however they do use it for sound notifications if you have them enabled. This leads me to believe that there’s no viable alternative for audio through browsers’ in built features.

Update: It seems that a lot of this can actually be done using HTML5 and Javascript. Of course none of this will ever work in Internet Explorer but Google is already in the process of providing a solution to this problem. Which means that I would only need to focus on supporting the main browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Unfortunately Safari doesn’t support OGG playback so I would need to use MP3s for it. Or I could just ignore supporting Safari because of its caveats and still have 93% of modern users (people using pre-XP versions of Internet Explorer would be left out) able to play it in their browser of choice.