Classically-styled MMOs like TibiaME have already made their way to mobile, including the iPhone by early next year. What else is on the way, and how close are we to "full-fledged" mobile MMOs?

Portable video gaming has become almost as ubiquitous as cell phones and PIMs, thanks to the rate at which the technology is advancing. Over a decade ago,"mobile gaming" was more or less reserved for gamers who owned specific hardware like Nintendo's Game Boy, or Sega' s Game Gear. But today, video games of almost equal quality are available on even the cheapest cell phones, not to mention the higher-powered smart phones and pocket PCs. The success of Apple's iPhone has accelerated the portable gaming market via the App Store, and similar services are now following in its footsteps.

Playing MMOs with portable gaming devices has always been a lofty goal for the industry. We've seen the mobile games and MMO industries meet each other halfway, in the case of single-player "rips" like MapleStory, or with apps that allow players to access specific features of their favorite MMO, like the mail system or character profiles. Some games tried to fix the graphics processing and bandwidth bottleneck by bypassing the problem altogether, like the Web-based PMOG.

We might not have the "killer" mobile MMO just yet, but fans may be surprised to learn that there are a few games already on the market offering a portable MMO experience. Some have been around for years, like Era of Eidolon (now defunct), or TibiaME. The latter, properly titled "Tibia Micro Edition," is one of the strongest examples of mobile MMOs in the market, self-described as "the first massive multiplayer online role-playing game for mobile phones." A few days ago, Massivley.com reported its developers are gearing up to release an iPhone version early next year, no doubt substantially widening its accessibility. Even though the 2D game is graphically superior to its early predecessors, like MUDs, it might not evoke the same picturesque vision that the majority of PC fans consider a "true" MMO.

TibiaME was created by CipSoft GmbH, a European indie games developer. The "ME" mobile version is based on its original PC version of the MMO, called Tibia. Tibia was originally developed as early as 1997 and remains "one of the oldest and most successful online role playing games in Europe," according to its developers.

TibiaME came along in 2002, but it wasn't until the last few years—when a Java version of the game was finally developed and released—that it became as popular as it is today. That's because a J2ME version of the game meant wider accessibility; one of the key aspects in mobile gaming, and probably the most important obstacle facing mobile MMOs in the future. To that end, ClipSoft has an iPhone version of TibiaME in the works, as previously mentioned. Even though the majority of cell phone users in the U.S. aren't iPhone owners, it is a concentrated niche in which mobile gaming has already proved successful. It may be the launching pad that MMOs need to break into the mobile gaming industry.

Even if MMOs do begin successfully working their way into the mobile market, the question remains, "How advanced will the first mobile MMOs be, compared to what's already on the market?" We probably won't be playing full-blown, 3D-rendered MMOs like World of Warcraft on our cell phones any time soon (notwithstanding emulation or VNC tricks), so how far back will mobile hardware set us?

The short-lived PPC version of Shadow of Legend was a "2.5D" free-to-play MMORPG; back in 2008, the developers toyed around with a working PPC port of the SoL client, which was probably the most-advanced mobile MMO to date. Unfortunately, the project was suspended earlier this year and remains on indefinite hold. The other main competitor is Anrufen Online, a mobile MMO in development by a company called WiSTONE. Anrufen Online also features an emulated 3D graphics engine, and looks slightly more advanced than TibiaME.

If TibiaME's success is any indication of what's first to come, we might see a throwback—initially, at least—to the top-down and isometric RPG designs of similar games like Diablo and Fallout. As you can see in these screenshots, TibiaME is a top-down RPG resembling The Legend of Zelda. Although there are many cell phones on the market capable of rendering graphics more advanced than TibiaME's, ClipSoft and future developers need to reach the largest player base possible by making their games as accessible to "the masses" as possible. In this case, ClipSoft set the minimum requirements to the widely-used Java micro platform, a move that other developers will probably follow.

However, multiple mobile client versions are also an option. ClipSoft's upcoming iPhone version isn't just a port copy; the developers recently posted a couple of screenshots on their Facebook page, which shows the upcoming Apple client to be a higher-res version than the standard J2ME one. It will cost developers more money to develop multiple clients for future mobile MMOs, but it's one way to offer consumers a more gratifying experience as long as they have the hardware to support it.

Gameplay is another factor that must be considered in technical limitations, because the more advanced the gameplay, the more lines of code it requires. Physical data size won't be much of an issue in the coming years, since even the cheapest mobile devices are beginning to come standard with expandable media slots and larger drive space. But as the complexity of game coding increases (especially the technology required to maintain delicate client-server communication on cell networks), the processing power required for the cell hardware to actually run it also rises.

In these early days of mobile gaming, it will probably be some time before we see full-fledged PC versions of our favorite MMOs being played on cell phones and similar hardware. It's not unlike the relationship between console/PC gaming and modern portable gaming devices like the Nintendo DS and the PSP; portable gaming technology has always been a few years behind PC and console gaming."Mobile gaming," defined as gaming on devices like cell phones and personal media players, faces an even steeper battle than the latter because the hardware isn't dedicated to gaming.

On the bright side, the technology continues advancing at an exponential rate; it might only be a year or two, instead of a decade, before we're playing mobile MMOs on the subway or in a waiting room. The gaming community has also proved to be more resourceful than anyone could have predicted, contributing to innovative solutions to bottleneck problems with technology like server-side processing.

We also have a few "appetizers" to look forward to in the near-future, with mobile apps that allow players to interact with specific elements of our MMOs, like checking our mail, chatting with our guilds and browsing the auction house. We've already seen Blizzard, for example, release a WoW authenticator and Mobile Armory app for the iPhone. Other MMO developers like CCP and Hi-Rez Studios are beginning to implement Web 2.0 functions in their games, in some cases allowing players to access game elements with just a Web browser, regardless of the hardware you're using. Mobile technology is about to change the playing field of our traditional PC-based MMOs forever, regardless of whether or not we're actually playing those MMOs with our cell phones in the next few years.