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BioWare Austin Talks About Upcoming MMO
Being on South Park, building the right end game for an MMO and more.
by Shawn Elliott, 11/27/2006 
21 of 21 users recommend this story. 
As you've likely heard, the December 2006 issue of Games for Windows magazine (in stores now) features a massive cover story on BioWare's upcoming RPG Dragon Age (check out some first details on the game here). But as part of the cover story, the guys at GFW also spoke with BioWare's Austin studio to get the scoop on its upcoming MMORPG. While the team isn't ready to talk details or world settings, they did go into a lot of the philosophy behind the game. As one of the best RPG developers in the business, the sheer prospect of an MMORPG from the studio is exciting, so read on for some intriguing comments.
Games for Windows: The Official Magazine: How long has your new MMORPG been in development?

Gordon Walton, co-studio director, BioWare Austin: We announced the game around March, but we'd really started on it in the beginning of December 2005.

James Ohlen, creative director, BioWare Austin: We've got a lot designed -- we've got the GDD [game design document] done, we've finished more than three quarters of the detail design documents. We've got a couple prototypes up.

We've licensed [Simultronics'] HeroEngine. It's a very good engine, and we're very impressed with it so far.

And we can talk about the high-level goals: We basically want to bring what BioWare's famous for to the online space, and one of the things BioWare's famous for is storytelling ... and it's something that pretty well doesn't exist in the online space right now. Most "storytelling" in MMORPGs is just FedEx quests -- you know, you have to go get some eggs -- and it's presented in a format that's just a bunch of text thrown at you in paragraph for ... and that's not so exciting. We want to bring a level of storytelling that's equal to the single-player box games that BioWare has done. I think we can do that. One of the big challenges will be making our storytelling work in an environment that has multiple players.

GFW: It seems that one of the big challenges in a big multiplayer universe is that you can't really have the player shape the world like you can in a single-player game ... .

JO: Here's the thing -- you can't have a story that involves saving the world from the dark lord Sauron -- not that we're making a Lord of the Rings game, but I'll use LOTR as a good example. You can't stop the world from being destroyed by [Sauron], but you can do a lot of things that are personal to your character. You change how your character evolves over the game, the player's personal story -- and a player's personal story can be quite epic. It can involve parts of the world that, while they're epic, exciting, and interesting, don't change the landscape of the entire world for everyone else.

Smaug [from The Hobbit] is a good example. You can have a personal quest to kill an ancient red dragon; you can have a story that goes all the way through, and you can meet all these interesting characters, and eventually you end up killing the ancient red dragon. Other characters in the online world will know you killed a red dragon, but you haven't changed the world for them. And they can still -- especially when you use things like instances -- go on a quest that involves killing an ancient huge red dragon. We can change the player's personal story, and that gives players the sense they're having an impact on the game world.

Rich Vogel, co-studio director of product development: One thing we don't want to do is NPC Pez dispensers, as I call them -- go over there, dispense a quest, and then go "vacuum-clean" a zone. We want to make sure you listen to NPCs, because choices matter. And that's really important.

JO: There are lots of quests in a classic BioWare game that would work in an online world. You'd be surprised how few wouldn't.

GFW: One of the big problems with MMO gameplay is repeating the same content, or same instance if you're specifically talking about WoW, over and over again ... .

JO: That's something we don't want to encourage. We want to encourage players to continue to make progress in their story, to do new quests, consume new content, constantly move forward. The grind is not attractive in any way. Going and killing the same dragon over and over again is not something I want to do. There are lots of different ways to encourage players to move forward. Simply putting more weight on storytelling experience points is a good way to do that. In WOW, you get XP when you finish a quest, but the weighting on that is pretty low; there's not much benefit to doing that over finding the perfect monster to grind and kill. If those quest experience points were a little higher, it would make a lot more sense to go along with the story. Now, that's a very mechanical way to ensure players go along with your story -- the other way is to make sure your story is good, that the presentation is exciting, it's personal to the player, that the player has a lot of motivation to move forward in their story. That's not to say that experience and treasure aren't still important, though.

GFW: Are there things in the other MMOs -- whether yours or another developer's -- that you've worked on that you can see working here? Any "lessons learned"?

RV: I think the big thing is that making a quality polished product with good gameplay is key. WoW proved that. WoW didn't really innovate all that much -- it just did a very good job of polishing what was out there. [Blizzard] took the best and put it in their game. But we want to develop an experience that's a BioWare experience first and foremost. And for that, it's very important to have directed content ... especially if you want to get to a mainstream audience.

JO: And by directed, we don't mean linear -- we mean that you know where you have to go to have fun.

GFW: How many of your key staffers migrated from SOE [which also has a studio in Austin]?

GW: I don't know that we have a count. Some from SOE, some from BioWare Edmonton, some from other companies completely. It's not like we had to go knocking. Experienced people want to work on a product that can be successful.

GFW: Can you talk about where the game takes place? Is it fantasy? Sci-fi?

JO: We can't talk about the setting of the game yet.

RV: The key points that we're gonna do that no one's done before in an MMOG are bring story, character, and emotion to it. Decisions matter, and NPCs aren't pez dispensers, and you're not in a grind. You're really compelled to get on and play what's happening to day ... kind of like watching a series like Lost on TV ... putting page-turning in an MMO. It's going to be extremely challenging thing to do, believe me.

GFW: Another BioWare strength, aside from story, is character customization. For lots of reasons, most MMORPGs lock you into classes without a ton of flexibility, which conflicts with customization. What's your philosophy?

RV: It's really important to have roles in an MMORPG. If you understand your role in the world, and others understand your role in the world with you, then you can get group dynamics and social behavior. [Developers] can set up interdependencies, which promote social dynamics in a game. If you don't have that, then you end up with loners ... and the world breaks down a little bit. Now, you'll be able to solo if you like in our game, that's for sure -- it's one thing that WoW proved can work. But it'll be a choice whether or not you want to group or not. You run into problems when people feel they're forced to group up or raid to get somewhere in the game.

JO: And while roles are important for gameplay, the visual aspect of your character is an area where we can let player differentiate themselves. We are gonna have a good selection of visual customization. We're probably gonna have more visual customization than you've seen in a BioWare game before.

GFW: Repetition of the same instances and raid dungeons is a huge part on what constitutes "end-game content" when you reach a level cap in an MMO. What's your plan for end-game content?

JO: We have big plans for end-game content that we can't talk about because it's a major part of our design. We think it's a very important aspect of the game, and we don't want players to be stuck grinding through the same content over and over again -- I know when I hit level 60 in WoW, I pretty much quit. So whatever end-game model we have, it's not going to be that.

GFW: And what of player-created content? Player-built cities, player-run businesses, that sort of thing?

RV: There'll definitely be an economy in our game, like WoW. But is our game going to be a simulation? No. Our game is an entertainment experience.

JO: If we're going to create immersive, epic stories that are believable, that really goes against having a simulation-type world. Those two things don't go together well.

GW: And putting the onus on players to create all the fun is ... a challenge.

GFW: How big is your writing team? Can you explain your writing process?

JO: One of the things we want to do is create more story content than in any other BioWare game before, and we started a writing team earlier than in any other BioWare project -- more than twice as big, nine total, and they'll be on the project twice as long. The reason is that the world is huge and has tons of paths and options.

GFW: How do you select your writers?

JO: It seems you can't get a writer from the same place twice -- we've got one from Hollywood, one straight out of school, one who was a designer and programmer before he decided he wanted to be a writer. They send submissions created in the Neverwinter Nights toolset, and cull out the ones we don't like. Senior writers give feedback to the ones that make the initial cut, and the potential writers make changes and turn it back in. It's some of the harshest testing for any position at BioWare, really.

GFW: What are you all playing right now?

JO: I'm playing in a World of WarCraft group with a few of the writers. We're in a Horde group.

RV: WoW, and I've started playing a bit of Eve Online. It's extremely ... niche.

GW: I still play Ultima Online every month, and play World of WarCraft right now. But mostly console games.

GFW: World of WarCraft all around. What's that game doing best right now? What keeps you playing?

RV: It's a very polished experience.

GW: It's got the best interface of any MMO by a longshot. It has craploads of content. You're always being directed from quest to quest.

GFW: Are you worried about taking on the World of WarCraft monster?

GW: There hasn't really been anything that's been built to beat it yet -- but we just want to be competitive. We're not looking to kill WOW. Will some people who play WOW play our game? Of course. But we'd be better off if we got new customers, too. It's not a zero-sum game out there.

JO: Aside from BioWare, Blizzard is the company I respect the most -- and yes, WOW is an amazing game. But there's still so much room for growth, and WOW still has tons of room for improvement. It's not a genre that's going to slow down any time soon. MMORPGs are going to be taking huge steps in so many place I can see.

GFW: What's the biggest improvement you want to see happen in MMOs?

JO: I'm a huge story guy. I want to play in a world where I feel like I'm reading a good book, where I feel like I'm there. I have lots of fun with World of WarCraft, but it's not because of the story or characters. So if we made characters you could care about and believe in ... that would be huge.

GFW: So when will we be playing the "BioWare MMORPG"?

GW: Anything worth doing well is worth taking the time. It's hard to predict when it'll be right. It's important for use to wait and make sure it's right. That's gonna take some time. Everyone who's tried to cram one into a ship date has had issues -- been there and done that a couple times.

JO: We're gonna make the best game we can.

RV: "When it's ready."

GW: The fan base of BioWare would love to see a Bioware MMO. And this was part of the genesis of this -- it's the natural progression for an RPG company to try this medium. We're happy to work with world-class game designers who aren't just copying what's come before. We have a really good studio. We probably have the most experienced team in the business, as far as building MMORPGs. We're excited about we're doing. The moment we talk about what we're going, expectations fly through the roof -- then you have to be the second coming. It's very difficult to live up to expectations; they keep escalating while you're trying to finish what you started.

GFW: And what are your personal goals in all this?

GW: I just want to entertain a lot of people. We are story-telling creatures. Story really helps make entertainment experiences more accessible.

RV: I just want to be on South Park.

 

Whole lot of nothin'

Wow, I assumed their sekret project was Star Wars.  I'm kinda sad now.


I guess you are supposed to get the feeling you changed the world by having your quest log update, <sigh> same as it ever was.

What's the actual difference between "having killed the Red Dragon, and the world knowing you've killed the Red Dragon" (BioWare), versus having a badge saying "Has Killed the Red Dragon (SWG), and "Having the Kick Ass Red Pants the Dragon Drops" (WoW/EQ/Diku)?

None. He's talking about the same thing. They're just trying to package the shiny a little different. If choices do matter, then at least you're forcing your players to read the quests. Or the cheat sites.

Killing smaug did not affect the world in any way shape or form, Gandalf was only around because he had nothing better to do  :roll:

"Dragon Age"

Man, there's a title that screams "meh".

I've mixed this interview with a giant glass of generic suck to make it more palatable. Wake me up when Obsidian dissolves and Black Isle reopens.

Dragon Age is their single-player RPG, right?

You know what I want. I want a dragon game where I breed dragons. Train them. Unleash them to fight other dragons. Fucking DragonTycoon. I want to create mighty hellbeasts and unleash them on the innocent. There aren't enough games where I can do that.

Maybe when Spore comes out, I'll make my fighting legions of custom dragons. I wonder if you can make flying creatures in Spore? Would seem a bit of an oversight if you couldn't.

*chuckle*

And when it was asked how to bring the story, character and emotion the answer is: instancing.

These guys don't have any good idea. They are left just envying WoW with the "me too!" attitude.

The game may be worth following only because there's Ubiq working on the combat system, and lately he seems more enlightened than usual.

You want Monster Hunter meets Pokemon?

Anyway this was boring generic tripe. The quests won't be fed-ex quests. Great. Isn't that what the WOW people said as well? We'll see.

Having seen a bit of Bioware's idea of deep characters in Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic, I can sort of see what they're hoping to pull off in terms of more believable NPCs in an online game.  I'm just skeptical they can achieve as much in a massively multiplayer platform with multiple players interacting with the same NPC... well, there's ways, but it does redefine the rules a bit.

In total agreement with everyone. Including HRose. Ubiq is the one element that stands out.

You know? I think they found the recipe for the Endless Stream of Quality Content - No grind!

HIRE NINE WRITERS! Woot!

Me? Not really. I'd just like a slightly different take on things for once, if we're going to be stuck in fantasy. Dragon Age? Fine. Do something different with dragons.

While I'm on that -- I want ugly elves, barbarian halflings adorned in the skins of their dead foes, and claustrophic dwarves.

"You change how your character evolves over the game, the player's personal story -- and a player's personal story can be quite epic. It can involve parts of the world that, while they're epic, exciting, and interesting, don't change the landscape of the entire world for everyone else. .... Other characters in the online world will know you killed Onyxia, but you haven't changed the world for them. And they can still -- especially when you use things like instances -- go on a quest that involves killing Onyxia. We can change the player's personal story, and that gives players the sense they're having an impact on the game world."

Haha. I know this has already been said in this thread but it bears repeating - they are really saying nothing here. They are basically describing the exact same thing that happens in WoW.

What you can get out of reading this:

Bioware is making a MMORPG.

Hehe. I think they can have a great epic story and come up with all kinds of lore, but at the end of the day, that's not why most people play these games. I know I sure don't. Sure it can help set a mood and a background and add a bit of spice to the experience, but it is pretty far down my list of priorities. A "player's personal story" is something I think naturally happens in any MMO that you enjoy and spend a lot of time with, regardless of the quantity or quality of the ingame story/lore.

Well, to be fair, most people don't play these games that way because there aren't any games that have really done it well.

As far as single player games go though, people are playing them for that kind of experience.

But yeah, emphasis on player created content/narrative/experience is important too.

Is it dungeon keeper 3? No? Not interested.

Where does the article say it is a fantasy setting or that it has dragons?  He actually flat out refused to say if it is a fantasy or sci-fi game.

Who cares, a contentless interview is a serious bad omen.  They might as well talk about the free golf clubs you get when you preorder.

The only thing worse than grinding for endgame is grinding to hear the end of a story (as in, can't finish the end of that quest arc? What? You wanted to just hear the story?). You think an MMOG is going to have the pacing of Deus Ex? HhahahahahhhHahahahahahAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHh.


No.

I think (hope) that what they mean by quest NPC's not being pez dispensers is that the quests won't be contracts, they won't be mathematical formulas, "You do x, and you get y, each time, every time, guaranteed" like they are in WoW and other games.  You get asked to do something, and you may or may not be able to, or it may alter your faction standings in ways you didn't think of, or the NPC quest giver may or may not betray you...  

First, each quest, you don't know what the reward will be, or the outcome, or the side effects, which is very nice in my book.  Of course, the answers may be posted on Thottbot within a week, but if they make the quest outcome depend on the state of the world, or the state of the other players, etc., it can be randomized some.  Maybe to the point where "you have to pay attention to what the NPC is saying".

Meh, we'll see if it's like that.  If it is, it should be fun.  They're promising a whole lot of entertainment, content, a lot of man-hours of coding that will be.

Oh, and it could be sci-fi...  they may have used dragons as an example just cause everyone gets what a dragon is and how epic of a "quest" killing one might be, without them having to explain anything.

[edit] Oops. I mistook this for Dragon Age.

I'm confused.


I don't care if it's fantasy though. Just as long as they actually "fantasize". I can let dragons slide if there aren't orcs, goblins, dwarves, and elves.

I started assuming what they'd do based on their segment of one of the AGC panels. They are firmly in the WoW-defines-success camp in this genre. To me that meant diku in a fantasy world, with the hopes of cannabalizing some WoW et al players because they wouldn't have the budget to get them all.

Not unsurprising really. Just a sign that modern MMOG companies need people not hampered by the rules of the late 1990s.

This is what is strange, not just in MMORPGS or games but in nearly everything:

Many many people can on paper identify real problems. But very few can deal with those problems, or even attempt to deal with them!

So often you see dev teams say all the right things, then not follow through or either bother trying. Or you hear politicians identify some issue then ignore it. Why?

1. They are saying the right things just to play to an audience and have no intention of addressing the issue. They may not even think it is a real issue.
2. Outside pressure and the fact that it is a lot harder than they thought makes them abandon whatever intent they had.

I no longer care, AT ALL, when devs spout all the right things. This is the same crap you can find on any message board. Why are quests fed-ex? Why is magic the equivalent of a gun with magic bullets? Why can't I change the world and be the hero? (And how can you fake that?) Etc etc.

There is a total disconnect from people simply repeating these points and doing something about it. There is zero relationship. No dev today would say that fed-ex quests are awesome and that NPCs should be pez-dispensers. Yet they keep making fed-ex quests and pez-dispenser NPCs.

They have learned only to say what you want to hear and to claim they are going to solve problems before having bothered to think at all about how. I can't think of a single recent MMORPG that didn't claim the quests would be much more inspired and interesting and not fed-ex. It is just one of the things you say these days from your marketing bullet-points list.

Fuck pre-canned story telling in MMOGs. Add the conflict and the stories tell themselves (oh sorry.. that's niche). I remember a lot of experiences I've had playing MMOGs but I can't say that I remember any specific pre-canned quest crap that isn't covered by the fedex label.


And for people complaining about fedex quests; let's see your examples of a quest that ISN'T a fedex quest. All pre-written quests are going to be fedex quests leading you around by the nose. LOTR is a fedex quest. The Hobbit is a fedex quest.

The very definition of 'quest' lends itself to being fedex.

#  The act or an instance of seeking or pursuing something; a search.
# An expedition undertaken in medieval romance by a knight in order to perform a prescribed feat: the quest for the Holy Grail.

Bioware is good at not making storytelling completely linear. They at least give you TWO paths some of the time.  :-D Sure, it's still pre-canned, but it's like having a can of chicken soup on one side, and tomato on the other.

All that being said, rpg storytelling sucks for the most part. None of them do it as well as adventure games.....and that's a genre that isn't easy to transfer to the mmog medium.

In general, I agree. The MMO lexicon has corrupted the idea and meaning of the word 'quest'. In PnP (and literature), a quest is supposed to be a vast undertaking - a whole story arc, if not the overarching plot behind a character's story. A quest is supposedto be a grand adventure with sub-adventures and unexpected encounters along the way. Frodo's entire part of the LOTR trilogy is a single quest.

There's very little grand or epic about fedexing, and very few MMOs bother with a dynamic encounter/unexpected event system. I can think of COH, where multipart missions sometimes had enemies spawn and attack you in the street during travel, which was kind of cool the first few times it happened. (And really sucked if you were part of a large group that split up to travel. ;) )

I'm particularly amused by the dumbasses who mistake the "dragon" examples (clearly just generic examples) for a super-secret announcement that the game will have dragons, and is therefore fantasy.  Maybe it will, maybe it won't but examples plucked out the air prove precisely zero.  If I were them I'd be deliberately misdirecting.

HRose's tediously predictable "oh they haven't hired me as lead game designer or taken my spoutings on board so it will be doomed" can be discounted as usual, of course, but tazelbain, do you really think it said nothing at all?  I mean, I don't want to hold myself up as an evangelist of close-reading or something, but there is a susprising amount there.  One massive element I took from it is that the player-run economy that might have been expected from people linked so closely to UO and SWG is going to be extremely limited, for instance.

The funniest thing is that an early, "we don't want to announce too much at this stage" type interview already has a few of the usual would-be pundits doomcasting madly.  The truth is that it looks like a bunch of people who made games before are making another game, and it might be good like some of their work or poopy like some of their other work, but at least they're not doing a Raph and aiming at 12-year-olds and housewives, so say thank-you for the attention and wait nicely, Fido.

You're looking for a game called 'Dwarf Fortress'.

Anyway, this thread is more meaningless than usual for here - it was just an interview about a pre-alpha game with no setting information and a bunch of feel-good PR waffle, after all.

