Bioware Austin.. damm more Dragons.. or Lightsabers?

[stray]

Maybe I am biased cause I played text MUDs. With games the "UI" is often an integral part of the gameplay -- I'm not saying that it never is. Baseball is not baseball if you aren't swinging a bat and throwing a ball. I do consider Quake's gameplay different than Wolf 3D's because Quake has true 3D presentation and positioning while Wolf 3D does not even though both fall under the classification of FPS. But with WoW I see myself doing the same things as I did in text MUDs -- moving around, killing mobs, getting loot, and leveling up my characters. The UI and presentation can make that gameplay more enjoyable but I'm still doing the same stuff.

I'm departing from what Margalis said in that I don't think WoW is much of a jump from "graphical MUD" either. I agree with you there. When I said MMO's are like Windows 3.1, I'd include WoW too.

[edit]

To further explain, I'd like to see MMO's have more functions that are inherently visual/graphical....Like the Mac OS did in comparison with Win 3.1. Drag and and dropping, for example, was an idea created solely on visual/graphical terms. It had no command line equivalent. Windows 3.1, on the other hand, was still merely a shell rapped around a bunch of old DOS command line actions. There were few, if any, actions in Windows 3.1 that couldn't be done through a command line.

[Sky]

It had no command line equivalent.

xcopy
cp
mv

[El Gallo]

El Gallo, I know we've had plenty of throwdowns before, but I really just have to ask... from what you write, it really honestly sounds like you believe WoW is the be-all end-all One True Way, and that there are no further developments to be had in MMOs, and that everything prior was a total failure, and that everyone in the industry prior was a talentless hack.

Seriously?

Usually our throwdowns are about something fun (or at least about a mildly substantial issue), while this thread is mostly just venting about the usual suspects blowing the usual smoke up our usual asses.  Really, how many times have we gotten the "you won't have to grind in our game because we've devised a Super Secret Infinite Content Generator (TM) that spits out nothing but high-quality product" line?  So I'm not sure this is Throwdown Worthy, but I'll try.

I think WoW's key innovations are (a) the fact that its team was not ashamed to build on what players enjoyed from other games (both online and single-player) and what testers said was fun, rather than their Vision as reflected in a design document for a MUD in 1994; and (b) the design process outlined by Pardo at AGC  http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/06/agc-rob-pardos-keynote/ (concentrated coolness, accessibility, and most importantly, polish FROM THE BEGINNING by ensuring you have a small, fun game before you make your game big).

Your first two questions:  This may not be the One True Way (and Blizzard certainly didn't execute it perfectly), and there are no doubt future developments to be made.  But those developments need to incorporate that base and expand from it rather than simply ignore it.  And, frankly but admittedly as an outsider to the game and software industries, it all seems so blindingly obvious that it is a bit disconcerting that people hadn't been using this process all along.  The genre was really quite inbred.

Your second two questions.  No, not everything prior to WoW was a failure and no, not everyone was a talentless hack.  However, the products (generally) reflected a lack of professionalism, customer focus and/or dedication to craftsmanship.  Maybe that's not a fair characterization of the people who made those products, but it is a fair characterization of (most of) the products they released, and that's all I have to judge them by.  Even more disturbing is the fact that the games seemed to be getting worse and worse in all three areas.

Basically I take shots at industry old-timers because I like the genre and they almost killed it.  As I said in a past throwdown http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6346.msg163793#msg163793 :
 
 

"Just fine" isn't what keeps a genre vibrant and isn't what keeps the money flowing in.  the flight simulator genre was "just fine" in 1990.  I always had the sense that the industry was just kind of slouching around before WoW. 

I remember the great optimism on LtM about the industry's growth in the early EQ days.  MMOs were THE thing to make!  Once this next group of games hit, wow, this baby is gonna explode.  Then those games -- DAoC, AO, AC -- hit with a big ole whimper.  Maybe the genre had capped out.  Maybe people wouldn't line up around the block to throw millions at Whamdoodles after all.  But, never fear, the old guard is coming out with their second round of games.  Oops, AC2 is an utter piece of garbage.  But wait, we have the first generation winning company (SoE) teaming up with the first generation's runner-up developer (Koster) combined with solid financial backing and the most valuable license this side of Bible Online (Star Wars).  Surely, that would be the game that blow open the market....after all, we'd been waiting for ~4 years for that now.

Then SWG came out, and it was just an embarrassingly horrid pile of shit.  The HAM system is just one of many systems that a moderately intelligent 9 year old would laugh at.  It hit the marketplace with a whimper and never came close to EverQuest, which by now was finally beginning its death rattle with PoP to fuck over the casuals and GoD to fuck over the hardcore.

All of a sudden, all that optimism from 1999 is starting to look a bit laughable.  Then a MMO based on the most successful computer game ever (the Sims) crashes and burns.  And now let me engage in a bit of alternate history.  Next, the successor to the industry's brightest star -- EQ2 -- hits the shelves.  Another crushingly bland game that limps along with sub-EQ1 numbers, mostly cannibalizing them from its predecessor.  Turbine vomits out another failure in DDO.  Then we get Our Lord and Savior Aradune McQuaid's Vanguard, which reeks more and more of EQ2b every day.  Another fizzle.  It's now 2007.  The high point of Western MMOs commercially is still EverQuest -- its release day now more than 8 years in the rear view mirror.

