For years now the MMO community has been talking about a "next-gen" MMO. A game that will bring that gaming genre to a new level. Game promoters even use the term in their marketing pitch. People have different opinion about what makes a game "next-gen", a core feature, a subscription model, a new technology. My vision is about the game model.
I have been playing MMOs since 1999 and have played a lot of different games. All those games were similar in their game model; a company creates a game and all the tools to manage content creation, buy or rent a bunch of servers to run the game on and offer gamers a few generic rulesets of their game. Then a few years later, small communities unlock the mysterious black box that is the server of a game through reverse engineering and begin to offer gamers with various niche versions of the original game. Now, depending of a vast amount of factors (success of emulated servers, code availability, health of the original game, philosophy of the comany behind the game, etc.) the company will fight, or not, those small communities of gamers.
I asked myself; what if? What if a company would embrace those small communities and help them flourish instead of fighting against them. What if they would give those armchair developpers some insight of their game, tools and support to better understand the beast they are trying to tame.
One of the argument for user-created content always have been the amount of content it generates. Of couse, the first counter argument was always about the quality of that content, but people have very different taste and having a lot of choice can only be a good thing. If you are somewhat familiar with emulated servers in the MMO world, you know that a bunch of them are really bad, but you probably also know that some of them are incredible gems with a really good small team of programmers, DBAs and tech-savy people with a working brain. They create small communities that sometimes rival the original game with barely any money or help. They are on their own and successfully developped a modded game of their own.
The phenomenon is pretty old, but is still largely marginal especially in the MMO genre where the game is so vast and the engine under it so complex... but what if a gaming company would came up with the idea of teaming up with those small communities to offer a pletora of niche rulesets servers that no other company could rival... could we talk about "next-gen" then?