The only reason I put "Dragons" in the subject line was to emphasize that this game in it's grand scheme appears to be more of the same and follows the winning WoW style. At some point in time a team will make a new game with a new kind of experience, sadly this team does not see it that way.

Those aren't really two separate paths over the entire game. It's the same path with a branch at the very end.

I would just like to say that Monster Hunter meets Pokemon would be a motherfucking godsend to MMOGs at this point. Hell, just straight Pokemon would.

Welcome to online gaming, Post-SWG.

As someone said, people don't want this, or at the least won't be expecting this in their MMORPG.  Bioware might have this grand story planned out 'choose-your-own-adventure' style where you get to make decisions that influence the outcome, sure, and that would be somewhat new for an MMORPG.  But no one is going to look at it in terms of roleplaying or story.  They are going to look at in terms of which piece of phat loot they want to get at the end, by reading spoiler sites.  Unless if they really change the MMORPG quest paradigm in ways I can't really predict right now this is basically going to be a waste of time and resources.

too early to tell IMO

but they have to have a reason to want to put in more stories, or more quests that aren't immediately accessible (non-pez) because people won't want a throttled experience unless it means something for their progression.  Unless reading all the text of the story means something -- like solving a random puzzle -- people won't care and will skip through it no matter what.  And if the quests are just longer for the sake of being longer... won't be appreciated.  Remember the frustration of having to wait for the quest text to be "written" in the original WoW quest log?  just give me the mission already, etc.

to me all this means that if they are genuinely worried about story/character/semi-customization it could mean there will be more than just a combat grind.  If their advancement model is not based on just combat xp it could mean that reputation, faction, dark/light ethical actions etc. will mean something for people's progression (e.g. open different skills/abilities/NPC's/classes).  That's the only way I can see having "stories" and "non-pez" quest gives etc. in the game to matter.  But stir, bake, hype and let cool 2-3 years to be certain.

> but tazelbain, do you really think it said nothing at all?
Yes.  The interview displays no more insight into MMOGs than 3 teenagers who got to level 60 in WoW and said "That wasn't hard, I could make a game like this."

I am sure Bioware are good story people, but MMOGs are a bad story medium. I have respect for things they have done in the past but this interview is crap.

I have a novel idea. How about if we actually let this thing get into playtesting before we all go into some 'gothy / angsty / hating MMOG's is the new black' mode. mmkay?

I'll do it your way when the makers of mmogs start doing more than rehashing the same circa 1997 spin on things.  Deal? 

 

I'll do that... when the game comes out around 2010. Starting the PR machine a little early? Mmmmkay.

Might that be because nobody has given stories the WoW polish, not even Blizzard?

I got from the interview that they understand the importance of WoW's level of polish and they want to tell stories, so I'm cautiously hopeful.

The point is that after the very first months a team is build and a project started, you already have the whole path already traced.

Of course it's hard to see things from the outside, but rarely first impressions are wrong.

Don't be. Unless Dragon Age tanks, the MMOG will be in that setting. You don't go to the trouble of creating a whole new IP these days to stick on just a single-player PC RPG.

As for their ideas, there really aren't any. They are going to try to take on the 70-billion headed Hydra that is "enough PVE content for the slavering hordes of shitheel whiney MMOG players." They are going to fail. YOU CAN'T HIRE THAT MANY MODELERS, PROGRAMMERS AND QUEST DESIGNERS, no matter how many writers you hire.

The writing isn't necessarily the hard part. I see a whole lot of naivete in that interview.

EDIT: And if Dragon Age does tank, I expect it'll be in the Mass Effect world.

I think anti-mmo dev angst is pretty reasonable here for reasons mentioned. They are the 'good story' people, and mmo is bad for stories. The Smaug example is laughable "Hey look, I killed Smaug!" "Yeah, we killed him last week."

I'm extremely cynical about the chances of any mmo, even Bioware, who I really admire. Dragon Age will probably rock, Mass Effect is looking great. MMO? We'll see, but...
(http://matrix.millersamuel.com/wp-content/8ballanswer.gif)

Bioware CAN produce a great MMOG. Unfortunately, they aren't going to do it by focusing on PVE storytelling. That way lies the road of whiny madness and the trail of community rep tears.

If they were smart, they subcontract with Blizzard to write content for WoW. They wouldn't be under pressure to do everything, and they could of course never keep up with the rabid players, but it would expand the world with some high quality stuff. And Blizz could afford to pay them to do it right.

I honestly think that good story is lost on 95% of the mmog playerbase.  Just look at the more popular gaming forums.  People won't even bother to read any post longer than a line or two.  I sincerely doubt they'll read any text and likely will skip through any voice-acted script. 

I WANT TEH SHINY NOW! <click click click>

If you consider from where those guy arrive (SWG) you can see deeper.

They come from a systemic game, it fails and now they are all for the directed gameplay "because you cannot be successful without". And because of the WoW "me too" syndrome.

They are just running around aimlessly, glad that they now have "Bioware" printed in their resumes.

Yes, the Smaug example was awful. How is that any different than how any game works now? Hey, Smaug might not be dead in the game, but he is to you!

Maybe once you kill Smaug he can never respawn for you and in your world he will be dead for good? Even that seems unlikely. So instead it will be "Hey, Smaug might not be dead in the game - and hell he isn't to you either even though you killed him 3 hours ago!"

I thought LoTRs was looking at some mechanic much like that. You kill Smaug, Smaug is dead to you, you can't go back. Of course, there's some technicalities if you're grouped with a buddy who hasn't killed Smaug yet and go visit the smoking ruins of his cave....

Speaking of -- just got a beta invite for LoTR. Worth the d/l?

Polish isn't the barrier to good storytelling.
How many good stories are there where the protagonist has no history and no personality?
How many good stories are there where the world is indifferent to and isn't affected in anyway by protagonists actions?
How many good stories are there where the protagonist can never die?

Fundamental aspects of the medium put sever limitations on storytelling. Can these ever be overcome, maybe.  But "Stories are good" and "Fed Ex quests are bad" doesn't display any knowledge of the medium they are building game in.

We can't answer that.  And no one here should.  I believe we're all still under NDA.  :nda:

LotRO sucks monkey nuts and you shouldn't play it.

Of course, I'm not under NDA :P

You're better off playing the Mount & Blade LOTR mod. You know the LOTR MMO is going to be the same old bullshit.

Well, that's the goal.
I am?  That's probably just the Nyquil talking.

I hope you guys do.  Everything in the interview sounded like almost every other MMOG interview done at this stage, though.  The only mechanics that were hinted at were lots of storyline content and instancing.  I also hope that the choices hinted at consist of more than:

"I need help with something"
A) Sure.  Also, take my purse.
B) Die.  *sizzle*  "

...And that the outcome of which is more than one metric that slides back and forth, and has little bearing on the actual consequences in the game.  I liked KotOR, but I couldn't imagine playing KotOR Online. 

That said, I think BioWare has made good games so far which is a hopeful start for the MMOG side of things.  This will definately be one to keep an eye on.

To clarify my statement, you will specifically need to change not only the way quests work, but how the MMORPG works in general.  MMORPG's currently are time to reward ratios, where the players try to get the most rewards in the least amount of time.  If this is how your game is going to work as well, (that is giving rewards to players for completing quests), then your concept is in trouble because people won't care about your story arc, and will simply min-max your story progression using spoiler sites to get the reward they desire, resulting in a waste of resources.  If there are no rewards to questing, I am curious as to why you think the average MMORPG player will play the game over a more pavlovian version that has seen great success (WoW).

This is why I can't imagine the solution you have in mind.  I might just be slow or unimaginitive, but I just am having trouble seeing you drawing subscribers using a reward-less method, or somethow making the story more important than the reward (the reason people pay for these games at this point, unless you are talking a 'world/player-driven' game like EVE, which survives due to high escapism and player versus player factors).

Conversely, at the start of the project it's all about the fetuspults. So really who cares what they say?

BIOWARE! MMOG! IN YOUR PANTS!

There. Marketing done. Everything else is hearsay.

Agreed. Part of the problem in these digital world is that there's almost no ability to enhance the gaming experience with semantics. My opinion or thoughts about a character and their dialog has no bearing whatsoever on my ability to achieve the 'goals' set forth by the game. There's no tangible reward for having knowledge of the world and the characters in it, no power in knowledge outside the mechanics of the game. If the Grand Warlord sends me off to kill 10 bunnies there's no value in the knowledge of his motivations or a grander meaning to his tasks. I can not leverage his bunny slaying ways to undermine his power in a future conflict, or unleash the Bunny Preservation League on his ass. Human emotion and social interaction is far too complex to represent in such a discrete environment, forcing the writer to cobble together some semblance of drama with a very limited toolset.

*Everything* in these games is based on a defined task/reward structure. When efficiency is measured by how fast one can progress through these structures there's no real benefit, other than personal gratification, to being aware of the story arc. As a result I often see the story elements as temporal barriers to their efficient progression through the content.

I think that Bioware can produce a great MMOG by focusing on storytelling.  I just don't think they can produce a successful one.

So they are going to have classes. Then, there will be directed storylines (with a few options) that will lead to some ultimate reveal. Sounds nice. What about loot along the way? If they don't let people re-play instances, then all gear/spell/money rewards have to be uniform (for each class?) at each stage of the story. If I kill the red dragon at the end, can I help my friends kill it even though it is dead to me? Of course I can or this wouldn't be an MMO.

The zone specific, solo questlines in EQ2 are technically fedex quests, but they do have reasonably good story to them. Is Bioware going to throw a few FMVs (!!!!wheee!!!!) into the mix?

Y'all are assuming that if you kill the red dragon, it'll respawn, or what you killed is an instanced version of it.  Permanent NPC death can be implemented (if I kill the red dragon, it's dead, no more red dragon for anyone else).  You're all going to argue that that's a waste of content, and that it leads to the crappy gameplay that EQ had, whereby guilds would camp world dragons and grief each other over them.  I agree with that, but they can still choose to do it that way.

They've mentioned they're focusing on polish and "storyline"; they haven't said anything about game mechanics.  They could have permadeath, one character per account, story-driven servers which shut down when the story is "finished"...  all sorts of things that seem non-profitable to us, who knows.

Yes. The Austin speech and the post on classes/Tactical transparency.

I don't care for all the doom-mongering quite yet. There wasn't a Ton in that interview besides that they might want to try things differently. Ok.

We don't know much about the actual Game. Yet. So I will withold judgement, and not armchair the game as if I had a clue.

Also, I would be in favor of some of the things mentioned above, as they look like things that would weed out powergamers.

That's easy. You just end up helping your buddy kill the Dragon's pissed off brother. It'll say "Dragon's Pissed off Brother" right over it (although your buddy will see "Dragon".

Loot's a real issue. The only reason anyone ever redoes instances or dungeons is looking for rare drops or for XP (or to help a friend do the same). If you can only go through once, do you get to pick your loot? Do you only get the snazzy loot as a reward thing "Pick your reward!"? Is there some "hunt through the treasure for one decent item, and take the rest as gold" mechanic?

Such jaded birds we are, albeit for good, historical reasons.  However...

Let's look at the example they gave again.


Firstly, note the part I bolded.  The player could have a quest to kill A dragon, not the one and only Vox/Smaug/Grendel.  There's nothing wrong with setting up a story arc leading up to a personalized ecounter with some sort of powerful critter that isn't the same named mob everyone else got.  To stick in fantasy terms there no reason you couldn't have 10 or more varieties or these type of long story arcs. Hell, just having it vary between a dragon, beholder, lich, titan, etc as the end target of the long quest BY INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER would be hugely different than what we have today.  Just because I got a red dragon at level X doesn't mean you got that same adventure.  So being known as a red dragon slayer may affect my characters development differently than Bilbo the lich slayer over there.

The key is in something else they said.


Choices.  Give players meaningful choices that affect their play and you can start to have more tailored experiences.  It's not a hard concept to introduce branching storylines that open, and more importantly close, in game options.  But, obviously there are limits to how many choices you can reasonably accomodate without hitting the dreaded development cost vs usage ratio.  A big quest that only 1% of the players can do and can only be done once.  Yikes! Development black hole!

And also, if there are too few choices, or some ones that are considered "best" than everyone will gravitate towards those.  Plus the inevitable whining that will arise some people who would feel locked out of all the content they want to experiences, let alone if there are particular loot, skills, abilities, character visual appearance traits they cannot get b/c you can't do everything.  Which is why i think someone else said it best.

Can BW make a good story focused MMORPG, probably, but can they make a successful one?  /cue magic 8 Ball picture...

Xilren

Of course it isn't a hard concept to introduce.  City of Heroes already does it to an extent, although they still have the Pez dispenser NPC's that Bioware wants to do away with and the stories in CoH are only mildly interesting.

What's the word on....

Voice acting?

Cutscenes (or at least...some kind of panning )?

And whatever other modern storytelling devices.

Ugh... they are good?

Yeah, because this 2006. Almost 2007. We have graphics and sound cards now. Infocom died 20 years ago.

Way back in ATITD1, I went to learn how to build pyramids. Long before I came to the world, pyramids were planned out by the people. Representatives from the seven nations of the known world gathered together, and each one went home with the plans to learn one part of pyramid construction. These representatives gathered the people of their respective nations, and everybody put forth the effort to research how to build pyramids. Some researched how to move blocks, others researched methods of finding them, and still others researched ways to fit them all together.

Seven universities across the land, and each one had a different method of building a pyramid, yet each method was needed to build one.

This was before I came to Egypt.

When I arrived, there were others who were new. We set out from our home in the Valley of Kings, on a journey that lasted days, to the seven nations of the world, to learn the seven methods of pyramid construction. Along the way, we met new people, found Sphynxes with riddles, traded our goods from the Valley of Kings, and halfway through we built a camp for us to rest at.

When we were done, we came home wiser, more experienced, enriched in trade goods and our new skills. And we started building pyramids. Soon, the Valley of Kings was unrivalled, just as it was in real life history, in its works of architecture.


NONE of that was bullshit masturbatory role-play padding. Everything happened, from the original gathering of nations, researching, travel, the fucking Sphynxes, our little camp, and the resulting Valley of Kings e-peen waving with insane architecture projects. And none of that was developer content. It was all done by the players, and little -- if anything -- was premeditated. It just turned out that way.

And yeah, that was all FedEx, and the worst kind of FedEx because we didn't have chariots in ATITD1. We had to run all that way. But at least it was player-generated FedEx. Hell, I can't even say the developers designed the systems so that would naturally occur. If anything, this was the opposite of what Teppy wanted, because he likes us to fight each other.

This is the result of no NPCs, almost no developer content, unrestrained PvP, full player freedom, a few dozen game systems in one big-ass world, and about 1,500 gamers with way too much time on their hands.

My definition of "Fed-Ex" is not just any quest that amount to "go kill something" or "go get something." As has been pointed out, that's what quests are. Go accomplish something and come back.

The difference is in the level of detail. For example, here is a quest I am writing now in 5 seconds that could easily appear in any MMORPG:

"Evil trolls have invaded our valley. Go kill trolls and bring back 5 troll-spears as proof that you are doing your part to combat the troll menace!"

Yay. I wrote a quest. Someone hire me.

That level of detail is what I consider a fed-ex quest. A quest the is very transparently just go collect some crap and come back. Now you can make collection quests and things like that that are interesting. I don't mind having to ultimately grab something and come back, as long as the quest has some level of uniqueness. Am I solving a new puzzle? Fighting some really strange enemy that takes some different tactics? Doing something non-standard like following a guy around, sneaking into a place, etc?

I think what quests writers have to ask themselves is operationally how is this quest different from any other one? "Operationally" here is key because it means minus all the fluff and backstory. If in the end the quest amounts to kiling shit in the same way you've killed a hundred other things that's bad.

How about if, as you approach the village for the first time, you see a bunch of trolls, so you kill a few, and when you get to the village, they thank you, saying they had problems?  Still Fedex?  Does it depend on whether the next guy who kills trolls gets the same thanks?  Or on whether or not trolls spawn for the next guy?

Xilren's Twin, are you saying that they'll implement a system where players aren't entitled to quests simply because they pay the monthly fee?  Where the masses will fight over the lower, less significant quests, and only a few players will ever get the "Please kill that damn dragon" end-game quest?  Perhaps those who have grinded their faction / connections / equipment to the perfect combination, AND are lucky enough to be online and there when the "dragon problem" is seeded into the game?

Prophecy type of stuff? (you use "prophecies" to hint at what the proper combination of factors might be for someone to trigger the quest/event, and let the players work at it, but a reward isn't guaranteed, much like with EVE's BPO lottery?).

Heh, they could have a quest be triggered at a certain date and time, and you could guess that date and time by watching the position of the moon and a bunch of stars, on screen, and calculating their (daily) drift to see when they align.  Take screenshots, play astronomer, time-lapse photography.

Quests need to be more than just XP gates for the content of that quest story to matter. Right now, quest text is irrelevant beyond the goals it frames. Some people read them, some people don't, both have the same potential for success. Polish or not, WoW sucks for quests, because all are one way: you either do it or you don't. You can't go wrong otherwise. At least in EQ, faction growth in one area could come at the expense of another, though that was ultimately just as grindable.

Quests need to result in real choices for people to care. If siding with one side means not gaining access to vendors on the other side, you can bet people will start reading descriptions.

But it's a lot more than just reading text. The entire game has to have a KOTOR-like level of player accountability in it. That's at odds with the silver-spoon content delivery we have today.

So is this fedex or not?


Why isn't anyone using things like Eliza and fortune teller tricks to give people quests that they want?

More likely they will read spoiler sites telling them exactly what quests to do in order to get access to whatever vendors they want to.  A MMORPG is a bad place to tell personalized stories, as immersion and significant world consequences is/are impossible.

I do believe they are a good place to tell large, overarcing ones though.  Kind of what Shadowbane hinted at doing if they hadn't had so many problems to begin with.  And you can have the playerbase actually matter in this story and retain total immersion.  If you want to focus on story-telling in an MMORPG, this is the way to do it, not with personal quest lines.  Why does that need an MMORPG format at all?  It would be done better in a single-player game.

Apparently, not very many want that either. Too communal. Too "world-y". Or something.  :roll:

They say they want a game, but they don't want that either.

What they want is camps and loot. Nothing more.

Oh, and polish.

Yeah I'm not sure what real choices amount to.

If real choices means my character is going to permanently have different stats or skills or equipment or access to items then I would expect standard templates to quickly pop up. Plus you give people the chance to screw themselves by choosing the "wrong" ones.

I think most people want to customize their own characters as much as possible without worrying about boning themselves. Having someone do a quest that ends up pissing off the tribe that sells good swords is a step in the opposite direction. Or a quest that makes it impossible to do another quest to get some awesome spell. Or that locks them out of some content.

I think that type of thing is cool in a single player game because those games are shorter and they are not competitive. IMO all MMORPGs are competitive to some degree, just in a passive-aggressive fashion. You may compete for coolness or bragging rights or for a spot in a party. Nobody wants to be gimped in any sense because they chose some cool storylines to follow. You did all the evil quests? Now you can't get the spell that makes your class useful in raids yay!

If quests have real outcomes (other than XP) players will have to know exactly what those are and what those mean going in, and it will quickly become min-maxing paradise. Again in a game where you expect to play hundreds of hours people want control over their characters.

I think if we want certain quests to exclude us from certain content, we should be excluded from content we wouldn't care about, anyway. If we like exploring and hate PvP, we might do the explorer's non-PvP quest, which gives us gear and skills which make us better at exploring, and worse at PvP; and any further PvP quests would be barred to us. A more extreme example would be playing a mage, and doing quests for mage societies, which prevent us from quests which would give us warrior gear.