Are you excited to invest in this industry?  Is this the wave of the future?  It sounds like a dead-end to me.  It wasn't only SWG, but SWG was a big part of this dreary picture.  MMOs were fucking done, man.  Flight simulator-done.  Betamax-done.  An inbred, backwards shithole in the world of computer gaming, much less video gaming.

I really think the old-guard was killing the genre.  And, for the most part, they don’t seem to have learned much of anything from WoW.  DDO: bland and unfun.  Vanguard, apparently, embraced the SWG/EQ2 model of “lets make an enormous game with lots of interrelated systems reflecting The Vision and then oh my God all the testers/customers think this is a disastrously un-fun piece of crap, let’s try to bend this monstrosity into some semi-fun shape.”  When they do speak out it’s usually a thinly-veiled sneer that WoW will falter Real Soon Now because players will realize they’ve been laboring under a false consciousness telling them WoW is entertaining, when Everyone (meaning “everyone on MUD-DEV”) knows that those poor, misguided fools really, really want something “deeper” (meaning “a game exactly like that MUD design doc I came up with in 1994”).  Sometimes we get “it’s not fair to expect my games to be as good as Blizzard games because they have more money” thrown in for good measure.  Almost everything the old guard says reduces to “let’s pretend WoW didn’t happen and go back in time to 2001 when people thought my game was gonna be the Next Big Thing” (note that "Verizon Wireless has 100x the accounts WoW does so really WoW didn't do much better than my game after all and therefore it doesn't really matter" fits in here).

What we don’t get is “WoW showed me that I fucked up in a lot of ways, I’m going to embrace the lessons of WoW and try to move the genre forward by executing the model better or adding something new to the model.”  If we did, I’d have more faith in the old guard.  But the old guard tried to strangle the genre in its crib, and they’ve done nothing to show me that they wouldn’t do the same thing again if they manage to retake the reins, so I think they are generally potshot-worthy.  Particularly in a potshot gallery like f13.

Besides, I'm old-school and still think teh h8 is cool and eventually will get me an invitation to Haemish's table at the back of the cafeteria with the cool spitball-shooting kids.  That's what this place is all about, isn't it?

[HaemishM]

Besides, I'm old-school and still think teh h8 is cool and eventually will get me an invitation to Haemish's table at the back of the cafeteria with the cool spitball-shooting kids.  That's what this place is all about, isn't it?

Consider that rant your confirmed invitation. Your spitball gun is waiting in the back room.

[Strazos]

In all honesty, I'd rather less people followed WoW, because that just means we're going to get more games like WoW.

That's nice if you actually like the game, but I found it to be boring, formulaic, dumbed-down drek.

Yes, learn from WoW that you need a lot of polished content....but I'd leave it at that. Some of the worst shit they do is listening so much to the idiots on their message boards about things to change or implement; this just means they are constantly making tweaks to class A, which will then result in players of class B to bitch about said changes to class A, resulting in more changes, ad infinium. I mean, fuck, who are the devs in WoW? The people being paid as Devs, or the loud-mouth players on the boards?

[El Gallo]

Consider that rant your confirmed invitation. Your spitball gun is waiting in the back room.

This is the happiest moment of my life

[Rasix]

Yes, learn from WoW that you need a lot of polished content....but I'd leave it at that. Some of the worst shit they do is listening so much to the idiots on their message boards about things to change or implement; this just means they are constantly making tweaks to class A, which will then result in players of class B to bitch about said changes to class A, resulting in more changes, ad infinium. I mean, fuck, who are the devs in WoW? The people being paid as Devs, or the loud-mouth players on the boards?

They actually take balance seriously and know that their players know the game better than they ever will. I like this. This is in sharp contrast to other companies' disgusting hubris in regards to game balance and ignoring all player feedback because their vision is obviously superior and beyond reproach.

If you've ever played DAoC for a long period of time, you know how frustrating it can be to play a horribly balanced game.

[stray]

It had no command line equivalent.

xcopy
cp
mv

Not talking about UNIX. I'm just comparing the original Mac OS paradigm (more object and task/file centric) to Win 3.1's program manager (more command and application centric).

But besides, there was more to drag and dropping and mouse manipulation than cp and mv. You could build entire OpenDoc apps purely through visual manipulation. And when I said above that Macs were task centric, I mean things like dragging documents on to an application icon to launch, or dragging a document on to a printer icon to print (in the command line/application centric world, initiating an application launch or a print with a file name as your fist "command" is impossible).

And even if we do talk about copying and moving, the Mac could do things with file management that had no command line equivalent at all ("blinking folders" navigation, for example).

...

Eh, anyways, I should probably keep the subject to games.

[Nebu]

If you've ever played DAoC for a long period of time, you know how frustrating it can be to play a horribly balanced game.

I've played DAoC since the beta and find it to be considerably better balanced for PvP than WoW is.  DAoC is balanced for group vs group combat.  8v8 on the classic servers demonstrates a great deal of parity among groups from the three realms.  I'm not sure what type of PvP you did in DAoC but your experience varied greatly from mine.  Having played DAoC, I found that I could even be successful 1v1 on many classes once I figured out the mechanics of the class. In WoW, balance is far more skewed not only among the classes but between the two factions.   

Now... if you're talking about PvE balance, then I'll agree that WoW is a much better balanced game.   

