1 million of you are keeping Blizzard in money hats.

[Margalis]

It's a lost cause Raph. (Explaining to Nija, that is)

What are those numbers, by the way? Years in development, team size, and final bill?

Edit: I have another good question. (Good to me, anyway) At what point in development do you still have room to adjust things based on what you see happening in other games? For example, if someone was working on a game today and they wanted to incorporate things they learned from WoW without seriously derailing their schedule, how far along could they be in the overall dev process?

I would also be interested in the typical breakdown of the MMORPG dev cycle. I assume there is the technology phase, followed by full on art production, quest writing, etc. Could you break that into approximate timelines. For example, given say a 3 year development, at what point is the basic tech set, at what point does production kick into high gear, etc?

[Merusk]

WoW is the summary game.  It showed us which of the old rules were just wrong, and which of the old important features were dead wood.   The old-view "we must be radically innovative and extremely broad or the player base will shrink" opinion is also in evidence there.  There are now four million reasons to believe that's not true.

If WoW's a summary game, then that means you think that social gameplay is irrelevant, user creativity is irrelevant, crafting is irrelevant, housing is irrelevant, and I could go on and on. What WoW has, it has done very well. But it's far from having everything that people want, regardless of what numbers it is hitting. So I'd say it is a summary game for a particular branch, for a particular set of features.

I do think that WoW definitely showed that there's a heck of a lot more people out there interested in the tried and true old gameplay model. I freely confess that I was as blind to that as everyone else, because of my biases. We should have all known given the situation in Asia--instead, we succumbed to a sort of "Korean exceptionalism" idea that was just wrong. In a way, it was a betrayal of the grand notions we always all had about how important and compelling online worlds could be.

I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons to take from WoW.

Wow, nice moment of clarity.

You discount that WOW has social gameplay, however.  It doesn't, it has plenty starting at level 20 and on through 60. Instances and Elites are social gameplay, they just aren't Required to advance.  Instances take at least 2 hours at the low level and can take up to 4 at the high end (non-raid). Hell, the entire endgame is this same social gameplay. The funny part about this is that this is actually where MOST Of the bitching about WOW comes from. Given the choice a lot of folks are just skipping quests when they say 'elite' or 'dungeon.'  Hell is other people.  Lucifer sits in the sea of Strangers in Online Games.

If you don't read their forums due to the signal:noise I can't blame you, but there's a LARGE segment of that 1-mil playerbase that just wants small-group stuff.  They have RL-friends who want to play with them, or like me are miles away from them and have kids and want to game online.  There's a segment of people that don't play these games to make friends so much anymore. Large-scale MMOs are an 8-year-old genre if you start with UO like most do. Folks are brining their own friends and want to play with them, forcing them to interact outside of that circle may be necessary on some levels, but forcing it at all levels just gets you backlash.

Too many MMO designers assume "Social Gameplay = Large Raids & Huge Groups!" After all, if you didn't want to meet and play with 100+ people you've never met face to face you wouldn't pay for an MMO, right?

Wrong.

Social gameplay is gameplay that requires other people, period.  IMO 5-10 people is the max you should need to accomplish almost anything, including "uber loot" in Item-Based games.  Sure, you can still design content for those 20-40 person encounters because there ARE people who enjoy them.  They shouldn't be elevated above the rest of your customerbase in item games by giving them the best loot any more than 1000+ person guilds should be an indominatable force in a game like Shadowbane (Which killed all 'the fun' on servers so dominated). 

Look at it this way.  The mobile telephone is one of the most advanced social tools modern man has. It allows instant communication with anyone at any time. Can I have your number, Raph? Just post it here publicly, it'll "encourage" more social interaction on your part. It'll be fun, think of all the new people you'll meet and the excitement each time your phone rings!

No? Now think about why you don't want to do that from a gameplay perspective. Now think about those of us who have smaller circles of friends, or even refuse to have a mobile phone at all.

Edit:

NEWAYZ Raph I wish you would take your pre-game speeches and put up or shut up. Do it or get off the pot. You say some good stuff before you really get started with games and it gets cut for various reasons.

Without any venom at Raph, he's just not a good lead designer.  Fantastic ideas guy with wonderfuly broad ideas that I'd love to see in games.  However, he's way too cerebral and creative and needs someone to keep him in-check and force him into reality more often.  Management is not a good job for creative personalities. At least that's why I enjoy busting on him the way I do any time he pops up.  :-D

[Alkiera]

Look at it this way.  The mobile telephone is one of the most advanced social tools modern man has. It allows instant communication with anyone at any time. Can I have your number, Raph? Just post it here publicly, it'll "encourage" more social interaction on your part. It'll be fun, think of all the new people you'll meet and the excitement each time your phone rings!