Huh? That'd work if all explorers were neccessarily opposed to pvp'ing. If.

Heh, and you said your mage example was extreme. That one actually sounds reasonable.

Except he said the "explorer's non-PVP quest."  Which rather strongly suggests that explorers who want to PVP would do the explorer's PVP quest.

Anyway, Krakrok's question is a cracker: why aren't people using Eliza-like basic parsing tech to tailor quests to what the player wants?  After all, since not dissimiliar techniques were in use on the Spectrum, C64, BBC Micro etc (language parsing in adventures, fake AI in Eliza) almost quarter a century ago, can it really be that processor intensive?

Yeah, but he said they'd be barred from any future pvp quests.

If that means what I think he means, then it's a bad idea. What if a guy logged in one night and just wanted to do one of these non pvp quests by himself, just to fiddle around and explore? His pvp aspirations are fucked for the entire remaining portion of his gaming experience?

No.

Yep, I agree with you there, Stray: I think that the ability to gimp yourself forevah is A Bad Thing wherever you don't have savegames.  Especially at the early stages of a game which is hopefully non-trivial in its complexity.  I like the idea of choices, but I dislike the idea of irreversible ones.

And then you hope that you live in the right time zone, aren't at work, or eating dinner, or sleeping, or out with your family and perhaps you can participate! yay.

What I find interesting about this whole discussion, from Bioware's interview up top to many, many of these posts is the way that they're writing as though WoW's quests are all "go kill/collect 20 foozles" when in fact many of WoW's quests, and even their quest arcs involve some or many basic fed-ex factors but involve a lot more. I'm thinking particularly of the quests I'm currently re-doing int he plaguelands, but a lower-level version of the same arcing story (that includes many fed-exes included) can be found in the human areas from pretty much level 2 or so, through to.. 20ish - the Defias series of quests that start from next to the chapel, continue all throughout Elwynn forest and Westfall, and then lead to both Deadmines and later, the Stockades.

Dragon's Breath (http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/DBA1/DragBre.html) Online?

... yeah, I'd play it.

Anyway, back to the first post - it's a standard "our stuff will be cool!!!" interview. The name Bioware has generated three pages (and counting) of discussion that, from any other publisher, wouldn't have made 3 replies.

How is this different than killing Naggy in EQ?

It's all well and good to say that choices will matter. Unfortunately even simplistic mutli-part quests wreck havoc with the grouping dynamics of MMORPGs since everybody has to be syncronized if they want to progress together -- otherwise you have to repeat parts of the quest over and over for multiple group members. It's one of the things I find incredibly annoying about CoH and other MMORPGs like WoW have this problem to a lesser extent. Now throw in "choices" and you have even more synchronization problems.

Great point, exactly what I found frustrating with the larger quests in EQ2. I really wanted to Heirophant's Crook, but I could only find 2 group to do it and neither group lasted long enough to finish it, to boot we spent more time back tracking to quest to get new players caught up. Branching would make it unbelievably worse.

You need a system to reward people for helping others with their quests.

Yet another fucking fantasy MMO. Fuck this shit. I almost expected them, being Bioware, to try a different setting.

I don't care about setting as long as it's done well.

I don't care about interviews unless they discuss concrete aspects of the game.  If it's too early to do that, then don't grant the interview.

Looks like a company that has ignored the truth: amateur hour is over, WoW shows the way to make fantasy MMOs that players actually enjoy and are willing to pay for.  If you grab some pre-WoW industry retreads to make your game, your game will probably suck.  WoW succeeded because it escaped that tired old mud-dev circlejerk; any game vomited up by fossils like Walton and Vogel will probably suck, just like any game made by any of the old-guard will probably suck.  None of those people came up with a game that didn't feel like it was put together by a bunch of college kids in their mom's basement, and people aren't going to put up with that shoddy workmanship anymore. 

Maybe Walton and Vogel have had a come-to-Jesus moment in the recent past; but given the loud and repeated reactions of more vocal members of the pre-WoW MMO designer cabal -- to bury their heads as deeply into the sand as possible while chanting "I was right the players will come back to me someday I just know it" I'm a bit skeptical.

Bioware's less-than-stellar history of technical excellence is also a concern.  MMOGs are very demanding on that front.

Still, I'll buy it and check it out because I do that with every damn game it seems.  Such a sucker am I.

I'm a fan of any bioware product, and I think they make the best games hands down. I've been real excited about learning that they were considering getting into MMORPG's, and I think that they'll end up making a quality product.  I might not see eye to eye with everyone of their devs, but the company itself has stockpiled a lot of brownie points with me over the years as they've released good products.

What WoW shows is how to make a game easily graspable by a casual player.  However, the proportion of their success has a lot more to do with being Blizzard than the game formula.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: if somebody made another game just like WoW, maybe even slightly better, they wouldn't get nearly as much players for two reasons: 1. They're not Blizzard.  2. The formula has been done and so players aren't going to be as excited about it as the first time it's done.

So, don't take Bioware's developers talk of attempting innovation as a foolhearty attempt to reinvent the wheel.

Preach on brother!

Personel is always the single most important thing, and BioWare decided to hire proven failures. The best indicator of future success is past success.

AFAIK none of the core designers of WOW had ever worked on a MMORPG before. You don't need that sort of experience. As I said before, technical experience sure. It would be nice if the guy who did the network programming had relevant experience. But design/production experience? Not really.

Hiring "proven" talent looks like a good choice from the outside but their talent has proven to suck.

"Before we start taking questions, no, we still can't talk about the MMO's IP..."
- Ray or Greg, every company meeting for the last year.

If those meetings are anything like, oh, every meeting I've ever been in -- someone asks anyways. Generally several people do. I suggest paintguns. Each time someone asks about subject X, after being told "We won't answer questions about subject X" , shoot them in the nuts with the paintgun.

Share the pain. :)

Agreed. I could have picked anyone on these boards with over 1,000 posts and they could have written Vogel's answers for him. I want to hear from a senior Bioware employee on this project that has zero MMO experience.

We have a good mix.  Most of our senior designers came from Edmonton, and have credits on previous Bioware titles.  I'm the exception not the rule.  I don't think our Lead Designer (the James Ohlen quotes in the article) hasn't made a game yet that HASN'T hit a million sales. 

Yeah, that would suck if that was the only quest in the entire game. If.


The mage example exists in WoW. You have a choice of rewards at the end of most quests; mage reward, warrior reward, etc. And as soon as you make an alliance rogue, you can't do the horde priest quests.

So is it reasonable to assume (besides the "extreme example") that most players don't want to be barred from any content? We hear a lot of talk about choosing one faction over another. Is that all it is? Talk?

I was just thinking about this. How far can this be taken? What if the game engine only generated one Nagafen. (And I use Nagafen because I'm fucking sick of WOW examples. :P ) Once Nagafen's dead, there are no others. But, the game creates a new dragon with a new name, and...a new tactic. This new dragon is Okrafen, and she summons skeletons to aid her halfway through the fight. She doesn't drop warrior loot, but instead drops gems. Kill her, and...she's replaced by Nagacross. Nagacross flies and never lands, and drops tradeskill resources.

Would this be fun? Would anybody bother with the dragon's lairs if the content was entirely unpredictable?

> Would this be fun? Would anybody bother with the dragon's lairs if the content was entirely unpredictable?
Sure, it would.  But current game developers don't know how to do that without making it feel kludgey like SWG or AO mission systems.

El Gallo and Margalis win the internets.  As for the Bioware MMO?  If it's Star Wars, I'll give it a look.  Just a look, mind you.  If it appears to be ass, I'll ignore it the way I ignored SWG.  But if it's just "Age of Everdragon: The Hobbit Chronicles" or some other generic fantasy shit, they can blow it out their ass.

PS:  Also Sly, yes, your idea sounds good to me.

The Dragon <insert name> with <insert 1-4 random powers> is active in the <random region name>!!!  Kill <gender> to get <set of random loot class>!

We're just dancing around the same old mechanic.  Either something is instanced so that everyone gets to kill Smaug once and only once, or it's random so that <random name> Dragon can be killed by whomever whenever it spawns.  The challenge always comes back to content:  the writers, art designers, developers, and whatever else can only script so much content.  It can either be pre-scripted, or randomly generated to fill a template.  If it is pre-scripted, then you almost HAVE to ensure that everyone gets access to it at least once or you're wasting resources.  They're not going to put a script together just so that the first group of 5 people that access it get to look at it. 

But I think this is also to miss the point - it's not seeing the forest for the trees.  The same mechanics can both be used AND be interesting with the right circumstance.  Take the issue of 'choice' for example.  Access to both scripted storylines (which are instanced / replayable for everyone) and to templates can vary depending on whatever criteria.  So one person gets "Save the Princess" templates and another gets "Kidnap the Princess" templates.  Random Dragon becomes interesting if a thousand things have to be done before he's killable, and all of them involve other missions, scavanger hunts, player-created missions, wars, whatever else.  Random dragon by itself isn't interesting.

I figured that went without saying, so I didn't compose an entire design document to go with my little hypothetical encounter system. ;)

Right, which is why i said something like 'the end of a story arc has a big boss battle'.  If the series of steps to get to that end encounter are all branching choices that have diffent gameplay elements, your certainly would give the illusion of each character's or group's path through the game is far more unique than we have now.  Branch after branch gives you an exponetial amount of paths through the game.

The key is making the moment to moment gameplay fun, and the content development decent without sucking up all of your resources.  Some content is resuable in branching anyway (i.e. town A run by orcs, town A run by humans, town A destroyed, town A with a magic fountain, all uses "town A" resources with some variations), it just play's hell with overall world continuity and friends playing together without oddness.

On the plus side at least they've already stated they're going for entertainment over simulation.

I would be perfectly happy with branching plotlines (ie. content locking) if the gameplay was fun and plots at least interesting.  Then again, Im not a powergamer looking to min max my equipment and stats to the absolute best thottbot says is possible.  Which is where the "good but not largely successful" line stems from...

FWIW Vogel at the AGC had some pretty rational things to say about managing architecture for scale. ie. by not solving the problem with more hw.

Hopefully they'll have some dungeons to put their dragons in. Looking for new RPG adventure meme, PST.

I'd say that World of Warcraft served as a come-to-Jesus moment for the entire industry.

Polish is rewarded, who knew?

There sure is a lot of negative criticism floating around on this game, sight unseen.

There sure is a lot Bioware fanbois giving them a free pass for a shitty interview.

All I got from that interview was: "We have dynamic quests that take place in a static world."

It sounds like a polished turd already. Any bets on the special prizes they will offer for beta participation? "Participate in dragon age beta for a chance to win a PS3 or one of 200 signed copies of Baldurs Gate."

I'm not giving them a pass for the interview. Really, I just don't care about the interview, and at this early point of development, I would not expect much from an interview. I'll reserve judgement until I see something playable.

Yes polish is rewarded but the game actually has to be, you know, fun as well. Otherwise we'd all be talking about FF XI not WoW, and that game also blows away the "omigod must spend 100 million dollars to create a polished MMORPG" FUD/meme that's been spreading around.

I'm not giving them a free pass either, but I have bought every game they've put out thus far and have liked them. So from a non MMORPG standpoint, my experience with bioware games has been positive. So I expect that they will make an mmorpg that will at least get a retail sale out of me along with a month or two of subscription fees, and much longer if I end up liking the game that they make.

I judge a company by my experiences with their past products, and bioware hasn't failed to make me happy yet.

Quality alone won't matter if the game mechanic is iterative of WoW and the IP isn't compelling.

Having said that, if it's KOTOR Online, even with diku, that could be a big hit. Sci-fi, "SWG done right", Bioware's comparable reknown for quality (though in different spaces than Blizzard), and their ability to manage accountability through storylines and branching choices. That could be huge.

I get none of that from this interview though. Personally, they'd have been better off not saying nuthin until they can talk IP. They can't get criticized for silence really. I can see a lot of reasons for why they can't announce their IP (particularly if it is Star Wars), but dropping hints rooted in Tolkien-esque fantasy at a time when the genre is replete with knockoffs and getting a LoTRO in 2007 doesn't seem the right place to start. People don't remember branching storylines from that interview. They think "I've been there already" and wonder what uniqueness Bioware brings to the table.

Argh! Stop it with the "branching choices" already. KoTOR and the like don't have true branching storylines. The storyline in KoTOR looked something like this:


       +               +               +
      / \             / \             /
+----+   +-----+-----+   +-----+-----+
      \ /             \ /             \
       +               +               +


where every once in a while the story would slightly diverge if you picked the light or dark path but immediately afterwards would put you back on the same linear storyline until the very end where you had two different endings.

Wing Commander, of all games, had a true branching storyline where success or failure of each mission would send you down different paths though they cheated as well by having the various paths recombine at certain places but you still had more "paths" than KoTOR ever did (I can't remember the details but I think 4 was the max in WC). I.e. it looked something like:


                          +
                      /       \
                     +         +
                    /  \     /  \
                   +   +    +    +
                    \  /     \  /
                     +         +
                    / \        |
                   +   ------- +
                              / \
                             +   +



The problem, of course, is that having real diverging branches (rather than branches that immediately recombine) means creating lots and lots of content -- e.g. in the worst case scenario even just two separate branches means double the storyline content -- which is why people don't do it, it's just too much work.

I hate to say this, but I think I prefer charts ;).

What the hell is that up there?

2 points for mentioning WC though.

I thought KOTOR was boring as hell.

Baldur's Gate too.
Never finished either of them.

I expect this to suck, sight unseen.

For KoTRO the "+" is a conversation decision node and the lines are the paths you take. So for the "+"s with branching paths those are places where your light or dark response actually changes the storyline, at least temporarily. In WC the "+"s are missions and the paths are whether you succeed or fail in a mission.

Edit: actually for WC it was only three distinct branches at most, not four:

(http://www.pandadesigns.com/f13/wc_mission_tree1.gif)

I guess you just don't like good western RPGs then.

Remember how HTML was going to usher in the "hypertext novel" with "interactive storylines"?

Trippy is right, real branches mean much more work. A single branch halfway though a game means 50% more content that people won't experience unless they play twice.

You can do what a lot of games and choose your own adventure style things do, which is have branches that meet up again. Maybe they meet up and then zoom off in other directions again but basically what you are doing is cobbling together 10 different stories from 5 unique parts, just assembling them differently. The problem with that is that it can become tedious as you get to learn the parts.

Choose your own adventure is a good analogy. They are pretty fun (well...if you are 9) the first few times you read them, but then they are just busywork to find the few branches you missed.

----

I'm not mad about this interview, it is just nothing. Might as well not have given it. It's the same thing everyone else says. And that is the downside - they are already establishing themselves on a well-worn track.

Not so. Fallout I loved, and many others (BaK is high up there), Baldur's gate had a crappy system that felt like D&D - boring rolls and unspried gameplay, and KOTOR was.. I dunno it was just boring. Mechanics were dull, world was insipid.. I didn't get far in.

Why do you hate Canada?

KoToR was a game that kept me interested almost by purely through character interaction and voice acting (yeah, yeah, laugh all you want). Wasn't the setting. Wasn't the thought of being a Jedi. Definitely wasn't the combat and gameplay. I just kept plowing through to hear what the characters and story would tell me next.

Actually, I believe that all content is experienced. 

With a single player game, every branch just extends the "replayability" of the game.  This may be a sucky mechanic to implement, but in the end it doesn't matter, because once you've bought the game, the dev doesn't really care how many times you play it.  The devs can claim "this game offers 60 hours of gameplay" whether it's a completely linear story, or a branching one where you only get your 60 hours if you re-start from scratch 6 times.

With MMO's, all content is experienced; some percentage of your playerbase will pick one of the choices and experience it.  Perfect example:  Horde vs. Alliance, split content right there, and the result wasn't that 50% of the content wasn't experienced.  The content WILL be experienced by at least some people.  It's not wasted; in fact, instead of "splitting" your game by having 2 sides, 8 classes, 4 races, you could have 1 side, 1 race, 1 class, and 64 branches in your plot, and they would ALL be experienced.

While I loved BG, I have to say that I agree with lamaros and others about KOTOR: it was dreary.  It managed to combine the feeling of a big game-world with a confined and constrained sensation, which is quite an achievement.  There were huge areas, but they were only there to run through on the way from plot location to plot location.  Potemkin space-villages.

The combat was meh, too.  I quite like that turn-based thing sometimes - ToEE was buggy as hell on release but the combat was fun - but KOTOR defied all three of my attempts to get into it.

Actually, in both BG games, there were many areas that were entirely optional.

From my experience, WoW has shown that people will gladly play through multiple times to see different content - when your leveling speed allows people to reach maximum level in a reasonable amount of time, which WoW does. Pretty much everyone I know that plays has done at least one Horde and one Alliance, and usually more than one character within each faction. So such choices act to enhance that replayability.

Same deal for DAOC and their 3 realms.  All MMORPGS have some locked content whether its by race, class, relam, whatever, but very few seem to have much content locking by choices made while playing.  EQ2's quest series to change your alleigence from Freeport to Qeynos comes to mind, but they are the exception, not the rule and it's also the same quest all freeport characters can do.  Plenty of content unlocking, but not the reverse.

True branching like the WC example based on choice (and not win/lose) leading to a large variety of outcomes (rather than combining reults back to a few paths) seems to be right up ther with server divergence on "list of developer things to avoid"...

Wasted from the point of a view of a particular character.  It seems like a pretty basic resource-allocation issue to me.  Say you have 500 man-days to make cool quests.  You can spend 500 days making one mind-blowingly interesting and detailed linear quest path that rivals the Odyssey, of you could spend one day each on 500 different quest paths that have all the depth and continuity of an episode of Cop Rock.  Obviously, there's a lot of space in the middle, but it seems equally obvious that every time you branch a story, you cut the amount of time you can spend on every other branch in half, which very quickly gets you to not much time at all.

I've re-read Hamlet close to ten times by now, and I'm sure I'll re-read it at least that many more times before I die.  Each time is a great experience, even though I know what is going to happen to each character.  On the other hand, I don't think I've re-read a Mad Lib even once.  Linear and good is just plain better than branchable and bad.  Branchable Hamlet might be even better but good luck coming up with that.

The problem is mignified by the fact that even in games don't have much branching, we aren't really getting stories that rival the Odyssey.  Watering down a potentially great story into two merely decent branches is one thing, watering down a merely decent story into two shitty branches is something else.

isn't the point that no matter how good the text/story is, if it doesn't impact the character progession it doesn't matter?

what are we arguing about again?

Whether they should add precasting to SWG I think.

SB.exe, good or bad?

BRING BACK PRECASTING BEEYOTCH!

Alas, that hasn't been a good catchphrase for UO ever since...  well ever since they brought back precasting.

Beeyotch.

MinscOnline.Com


bring it

The branching choices I was talking about was Faction. Yes, it wasn't a truly branching storyline with 200 different endings. But your character at the end was absolutely affected by the choices you made throughout.

Right now, there's a strict linearity to MMOGs that Relic could innovate against. This isn't about lore. This is about pure accountability within the game world. Forget KOTOR. Think Ultima IV and the 'Air of <whatever>' that would permit or prevent access to various places. Like Air of Thievery prevented access to Skara Brae, but they loved you in Bucc's Den.

EQ1 is the only one that came closest to that, but Faction there was easily game-able because it was just another XP bar.

FFXI was neither low budget nor particularly polished (the PC version was a direct port of the console version).

I think it depends on what you were used to. I had a friend who took to FFXI like a duck to water, since he also played console games. Myself, being a PC-only person, found FFXI a royal pain in the posterior.

Baldur's Gate used the D&D 2.0 system. It was D&D. And it used the Forgotten Realms D&D system. But frankly, I played for Minsc and Boo.