[WindupAtheist]

Stuff.

That was a shining beacon of rant, worthy to stand beside the best of any which have ever been.  I bow to you, sir.

[Rasix]

If you've ever played DAoC for a long period of time, you know how frustrating it can be to play a horribly balanced game.

I've played DAoC since the beta and find it to be considerably better balanced for PvP than WoW is.  DAoC is balanced for group vs group combat.  8v8 on the classic servers demonstrates a great deal of parity among groups from the three realms.  I'm not sure what type of PvP you did in DAoC but your experience varied greatly from mine.  Having played DAoC, I found that I could even be successful 1v1 on many classes once I figured out the mechanics of the class. In WoW, balance is far more skewed not only among the classes but between the two factions.   

I've got a couple friends that will argue with you for at least 2 hours a session over that statement. 

They've sworn to never play another Mythic game as long as they live due that one issue. FYI, they mostly played Alb. Dunno if playing on classic servers would have helped (I think they gave it a shot), but a great deal of their ire was directed at ToA (the rest was either due to realm imbalances or RR issues).

WoW's balance seems to work fairly well on an individual  (some matchups depending on spec aren't very winnable though) and GvG level.   WoW balance seems to mostly get hazy on itemization (not as bad as artifacts though.. jebus), which they're addressing somewhat with the newest PVP patch.

Edit: I won't be able to offer too much more back and forth on this issue. My personal time in DAoC was limited, but I did get to witness the early gimpiness of steath and then its emergence as godliness. The death of smite clerics was fun to behold. High RR Hib groups destroying hordes of Albs with just some enchanter spamming PBoEs.  My friends played for years and one thing was a constant, their love for the PVP but their extreme hatred of, in their view, Mythics inability to get their game to a stable, balanced state.

[Slyfeind]

So far the biggest concern seems to be the idea of "wasted content". I think this is misplaced though, in that as a player, it does not bother me in the slightest how much extra work was done by the developers to create something. If i, as a player, advance a character through a particular and sufficiently unique path it is then of interest to me what else i can experience under different circumstances. This will not work for everyone, as some will no doubt make the same choices over and over again, then complaing about the lack of gameplay, but it serves no purpose in belittling the intelligence of the players and assuming that more than, say, 50% will not take a different path.

Asheron's Call was my first DIKU-ish MMO. Everyone around me was rushing through the levels, and this honestly confused me. It still does. I don't care how quickly I can go from 24 to 25. I want to know what I can do with 24, that's unique to 25. When Burning Crusade comes out, my current WoW guild is going to grind to 70 as fast as possible, just to get to the end-game again. I doubt if I'll be with them.

I do feel it could work better than it does. You can reuse old zones. Send level 60s into level 10 zones for mega boss fights in areas, and based on quest chains, that won't impact newbies. WoW probably not. They like keeping people in zone blocks. Maybe population management is less server intensive than compelling players to go everywhere all the time.

They do that, a little bit. To get your mount, you have to go back to the newbie zone, and there's a level-40-ish Alliance quest that takes you back to Northshire Abbey. But then, it's just "show this book to the librarian." After rebuilding Britannia, I always thought it would be fun to go into EverQuest's world and revisit all the newbie zones; just upgrade the whole thing. It seems a genius way to add new content; just a few new encounters in all the old places. Would the players like it? I dunno, I always like going back to the newb areas and seeing how far I had come. Unfortunately I can't stay too long, because there's nothing for me to do there.

So basically...cajole players into playing through many times for minor differences in content...

Why? You got them there in the first place with a good game that took time to make. Given you are making money then there's no reason to just cut down and try reap profits. You'll still do well if you keep putting in the same effort for these people, so just do it.

So...it's possible to make too much money? 

[Sky]

I'm just comparing the original Mac OS paradigm (more object and task/file centric) to Win 3.1's program manager.

I was just joking anyway. I disliked both the original Mac OS (up through 9) and early Windows. I didn't even have Windows on my pc until someone gave me a copy of Civ for Windows (I had been playing the DOS version), and even then I only loaded 3.1 when playing Civ. I didn't 'convert' to windows until gaming forced me to during the Win95 era. And that was kicking and screaming. I liked command line, still do. Heart OSX and all that.

But yeah, /tangent.

[waylander]

My guild quit playing DAOC (Gareth classic server) officially a week ago after the horrible LOTM expansion, and we were in the top 50 ranked guilds for our faction.  We also played DAOC the first six months on Merlin and were a server top 20 guild at the time there.

DAOC today is IMHO worse of a game than it was then, because at least back then  you didn't have to grind to 50, grind to RR5, grind raid gear, and now 10 champion levels to live more than 5 seconds in PVP.  Not to mention that newbie areas are a ghost town, leveling is still horrid, and you have to essentially bot yourself up if you want to level quickly.

Early DAOC's problem was lag, a better RvR experience, and no real PVP until level 41 (which took longer then). I feel like it jointed the shitty/unfun list by adding more timesinks with later expansions when it should have just made the game more fun.

[shiznitz]

Yes, learn from WoW that you need a lot of polished content....but I'd leave it at that. Some of the worst shit they do is listening so much to the idiots on their message boards about things to change or implement; this just means they are constantly making tweaks to class A, which will then result in players of class B to bitch about said changes to class A, resulting in more changes, ad infinium. I mean, fuck, who are the devs in WoW? The people being paid as Devs, or the loud-mouth players on the boards?