No? Now think about why you don't want to do that from a gameplay perspective. Now think about those of us who have smaller circles of friends, or even refuse to have a mobile phone at all.

I like this argument.  Makes a very good point.  In short, Amen, brother!

Alkiera

[Murgos]

I think I agree that social gameplay as is requires too much social.

For example, forming a group.  Whats the typical process?  Two or three people meet up and form a group (this part happens almost instantly usually) and then depending on circumstances filling out the rest of the group requires far more time, spamming chat channels and looking for friends.

Why isn't the group dynamic centered at three then?  Duo's and trios are very popular because they are very easy and still have that social connection.  Unfortunately most games see a tiered structure where you are either alone OR in a full group OR in a raid group (exclusive ors).  There is no real flow from one level to the next.

I would like to see an end to group limits all together actually.  If you just let natural ad-hoc groups form to the size of the immediate desires of the players I bet you would see the vast majority of time spent in a group will be 3 or less with the occaisional foray into bigger 'mobs' for a specific purpose.  Why differentiate at all between 'raid group' and what-ever.

[tazelbain]

I think you guys are narrowly defining social gameplay.
What about costume contestes in CoH and weddings in RPGs, you guys are talking about situations where developers strong arm the players to work together to get some reward.

[Mesozoic]

I think you guys are narrowly defining social gameplay.
What about costume contestes in CoH and weddings in RPGs, you guys are talking about situations where developers strong arm the players to work together to get some reward.

Yeah, they're talking about multiplayer achiever gameplay as "social."  Just a use-of-terms thing.  What you are describing is more traditional Bartle Social player type.   

[Murgos]

I think you guys are narrowly defining social gameplay.
What about costume contestes in CoH and weddings in RPGs, you guys are talking about situations where developers strong arm the players to work together to get some reward.

Because we give a shit about your hairdresser gameplay?  If it's an issue to you bring it up.  Don't accuse other people of not dreaming up solutions to your problems.

[tazelbain]

I think you guys are narrowly defining social gameplay.
What about costume contestes in CoH and weddings in RPGs, you guys are talking about situations where developers strong arm the players to work together to get some reward.

Because we give a shit about your hairdresser gameplay?  If it's an issue to you bring it up.  Don't accuse other people of not dreaming up solutions to your problems.

The only problem I see here is the bug up your ass.

[Merusk]

I think you guys are narrowly defining social gameplay.
What about costume contestes in CoH and weddings in RPGs, you guys are talking about situations where developers strong arm the players to work together to get some reward.

That's the context I took Raph to mean.  All those other social gameplays are extras that develop out of the nifty tools players are given.  Even then WOW has some of those.  Naked gnome races, cyborzing elves, fashion contests from those who care to collect sets (guilty).  However, unless you're developing a Graphical MUSH/ MOO (hi Second Life) those are secondary in the minds of the players who are playing a GAME and want something to DO. Those players are also the majority of folks who'll bother with video games.

Wanting to push everything towards 'virtual world' and expecting everyone to follow is going to leave you with some sparse company in the wilderness while everyone else is Downtown.  This is what Raph was talking about when he mentioned he gets too caught-up in the 'potential' that's there and WoW kicked him in the pants.  The world in general is only beginning to accept video games as anything more than something anti-social geeks and teenagers play.  Going from 'oh video games CAN be fun for everyone' to "Hey here's a virtual world" is a big leap, and one that's not ready to be made by the majority.  That's why worrying about the extras should come second unless you're specifically developing the entire project around those extras.

Yeah, you can include all those other bits, because they make a game a more vibrant experience. However, you can't let them cloud your vision or try to make more of them than they should be for the project you set-out to create.  Scope creep is as big a killer as feature creep, and if you see all that potential both are just as likely to happen.

[Nija]

Dude...

First off, you should read up on how Sony is organized. Identifying SOE with Sony the overall corporation, or with SCEA, is a mistake.

Secondly, we're not talking about War2. We're talking about WoW. You may want to toss into the mix how many years WoW was in development, the size of the team that it took, and the eventual total amount it cost. If you can dig up any other figures for the cost of MMO games, that should put it in context.

First off, you are correct. I don't know anything about how Sony / SOE / SCEA is organized. All I know from growing up in the US is that Sony = $. If the title has Sony in the name, Sony is backing them somehow. Big money. Walkmans.

Secondly, I know we aren't talking about War2. War2 was one of Blizzard's first big games, back when they had Diablo, (maybe, my timeline is a little off), Lost Vikings, and Rock N' Roll Racing. Yet, whoever was in charge there got the suits' permission to hold off shipping the game until they were ready. So this small studio with very little name recognition was able to take their time and release the game they wanted to at their leisure.