As for Wing Commander -- I remember (way back in the day) playing WC2 at the same time a friend was, and him being shocked that I took Kithrik Mong (or whatever the hell that station was called) and he got stuck battling a fleet.

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?

Anyone who suggests, greenlights, or in any way participates in a direct console to PC port deserves to die from sort of hemorrhagic venereal disease.

What the hell Ultima are you talking about there?  :-D

Actually in UVL, we used that very thing you're talking about. There's a good path, and an evil path; and very little was done to accomodate either. We just designed the world, and scripted maybe six encounters along the way that defined who you were. There was a beginning and an ending, but the middle was up to the player to invent. That middle part shaped how the player saw the ending.

I think when people try to design two branching paths, they think they have to come up with two sets of cinematic sequences, two different game maps, two sets of dialog, etc etc. That's certainly one approach to it, but then you're wasting resources, as Gallo points out. A more economic approach is to build the world, give the world a purpose, then let the player explore the world.

I could swear I've heard that somewhere before....

Like BioWare? :rimshot:

If the virus fits...

You must acquit?

It was Ultima IV with the Air of <Whatever> wasn't it? Because of the whole "Knights of Avatar" thing right? Or was that actually Ultima V (and by extension the Lazarus project you were on)?

Anywho, when I think of branching paths, as mentioned, I don't think of a robust network of content wherein each player might ever only see 25% of it (as they have made choices along the way to therefore not see the other 75%). That's a waste of resources. I want an open virtual world with game within but where choice matters. To make choice matter, one must be given real options, maybe through narrative, but it doesn't need to be. I'm not asking people to read books of text in the game. I'm actually just saying one should be able to choose sides, whatever and however many there are, and be compelled to do so by the game system.

EQ1 had some of that. Older games had more of it. Newer games have almost none. Your choice is to play or not, so really, not a choice.

I'm sure some folks might think that choice and accountability were reduced to cast a wider net on the mass market. But I'd counter that this removal happened before these games had a chance at mass market appeal. Back in the 90s, people would barely consider an online game, much less an MMO, due to the dialup crap. So design theories were tested and tossed based on the limited set of envelope-pushing dedicated gamers that came here.

I say a lot of old options can be revisited again. There's both a LOT more players and a much broader array of them. If you measure by WoW, you're trapped in the same late-90s thinking that inspired diku, thus still ignoring the truly large amount of people who would come here. But the difference nowadays is that the barrier of entry to capturing those new people is so low, it's folly to ignore them.

Drop in a free-to-play browser-based front end and you've removed all barriers. Just make sure you actually compel them to a full purchase :)

Looking forward to El Gallo's answer. I want to see a throwdown.

What El Gallo said was a bit harsh but he has a point.

I have been complaining for years about MMORPG devs that still use MUD terminology. Nobody wants to play your damn MUD anymore! That is a refusal to move forward and embrace a new medium and experience.

Why does the interface to a lot of "graphical MUDs" suck? Maybe because MUDs don't even *have* interfaces.

I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: MMORPGs are to MUDs as movies are to radio. Someone who speaks about movies in purely radio terms is obviously far behind the times and shows a stubborn refusal to catch up. Sure, MMORPGs are similar to MUDs in a lot of way. But people stuck in the MUD mindset just don't get it. (TM) In my mind a great familiarty with MUDs is likely a negative at this point.

I don't want the guy that designs Wii Tennis to speak about everything in Pong terms. That kind of speech and thought is inherently limiting. If you think of MMORPGs as graphical MUDs that is what you are going to make - graphical MUDs. With the same problems MUDs have and a bunch of new problems that come with not recognizing the new territory you are in. (For example, implementing a feature in a MUD takes 3 hours vs 6 months in a MMORPG)

I don't particularly care for the game vs. world debate, but what I do know is that "MUD - but with graphics!" isn't going to cut it any more.

We may have to ask Schild to open a "throwdown" forum of sorts. It'll be just like Fight Club, but with nerds.

re: Darniaq


Would it really be a waste of content though? We've all played MMOs where we have re-rolled a character for whatever reason; be it a new class to play, guild needs more of x, new server, etc... So if a player experiences a percentage of content available and is able to experience the rest by playing other classes/re-rolling, this adds replay value does it not?

Yea, I consider it a waste, based on probability. Assuming a purely binary system of choices on a linear path, a player has a 100% chance of not seeing 50% of all content tied to those specific decision points. So it's actually in-efficient, development-wise, to let the player make too many choices, because the more choices you let them make, the more content they won't see.

Now, you argue that a player on their second or beyond time through may make a different choice. That makes sense. However, nobody would ever say they guarantee the player would completely yang this time when they yinged the first time. So that's still not 100% of the programmed content.

As a result, it's simply become more efficient to FORCE players to see all the content by doing two things:

• Making key decisions for them. Like, arbitrarily splitting them between factions and realms, and never providing a way for that one character to switch sides. Also, Class/Template/Archetype is another arbitrary pre-made choice.
• Limit what they can based on the choices they made, already pre-limited by the game.

By limiting the player during their first choice, these games have a chance at getting that player to make OTHER choices, thereby seeing other content so much money was spent to create. And driving retention.

That's the challenge with branching storylines. How do you maximize all the content you spend so much money making while integrating a system that lets players use their DECISIONS as part of their character growth, not just an XP ladder? One answer here is procedurally-generated content. The other is player-generated content. When either drives the success of a game to a level enjoyment by pre-canned linear diku-spinoffs, then I think they'll matter. For now, the whole world hinges their hopes on Spore.

And that experience is unproven on many levels, no matter the skill or cash driving it. I can easily see that becoming like SL: the most talked about game nobody actually plays.

I disagree on some level.

Let's say I have one choice halfway through the game that totally changes everything. That's 50% more work for me. That's bad.

But if that makes the player play through again when they wouldn't have otherwise, that's good. Especially in a MMORPG where retention is key.

Now let's say instead of a huge choice at 50% through the game I have a rather small choice with 3 prongs in the last 95% of the game. That means I have maybe 10% more work to do. (Two extra prongs at 5% of total game) but if the player plays through 3 times that is 3 times the retention for 10% more work.

Alliance/Horde is a decent example of this. Having two sides is a lot of work, but probably not twice as much work. The classes are largely the same, all the items are the same, the basic mechanics are the same, etc. If this gets players to play twice as long it is a win.

The key is making the extra work for yourself small while still encouraging players to play through many times. That can be done with relatively small choices, at varying points, some of which are mutually exclusive. The holy grail here is that there are a whole bunch of different paths the player can take, where each path doesn't take much work to create.

At some point that becomes annoying, players won't replay the entire game just to play one half-hour quest they missed. So you have to be careful.

I would argue that class/race selection is already an example of this sort of thing. Creating a new class or race is not *that* expensive, and if it means your player will play 2 chars instead of 1 that is a big win.

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

Err, you just made my point for me. :)

Seriously, you've described in greater detail what I listed above: this is why it currently works.

The problem being discussed is Lore, or the lack of relevance thereof. It's because the game isn't about RPG. It's about XP. To me, these experiences are built not upon a game mechanic, but rather an acquisition engine wrapped with a gametic interface. Obviously it works, but think about who it works for. WoW is not a mass market game. It actually just proved (in my mind) that the psychographic of EQ1 was actually much bigger than people believed.

Players can have 1,000 "choices", but they all get right back to a game purely about acquiring stuff. So, in the drive for efficiency, Lore itself has been subjugated to mere flavor text. Nobody cares because nobody has to care because why you do something in the game has nothing to do with any of the story within. The decade of Warcraft lore may have attracted people to the MMO, but that just proves a compelling game-based IP can be wrapped around the same core engine. And that simply inspires derivation by other similarly-big relevant (or otherwise) IP holders.

With the barrier of entry raised so high by WoW, who ELSE can possibly add to this highly saturated space? While sure the same question was asked pre-WoW, most who were asking ignored the Far East market which, business model aside, is coming here (ref: MTV with Nexon, Codemasters, etc). And they're bringing games that themselves are pretty similar, because their microtrans business model is the absolute perfect fit for an acquisition engine. Big money, big successes, big quality requirements, what's a budding MMO dev to do?

Something new. They almost have no choice.

One way to do that is to integrate paying attention and therefore accountability within the PvE side of the game. That means instead of rewarding XP based on achieveing a goal set forth by a Journal, you actually change a more fluid mix of variables, like faction/rep, in a system with more interconnectivity. It's a bit of a virtual worldy concept, something cribbed from, say, Eve, where this sort of thing does happen. But blending that with a more-RPG-like story engine of real choices and lore-based accountability, you could end up with a game compelling for similar reasons to WoW without the base compulsion towards addictiveness.

Or, said another way, it becomes more of a game.

I still think that choices, though they look like they multiply the work, don't really.  If the choices are a feature that brings in significantly more players than you'd normally get with just the polish and the standard class/race/xp based system, I think the "extra" work is justified, especially since "choices" are as viable as races, levels, and factions when it comes to spreading out your player base across nodes so they're not all trying to zone into Jita.  A 100% linear story would be terrible for the Jita problem, btw, especially if Jita is a starting system on opening day. 

But anyway, I still look at it as "your player base divides itself over the spectrum of choices and thus experiences all your content".  I could say that Redridge is wasted content for WoW, nobody goes there before L10 or after L30, the zone is used for only a small portion of a player's play time.  All zones are.  All MMO games have "wasted content" like this, where only a small portion of the player base is visiting said content, so I don't see how it would be different with limiting access via "choices" rather than limiting by level range or faction.

-------------

Heh, a PvE version of EVE, where players can acquire gold by grinding the NPC's, and also the NPC's respond to various playerbase characteristics, such as they build cities and move in and expand their (NPC) empire if the players have cleared the wilderness of monsters.  Players could (indirectly) control what the NPC's do, if it's coded in on the NPC side that they respond to things the players do.  Not individuals, but player guilds/alliances.

That's actually part of it. EQ1 is a huge game with I think now in excess of 400 individual zones. But not only have they totally mudflated old zones, they obsoleted the core game mechanics in them, by chasing players into newer expansion packs with newer rules specific to newer places. Their legacy content has depreciated to a point I wonder if they ever wonder about just closing up those places to save on the hosting and maintenance costs. That'll happen in WoW too. Even NOW Redridge is a wasteland. Imagine a year from now, with another expansion looming, yet another race, probably another class, all new 1-whatever content. EQ3.0.

Is that a good thing to do? Maybe it works. If you ammortize the dev costs for content, maybe it pays for itself handily and hosting/maintaining is irrelevant in aggregate. I don't know.

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.

Actually it's 33% more work.


Of course, monkeys that will play twice as long to see exactly the same thing with different colours are .. well. I have no desire to play another race just for the sake of it. I do have desire to play through a new class, but I have little desire to play through the same material. I would pay to get Premade 60s in WoW.

I don't know how many people are like me and how many are willing to replay through the same content over and over for 5% more new, but I expected it's a lot lower than you think.


I think this point is much easier reached than you think. The replayability of different things in WoW, like different classes, different factions, actually comes with a LOT of new stuff. Whole new zones, new quests, new character animations, new class mechanics, etc. You really have to add a whole lot of content to make it new to people, and it's the newness that makes it repayable.

You might argue that you never have to design the game engine or certain fundamental issues to do with the game again, and thus you're saving time there, but most of these types of games spend HUGE amounts of time putting in content, so you're not saving as much as you think.

After a while the game mechanics will bore people too and they will move on regardless, but the threshold here is much higher.



I disagree. I think making a new class would be a huge amount of work. That why you only see it in expansions. It's a whole lot more than putting in a new zone or a few more levels.


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.


Moving on.

WoW is a co-op RPG done large. Why to people keep playing? Because it's a good RPG. It's a well made game. It's social and persistent, so it retains people and they pay for it.

I don't see why you cant do CS: S as a game done large either. Why would people keep playing? Because it's a good FPS. It's a well made game. Make it social and persistent and it'll retain people who pay for it.

This issue gets so confused, but it's so very simple:

1: Make a solid polished game.
2: Make it FUN.
3: Make it social and persistent.
4: ??
5: Profit.

You might want to say that WoW is big because it did 3 well. That's true, but I don't think that's as hard to do as you might think. And they could sure it it a heap better(WoW would sure do it a heck of a lot better if they never had this stupid 'faction' system in the game.) If you do 1 and 2 with 3 in mind you should be able to tackle 3 quite well.

Lets use the example of GW. It did 1 well, I have to say. It fucked up some key areas of 2, especially in regard to the PvP game, but was still fun. It failed to do 3 well, especially the social aspect. It did a lot of things wrong but people would still say it was a bit of a success.

Bioware could make a good MMORPG. They could do it with great PvE content, they could do it with a great story, they could do it with great PvP. There are many ways to make your game fun and do it in a way different to WoW. There are many games out there that, redesigned for 3, and given some polish, would make good MMOGs.
I don't have faith in Bioware though, because I think they have no horse to pull the cart. You have to start with "we want to make a game that plays like this", then move on to "and we want to make it hugely multiplayer". You dont just think "lets make a MMORGP" and they try to decide what kind of game you want it to be afterwards.



This comes from taking a single player, progression based, game and making it into a MMO one. They are inherent problems, and while they can be managed through future content (WoWs use of BRD for coffer runs and such are one way to do it) it is not going to go away until devs step back and address it from conception. This is the area where WoW has failed the most in regard to the Online aspect, and one that will only be exacerbated with time.

CoH does this (sending higher level players to lower level zones for missions) but then people complain about the travel times.

Not playing CoH I don't know for sure. But I'm going to assume that stems from a problem with zone design that dictates the harder/higher level areas are progressively further and further away.

That's one of the inherent problems.

Once you reach a point where the zone demands are more balanced between the classes that use it then people will pipe down. Of course it just helps to design a more integrated world from the onset.

Oh, and you'd have problems with ganking and griefing and other such things if you do this in a PvP game too.

Inherent problems of a single player game translated to an online persistent one. No real solutions at that stage of the game.

You give people a path to follow, but you want to retain them. So you make the path long. When they get to the end of the path you say "it's not a path, it's a world" and you send them back to an earlier part of the path. But players are not stupid, they ask "why the fuck am I going back here? I've done this part of the path." And you say "it's not a path, it's a world." And they say "then why the fuck does it take so long to get from place to place?" "Because we only realised we needed a world once the path was already built."

CoH is the one game where I don't mind travel time. Travel powers are great, and never really get old. It'd be nice if there were things you could do that made it a game in and of itself....Like THPS or something.

[edit] Actually, the Spidey games are a better comparison.

Uh, Guild Wars + Guild Wars Factions sold over two million copies. That puts it in the top 30 PC game sales of all time. I'm going with 'wildly successful' here.

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.

As far as mudflation; i don't think that the introduction of new content should automatically equate with the discarding of old. Maybe this is an artifact of a diku-level system, which would then indicate a problem with the actual game design rather than the "oh, that's boring!". A good example, the people who run the M:tG system constantly introduce new rules into what is (by gaming standards) a very old design. However, none of the rules introduced (at least to my knowledge, as i stopped playing around Urza's) have made or make old stuff unplayable or irrelevant.

A lot of this probably comes back to what Margalis said: we keep hearing all about this stuff from developers, who are supposedly now "enlightened", but with a few small exceptions we've yet to see anything actually being done.

Yes, a bit of a success (one likes to be understated). These numbers are agreeing with my point. Make a good game, make it polished. It will work. The world bits, the social and persistent online aspects are not that hard to do, to a satisfactory level - GWs did it shit and sold well, WoW has done it reasonably well and done awesomely. It's the *game* that makes the money, not the MMO.

Just make a damn fun game and make it well, the rest will follow.

It was Ultima V, but your point still stands. The Air of Whatnot didn't make one city safe and another city more dangerous; it just made one city more dangerous. But making another city correspondingly more safe would have been cool nonetheless.

The terms have hung on because they are mostly still applicable. Show me an MMORPG that doesn't make use of the familiar litany of zones, classes, aggro, tank, DPS, yadda yadda yadda, and maybe we can use some new terms. (And yes, I know they exist. And surprisingly, several of them come from MUD vets!).

I agree with you that people get stuck in old designs because it's all they have to reference. I even agree with you that the older guard is kind of inbred. I don't think you mean abandoning all the learning thus far, because that would be a bit silly.


The analogy I would use is very different. MUD are to MMORPGs as Lynx was to Mosaic. The server side has not changed very significantly for a variety of reasons (and not having solely to do with imagination).


And yet WoW is one of the most mudlike of all the MMO's?

Raph, I both agree and disagree with what you are saying.

To me WOW represent a very thorough but shallow re-examination of MMORPGs. When I talk about polish I don't just talk about things like fewer glitches, I mean actual polish and sanding, which is iteratively smoothing out rough spots, shaving off sharp corners.

Why do quest givers in WoW have icons over their heads? Only because having to constantly run around town talking to everyone over and over again to get all the quests really sucks. So they removed the sucky parts. (The first time I made it to Windurst in FFXI I stopped playing for a month because the town was so large it depressed me, it took me an hour just to explore 1/5th of it)

They adhered very closely to the fundamental core of most MMORPGs and MUDs, but did not adhere closely to the outer layers. I would surmise this is because they are not wedded to those layers. They didn't help create those layers and they don't take them as givens.

That is the danger - taking things as givens. Why does crafting work the way it does? Why does getting a quest or using the UI work the way it does? Only because that's what we did before and it seemed to work ok...and nobody has come up with something better...

The graphical layer can not be an afterthought. The end user experience of getting quests, making items, drinking potions, moving around...that may not be any different on the server side but the server side is not the game.

"MUD with graphics" is not the same as "graphics based on a MUD." In WoW the end-user experience is what has been polished. Not so much the core mechanics and rules. But that is a valuable thing to do because MMORPGs are not just servers with a tacked-on front end.

Deciding to put icons over quest giver heads is a simple client-side graphic effect, but it makes a huge end-user difference. I think a lot of MUD-centric people would consider that sort of thing an afterthought, when the reality is the players play the front-end, not the back-end.

If you think of a MMORPG as a MUD with a graphical layer all that user-facing stuff will be treated as an afterthought.

Thinking of MMORPG's as graphical MUD's almost strikes me as the same kind of thinking Microsoft had behind Windows 3.1 (as opposed to Apple's from-the-ground-up approach to GUI's).

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.

WoW is actually borrowing very heavily from single player games for the 'polish'.

Except that they are graphical MUDs. Sure the presentation and UI are different but fundamentally the gameplay is the same -- moving around, bashing monsters, collecting loot, and gaining experience.

I played some and it's where EQ got its "guess the conversation text that triggers the quest" mechanic for its quests.

And Windows 3.1 was graphical DOS. And MacOSX is graphical unix commands. Yet Windows 3.1 and MacOSX are quite different.

UI *is* a fundamental part of gameplay. That is part of my point. To the end user it may be the most important part of gameplay.

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?

All auction house variants transfer items across DB tables. That doesn't make all AH systems the same. Even if all the rules about what you can buy/sell are the same they *still* aren't all the same system.

You are taking a very narrow view of what "gameplay" actually is. The core fundamental rule set is not what defines gameplay, those rules are only a part of gameplay as a whole. Take Tetris. Now instead of using the arrow keys to move the blocks around you type "left" to move a block left and "rotate clockwise" to rotate it. I've just turned Tetris into unplayable trash by changing the control scheme. Have I changed the gameplay? I certainly have to the end user.

What matters is end-user experience. If "gameplay" doesn't capture that then gameplay is an irrelevant term. That is *the* WOW lesson. End-user experience is king. Your systems are only as good as the way users interact with them. It doesn't matter how great your quests are if finding quests is a pain in the ass, even if the solution is a 10 minute client-side graphical effect. The reality is that small graphical effect has HUGE gameplay implications. Now instead of spending an hour running around town talking to people trying to find quests I spend two minutes.