They actually take balance seriously and know that their players know the game better than they ever will. I like this. This is in sharp contrast to other companies' disgusting hubris in regards to game balance and ignoring all player feedback because their vision is obviously superior and beyond reproach.

If you've ever played DAoC for a long period of time, you know how frustrating it can be to play a horribly balanced game.

A bit off topic but I had to put this into the mix. A classic dev attempt to re-balance the game gone horribly awry in EQ2.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8768.0

[Margalis]

If you have the exact same crafting rules and crafting works the same on the server, but one UI takes 100 clicks to make something and one takes 3 is that really the same gameplay?

Yes it is.

So you contend that even though the game plays very differently, the gameplay is the same.

It sounds like gameplay is a meaningless term. It clearly doesn't capture the play of the game.

End-user experience is all that matters. The basic rules are part of that, the interface is part of that. Game play is how the game plays to the end user. Clicking 100 times and clicking 3 times are not the same at all. They just aren't.

This isn't a question of opinion. The game plays differently.

[Trippy]

If you have the exact same crafting rules and crafting works the same on the server, but one UI takes 100 clicks to make something and one takes 3 is that really the same gameplay?

Yes it is.

So you contend that even though the game plays very differently, the gameplay is the same.

It sounds like gameplay is a meaningless term. It clearly doesn't capture the play of the game.

End-user experience is all that matters. The basic rules are part of that, the interface is part of that. Game play is how the game plays to the end user. Clicking 100 times and clicking 3 times are not the same at all. They just aren't.

This isn't a question of opinion. The game plays differently.

Like I said above, I don't consider the fact that a game like WoW makes you drag icons around to, say, setup your hotkey bar part of the fundamental gameplay. I'm not saying, for example, that EQ and WoW play identically -- I'm saying if you strip the two games down to the basics the two games have the same fundamental gameplay which is the same fundamental gameplay as a DikuMUD.

[Venkman]

So you contend that even though the game plays very differently, the gameplay is the same.

It sounds like gameplay is a meaningless term. It clearly doesn't capture the play of the game.

End-user experience is all that matters. The basic rules are part of that, the interface is part of that. Game play is how the game plays to the end user. Clicking 100 times and clicking 3 times are not the same at all. They just aren't.

This isn't a question of opinion. The game plays differently.

Nope. You scratch 1 lottery ticket or 100 lottery tickets, you're playing exactly the same game. You whack one wolf or 100 wolves, same game. You combine 1 item or 100 items, same. You click 100 times to perform the same action or 3, same exact games. DAoC crafting was exactly EQ1 crafting except they multipled the number of combines per skill level by a factor of 10.

Games Rules and Game UI are integrated in every game there is. They form a part of the end user experience, but the use themself completes it.

They do that, a little bit. To get your mount, you have to go back to the newbie zone, and there's a level-40-ish Alliance quest that takes you back to Northshire Abbey. But then, it's just "show this book to the librarian." After rebuilding Britannia, I always thought it would be fun to go into EverQuest's world and revisit all the newbie zones; just upgrade the whole thing. It seems a genius way to add new content; just a few new encounters in all the old places. Would the players like it? I dunno, I always like going back to the newb areas and seeing how far I had come. Unfortunately I can't stay too long, because there's nothing for me to do there.

In EQ1, every 10 levels starting at 20 I'd revisit Crushbone, just to break Emperor trains and whatnot. Good times, particularly back when I played when a level 26 Bard could AOE mezz an entire room (before nerfage)

Revisiting content has to be more than just going back for yuck yucsks. Maybe it's fine as is. All adventure zones spiral outwards from starting areas, but major trade centers are built to bring players of all walks of life back together. I think WoW does some of it ok. The Onyxia quest series is a good example. A major encounter takes place in a part of a major city most players never have need to otherwise visit after they hit 34 (when they can max out First Aid). And the quest series contains scripted events anyone can witness. This happens in other parts of the game too. It's a way of being able to re-use content by triggering events based on who's talking and what level they are or quest they are on.

I just wondered allowed about doing more of that.

[lamaros]

I don't remember many MUDs I played having quests at all. And I've played a few. I wish WoW adhered closely to them in that regard. I hate quests, especially WoWs quests.

Huh?  MUDs were mostly heavily focused on quests.  You had quests, killing mobs, and whatever PvP/guild mechanics that were tossed in. 

Most of the ones I played didn't have quests. Some started introducing quests very late in the day and I hated them, it took away a lot of freedom from my play.

Quests can be a good thing. But the glut of generic quests put into games like WoW to hide the grinding from the players is not fun.

I would much much much rather have a few good quest chains (and games do this already) and have more time spend on level design for outside, non instanced areas. I would much prefer to grind in well designed game areas, side by side with other players and conflict, than do 50 "kill x, collect y" in flat fields populated with an unrealistically even spread of random beats.

I understand that this is probably an impossible expectation give the time to takes to create such content and the size of the world typically, though.

So...it's possible to make too much money?  shocked

It's possible to try. I would expect that in the long term it would mean you actually make less, as you take your eye off the reasons people played the game to begin with.

1. Polish.
2. Fun.
3. Make it MMO.

That's what WoW has done (in order of how well they've done it), and done importantly well.