If that isn't gameplay then what is? How users play the game is the gameplay that matters. To me "run around for an hour lookng for quests" and "walk right up to the quest guy and grab your quest instantly" are totally different gameplay experiences.

Yes it is. There are situations where I would consider the UI and presentation as part of the gameplay like with rhythm games and there are situations where the lines get blurred like with a FPS but if somebody asks me what WoW is about I would say what I said above. I wouldn't say well you move your mouse around to rotate your view and you use the WASD keys to move your 3D avatar around on the screen and you click on little icons and drag them around on the screen and you push the number keys to make your avatar do stuff, etc. A crappy UI and presentation can make what would otherwise be some fun gameplay into crappy gameplay but that's a UI issue and not what I consider part of the fundamental gameplay.

To build on your OS example, to me something like "word processing" is a separate concept than the UI that is used to allow you to do your word processing. Maybe it's a text oriented interface like Emacs or something crude like Electric Pencil or maybe you need to use "dot" commands like WordStar or maybe you have a nice WYSIWYG graphical UI with pull down menus and a mouse or whatever other UI people come up with in the future -- it's still just "word processing" to me.

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

Isn't that, more than anything, an indication of a bias against WoW?

Yea, but what analogy would you use to explain that to the masses? :)

Exactly. But then, evolution is like. It takes what's given and tweaks. The definition of a "tweak" is based on the rules of the prior generation, for comparison sake.

I don't know is it? 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 throwing a ball and swinging a bat. 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.

Edit: swapped bat and ball

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.

xcopy
cp
mv

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 :
 
 
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?

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

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?

This is the happiest moment of my life :heart:

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.

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.

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.   

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

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.

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.


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...it's possible to make too much money?  :-o

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.


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.


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.

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:


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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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


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


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


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.


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.


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?


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 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?


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.


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?


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 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.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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?


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.


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

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.


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.

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?

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Bravo. Let me throw in a few points about the "old guard" myself.

1. Believing your own Bull

Remember that these are Virtual Worlds not some game, not some MUD with graphics. That's why 90% of dev resources get put into crafting, fluff, and the economy while core game mechanics are pure shit. That's why shipping with broken combat systems and non-existant class balance are acceptable while shipping without a wedding dress is not.

2. Blaming the players for systems that don't work

"Oh those maladjusted Griefers! The fact that people refuse to play the way we envisioned they would is a product of them being Bad People, not the way we designed the game. Let's consign the lot of them to a Virtual ghetto where we won't have to think of them anymore or design a system that can make everyone reasonably happy. Let's face it, PvP in Virtual World is a niche. People will never be happy with PvP unless they win most of the time, and staticsics show that only 10% of players do win most of the time. What's that about all the millions of people playing and losing at BF1942, CS, Starcraft ect? Why those are games, not the Virtual Worlds we're making.



For the most part the early SWG testers were handpicked board warrior fanbois. What did you expect? Your "This is not a Galatic War Simulator" statement made it pretty damn clear the game was being fashioned to fit in with your vision, not the vision of most the people wanting to play the game. I daresay that not too many were envisioning SimBeru outside of you.

One would think that a company could take their time and do prototyping and such with minimal staff. However the way most publisher agreements work doesn't really allow that. You get X money and have to hit Y milestone.

If the publisher gave the developer all the money up front taking a lot of time before content-creation gets underway might be viable. But no publisher is going to let you sit around for a year doing early testing and such, even if it is relatively cheap.

Now that Blizzard has proven that taking your time and doing it right no matter the cost does in fact pay off in the end do you see the attitude changing to allow you and other developers the time and resources you need to make games of the caliber of wow?  I have no idea how much less time/money was pumped in EQ2 compared to WOW but i very seriously doubt it was in the same ratio as their sub numbers turned out.  I would imagine when the suits see that the difference between 40 million and 3 years vs 80 million and 6 years is 200k subs vs 7.5 million subs they might start to rethink their priorities.  At least thats my hope, i guess i should know better than that right?

You can prototype game play experiences for small groups. But how do you prototype thousands of players testing the game-wide equipment and stat balance along with the economy without, well, building the entire MMO infrastructure you need host those players concurrently?

This is why middleware can be useful. Trouble is, middleware comes with many constraints of their own. If you're looking to knock off diku, great, tools exist. If you want to try something completely need (as a few upcoming games are), you gotta build so much more. And what and how you build is a complexity and uniqueness unto themselves as well. We're a long way from dedicated salaried teams banging out and hosting MMOs by the truckload in NWN2.

Basically, there's no shortage of innovative thinking in this industry. The devs get a bad rap for iterative execution, but it's not because they set out to copy something exactly. And besides, "devs" is just way way too singular. People blame the public faces while it's the thousand papercuts of middle management decisions that make a game what it is.

I don't think it'll be that direct (though you asked Raph ;) ). As discussed, who else has that much money and a publisher willing to give them that much time to test and test and test? Not to mention the decade-old game-based IP that comes with its own pre-built community?

It's not that nobody else wants the same quality. It's that by the measure of WoW, almost nobody else can.

Well that was sort of my point, i know nobody else was willing other than Blizzard, i was simply wondering if now after Blizzards success other publishers wouldn't be open to the idea that time+money=bigger money hats.  I have a hard time believing that nobody else has as much money, i just think its a matter of being willing to spend it and a proven success that was magnitudes more profitable than anything before it might encourage other companies to go the Blizzard route.

There are companies that have that sort of money like EA, and EA, and well EA and there are companies that have the same "when it's done" philosophy of Blizzard and in fact the first game company I know of that had the financial freedom to apply that philosophy was id but there are others as well like Valve, Epic, and 3D Realms (*cough*), all of which are, oddly enough, shooter companies. Blizzard was basically the first to apply that philosophy to an MMORPG (even though it was somewhat rushed out for Christmas 2004) and they are reaping the same type of success that those other companies have had and they themselves have enjoyed with their RTSes and Diablo except magnified because of the economics of a subscription-based game.

Unfortunately for EA, they don't believe in the "when it's done" philosophy even though they are one of the few that have money to put it into practice and being a public company isn't an excuse since Vivendi was willing to do it with Blizzard for many years when VUG was struggling though of course they had Blizzard's history prior to Vivendi's acquisition of Sierra as evidence that the "when it's done" philosophy does work when practiced by a talented group of developers.

Edit: added Diablo

I completely agree. In terms of overall revenue, it's almost always better to keep working on the title. The issue is running out of money before you finish. :)


Internal studios are subject to much the same thing, btw.


Presentation and content are still hard. And they also now consume a huge amount of money as well, easily the lion's share of the budget. Figure at least 50% of the total spend is art, at least.


I completely agree. But it takes a long time to iterate in that fashion too. :) And time costs... money.


Not quite what I said. :) I said following the entire Blizzard recipe... Starting small is perfectly viable. But doing the whole "make one feature, then polish it to a fare-thee-well" gives publishers fits. They want to know that all the items on the bullet list are going to show up, and this doesn't tell them that. That's why the "Vertical slice" is preferred by publishers. "Make one of everything, THEN polish."


Only if they let Blizzard write the rules. If they find new market segments, new gameplay styles, and so on, they can compete on freshness, new audiences, blue oacen, all that jazz.


Microsoft DOES own every market they decide to. They go slow, do tons of iterations, and burn cash like nobody's business. Heard what the XBox unit's losses are to date? :)


I think that if every element in SWG had been executed and polished, it would have owned and done extremely well. Even without any design changes at its core, even with "broken" design choices (of which there were plenty). Just based on the demographics of who we attracted, the growth rates, etc. What hampered SWG above all was lack of content and unbalanced combat. Have more challenge and fun to the combat, and tons of adventures and monsters, and the core MMORPG players would have stuck even more.


There are virtually no creative fields in which you "do it right the first time." Instead, you don't SHOW it until you have done it enough times to be presentable. cf my post on that here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/01/17/iteration-in-games-a-mini-rant/


I gotta tell you, everyone always says this, especially about SWG, and as a percentage, it's just so loopy-wrong-crazy that I can't let it pass again. Even on SWG, with all those other systems, combat and combat-related content was easily 2/3 of the overall design time.


Only the first 150 were. By the time period I was referencing, there were thousands of testers, let in by lottery. The tone of the SWG beta was very positive right up until the day we announced a release date. Then it turned ugly.


Yeah, "stage gate" development is very uncommon in games. Popcap uses it, so does Blizzard. Not too many others do. That's because it's all dirven by SKU planning and franchise needs.


I cannot tell you what the EQ2 development budget was. Your ratios are off, though. WoW really did outspend everyone (except for TSO) by 4x or so, I would guess. And yes, they reap more than 4x the rewards -- that's the nature of a commodified market where the products are substantially similar.

The attitude, I think, is changing somewhat as a result. But remember that almost nobody can play on the $80m playing field. Everyone else isn't going to stop trying.


You have to factor in opportunity cost. Any given title has a 10% chance of earning out, whether you spend lots or not. Spend lots and your eventual magnitude of hit may be much bigger. But it's still just as likely to fail. Given that, do you make 1 $80m game, or 4 $20m games?

Good god Raph.

Anyway.


That's what people were saying 2 years ago. All signs point to bullshit. Yes, I know you want to make something like Kaneva with swords or MyHovel with a trading/economy/crafting metagame. But comeon.

What'll be funny is when Blizzard (or someone) comes along a couple years later and releases World of Shantycraft, which is exactly like MyHovel except with quality production values.

Blizzard won't release World of HovelCraft. MySpace will. And MySpace will automatically convert your account over, add a friends bulletin board with all your friends autoadded and all the blog shit playing on a TV in your MyApartment while your MySelf MySturbates.

"But that's completely unfair!  MySpace has, like, money and resources and stuff!  Oh well, time to find new markets and a new audience!  MySpace will only rule over us other hovelgame developers like a wicked god if we play by their rules!"

Ya know, I'd like to see the result of MySpace and Second Life getting together.

It sounds like an idea, but I betcha the end result would be ten million teenagers going "tehse graphics sux lol!" and a front page USA Today article about Junior being cyber-molested by a gang of furries.

If ten million teenages aren't complaining about [graphics on] the Wii, they sure as shit won't complain about a place where they can let every deviant fantasy they've ever had run wild.

Random Wii-hate aside, have you tried playing Second Life?  I know it gets lots of media love and is on a huge growth spurt lately, but let's have a little perspective.  According to the Bruce chart (yeah, yeah) it still has a few thousand users to gain before it tops fucking Tibia.  Second Life is ass.

And even if someone spends the time and money required to craft a Not Shitty Second Life for just this purpose, I question how much of a difference it will make.  Millions of teenagers might want to gossip and bullshit and socialize online, but the subset of those who want to build a virtual house to have creepy cybersex in is undoubtedly a vanishingly small fraction.

Not that we're teenagers, but as an example, you and I are "socializing" in having this discussion.  That doesn't mean I want to build a virtual hovel in F13 Life Land, then teleport over to the Palace of Teh Hate and talk things over with your giant purple hippo avatar.

Not everyone uses it for that...But why should it matter to you anyways? There's nothing wrong with the idea of extending the ways people use the net. Not everyone has to socialize like you and I. If we really carried that prejudice to it's fullest degree, we'd still be using BBS's and Gopher. Second Life (or things like it) should be seen as no different than other protocols, such HTTP, Email, or *gasp*, online gaming.

In a year or two, some marketing/MBA type will come up with a new virtual buzzword. People will be able to trade homemade music and video with eachother within the confines of a virtual world. You'll have blogs, integrated youtube style video and all this other shit. Me? I'd call it a clusterfuck. Someone else? Money printing machine. And it would be. If you don't think guys and girls would like to flirt NORMALLY online using a service like that, you're insane. INSANE.

And furry sex aside, it would be popular. Sure, news reports and magazines would focus on the more risque side of the business, but their bread and butter would be high school and college guys and gals flirting with eachother when they're not actually having sex. Yes, even teenage women have completely incorporated computers into their lives. The number of super hot chicks I knew in college who talked on AIM for 3-4 hours a day and played Snood is overwhelming. They're ripe for the picking for this type of virtual world. Something at the midway point between SW:G and Sociolotron. It would be easy to say that the midway point is a yoda shaped dildo. But you know exactly what I'm talking about. Game meets world. World meets game. Everyone who isn't a gamer subscribes. And if a company could attach RMT to that whether that be music for your ingame jukebox or a virtual movie theater, so be it. They win.

I *think* that's what Raph wants. If he doesn't, he should, because anything else would be half-assed. Yea, yea, I know, baby steps. Well, look what baby steps got you. While you tripped and had your pants down, WoW came out.

As to rerail - uhm - Dragon Age will not be that game. I suspect it will be more like the original design docs of Horizons, but with less angels and demons and shit (hey! that design doc was good shit!). Lookit what I dug up (http://italia.planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/horizons/race-lineup.jpg).

As I've said, Second Life is the most talked about game nobody actually plays. Here's some numbers (http://www.darniaq.com/wordpress/2006/10/mmo-live/second-life-economist-article/) (my read on an Economist article). They have an awesome marketing department. The people they manage to attract though are either there to conduct business (and learn the interface because they're getting paid for it), or get immediately turned off by the interface. The rest are the diehards getting turned off by all the neophytes coming with dreams of a personalized CADD community, only to encounter Red Light districts in the newbie zone and pay-to-access private islands home to the people who know better.

It's high concept, and as a concept has potential. But the experience itself needs a few iterations and then a Blizzardization before it'll hit the main audience. The big thing is that UI.

Every market Blizz has entered they've capped because they won based on the rules that existed. And what has happened as a result is either they've gotten bored or the rules were changed and Blizz decided to take a step back. There have been very successful RPGs after Diablo and RTSs after Warcraft. Maybe none that carry the longevity of the combined starpower that is "Blizzard" and "*craft" in the same sentence, but for how many years now have their eggs been either in one basket or continually pulled from ones even older than that?

Domination always requires the rules be changed if anyone else competes. The question now isn't whether the rules will change, it'll be how they change. Pure speculation of course, whether it's Metaverse done right or someone else out-diku'ing Blizzard with a broader experience and more cash. Or sports games. From the future. With guns!

Actually -- and he can correct me if I'm wrong -- but I think he's mentioned that he's making another MMO. He's just predicting other people to come up with weird conglomerate MyHabbo SpaceLife things. And of course there's going to be tons of crappy versions of those things before someone gets it right. It seems to me that MySpace + SecondLife = VeryVeryNiche. You can't just throw two successful things together; otherwise we'd all be driving donut cars, living in blue jean houses, with calculator sharks as pets, and be playing Sims Online.

OK, you got me there. SimsOnline is telling.

You don't think that SL qualifies as an MMO?

Really? IMVU is up to 6.8 million accounts.

SL is niche. 1.5 million "citizens", but less than 35k paying $10 a month or less for it, and less than 15k concurrency. That's well below even Eve, which is an awesome game but itself decidedly niche in appeal.

So SL is an MMO. It's just not that big of one :)

Huh, I always thought IMVU was just a little 3D avatar that sat next to the user's IM client. Seems more like SL with less options...and thus more accessible, like WOW was to EQ! I'd be interested in knowing how much users communicate through their home pages versus the 3D space. (And also how many users came back after initially signing up.)


Sure. And he could be making something along the lines of SL. My point is I don't think he's going to make a competitor to MySpace, since he said "I'm not making the next ChatSpace 3D" or words to that effect.

The truely hilarious thing is that, regardless of what is said here or even once more information is released, there will be a sizeable proportion of f13 posters who will try to get into this MMOG's beta.

The h8 is for the day-to-day, but is easily shed once some new luv appears on the horizon.

I have never once been in a beta that I particularly cared to be in. And I've been in many at this point. In fact, my hate seems to just grow stronger once I do get invites.

Eh, probably just screwed myself by posting this.

MMOG developers should make it a point to only get testers from outside the current playerbase. Probably would be pretty hard, but I think they should at least try.

I know some would argue they wouldn't get good Testers. But really, how long has it been since Beta testing was really just about testing? And, how many of those they do get as testers are any good at testing anyway?

I say they should avoid the noise and get general gamers. Best to avoid the history veterans bring with them, particularly if you're making a derivative game. Vets will call you on that stuff, and then make sure it becomes public fact. At least newbies you can try and fool for awhile :)

No doubt.  The last few betas I've participated in seem to revolve around (in no particular order):
1) E-peen waving  - Random game forum:  Yeah, that's right, I got into X beta.  It's so cool, but I can't tell you about it cuz I'm under an NDA
2) Finding exploits (xp/credit/gold/whatever) and NOT reporting them and hoping to hang onto them once the game goes "live".
3) Advertising through word or mouth via forums or between gaming friends on Instant Messengers, NDA be damned
4) In addition to number 3, I've not seen a marked improvement from beta to release

Betas I've participated in: CoH, SWG JTL, EQ2, DDO, RF Online

Funny, because I am a general gamer (I've only been playing mmo's since 2003...and there was only one game I found enjoyable for longer than 3 months. The rest were just short trials and torture experiments). I think that's precisely why I tend to hate this stuff. Because I expose myself enough to other games.

Look at the loudest haters at this site as well: They're in the same boat as me.
 
Don't let my ability to converse in "MMO lingo" or my mere presence here deceive you.  :wink: I might have lost my soul a bit, but I am still very much one of those "newbies". Or at least, that's the angle I'm trying to come from.

You should not do this.

You will be totally disheartened if you ever do make it and we all turn round and say 'No, that also sucks ass.  And it's unworkable.'

Let it lie.

Actually, I'd think it'd be more disappointing if the system worked and everyone was like "wow, yea, I'd have definitely played/stayed-with SWG" :)

I include Age in "newbie" as well. It's not an accident that Acclaim and MTV are bringing MMOs to America that not only don't target the WoW pyschographic (playstyle preference), they don't target the same demographic (included in that is Age). Younger kids, different references.

No. He should do it. Look, there's two possible outcomes if he puts together what he had in mind:

1) People think it sucks, and he learns from the experience, drops it and works on something else.
2) People love it, and he might use it now that he has something besides the galaxy of suck SWG became to point to the "fun" factor.

Right now, he's got the "It was never tried the way I designed" thing going. Often that's just an excuse for suck ("This only sucks because I was forced to compromise my VISION. See: Vanguard), but given the way the game industry pushes shit -- every once in awhile it's true. Only way to find out is for him to throw up a demo and let people try it, and then be appropriately sarcastic.

It's certainly better to try it out on a jaded and generally hostile enviroment then a bunch of starry-eyed beta testers who don't want to piss off the Powers That Be. (Although SWG's beta wasn't that bad, the NGE "sneak peaks" were. Flying your ass down to Austin for a super-sneak-peak? Virtually anyone is going to find something positive to say at that point, no matter how much it sucks. You want honest opinions? Find a bunch of sarcastic assholes who have been playing games since fucking Pong. They might not have jack shit in common with your target audience, but they're not really going to hold back either).

Dude, you can't invoke throwdown and then refuse to throw anything down.  It's just not done in polite society.

I don't know those numbers. I do know they've added 6150000 accounts in the last 326 days. I'd rate it as sticky as MySpace. Probably more because the client gets installed and then it's in your face every time you reboot. You have to pay $8 to register your name (and become a developer to create content) and $20 to access the adult area. It has software rendering. It has built in RMT. The 'comment' functionality seems to mainly be used for 'answering machine' messages. There is no mail function beyond that which shunts all other communication to the IM client. 'Developers' can create animated actions & content but there is no scripting functionality ala SL beyond what 3DSMAX exports.

I'd describe it as an instanced version of SL (or a P2P version take your pick). WoW is to Guild Wars as SL is to IMVU functionality wise.