Future games have to do this. They don't have to borrow the specifics of WoW, they just have to start building their game from the right perspective.

Like I said above, I don't consider the fact that a game like WoW makes you drag icons around to, say, setup your hotkey bar part of the fundamental gameplay. I'm not saying, for example, that EQ and WoW play identically -- I'm saying if you strip the two games down to the basics the two games have the same fundamental gameplay which is the same fundamental gameplay as a DikuMUD.

I would agree; the games are fundamentaly the same, but one plays with more simplicity and communication, thus is more fun and polished.

That said, above I just said how I would prefer to have fewer generic quests and more grinding in well designed areas. This is not a fundamental change, but makes a big difference for me even if the base model is the same. I dont think you should underemphasise the important of the way the game communicates with you, as it can have a whole heap of implications.

[Margalis]

Nope. You scratch 1 lottery ticket or 100 lottery tickets, you're playing exactly the same game. You whack one wolf or 100 wolves, same game. You combine 1 item or 100 items, same. You click 100 times to perform the same action or 3, same exact games.

I don't think you are getting this.

Imagine Super Mario Brothers 1. Exactly as is. Except to jump instead of pressing 'A' once you press 'A' 40 times in a row. Exact same game, or totally unplayable trash? Would you play that game?

Imagine WOW except instead of having icons over people's heads you have to run around and talk to each person in town to figure out who has quests. Exact same game? It's the same except much more tedious and boring, with a higher ratio of wasted time to fun stuff.

Whether or not the gameplay is fundamental to the overall design or architecture is not what matters. What matters is how important it is to the end user and how it effects the overall experience.

Again, putting icons over a guy's head doesn't change the internal logic at all, it is purely client side, and is easy to do. But it fundamentally changes the end-user experience. WOW is a collection of many small improvements like that.

Whether or not something is "fundamental" to the core or not is irrelevant. You can't ignore the fundamental stuff, but you can't ignore the non-fundamental stuff either. Improving the end user experience is what matters.

Again, would you play Tetris if you had to type in "rotate clockwise" to rotate a block? I'm guessing no.

The minor evolutionary improvements that WOW made are not hard to make, but they do take an investment of time and effort and a realization that those changes are important. If you can't acknowledge that those changes are more than window dressing chances are you will half-ass them or ignore them outright.

----

I agree almost 100% with El Gallo but:

And, frankly but admittedly as an outsider to the game and software industries, it all seems so blindingly obvious that it is a bit disconcerting that people hadn't been using this process all along.

Probably 5% of software companies employ a rational product development process. All the things I rant about that don't make sense - my company does them all the time. The reasons have to do with a lot of things - board members, outside pressures, money issues, personality issues, etc. It is easy to lose the big picture.

"Make sure you game is fun as early as possible" may be new wisdom to some companies, but even among companies that do understand that very few of them actually follow through. In addition the games industry has a lot of turnover and doesn't attract the most professional product managers to begin with.

[ajax34i]

The word seems to be used in two ways.  One is "what's the point of the game", and the other is "what will I experience while interacting with this game"?  I suppose "the game plays differently" does NOT equate "the gameplay is different."  It's the fault of the leet-speak kid who first spelled it "the gamplays diffrnt", confusing everyone.

[Trippy]

I don't think you are getting this.

Imagine Super Mario Brothers 1. Exactly as is. Except to jump instead of pressing 'A' once you press 'A' 40 times in a row. Exact same game, or totally unplayable trash? Would you play that game?

It might be unplayable but it's still a platform game.

Whether or not the gameplay is fundamental to the overall design or architecture is not what matters. What matters is how important it is to the end user and how it effects the overall experience.

I never disagreed with you on this point. Go back and reread what I said. I never said the user experience was unimportant. Even if we are just talking about text MUDs, the UI and presentation is important. Does the game show you available exits in each room (except where they are supposed to be secret)? Is there an in-game map? Does the game support macros or do you need a client like TinyFugue to create them? And so on and so forth.

[Slyfeind]

I wonder how far this argument can go. If you boil things down too much, playing football is the same as playing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It's all just objects colliding in space at certain moments in time.

[Slyfeind]

So...it's possible to make too much money?  shocked

It's possible to try. I would expect that in the long term it would mean you actually make less, as you take your eye off the reasons people played the game to begin with.

Ah, yeah. I was presuming everything else being equal, like content being just as fun but costing half the money. (But yeah, that might presume too much, har har.)

[Raph]

Somehow, I feel too tired to have a real throwdown. :) SO mostly, I am going to ask more questions.

I think WoW's key innovations are (a) the fact that its team was not ashamed to build on what players enjoyed from other games (both online and single-player)

Not exactly an innovation there... MOST games, including most MMOs, have been highly derivative of previous games, including the parts they found fun.

and what testers said was fun

I wasn't in the test until late, so I can't judge.

rather than their Vision as reflected in a design document for a MUD in 1994;

Heh... and yet, I'd say that WoW has adhered extremely closely to a vision. Hasn't it? It's just a very different SORT of vision.

and (b) the design process outlined by Pardo at AGC  http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/06/agc-rob-pardos-keynote/ (concentrated coolness, accessibility, and most importantly, polish FROM THE BEGINNING by ensuring you have a small, fun game before you make your game big).