I dont know about this. I mean you would know more that I about tester feedback. But I remember hordes of testers screaming "ITS NOT READY". As release date speculation got more and more, all the testers where saying, "This wont release for 6 months at least, there are still tons of bugs and issues", then the game released like 2 weeks later.

I think that's what he's saying. Everyone was positive, giving feedback, and pretty happy there'd be a good game there once all the crap was ironed out. Then SOE announced "We're releasing in a week" and everyone started screaming because it wasn't ready. Which it wasn't. I don't think that game's ever been out of beta.

Yeah, I was in the closed beta. When I was playing, I could see how it could be fun, once they ironed things out and such....

Then it released about 9 months earlier than it really should have. All I could do was laugh.

My apologies for not reading the whole thread. I just wanted to chime in that the Eve devs are planning to allow players to swear allegiance to one of the NPC empires and fight to expand that empire's territory. Here are some links discussing the system:
http://mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?gameId=14&setView=features&loadFeature=107&bhcp=1
http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/indevelopment.asp

It is currently vaporware, true, but I judge the odds are quite good that they'll have a system in place next December.

Err, wrong thread? Or are you stumping to grow the Corp while you guys discuss where to move? :)

dwindlehop won at the thread derail. I am beaten.

WTF.  Don't do that.

Damn. It is clearly The One, that which we all knew was coming...except it's here. I'm surprised I'm just now hearing about this imminent dethroning of WoW. I'd try it out, but that "in your face every time you reboot" makes me want to vomit.

MORE HYPOTHETICAL YEY: If it had combat, quests, and PvP, would it still have appeal?

I believe his ratio of 2x is closer to the truth than your guess of 4x is. I know how much it cost to develop and to launch WoW and while it is a very large number, if you take into account that that number includes the cost of setting up their server infrastructure in the US and Korea (and possibly Europe as well, I'm not sure on that point) the "development" cost ratio is much closer to 2x than the 4x you are guessing. As a point of comparison The9 said in their recent conference call that they just spent 5 million US dollars building out their newest cluster of 40 realms so deploying a game as popular as WoW was even at launch requires some serious change, and The9's costs don't include the initial data center setup since they had 6 other clusters running plus their labor costs are *a lot* lower though the hardware costs are the same.

All the costs I've seen estimated for EQ 2 are the "development costs" and don't suggest that they include the infrastructure costs. However the WoW estimates do include the infrastructure costs. That means if you subtract out a server infrastructure cost estimate for WoW and compare the remaining costs the ratio is closer to 2x than 4x. E.g. let's say the development cost of EQ2 was $20 million and the WoW development + infrastructure cost was $80 million (which is way too high but we'll go with it for this example). If you subtract out, say, $20 million for the initial servers and data centers setup (I'm throwing Europe in there as well which may be wrong) you get $60 million compared to $20 million which is a 3 to 1 ratio and given that the $80 million estimate is much too high you get closer to the 2 to 1 estimate.

Either back when I was at EQ2 Stratics or in a CGW mag review at that time (2003 time frame), SOE mentioned in an interview that they budgeted $25mil for EQ2. They built a new graphics engine for it, and a lot of the Station Exchange stuff didn't exist yet, so I imagine that cut into it as it would WoW and others.

Question regarding the development costs of WoW vs EQ2...

Which game was immediately available to the most countries at launch?  It would seem to me, to get the most accurate development cost comparison, it would be best to discount the costs associated with a BIGGER launch that WoW possibly had. 

I guess my question is:  How much more did Blizzard spend on WoW than say, SOE did for EQ2, to make the game ITSELF.  To me, the extra "development" costs that Blizzard spent to make the game more available at launch in more countries (IF that is the case) are void.

WoW launched in South Korea and North America at the same time and Europe two months later. EQ 2 launched in NA and Europe at the same time.

Dude, I was totally on topic n replies ago. My point was some developers had a game design for PvE content that is not instanced, not canned, and allows the player to make meaningful decisions and actions in the game's plot --- support the Amarr empire's slavers or fight for the scrappy but outnumberered Matari. The caveat is that it iis still just a dream in CCP's collective head.

I doubt it will ever have that kind of thing. It's coming from an internet company not a game company. It really has nothing to do with WoW either. The demographic is entirely different and it isn't subscription based.

Soooooo.....WoW had a bigger launch than EQ2, yes? 

I don't have the numbers anymore but I'm pretty sure WoW launched with more servers than EQ 2 did.

OK.  That being said.

Throwing out that cost (a bigger launch), how much more did Blizzard spend than SOE to make the GAME.  The polished, working GAME.

Like I said above I believe that Blizzard spent about twice what SOE spent on EQ 2 developing just the game part. 4x is way off unless Raph is claiming that the $20 - $25 million bandied about for EQ 2 includes all the costs for the game (development, marketing, server infrastruture, etc.) putting the actual development costs closer to $10 - $15 million.

I think you just made my point.

:)

Yeah, Morat, I believe that Ironwood was saying "Find a bunch of sarcastic assholes who have been playing games since fucking Pong. They might not have jack shit in common with your target audience, but they're not really going to hold back either" as well.  He just reckoned that it might not be the closure Raph was looking for.  Let's face it, if Bartle and Trubshaw had knocked together an alpha of MUD and, upon excitedly roaming the corridors of Essex University for someone to show it off to, had stumbled upon proto-Sinij and ur-WUA, then the history of MMOs might have been a lot shorter.

Raph, I'd whole-heartedly recommend that you do fly some starry-eyed beta-testers to your fortress of solitude for a super-sneak-peak at the putative HAM simulator, then ask them what they think.  They'll be happy.  You'll be happy.  F13 won't be happy, but then hey, what were the odds?

Awesome line.

Raph's a big boy. He can handle it. And frankly, he'd probably find impressing the jaded forum monkeys a challenge.

Bigger "tech":
Hard to compare the two though on that level. WoW's server architecture is probably pretty different from EQ2's, and then there's the question of how many player accounts can be supported per server (and then concurrency).

Bigger "success":
WoW launched in more territories and way more quickly ramped up into other ones throughout 2005. They hit 1.5mil subscribers (http://www.worldofwar.net/pressdesk/170305.php) four months after launch.

Numbers?  Bah!  WoW is still doomed.  On some level.  Some mysterious level.  Where money hats are not desired, but rather, anti-money hats.  And my horde of cyborgs shred humanity on their titanium claws... <trails off>

Where was I?  Oh, right, EQ2 and WoW, different and not better or worse.

What I was getting at, in my own particular way was this:

Blizzard spent XX million dollars developing the GAME (WoW).
SOE spent XX million dollars developing the GAME (EQ2).

The GAME being full of content from 1-60, WORKING classes, WORKING quests, WORKING content areas, etc.  In my mind (however warped it might be), to consider the costs associated with server ramp up for WoW versus EQ2 is a mistake.   More than anything, I wanted to know the cost to make the game itself (and the level of "polish" the game itself had versus the other).

I think you should take all of the information you have gathered on the startup costs of MMoGs and put together a chart. Put it on your own website and you might become famous for it or something.


 :wink:

Yea, figured something like that. Trouble is, those are pretty well kept secrets. It's sort of a competitive edge that companies have to hold onto. I would imagine it'd be easier to get info from SOE on this, because they make games themselves and provide services to enable others to make games. Blizzard, on the other hand, is way more vertically oriented. They ARE the game, AND the tech, AND the profit center. No real reason for them to bother telling anyone.

It's anyone's guess really.

WISE FWOM YOUW GWAVE!!!!!

http://www.primotechnology.com/2007/10/19/biowares-upcoming-mmo-based-in-kotor-universe/

"A source close to BioWare confirmed to us today that the studio’s upcoming untitled massively-multiplayer online RPG will be centered around the Star Wars universe, specifically that of Knights of the Old Republic, which the developer released in 2003. The game garnered critical acclaim and spawned a less-popular sequel, released by Obsidian two years later.

The game is being developed by the company’s Austin studio, formed in 2006 and headed by BioWare Creative Director James Ohlen, whose past credits include the first KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur Gate’s I and II.

This is not the first Star Wars-related MMORPG: Star Wars Galaxies debuted in the summer of 2003, followed by several expansions. It was generally well-received by fans and critics, but subscriber numbers plunged and never recovered after a controversial gameplay update in 2005. It’s estimated that the game now has fewer than 100,000 subscribers and less than 20,000 active players.

It’s currently unknown whether or not EA, which acquired BioWare last week, will act as publisher for this title, or if the studio had a previous arrangement with another publisher."


Necro post and a reference to the game that shall not be named. I like writing checks my post count cant cash.

Obvious game is obvious.

Eh pretty much. Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, film at 11.

I'm feeling twinges of excitement over the possibilities. I feel dirty and ashamed.

They did this just to screw over schild's no SWG discussion idea :-P.  Now SWG can be validly brought up in dozens of threads that will be created from now until well after launch KotORO.

A KotOR-based MMOG COULD be good. Or it could suck because it's an MMOG and the developers don't go far enough outside the diku comfort zone to be interesting. Without more information about the game itself, there's no way to know.

Think this will have twitch combat?   :dead_horse:

Sure we can know.  It will be DIKU and set 4000 years before the movies.  Raids on krayt dragon nests.  Bounty Hunters will be balanced with Jedi, world turns, etc.

You make sad pandas out of us all.

Does LucasArts still have to give permission for all things SW?

Yeah but I'm fairly certain it's just IP/lore and standards stuff. Making sure Exar Kun isn't a degenerate porn conossieur with a fondness for underage Jawas, etc..

I have a different conspiracy theory, I think they paid schild off to squash the anti star wars mmog feelings in an attempt to pave the way for better feeling in regards to their new SW mmog.  I will know I am right once I start seeing adsense replaced by Bioware/SWMMOG ads.

This has been going on for so long I remain skeptical. I don't get all hot over "A source close to..." crap anymore. It's official or not. And that's then followed by it's on my hard drive or it's not.

I think the first step, if they do a fantasy MMO, will be not to copy Diku but go with a more City of Heroes approach, including no loot, power lists, and armor and such being designed at character creation. But faster XP.

Maybe.  I envision a D20 system, just like KotOR, including the ability to pause the game.  That would be a hoot.

Obvious or not, I do believe I just gooed upon reading this. This is not good, as I am still at work.

lol I hope your Globally Unique Identifier didn't messup your keyboard or anything.

KOTOR MMO sounds promising, but with EA running the show it's still an even bet this will get canceled before it launches.

I refuse to get excited about any games until I get into the beta, and not a moment before (and almost assuredly not even then...  :cry:  ).

As I have said before, I'm a huge fan of Bioware and if anyone can get Star Wars right its them.

I hope like hell I get in the beta!

I don't have a ton of faith in the Bioware + SW MMOG + EA = teh win but I would love to beta this just for the opportunity of being able to waltz down the street and park my ass in front of the bioware austin offices with a big ass picket sign if the occassion calls for it. 

Guys.

Bioware Austin isn't Bioware.

It's a rogue gallery of MMORPG developers.

They're lucky to even have the name Bioware attached to it. No offense to them, but the tiers just don't match up. It's the reality of it. It's like comparing UFO and Namco. It's just a silly thing to expect top quality.

But hey, maybe they can prove me wrong (this is not likely, at all).

They still have James Ohlen down there don't they?

At least they can fall back on EA's long track record of success in the genre.

You know, everyone says this now but when you stupid SW fanfucks are spewing out 90 page threads about how you were azzraped by some PR guy who promised you this that and the other 4 years from now I'm going to be pretty pissed off that nobody remembers how obviously bad this whole thing was going to be.

I hope they get Madden and the dude who does the great Jim Rome impression to do voiceovers for the game.

That'd be phe -- nomenal.

Dammit, I was burnt out from pre-beta SWG and vowed NEVER to get excited by a Star Wars game again.  Why, the instant I saw this thread today, did I have an overwhelming urge to camp their forums and enter the beta?  I now have much more sympathy for recovering crack addicts.

Sorry to state the obvious, but a KOTOR MMO isn't the KOTOR single player game. There will be no plot twists, because there will be no plot.

But anyway: yeah, a CoH/V-style game would work much better than a SWG-style game set 4000 years earlier. Oh, and any bet for which console it will appear on? I'd have to say the Xbox 360 at this point.

On the plus side, at least lore-wise it will be reasonable when everyone rolls a jedi.

Eh, I could see them doing this well.  They would have a pretty free reign with the IP.  They could have the way you run through quests in game effect your dark side/light side points, which in turn controls your character abilities.  So they could actually make the quests themsevles have an impact on how your character advances and what skills/weapons/powers he can use.  This, with a ton of well written quests, with multiple ways to complete, which effect other quests you get down the road, I could see making questing/story telling interesting in an MMO.

Or they could fuck it up.  But hey, the idea of what I just mentioned actually intrigues me, if they go that route.

Not going to happen.

RESKIN PLANETSIDE.  MAKE THIS A BETTER PLANETSIDE.  THIS IS WHAT JESUS WANTS.

The timing is indeed delicious.

If it's set in the KOTOR timeline and I can be a Sith, I will play this for at least three months no matter what else is wrong with it.  I will sit around thinking up cool-sounding Sith names for entirely too long, and write up long rambling RP backstories to go with them.  I won't be able to help myself.

This game will suck. Just repeat it over and over if you start getting excited. This game will suck. This game will suck.

Faction wars. And you can change faction from Light to Dark.

Yes.

Also, Damion Schubert is combat systems lead, which gives me complete confidence that the bread and butter, moment-to-moment gameplay Will Not Suck. He's always been the "build the foundation properly" guy. If you don't grok why, you haven't been reading his blog.

Obligatory Disclaimer: I can't comment on any rumors. Sorry.

Actually this just validated his decision. Now SW:G really is the old Star Wars MMOG.

Isn't Gordon Walton at Bioware Austin too?

I seem to recall from the press releases when Bioware Austin was first announced that both he and Richard Vogel ended up there.

I'm not going to cream my jeans yet but this exciting news. Just because some all of you have had your dicks stepped on in the past doesn't mean this game won't be three layer cake.

I'm just kinda relieved that the specualtion is finally over.

... and if KotoRO turns out to be a Wii-exclusive, we'll have the amusing site of schild ejaculating blood all over the forums.

Seriously though, I hearby nominate that the new BioWare MMO be called KotoRO, regardless of what it actually turns out to me. That name is awesome.

"Kotoro angry! Kotoro SMASH!"

I think we all know the real story behind the cake's factuality around here, mister.

I just hope Kotoro isn't mediocre.  I hope it's either awesome or a total fucking trainwreck.  If it's awesome, then I get a Star Wars MMO which is awesome.  Win.  If it's a total fucking trainwreck, we can go for a thousand-page thread this time.  Also win.

Putting assassin droids in would be a good step in the direction of awesome.

Concurrance: That would certainly improve matters, meatbag.

"Kotoro wins!  Flawless victory!"

I must strive to remain rational.  I must remember that even though KOTOR was awesome, any hypothetical BioWare MMO would be a completely different project.  I must remember how much I hate most MMO games.  I must remember how much I generally dislike the Star Wars EU material.  I must remember that this all could very well be nothing but hype and rumor.  I must...

FUCK JUST LET ME BE A SITH AND HAVE A RED LIGHTSABER AND LIGHTING AND PWN PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ!!!1!!

...I must strive to remain rational.

Wank.

Each day I see how happy the cake makes all of you and I hope that KOTORO can do the same.
Do you mean playing as one? 'Cus that would be awesome.

Just want to second the idea of actually PLAYING as droids.  I've never seen why not.

Limited abilities. I mean, a droid would only have access to some abilities, probably needing to be bound to hotkeys, and would have very limited movement probably only in a two dimensional space. Droids would only be able to act or react based on dice-roll-type mechanics, and would likely need to gain some progressive award that eventually let them download/install/"learn" new code/abilities or some such. How fun would that be?!

Oh, wait....

I laughed.  I cried.

Yarp.

I would Kill for it to be on the Wii. Kill! Then I could ignore it completely.


Anyone can write anything on a blog.

It's much more telling to read his game credits:
Games Credited

    Shadowbane (2003), Ubi Soft Entertainment Software
    The Sims: Online (2002), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Meridian 59 (1996), 3DO Company, The

Look, I'm not going out of my way to knock the guy or Bioware here.

The writing is on the wall.

(http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/4660/asset6300hlad4.jpg)

Challenge Everything.
Get in the Game.

Things they haven't done since my balls dropped.

If there was ever a "prove me wrong" situation. This is it.

The story line won't be as epic since the universe won't really be revolving around your character but I'm certain it will have one continuous plot, sort of like LotRO.  It will also have some of the best kill X number of spiders and delivery quests ever invented!  The only reason I'm trying to contain my excitement is because I know it is years away.  I have wanted a good sci-fi MMO since forever.

It will be glorious.

At least it'll make more sense to have Jedis running around everywhere.

What about spacecraft? Any piloting in KOTOR?

(http://membres.lycos.fr/marsetsf/tr/quato_29.jpg)
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/Goro_Mortal_Kombat.PNG)

I think it's a good thing.  People saying it's gonna suck before it's even technically announced crack me up though.

At the least I think it's interesting to see the choices game devs make so we can tear them apart or cheer them.

Why?

What do you know about the game's lineage?

Are you saying I'm not qualified to take a laser accurate guess at quality based on heritage?

It will be as easy as the prediction for the outcome of Britney and KFed's kids.

What possible measure exists to gauge accuracy? Nothing. The guesses floating around now are little different from a year ago pretty much because we know no more now than we did then.

It's like blaming the entirety of Blizzard for SC:Ghost.

I click the last page page of this thread, read a whole lot of crap about a KotORO, I'm like "woot", then start reading the thread backwards and find it it's just another fucking rumor. Hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! :hello_thar:

What the hell are you talking about?

Swinging Ape != SC:Ghost. Sure, I could blame Blizzard. But I wouldn't do that, BECAUSE I KNOW BETTER.

Bioware Austin != Bioware. It = a bunch of ex UO/UO2/SWG/Shadowbane/SimsOnline/Turbine/ IT'S A REGULAR FUCKING MMOG COMPANY MAKING A REGULAR FUCKING MMOG.

IT'S EXACTLY HOW YOU GAUGE SHIT. BY THE LEVEL OF SUCKITUDE INHERENT IN INDUSTRY NEPOTISM.

You forget that he actually likes most of these games.

With a list like that, surely they'll run out of shit not to do eventually.

They've got the Baldur's Gate/KotOR guy designing the game itself, I'm just going to assume all the other "ex UO/UO2/SWG/Shadowbane/SimsOnline/Turbine" people are there to implement his design.  I don't see the problem with having an SWG dev on the team so long as he's just there to implement the auction house system and isn't proposing HAM mkII.  It would be nice if he also piped up with a "we tried that in SWG and it was a huge disaster" when appropriate...

The genre, not most of these games :) I draw a thick line between games that are interesting and the relatively few games I actually want to play.

My own opinion of BW Austin is about the same, based mostly on the "the world is WoW so we must be like it too" talk they gave at AGC 2006. I've seen nothing mentioned since from them nor anyone "close to" them that compels a change in that opinion. But at the same time, that's neither a new opinion nor one capable of being changed. That's what I was challenging schild on. Not the opinion itself. There's simply nothing worth getting excited about either way because our net knowledge gain is zero.

See Darniaq, you think they're making something.

Unlike Bioware, the one we know and used to love, Bioware Austin is a rogue's gallery that has to prove their worth and ability to MAKE A WORKING TITLE PERIOD.

I could give a rat's ass what their "plans" are.

That would make the design meetings run 24x7 for months.

That's a good point. I actually did think they were making something. But now I'm not sure if it's a Darkfall-making-something (vapor), Wish-making-something (barely playable but canned), Gods & Heroes--making-something (very far along but canned) or Something-that'll-launch-making something (other).