I think most everyone in the industry would love to follow that design process, and rarely gets to (damn few teams get to). I quite agree it's a great process.

But those developments need to incorporate that base and expand from it rather than simply ignore it.

Here we may part ways. If you mean "incorporate the base" as in "start from the same premise in terms of how the game plays," that's a recipe for endless games that are mostly the same.

If you mean "start assuming that good a process and that level of user feedback" and so on, then sure, I agree with you.

Which one did you mean?

And, frankly but admittedly as an outsider to the game and software industries, it all seems so blindingly obvious that it is a bit disconcerting that people hadn't been using this process all along.

A statement rather than a question, here.

The number of companies and teams that get to use that process can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the reason is money. This is why several of us keep bringing up money. Starting small and polishing like mad and not having a deadline can only be done by those with money. Most people are instead given a deadline that can only be hit by focusing entirely on presentation and content (no new game systems), and then work to that. Some people are given a chance to make something new in terms of systems, but are usually given a deadline too short, lie or kid themselves about whether they can hit it, miss it, ship late, and usually incomplete. This is true industry-wide.

You do recall that Blizzard was even up for sale during the development of WoW? This process almost brought down Vivendi Universal. Yes, it's a wonderful process and I wish I'd gotten to follow it, and I am sure most devs wish they had gotten to follow it. What else do you think Vogel and Walton are referencing when they say "it's nice to work somewhere that puts quality first?" Bioware follows that process now, but they had to work for years making stuff like MDK2 to get there.

The genre was really quite inbred.

The genre wasn't inbred, it was small. IMHO, anyway. A bit of a difference, I think. One tends to forget the slow pace of making these games, how many people they take, how little available experience there was in the industry -- and the fact that EQ, UO, & AC were all made by newbie teams. In fact, even the amount of mud development experience on those teams was fairly limited, when the teams are taken as a whole. DAoC is the only game made by vets of the previous gen, and its big innovation (cheerfully adopted by WoW) was in fact brought over from the older Mythic/AUSI text games. Define inbred, maybe?

Your second two questions.  No, not everything prior to WoW was a failure and no, not everyone was a talentless hack.  However, the products (generally) reflected a lack of professionalism, customer focus and/or dedication to craftsmanship.

This, I rather agree with. See above about games made by newbies. All of those titles were made by people who were new to the videogame industry, myself included.

Basically I take shots at industry old-timers because I like the genre and they almost killed it.

I can't think of any axis on which the genre was almost killed. Losing audience? Losing money? Market share? Even creativity, much as I bemoan the constant stream of Diku clones? What metric are you using?

As I said in a past throwdown http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6346.msg163793#msg163793 :
 
 

"Just fine" isn't what keeps a genre vibrant and isn't what keeps the money flowing in.  the flight simulator genre was "just fine" in 1990.  I always had the sense that the industry was just kind of slouching around before WoW. 

I remember the great optimism on LtM about the industry's growth in the early EQ days.  MMOs were THE thing to make!  Once this next group of games hit, wow, this baby is gonna explode.  Then those games -- DAoC, AO, AC -- hit with a big ole whimper.  Maybe the genre had capped out.  Maybe people wouldn't line up around the block to throw millions at Whamdoodles after all.  But, never fear, the old guard is coming out with their second round of games.  Oops, AC2 is an utter piece of garbage.  But wait, we have the first generation winning company (SoE) teaming up with the first generation's runner-up developer (Koster) combined with solid financial backing and the most valuable license this side of Bible Online (Star Wars).  Surely, that would be the game that blow open the market....after all, we'd been waiting for ~4 years for that now.

Then SWG came out, and it was just an embarrassingly horrid pile of shit.  The HAM system is just one of many systems that a moderately intelligent 9 year old would laugh at.  It hit the marketplace with a whimper and never came close to EverQuest, which by now was finally beginning its death rattle with PoP to fuck over the casuals and GoD to fuck over the hardcore.

All of a sudden, all that optimism from 1999 is starting to look a bit laughable.  Then a MMO based on the most successful computer game ever (the Sims) crashes and burns.  And now let me engage in a bit of alternate history.  Next, the successor to the industry's brightest star -- EQ2 -- hits the shelves.  Another crushingly bland game that limps along with sub-EQ1 numbers, mostly cannibalizing them from its predecessor.  Turbine vomits out another failure in DDO.  Then we get Our Lord and Savior Aradune McQuaid's Vanguard, which reeks more and more of EQ2b every day.  Another fizzle.  It's now 2007.  The high point of Western MMOs commercially is still EverQuest -- its release day now more than 8 years in the rear view mirror.

Are you excited to invest in this industry?  Is this the wave of the future?  It sounds like a dead-end to me.  It wasn't only SWG, but SWG was a big part of this dreary picture.  MMOs were fucking done, man.  Flight simulator-done.  Betamax-done.  An inbred, backwards shithole in the world of computer gaming, much less video gaming.

And yet throughout that period, the audience grew, the revenues grew, the market share grew, and yes, MMOs were still the hot area to invest in.

Look, I completely agree that the last batch was pretty iffy. But there were also a lot of good things being tried. (And I still need to make a HAM simulator so people can try what I was hoping it would play like).

I really think the old-guard was killing the genre.  And, for the most part, they don’t seem to have learned much of anything from WoW.

I think one reason why you hear the old guard with sour grapes about WoW is because it's not something that any of them could have done -- and I don't mean just creatively, I mean practically.

From the creative point of view, quite a lot of the old guard doesn't want to make the same game over and over again, any more than the jaded f13 folks want to play it over and over.

From the practical point of view, it takes an entire company culture to hew closely to a model like Blizzard's. The number of studios with that model in the entire industry is tiny.
And none of them were in MMOs.

Vanguard, apparently, embraced the SWG/EQ2 model of “lets make an enormous game with lots of interrelated systems reflecting The Vision and then oh my God all the testers/customers think this is a disastrously un-fun piece of crap, let’s try to bend this monstrosity into some semi-fun shape.”

I cannot speak as to Vanguard, but I can tell you that this was not the attitude of testers in SWG until the moment that the release date announcement hit.

When they do speak out it’s usually a thinly-veiled sneer that WoW will falter Real Soon Now because players will realize they’ve been laboring under a false consciousness telling them WoW is entertaining, when Everyone (meaning “everyone on MUD-DEV”) knows that those poor, misguided fools really, really want something “deeper” (meaning “a game exactly like that MUD design doc I came up with in 1994”).

Well, I went on record as saying they are going to hit 10-12m subscribers. So that's my take on that.

I ALSO think that players will want something deeper. That's just how it goes in general, just like the FPS player of today would find the FPS of ten years ago shallow and the racing game fan of today would laugh at Pole Position.

Sometimes we get “it’s not fair to expect my games to be as good as Blizzard games because they have more money” thrown in for good measure.

I think I have explained this one enough. I completely get that it's utterly irrelevant to the player experience. It's still a huge huge factor.

Almost everything the old guard says reduces to “let’s pretend WoW didn’t happen and go back in time to 2001 when people thought my game was gonna be the Next Big Thing” (note that "Verizon Wireless has 100x the accounts WoW does so really WoW didn't do much better than my game after all and therefore it doesn't really matter" fits in here).

Really? What I see is vets like Jacobs, Vogel, Walton, Anderson, Schubert, all working on games that are copying WoW. Don't you? How is that pretending it didn't happen?

What we don’t get is “WoW showed me that I fucked up in a lot of ways, I’m going to embrace the lessons of WoW and try to move the genre forward by executing the model better or adding something new to the model.”

I think that's damn close to exactly what Vogel, Ohlen, and Walton said in this interview. Isn't it? What am I missing here? The direct "I fucked up" part, presumably, which is the part that generally speaking, you can't say for a number of reasons, no matter how much you believe it?

Both my postmortem for UO and the infamous Escapist interview had both "here's where I was wrong" and plenty of harsh words for bad practices, I think? Who exactly are you looking to stand up and say "I fucked up" from the old guard?

If we did, I’d have more faith in the old guard.  But the old guard tried to strangle the genre in its crib, and they’ve done nothing to show me that they wouldn’t do the same thing again if they manage to retake the reins, so I think they are generally potshot-worthy.  Particularly in a potshot gallery like f13.

Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd say that most of the old guard was working to try to get the baby to take some first steps, and the baby fell on its face. Along comes a pro nanny from London and presto, the baby starts walking. IMHO, walking straight into some walls, but we'll have to see. :) One thing I have a high confidence in is the propensity of babies to fall back down again.

Besides, I'm old-school and still think teh h8 is cool and eventually will get me an invitation to Haemish's table at the back of the cafeteria with the cool spitball-shooting kids.  That's what this place is all about, isn't it?

No matter where you sit, the food still sucks. ;)

[Margalis]

The number of companies and teams that get to use that process can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the reason is money. This is why several of us keep bringing up money. Starting small and polishing like mad and not having a deadline can only be done by those with money.

The strange thing is, it often isn't money, although money is the motivating factor. A lot of times the rush to money means in the end only realizing half the revenue you might have otherwise. (Or far less even) I've seen that happen so many times in software. Something is rushed out to be "first to market" (which actually doesn't make any difference, first to market and GOOD is what matters), the product is not very good, and the second or third guy makes all the money. The iPod wasn't close to the first portable music player for example.

The rush to quick money actually costs a lot of companies money. Unfortunately it is impossible to explain that to business folks who have had "first mover" drilled into them from birth.

Of course the way publishers pay out money based on milestones and such most dev houses have no choice or say in the matter.

Most people are instead given a deadline that can only be hit by focusing entirely on presentation and content (no new game systems), and then work to that. Some people are given a chance to make something new in terms of systems, but are usually given a deadline too short, lie or kid themselves about whether they can hit it, miss it, ship late, and usually incomplete. This is true industry-wide.

Although I understand what you are saying here, how come the presentation and content of many games are pretty poor? I would argue that WOW doesn't have many new game systems.

I am not a WOW fan. Don't take my ranting to mean I think WOW is great. I think it is boring and it interests me far less than most other MMORPGs. That said, I get why it is a success. It's not because it has some awesome new systems. Eve and SWG are both more innovative. Probably Matrix Online as well. (Not that I would know)

Again, the outer layers of the onion are greatly improved, but the inner layers are the same as ever. Apparently you *can* polish a turd. My point in all of this has been the core gameplay may not be that different, but to most people that doesn't matter because all the stuff around the core is much nicer. And that stuff is important.