Their plans are to make an mmo. That's enough to judge it already.

As for the BGS/Kotor guy...y'know... The biggest strength of those games was the writing, world changing multiple choice shit, and npc interaction (it sure as fuck wasn't the combat or gameplay) --- which is also kind of the antithesis of a massively multiplayer game. Even if they tried to implement it, it won't and can't be the same in a big social space, therefore the BGS and Kotor legacy kind of means jack and shit.

Let's face it, the KOTOR single-player game translated to multi-player co-op style would still be one billion times more fun than SWG in any of its incarnations, even if the graphics engine wasn't updated and there were "Kill 10 krayts" missions galore.

I disagree. Kotor wasn't a fun game so much as it was a fun story. The game sucked. Just as bad as SWG.

Yeah, I hated the game in places.  But I kinda wanted to know what happened, so persisted.  I suppose I wanted to experience what happened, really, since spoilers were available.

I liked the gameplay. Tedious in some places, like most RPG's, but still fun. And tons more fun than most MMOG combat.

I think they are making something, but I can't say how far they will get.  My guess is they will get to release.  I figure the design is in the bag but the implementation could be OK or crap.

Design?  World of the Old Republic, of course.  Two factions, separate planets, grind your faction, PVP on battlefields, everyone is a Jedi or Sith.  No space combat.  But who knows, really?  Even this KotOR stuff is unverified.

why no space combat?  may as well include some eve style play, star wars as an eve type space/trading sim sounds like more fun than a game full of jedi/sith wannabi's. 

Fuck that noise.

WoW with lightsabers = TAKE MY MONEY PLEASE
EVE with Star Destroyers = Who gives a shit?

Because all of the JtL people are at Spacetime Studios?  Maaaaaaaybe they will put it in there, but I don't think it's a design priority.  You could do EVE of the Old Republic well or World of the Old Republic well, but not both together.  This is all guesswork since I don't have any inside info.  I suppose it is possible, however, since all of these people live in Austin and some of them are even married to each other... which is why schild says the things he says.  It is likely it will be Yet Another MOG from the people who brought us UO and SWG.  I'm hoping it won't but I only have history as a guide.

Also see WUA's comment.

To hell with both lightsabers and Eve.

zomg it has 2 b star wars becaz shild denned the old swg threads teh day b4!!!1111!!eleventy!!  he noes and he isnt telling us!!!!

I get what Schild is saying, but are we really at the point of pattern of failure here? I mean, how many successful, quality MMO's are out there? WoW and... what?

If somebody wants to make a quality MMO, who the hell do they hire? I mean there's only so many ex-WoW developers to go around. Would it be better if they brought in some wet-behind-the ears interns whose names aren't attached to games that have been less than stellar but also don't have the first clue of the pitfalls and logistics?
 

I also really like KOTOR's gameplay. So yeah, I would love to see it translated to MMO format.

I'm pretty sure hiring people who have never worked on a MOG before is not the best idea ever, if you are planning on being a HUGE SUCCESS.  You are right in that the medium is pretty young and getting together a group that actually knows what they are doing is pretty fucking hard, but that's why I say what I do.  Something super-awesome will come out one day.  Maybe it's this Biowaustin thing, especially since a lot of them have probably worked on a MOG before.  /shrug

Also, this isn't going to be D20 Online.  Read Ubiq's blog or a recap of his AGC'07 talk and it should be apparent that he's working within the established MOG framework we have all grown to love since we watched Aradune dance around outside Freeport.

I know he's been reading this thread, so maybe he will correct me.  That would be neat.

Hit flurry.
Mob dies.
Listen to pre-recorded speech.
Repeat.

Ok, there are a few interesting battles prior to becoming a jedi, but honestly, KotoR lives or dies by the story and the conversation sequences. Translating them to a MMOG format and delivering sufficient content for extended subscription would be a hell of a job.

Oh, and put me down in the 'include space combat plz' column.

As of right now it is SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS since anyone released a passable space combat game.

And it's a little over eight years, or two thousand nine hundred and forty five days since the last good one.


It's as if someone stood up on 30th September 2000 and said, 'yep, take the rest of your life off boys, we've finished this genre, no need to do anything else ever again'.

Schild, I'm genuinely curious so don't freak out, but how did a guy like you even end up playing... uh... that other Star Wars MMO... in the first place?  I'm just curious because you dismiss the idea of a hypothetical KOTORO being any good so quickly, and yet you didn't catch the shit-stink coming from the old game that even I was able to smell.

I like crafting.

I'm pretty sure I've been pretty clear on this.

Also, I had a shitload of free time and a roommate that would play it with me in college.

Whatever Biowaustin makes will have crafting.  Of some sort.

someone just digest this 11 pages and interview for me?  we know what they're doing or not?

Umm k name both games please, because I don't have them it seems and my joystick is lonely.   Last space combat game I bought was X-Wing Alliance.. which is OK, but it's no TIE Fighter.

Also, even as big a Star Wars fan as I am, I'm forced by SW Game history to agree with the haters in this thread.  There have been far, far more flops than gems and the bulk have been this side of the LucasArts-as-dev days.  Eldaec makes a very good point about how combat in KoTOR actually ran.  It was the story and the characters that made the game, not the combat or the shinez.  Something that will not make it into the game outside of a few character interactions, or perhaps some fantastic quest text you'll all be bitching about how derivative of game xyz it was 3-6 months after release.

  The other point I'd like to state is: so many of you all fucking bitch about DIKU this and DIKU that.. but KoTOR is a D20 game.  The fucking GRAND-NEPHEW of the DIKU format via daddy AD&D, yet here you are asking for another game to use it.   It's incredibly fucking amusing.

Last decent games I can remember in the genre are the Colony Wars games on the PS1.

Not space combat, but anyone who liked Wing Commander would like the Ace Combat games. Same formula pretty much.

One of them has got to be Freespace 2. The timeframe fits, and it was the last decent space combat sim I've played. If not for how ratched it was to the ground game and DIKU, JTL (SWG) could have applied too. That was much more recent.

Also, I hear he drowns puppies.

I know very little about the games lineage, by which I am guessing you mean who is working on it?  I read the Bioware talk on 1up (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155486) and from that I gather that Gordon Walton and James Ohlen are working on it among others of course.  Wiki tells me Walton worked on SWG, and Ohlen was lead director of KotOR and Baldurs Gate II.  I've played all 3 games and loved 2 of the 3, SWG never got me hooked.

So beyond that you can go ahead and learn me why Bioware Austin automatically means a suck game, I'm curious to know.

I'm not saying you are or are not qualified, no idea.  I do know that it's honestly funny to me to hear people go on about how EA means a failed game.  I'm looking at The Orange Box and it has a little EA thingy on it.  Or because so and so is involved in it the game will therefore blow.  I can understand it if you're talking about a very few individuals but just because some dude worked on a game you hated doesnt mean everything he touches will suck.

I think the fact you compare drowning puppies to working on those games speaks for itself.

Publisher.


Not that I'm an EA hater (skate is cool), but it needs to be said anyhow.

If the wishes and tears of gaming fanbois can make something happen, then yes, KotoRO is coming out.

Otherwise: still a rumour.

Moby Games doesn't have a "trivia and other obscura" section. But I'll look into adding that.

At any rate, surely BioWare had their fill of the pains of working with LA during KOTOR, and wouldn't want to go down that road again.  Not to mention Gordon Walton and the other exSWG devs they have working on it and their prior experiences with LA.  Granted, I'm merely tossing this out there and have no idea what goes on inside their respective melons, but I've never heard (privately) of any positive working experience with LA (layers and layers of beaurocratic bullshit to get the smallest thing even 'fixed').

Besides, who woud really want to carry the baggage of thousands of exSWG players constantly yelling "Back in SWG, we did it this way and it was soooo much better"?  I'll concede that every dev thinks that their design documents they've been working on since they were kneehigh to a grasshopper is THE set of design documents to rule them all and can fix every ill that fates an MMO and draw in hundreds of thousands of millions of subscribers.

Was the development of KOTOR reputed to be painful in that way?  I mean, it was a very successful game and presumably made them some nice money.  I don't really see it as a reason for BioWare to go "Let's not do THAT again!" unless there was some kind of epic agony involved.

Well, they didn't do it again actually.... But that has more to do with them wanting to spend more time creating original properties outside of D&D and Star Wars. I'm not sure what Snakecharmer is talking about. I've heard them say nothing but good things about Lucas Arts. That they didn't mind the approval process because they were huge star wars geeks themselves. They had resident designers who were already obsessive about that stuff to begin with.

D20 some major differences from the standard MMO DIKU format.  Most importantly, AD&D and D20 have never really had any form of agro.  Battles tend to be more tactical because you can't guarantee enemies will attack the character with the best armor and hitpoints by spamming various taunts and agro grabbing abilities, so you have to come up with other means of keeping everyone safe (either via distance, use of terrain, protective spells, healing potions/medpacks, etc...).

Of course they could always change it to make it more like typical MMO combat, but the fact remains that one could make a D20 MMO that doesn't play like most DIKU's.

Merusk had a certain point.  But given how poorly the "virtual world" version of a Star Wars MMO played out, I'm willing to tolerate some Diku this time around.

I don't think Merusk's comparison of D20 and Diku had any sort of point at all, but then I've also never liked the way the Diku label gets thrown around either, as it doesn't really have much of anything to do with most of the problems people have with most MMO's.

Straight-out DIKU has no aggro whatsoever. It was very much like a single player RPG where the 'closest' got attacked, except 'closest' in a DIKU meant the person first into the room.  Aggro is an EQ artifact that has been added-in to the mix due to the 3d nature of the game and the inability for mobs to behave intelligently otherwise.

It's a computer game, not a p&p run by a DM, you're going to have some abstraction.

Also, quit hiding behind the strawman.  Folks who would wail and gnash-teeth over any other game coming out with the same mechanics - REGARLESS of what you want to label them as - are getting tight in the shorts over it.  It's still fucking amusing.

I want to know if Ubiq actually enjoys drowning puppies or if he is just doing it for his art?

I can't remember if the base Diku code had it but I played on plenty of Diku-derived MUDs that had a taunt command.

Yah understood, valid point but we dont know what EA is going to do with Bioware.  I can see being skeptical but to call out the sky is falling is a bit much imo.  When we hear EA is putting it's mitts into the game and mucking around then fine.

They also had hate lists, and mobs changing target based on them. I'm also unsure if these were in straight DIKUs. I played mostly SMAUGs, so maybe they were a feature of that code base, but certainly not an invention of EQ.

We had two SWG devs in our guild in the early days of SWG, and I got to be pretty good friends with them during the course of about 6-9 months.  Publicly, they'd always say "it's a fantastic thing working with LA yadda yadda yadda".  Privately, they'd mentioned on more than one occasion how much they hated it.  One of them was fairly high up on the dev food chain.  The other was 'just' a coder/programmer.  Later on, we had several former SOE/SWG people in different other betas that we'd gotten into.  Naturally, at times, the convo switched to SWG. 

Naturally, publicly they're going to be putting on the window dressing for PR purposes.

The above statement is why people work with LA.  If some studio managed to make a Star Wars MOG that wasn't actually a pile of shit sans peanuts, they would end up lighting cigars with $100 bills earned from the eager wallets of people who just can't help themselves.  It's great to attempt innovation and good gameplay whatnot, but let's be honest here: if someone reskinned EQ1 with a Star Wars theme, they would would have lots of return for minimal investment.  Camping the Ewok highway in North Tatooine?  It's gold, Jerry!

shit half the work is already done, after all EQ already had light sabers!

I'd submit that 85% of the work is done, actually, assuming you would spend a large amount of time on the reskin.

I would definitely pay a monthly fee to murder Ewoks all the live long day.

If you want to do some kind of early jedi-heavy SW game, the model should really be City of Heroes.

oops, for clarification I was stating that 50% of the reskin work is already done due to there being light sabers already in game.

I remember a lot of people espousing that view in the SWG beta days.

Until they opened up Endor for the first time. Then it was like viet nam vets having flashbacks as they sat in cantinas in Eisley and Coronet and Tatooine, HAM bars black and shivering and shouting, "They're in the trees man! Wicket's in the trees!"

Those little bastards were deadly and they swarmed like the bugs from Starship Troopers.

Which is one of the reasons I think the phrase Diku gets tossed around too much.  The problems people have with most MMO's (grind, holy trinity which is largely a result of the agro system, raiding, hot key/autoattack combat, etc...) have very little to do with anything inherent to Diku.



It's not a strawman.  You whole point had nothing to do with similarities between Diku and D20 (the only similarity being that they're both RPG systems).  Essentially your post was "lol you guys hate MMO's and you're looking forward to an MMO", and I think that's a fucking retarded attitude.

Actually, it wasn't the whole genre, just the part people under "DIKU".

There's really no arguing what type of game most people here like though. The proof is in the traffic. Doesn't mean we can't want more either, as there's always room for improvement. People who don't want DIKU at all have slim pickings, or aren't here at all.

Say hello to my little (Frenzied Graul) friend...

At the end of the day, so long as pistol damage doesn't stack with rifle damage, the game will be awesome.


That's the true spirit of Star Wars.

At the risk of repeating myself, and for the last time (today):

PLANETSIDE RESKINNED AND BETTER. PLZ. 

Why can't everyone see this?

You're so not getting planetside reskinned and better.

/chuckle

You won't get louder trumpets of support for SW-skinned PS than you would from Sky and I. But that ship has sailed. The best battles are generally not Braveheart-style 500 on 500  zerg rushes, but rather the 24 v 24 or 36 x 36 variety, maybe 64 x 64 if the map is right.

You don't need a persistent world for that. You don't need a monthly fee for that. And you certainly don't need to license an IP for that.

So we gots the best big-battles we're gonna get. They're just not in this genre. And that's fine because the UI for "twitch" generally devolves to some passably excusable thing anyway, where the idea of what it could maybe be someday is more interesting than what actually installs.

Didn't see this posted yet:

Bioware says, "It's just a rumour. Or is it? BWAHAHAHA!". (http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/829/829184p1.html)

It's time for f13 to send in the covert ops, Sneakers-style.

... or to just abduct a group of Bioware employees, make an "example" of one, then start asking questions about what they are hiding. They'll talk. Eventually, everyone talks.

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2007/20071024.jpg)

I have to agree. Any sort of DIKU/D20 type model just won't work. Either Planetside:SW edition or CoH type hero/Jedi land or fuck it. Star Wars games are almost as cursed as Star Trek games. Make it count. Vader pic? Oh no, wait...

Why?

I think the problem is everyone has their own ideas of what a Star Wars MMORPG should be. Some people think it should be like Battlefront, others like KOTOR, others like X-Wing Versus TIE-Fighter, and others, well, like SWG done right.

Why? Because everyone has an aspect of Star Wars they really want to play -- epic Light/Dark Jedi battles, epic piloting, serious roleplaying, just fucking living in the IP. It's why IP based games rarely do well. You can't please everyone, and the bigger the IP the more picky the fans are. And when your fans want 5 mutually exclusive things, what the hell do you do?

I can say this: it won't be virtual world, it won't be space-sim, and it probably won't be twitchy or Planetside like. It'll be some D20 DIKU variant, because that's what MMORPG makers know works. Which is kind of sad, as frankly people would be better off (in the face of WoW) offering something different.

I'm pretty sure he destroyed Christmas.

It ain't Star Wars / KOTOR.

You can't say that unless you are allowed to say what it is. Even when Trippy does that he has to back it up :)

:hands over ears: mblambalmblambalmbalmbalmbalmbalmbalmbalmbalbmalbmalbmalbmalmbalmbalmbalmblambal

What? No, sorry, still can't hear you

mblamblambalmbalmbalbmalbmalbmalmbalmbalmbalbmalbmalbmalbmalbmal

It's not?

Both things are required to be hard enough to develop PVP systems.

The tears of a million internet hopefuls disagree. They all know that KotoRO would be the best game evah, solve the Israel / Palestine crisis and find the real killers on behalf of OJ.

Actually...I'd prefer no KOTORO because that'd leave a sliver of hope for a KOTOR 3 single-player RPG.

Exactly. Wtf is wrong with the rest of you anyways? An MMO..? Sheesh

Pretty much. Give me a fluid combat system that doesn't feel like WoW underwater plus Star Wars/KOTOR lore and I would gladly submit monthly moneyhats to our EA overlords, Diku or no Diku. And I don't even have any SW costumes in my closet.

It'll be Old Republic set Star Wars, whatever the title ends up being.

What exactly is it about Bioware, Kotor, RPG's, or the Austin MMO development world that would make you think this would have "a fluid combat system"?

Give me one good even remotely plausable reason as to why BioWare would make a Star Wars (regardless of timeline, setting, etc) MMO?  And "why not?" can't be the answer.

Huh? Who said this was about reasons? What's wrong with just knowing what's going on?

What?

Noone knows whats going on, but I can think of a hundred reasons as to why it's NOT SW based, and not a single one why it IS.

I can think of one reason why it's Star Wars.

MONEY!

Seriously, Stars Wars Turd in a Box makes money, why not an MMOG?

Money?  People like money and the Star Wars franchise is a license to print it.  You are completely blinded by your SWG hate.

Edit: Beaten.

Seriously, here are a few reasons off the top of my head:
- We know it is a major IP.
- Bioware has been involved with Star Wars and Lucas Arts before.
- What else would they risk the massive amount of cash needed to start an MMO on?
- No KotOR 3, not even any plans to do it.  It was a huge success and the only reason they wouldn't be doing 3 is if it is the MMO.
- I'm guessing one of the main reasons they still haven't announced the IP is that SOE has some sort of exclusive agreement which hasn't expired yet.
- I doubt EA would have bought them if the IP is some huge let down.
- Common sense.

Awwww.  Beaten by two people.

 :sad_red_panda:

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2000/20001023h.jpg)

ALso, the whole reason this thread woke back up was media reports that it is star wars.

Not to rip on ya SnakeCharmer, but your statement made it sound like you know for sure it's not SW MMO. If it's really more a matter of strongly not believing, then, well, carry on :)

There's a million reasons for it to be or not to be based on some period of SW. I still don't care until someone says something officially. I'm more interested in that this is worth speculating about at all than in what the speculations themselves are about.

If I start up a website, does that make me media?

Further, if my new website says <whatever>, does that make it more or less as credible as anyone else?

No.

"Gaming media" is tossed around far too easily these days, and the lines defining it are just way to grey and blurry.  Who had heard of www.primotechnology.com before this?  Honestly?  Easiest way to generate hits to a 'gaming website' is to toss out rumors regarding high visibility projects.  No brainer.  BioWare's "we will not confirm nor deny" stance is doing nothing but generating publicity.  Same for Lucas Arts.  If they come out and say "No, it's not based on Star Wars", the interest automatically drops by a fairly significant margin, and possibly becomes negative (i.e. - damnit, another fantasy MMO. GG BioWare :( See ya!!) wanes.  And they don't want that.  So, yeah, they sit there and say "No comment" because it keeps the comments coming, no matter how wildly speculative.  It's GREAT free advertisement.  Everyone is praising BioWare as the one dev studio to rule them all, the one true hero that can 'do it right' with BioWare fanboism at its finest.  And I'm really with Schild on the "What makes anyone think BioWare can do it better than anyone else given the pedigree of people working on the project" outlook.  Other than Gordon Walton, who else there can truly be considered bringing a successful MMO to the market?  And to that point, what has Walton done that is so spectacular?  I'm a HUGE Walton fan, just because of his personality.  And all due respect to Schubert, but what has he done lately?  

Same tired people doing the same tired thing.

Other true(?) media outlets such as gamespot and what have you picked up on it and posted it because it (the zomg star wars kotor bioware mmo!! frenzy) generates hits.  It's the same thing.  It's all about publicity and bringing hits to a website.