To me that says a lot of people have put too much emphasis on what they consider the core systems and not enough on what they might have considered periphery stuff. I really do believe you could take a game like EQ2 or FFXI, make a huge list of customer gripes, fix them one by one and end up something pretty close to WOW. One by one just eliminate all the annoying headaches and things that rub people the wrong way - without changing the core gameplay at all. Travel times too long? Make people run faster. Have to wait forever for a group? Rebalance monsters for solo play. Takes too long to find quests? Add handy icons. It is more tweaking than reprogramming.

The fact that people are willing to create server emulators with tweaked rules should tell everyone something.

I do think there is a danger in listening to customers too much but when 95% of people are complaining that it takes 4 hours to get a group you have problems that need immediate addressing. Yet those sorts of problems are relatively commonplace.

[Venkman]

Money has its own price (heh) though. How'd you make that money? If it's from internal structure, there's rules to how it can be spent.

Raph said above that starting small was one of the things that's only possible with a lot of money. I see more examples to the contrary though.

Lots of money wants lots of success. Look at the finances of VUG throughout WoW development. They needed 7mil subscribers for all the money and time they put into it. No way WoW could have survived at 100k subscribers. The money (and other factors) would not have allowed for it.

Conversely look at SWG. That games was designed to do much better than  it did, given the dev budget, architecture and license. And yet even though it did quite respectively by standards of the day (275k was nothing to sneeze at), it didn't apparently hit expectations (or it wouldn't have been redesigned midstream).

The other important factor of money is patience. What publicly-traded company could spend $75mil on a game and patiently wait three or four years to maybe become successful?

Whether or not the gameplay is fundamental to the overall design or architecture is not what matters. What matters is how important it is to the end user and how it effects the overall experience.

What I read earlier was that you thought the UI fundamentally changed the game. I get now what you're saying is that it can fundamentally change the appeal of a game. With that I totally agree, for the examples you cited and others. That's an important distinction. It's why people kept saying things like "DAoC is EQ done right". Same game [mechanic], "better" delivery ("better" being dependent on who the game is for... though in DAoC's case, I never agreed with that assessment).

[WindupAtheist]

If Blizzard has resevoirs of cash and patience that no old guard company can match, then that's all she wrote.  Those companies are all doomed to being second-rate bitches for all time, their developers rambling about the "importance" and "relevance" of the features in their crappy innovative games no one is playing, while Blizzard enjoys near-monopoly domination of the market.

At least until years down the road, when someone else with really serious money crashes into the market to challenge Blizzard.  That still leaves SOE/Turbine/whoever sitting at the bottom of the pile as they, frankly, deserve to.

[Strazos]

WoW can have their coffers. Money <> Good Game.

[Arrrgh]

If it only takes cash and patience why doesn't Microsoft own the market?

[Fabnusen]

I swear you guys remind me of some female coworkers. I am in a heavily young(er) female industry [no, not porn]. When a good looking woman walks into the room, the other women immediately start tearing her apart. "Her breasts aren't real". "If I had a personal trainer, my legs would look like that too". "I bet she can't spell her own name". "Did you see that blouse she was wearing?". "Bitch".

This thread is highly entertaining and informative - I have read every word........so I'm the pot calling the kettle black. I have not one iota of programming experience (unless you count college courses like PASCAL, or whatever the hell that was) and am purely a consumer of your business products. The brain power and insight shared are good stuff. My e-peen shrinks in the presence of those who do this kind of stuff for a living, which I do not.
I make these observations as a total outsider.

This thread is a bitch fight in the best sense: hair pulling, name-calling, accusations, clawing...hell I might even go so far as to say there is some mud westling going on. I was surprised at how quickly people of all stripes jumped on the thread and made a bunch of assumptions about the (unknown) game thereby giving us insight into their mindset.

[WayAbvPar]

I am afraid that we can't accept your opinion until you post some pics of your hot female coworkers 

[Fabnusen]

I am afraid that we can't accept your opinion until you post some pics of your hot female coworkers 

Again, your avatar picture rocks.

My daughter was looking over my shoulder and asked what kind of cookies those were as I rapidly clicked away from it.

[Venkman]

If Blizzard has resevoirs of cash and patience that no old guard company can match, then that's all she wrote.  Those companies are all doomed to being second-rate bitches for all time, their developers rambling about the "importance" and "relevance" of the features in their crappy innovative games no one is playing, while Blizzard enjoys near-monopoly domination of the market.

Not really. All that needs to happen is the rules for success to change. For example, while we can ask "who else can make a diku as polished as WoW", we really should be asking (as we do all the time): "who else can make an MMO as polished but with different and equally compelling rules?".

Those will be coming. To me it'll be the whoever can do the polished combat and questing acquisition engine with an equally compelling virtual lifestyle. Like, SWG executed as well as WoW. I've argued that SWG itself was a niche concept, but that has been mostly because the only parts that worked really well until JTL launched were crafting and commerce. The rest we accepted.

So instead of WoW done right, which only entirely different industries even have the cash to attempt, I think it'll be broader. Same budget (call it an even $100mil), but with wider thinking. And probably lots of procedural stuff.

[SnakeCharmer]

The number of companies and teams that get to use that process can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the reason is money. This is why several of us keep bringing up money. Starting small and polishing like mad and not having a deadline can only be done by those with money.

If you do it right the first time, ensuring that system A works, doesn't that save you money in the end?