/cynic

And DQ, no I don't take it as a rip.  It IS a matter of strongly believing that it isn't, along with the same speculation (however, polar opposite) of people saying that it IS a KOTOR/SW MMO.

The reactions of various folks seems to me more interesting than the rumor itself.

It's like a forum about romance novels having a ton of militant lesbians with Birkenstocks bitching they have men in them.

I hate to burst everyone's bubble but I now have confirmation from a reliable source that the title being worked on is:

Big Rigs Online

I completely agree.

I was one of the people cheering for the demise of old-style E3 mostly for this reason even more than the other one (that it had devolved to little more than an obnoxious anal retentive pandering to antiestablishment stereotypes). It's easy to call oneself a reporter, or a pundit, for just about anything these days. And that's fine really. We shouldn't all exist on the teet of info-dispensing profit centers because no matter who you are or where you're from, your bias is absolutely going to always come out anyway. Anyone should have a say.

But there's quantifiable and there's other. Prime standing by their "source" is little more than them not wanting to admit it was a rumour. They have no way of substantiating any of it. Real reporters* wouldn't have reported it unless it could be sustantiated in some capacity. Here again I really and truly don't care who you are. You can claim insight all over the place, but unless I see links, you're just more noise.

And I suffer from the same things. I know stuff. We all know stuff. But some of the stuff we know is based on sources we're not really allowed to talk about. It's always better just to not talk about it of course. But we're all human too :)

I'd have had more respect for Prime if they said something like "sorry, we can't substantiate nor provide info on how we learned this. We believe but understand if you do not. You'll just have to wait and see".

* And I'm not one of those people who only thinks print media has real reporters. "Reporting" is in your actions and your writing style, regardless of medium.

(http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/5536/raymondmmoro5.jpg)

I'd say I have a pretty good track record.

But hey, if you want to think it's NWN Worlds or something, go ahead.

There isn't a license on the planet besides Star Wars that could make Bioware worth $860M though.

Not to mention EA already has Spielberg in the bag.

Those last 2 things are unrelated, but ya know.

Edit: Without a set of forums, I don't know why Primotech exists.

I'm not slamming you in particular with that minirantwhateverthing, Schild.  I'd trust your opinion on the matter more than most. 


Would you agree or disagree that pulling the trigger on an IP like Star Wars is inherently riskier than fantasy clone 82347513?


They didn't pay 860 million for the MMO license.  Granted, dumber things have been done with money...Yeah, I know that's not what you mean. 


Why even bring up Spielberg?

If it were not Star Wars, I tend to think BioWare would come out and say "It's not Star Wars!"  At least if their PR machine is competent.  Otherwise they risk annoucing Jade Empire Online (or whatever) and having the dominant interweb/gamer/geek reaction be nothing but groans of diappointment.

This rumor is persistent and popular enough that it would merit serious dispelling if it weren't true.

I don't, for reasons stated above.  If they keep saying 'no comment', it keeps speculation.  It keeps people talking.  It keeps people talking positively about how well BioWare would do with it.  If they come out and say "We're not doing Star Wars", all those Star Wars fanbois like me vamoose.

They're smart in what they're doing.  They're riding a PR gravy train for as long as they can.

Playing my own devil's advocate here:

Let's say that it is Star Wars.  No comment is going to be made until shutdown is announced for SWG.  SWG currently has no plans beyond Chapter 8.  Publishes are taking longer and longer.  Conspiracy theory incoming...

Lucas Arts is instructing SOE to 'take their time' with publishes on SWG, and telling them when they can publish updates to the servers, because the BioWare Star Wars MMO isn't ready for public viewing/announcement.  Once KOTORMMO is ready to go public, LA will instruct SOE to issue a public statement regarding the impending shutdown of SWG, or at the very least, no more content or such.  It will be supported in an absolute minimal capacity (i.e. - just enough to keep it running) at best.

But I'm not playing a guessing game. :awesome_for_real:

Is it too early to start making posts like this on each page?


(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/195/511906866_df30ad8dc1.jpg?v=0)

This is the daftest thing in the thread.

One thing Star Wars has going for it is guaranteed profit. Even Star Wars games about wookie hairdressing make money.

Games with elves carry no such guarantee.

We have a forum for that.

The central point of this thread has become who's closest to knowing jack shit about what Bioware is working on  :-P

Just like I don't care who says what until there's a verifiable link, historical performance does not guarantee future success. Unless you're in the adsense traffic clickthrough business, being first with anything is far less important than being right. Being first happens every day.

But apparently not enough money.  Hence the thing that shall not be named.


OK. 

Edumacate me.  Convince me.

Why do you believe it's KOTOR or some variation thereof?

He's not going to tell you how he knows anything he may know.  If that were the case, it would already be in News or something.  Don't be thick.

BioWare Mystery Online was stated as launching in 2009 by their technical director in an interview. SOE and LA agreement expires in 2009.

LA has already said that SOE doesn't have an exclusive license to MMOs set in the Star Wars universe.

And you know the SOE / LA agreement goes poof in '09 how?

You show me yours first...

Bioware would be playing a dangerous game in pretending that KotorO might be what they are working on if they aren't. It's all well and good generating buzz, but that buzz is going to die faster than Micheal Richards in front of a black audience if KotorO isn't coming out.

1) Bioware gets tarnished with a "they treated us like suckers" response from the internet. Nerd rage ensues.

2) The non-KotorO MMO suffers in comparison to what KotorO "would have been".

3) Does Bioware really need this hype? They are Bioware. If Mass Effect does well (all signs point to yes at this stage), they don't need it. If Mass Effect flops, a non-KotorO announcement burns them even more.

If the Bioware MMO isn't KotorO, they need to stomp the rumour dead. Non-denial denials don't cut it. While it might seem like a good idea now, when everyone is talking about Bioware and how good they are, it could easily become a painful burning sensation that their new non-KotorO MMO can't ever scratch.

Edit: Comment got all screwed up..exactly right. If it isn't Star Wars then they are setting themselves up for immediate letdown.


Given that SWG was a bad game only marginally related to Star Wars and still did OK I'd say you'd have to be stupid to think SW is the riskier investment. History is full of SW games that sold way better than they should have. And it's full of fantasy games that bombed horribly.

I think SW is one of the few licenses that you can slap onto anything and honestly expect sales to measurably increase. We aren't talking the 7-Up "Cool Spot" logo here...

Also SW MMOs are a lot rarer than fantasy MMOs...

KOTOR gives me confidence that BioWare would make a better Star Wars MMO than SWG.  Not because I think any of it's design concepts lend themselves to online play, but simply because KOTOR showed me that BioWare knows what I want out of Star Wars.  They understand the IP.  Whatever they make, it's not going to be an economic sim with UO-style animal tamers.

Snake,

The devs of SWG have announced that chapter 9 will include the droid commander expertise, what else is in that chapter has not been anounced. Chapter 7 goes live next week, and the devs announced that they will push the space chapter 8 out by the Christmas holidays. SWG is far from dead.

There's no reason why SWG and KOTORO wouldn't be able to coexist. In a perfect world, I'm sure Lucas Arts would want them both to be running at the same time. If BioWare is releasing their game in 2009, the people at SWG have plenty of time to get their game were they might want it to be, wherever that might be.


Plus, anything outside of the original films is fair game. With that much freedom, the nit picking from fanboys shouldn't be so bad. BioWare has already proven that they have solid writers, so as long as the gameplay is fun, I'd say most people will actually be relieved to have an outlet besides SWG.

I do hope they don't just shitcan SWG the day KOTORO comes out.  I want to see the fighting between KOTORO fanboys and SWG community diehards.  I look forward to people trolling with images Darth Revan standing triumphant over the corpse of a wookie barber.

Take that shit to the Graveyard.  Don't try to sneak your SWG update garbage into here.

Fuck it.  As far as I'm concerned, it's Star Wars until proven otherwise.

/e dusts off his Star Wars fanboy hat

Old friend, I never thought I'd get to wear you again on these boards...

/e slaps it on his head and begins to drool vacuously

THIS GAME IS GONNA FUCKIN RULE.

You know, it's reassuring to know that there will always be at least one fanboi around who is several magnitudes more in to something than I am - to me looking sane by comparison.

I think the mods need to give him a stealth name change, WUA is instilled with more faith and belief than the pope.

Bioware having a good track record with Star Wars properties doesn't mean KOTORO would be good. It's certainly more encouraging than if the Darkfall guys or Turbine got the license. But it's an MMOG... chances that it will be a shitty, class-based Diku-y snorefest are pretty fucking high.

Bioware's name on the game DOES NOT MEAN IT WILL BE GOOD. Especially considering, as has been pointed out, it's Bioware Austin and not the guys responsible for KOTOR in the first place. It's a bunch of guys responsible for failed (in game design terms) MMOG's.

The only positive to take out of an announcement of a KOTOR-based Star Wars game is that the designers don't have to ass around with huge continuity problems, they don't have to worry about making Jedi rare and they don't have to use any known characters at all.

The reason I was looking forward to whatever game Bioware came out with was that they're the only game company I know of other than Blizzard with the reputation and the financial resources not to have to release before the game is done.

Now EA owns them so that confidence is gone. Oh well.

That and the fact that the use of "KOTOR" gives us some hope that they will try to make a game that appeals to KOTOR fans (i.e. they won't consciously attempt to make "Shadowbane in Space" or "UO In Space").

WoW with Star Wars skins would be more than OK with me.  Current-Bioware's-half-assed-version-of-WoW with Star Wars skins would be good enough for at least a whirl, possibly longer depending on how half-assed it is.

KOTOR would seem to lend itself well to WoW-style quest-oriented diku gameplay.  The game was ding-grats-lewt with some story.  A decent story for a video game, but hardly video Hamlet.  And, hell, the story of KOTOR II makes the story behind any generic lowbie "collect_[number] of [insert local animal]'s [skins/meats/fangs] so I can make [blankets/food/spears] for our local [children/elders/warriors]" quest look, if not like Hamlet, at least like a decent Law & Order episode.  And people still played that, proving to me that (ding-grats-loot) + ("vroom vroom" lightsaber sounds) + (hot jedi lovemommas) = winning game.

Bioware can provide the first two elements, and horny 45-year-old shut-ins will more than take care of the third, assuming the availabilty of appropriate character models.

Whether it was Hamlet or not, it was still a story.

Something which isn't going to happen in nearly the same way in an online game.

Not in the same way no, but FFXI and LotRO have both shown that you can have a story in an MMO.

Pics of the hot jedi lovemommas?  I'm curious how sad that is.

Well if they are doing a Star Wars MMO, they can WoWize it if they want, but they better not fucking stylize the artwork and avatars.  I do not want my toon looking like that Cartoon Network series.

Ok, Ill agree with that - we do not want Samurai Jack-Jedis.

I do.

Game should be based on star wars sock puppets.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v423/moon_custafer/knit_yoda.gif)

Nobody has tried that yet.


Lack of sock puppet avatars is what killed S** imo.

I was looking for a pic to fullfill your request and I came across this index.

NSFW (http://www.vksystems.net/pics/Patia/)

Ummm... I guess you just have to see it for yourself.


If this game really is going forward, BioWare is probably going to want to set themselves as far apart from SWG as possible, so i wouldn't be surprised if the graphics lean towards an updated version of what WoW has. As long as the game is fun to play, I'd be cool with it. Also, the character models for the new animated series around the corner are are pretty slick.

Yeah, the scary part is how much time that took to make all those. Why is regular old pr0n not good enough anymore?

Holy crap, somewhere out there in the heartland, some poor company is waiting for their logo and wondering just why the graphic designer they hired for a few hundred dollars is taking so damn long...

I may not know art, but that is a directory of shit.

Nope.  I could live with a Lego Star Wars MMO though.

I frothed for SWG at one point as well, but I had the sense to stay away from that shitpile once I saw what it was really like.  SO LEMME ALONE, THIS IS THE ONE POINT IN ITS DEVELOPMENT WHERE I CAN PRETEND THE GAME IS PERFECT!

To all the optimists saying the makers of KOTOR couldn't possibly screw up an MMO version of it, I humbly submit Maxis and their brilliant conversion of The Sims into TSO.  Single player goodness based on either story or flexibility does NOT generally translate well into MMO-land.

Be honest... nobody actually said that did they?

I still don't know what a Bothanese is, but I really really never want to meet one...

On a related note, cgi pr0n still very gross and shitty looking it seems.

And oddly enough Gordon Walton was the executive producer on TSO.

You know, once upon I time I was a SWG fanboy.  Back before anyone actually knew anything about the game.  By the time beta rolled around I had already pretty much written it off.  And yet, here we are again.  With that in mind, I present the...
(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/sig.jpg)
To be updated once the game is officially announced, and the inevitable process of reality crushing my fond hopes begins.

I would have placed Amidala higher- especially after seeing her nekkid in that new movie.  :oh_i_see:

The Twi'lek pics are hawt.

^ no that was not meant to be green.

Why is Hayden Christiansen on there?   :-o

It's WUA.. he's not well.

More to the point, why is he only one step down from OT Vader?

To maintain a linear scale, it would need to go something like Vader, Han Solo, OT Obi, Yoda, R2-D2, PQ Obi, THEN maybe Haden Chrisitiansen.

Your current scale goes....

Winful
Awesome
A bit Rubbish
Crap
Embarrassing
S**

...you're just not taking this thread seriously enough.

No you guys don't understand what Merusk was alluding to, WUA honestly liked the prequels.  He thought they were great, that's why his scale looks so screwed up to the rest of us.  I am not being sarcastic.  Don't try and drag him into an argument over it either, he has apparently spent a great deal of time over at a forum entirely dedicated to Star Wars defending his controversial ideas.  Just, just let it die...

It's only a six point scale.  It goes...

Shaft Windu = Epic win.  Flawless victory.  Robot Jesus.
Vader = Pretty awesome.  Lots of people should play it.
Anakin = Well it's not all bad.  Fanboys will play it.
Padme = Weaksauce.  I might play it for the free month, just because.
Binks = Pile of shit.  Even I'm not playing it.
SWG = Total trainwreck.  Hundred-page thread incoming.

And to make this more clear, I present version 2.0!

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/sig2.jpg)

Surely...

Shaft Windu = Epic win.  Flawless victory.  Robot Jesus. Hundred-page thread incoming.
Vader = Pretty awesome.  Lots of people should play it. Hundred-page thread incoming.
Anakin = Well it's not all bad.  Fanboys will play it. Hundred-page thread incoming.
Padme = Weaksauce.  I might play it for the free month, just because. Hundred-page thread incoming.
Binks = Pile of shit.  Even I'm not playing it. Hundred-page thread incoming.
S** = Total trainwreck.  Hundred-page thread incoming.

Could someone tell me what that gambling card game was in KOTOR? I tried googling it and I'm not getting any hits which actually name the game. Paszak? Pazack? I'd like to be able to play it if the MMO ever gets made.

Pazaak, I believe is the name of it.

Sabbacc?

Pazaak is the one I was looking for. I had been trying to figure out the name for a little while. Thanks.

Everyone knows Jar Jar made the prequels great. It's just that no one's willing to admit their love for the Binks.

It's like when you jerked off another guy at camp. You enjoyed it, but you'll never admit it...

WHAT MOVIE

:google:

People keep saying this as if it's common knowledge.  Is this one of those things that got said once somewhere and people just accepted it or am I ignorant about something.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155486


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ohlen


Now. Where am I going wrong?

This thread has turned into greasy grimey gopher guts.  (http://www.invision.smileyville.net/smilies/badtaste%20(14).gif)

you are off your rocker.  Casting that whining creampuff as anakin makes me wish I had been playing SWG instead of watching him destroy a multi-million dollar movie.  He makes NGE look like a good idea.  This is the star wars equivalent of casting Leo as the main in man in the iron mask.

DiCaprio was great in Iron Mask. Were you like 12 when it came out or what?

"It's a trap" is one of those things that gets me to lol every time.  Doesnt matter.

I'd swap Anakin with Padme, at least she's eye candy.  And Jar Jar with SWG.  SWG wasnt THAT b.. ok well it wasnt Jar Jar mesa don like yousa bad.

you must have been hammered when you watched it, I was closer to 12 when the Chamberlain version came out.  I find the Leo remake unwatchable.

Well, let me test this first, just to check whether you're just not biased against the guy in general:

Basketball Diaries?

This Boy's Life?

The Aviator?

His only decent role ever was playing the retard in what's eating gilbert grape. 

It's settled then. No need to speak further. :awesome_for_real:

What about The Departed? He was fuckin' money in that. Blood Diamond, too.

He's just a good actor period. Some people have an irrational disliking for him, I guess.

[edit] And nobody better get on my ass about derailing. Dicaprio is actually more interesting than another Star Wars game.  :wink:

If I bold other statements in that paragraph, I could provide evidence that there is a Shattered Steel MMO incoming. Or a Baldur's Gate one.

Ohlen might be the lead dev, but that doesn't mean he personally designs everything in the game. Or even picks the IP. He just has to ensure that all the systems work together well and the game is delivered on time and on budget.

How some of the systems work underneath all of that will come from the other developers - developers who may or may not have bad habits picked up at other MMOs. The fact they can look their lead dev in the eye and say, "What you are suggesting never worked at <my old MMO> but it worked if you did this..." might see any Bioware MMO play pretty similar to <that old MMO or their derivatives>.

Hay guyz multiplayer ftw~!

(http://www.freewebs.com/goodknowledge/The%20Ultimate%20Photo%20Ever.jpg)

Epic. Fucking. Win.

Shaft Windu? Jedi, pleez. This Jedi busts tehawesome scale:

(http://www.just-whatever.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/jedi-t.jpg)

That's seven on that scale. I PITY THE FOOL WHO SAYS COLLISION DETECTION!

Yeah no clue if it's going to be KotORO or not, I'm just saying it's obvious that "Bioware Austin" is still Bioware in that it has high level people that were directly involved in Bioware successes.  So the idea that this isnt the same people that made KotOR is simply wrong.  Maybe he's the only dude that was involved, but he had a very big role in it and there are apparently others from the Edmonton office as well according to the 1up article

(http://magmo.typepad.com/magmo_the_destroyer/images/mca_t_600.jpg)

The fool who says collision detection, I pity.

yeah and Di Caprio isnt a good actor. He is a baby faced-mother-in-law-dream.

Sure he was ok in Aviator and Blood diamond but anyone with a slight touch of testosterone could have portrayed those guys.

If you think it takes just being male to portray Howard Hughes, then you really don't have any appreciation for the subject.

[edit] Wtf is a "mother-in-law dream" anyways?

Patrick Swayze during the 80s.

I wasn't much a DiCaprio fan until I saw that movie.  After seeing that, and especially The Departed (though my view on his acting ability may be skewed because of the sheer splendidness of the rest of the movie/actors), I would then admit he's a fine actor.

Pretty much hate everything else he's done though.

I thought he was the perfect casting in Catch Me if you Can.

You really need to get Hayden the fuck out of there. He's bearable at the best of times, but as mentioned, having him next to OT Vader is just Wrong. Replace him with the guy from LA Law as Organa or a Super Battle Droid or Jango. Someone that's ok but not oarsome.

Version 3.0

Are you picky bastards happy yet?  Shaft Windu had to go.  First I downgraded him to #2, because nobody is more kickass than Vader.  Then I dropped him entirely in favor of Han, because the meter needed more OT.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/sig3.jpg)

Is that Jengo Fett instead of Boba Fett?

Look.

Nothing from Episode 1, 2, or 3 goes above meh.

For you claiming you "love" this shit, you're really bad at it.

This. This right here. I didn't like the guy at all until The Aviator. maybe that's a testament more to Scorsese (which is fine and true because he makes the best fucking films) but it's probably both of them together making amazing stuff. Like alchemy.