The people leading projects at SOE do not get permission from the suits. Going back to even Tanarus, which was a rushed mess. It was probably 5 patches short of a solid game. If that sounds familiar, that's what everyone (everyone who reads forums like this. ie 0.007% of the mmorpg population) expects from SOE games 9 years later.

Finally, a decade into the future from War2, the one studio that is known for taking their time is still Blizzard. I don't know why that is, but I know it works. Yeah it took money and people up front, but it paid off. I bet they make enough money every other month to develop UO all over again. At least when you begin chasing suits to get permission to do your next game, you can tell them how releasing a finished product works for Blizzard, re: WoW took money to make money, cause apparently they've been ignoring the Bliz Method* forever.

* - Releasing a 99% complete product instead of a 66% complete product.

[HaemishM]

What it's really proved, is that the drugs Blizzard packs in their game-boxes seem to make their fans explode into hyperbole.  Yes, Blizzard tends to make decent quality games, but only relative to the rest of the industry.  They are not the paragons of perfection you make them out to be... they're just okay.

Hum that comment is worse than the ones I made. You say Blizz makes decent quality games... what that qualifies other games as ? Huge stinking piles of code put together by newbies? ;)

I see you've played other MMOG's.

[shiznitz]

We get back to how exp/levelling limits what these games can be. Get rid of it. Then groups can be as many people as anyone wants because the group basically just becomes a private chat channel.

[HaemishM]

WoW is the summary game.  It showed us which of the old rules were just wrong, and which of the old important features were dead wood.   The old-view "we must be radically innovative and extremely broad or the player base will shrink" opinion is also in evidence there.  There are now four million reasons to believe that's not true.

If WoW's a summary game, then that means you think that social gameplay is irrelevant, user creativity is irrelevant, crafting is irrelevant, housing is irrelevant

ALL, every last one of those things you mentioned is entirely and irrevocably irrelevant IF the core gameplay, the stuff you spend most of your game time doing is not fun. All of those things will net you almost nothing if the core gameplay is not fun. And for most MMOG's, the core gameplay is combat. Now if you want to make those things the core gameplay, that's fine, but then you are leaning into either niche territory, or you are making a game for a completely different audience than that which WoW is made for. And since we're talking about WoW, they aren't completely irrelevant, but certainly sublimated.

Everquest did not have great social gameplay (in the sense that the tools you used for such gameplay were shitty shit shit shit). Same goes for UO. User creativity in EQ? Absolute zilcho. NADA. Crafting? A complete waste of time, at least until about 1 1/2 years into the game, because the interface was crap and the stuff you could make was useless to the core gameplay. Housing? Not even in the game.

Yet it was a fun game (that got really old after a long while playing), and it was successful with the same market that WoW has now blown up. And for the moment, that is the MMOG market. Yes, there are other segments of the market, none of which are being explored other than by really small niche developers like in ATiTD or Second Life. Maybe WoW's success will lead to other devs trying to make games in those other untapped segments.

[El Gallo]

Couldn't disagree more. Unless you want to only play WoW over and over again for the next few decades.

That is not a fair characterization of what I said (or meant to say).  I don’t want WoW over and over.  I want WoW better and better and better (both by refining the elements already there and by adding new elements).  I don’t want to drive a new model T every 2 years for the rest of my life.  I want a new, better car every 2 years.  What I am not interested in is some company telling me that really, deep down, I’d rather ride one of their giant octopi to work.

Much of Blizzard's pre-eminence is due to their willingness (and sheer financial ability) to hold games from release until they consider them to be done.
. . . .
I literally do not think there is a single other company in the entire industry who has the particular circumstances that Blizzard did in making WoW.

If this is true, the rest of the industry is going to have to get used to being Blizzard’s bitch for the rest of time.  What you are telling me here is that SoE (and everyone else) lacks the ability to compete.  If they are able to spend time and money to make high quality games and SoE is not able to spend nearly that much time or money, then SoE just doesn’t matter anymore.  Every other MMOG maker will spend the rest of their professional lives scrambling against each other for whatever crumbs fall off Blizzard’s table or hope that Blizzard somehow self-destructs and sinks to SoE et al’s level of ability so they can actually compete.

If WoW's a summary game, then that means you think that social gameplay is irrelevant, user creativity is irrelevant, crafting is irrelevant, housing is irrelevant, and I could go on and on.

I think you are pretty far off base here.  Social gameplay?  I had more people on my /friends list in 2 weeks of WoW than I did in the 2 months I played SWG.  Because I actually need other people – not just their vendor bots, but real, live other people – to get what I want.  And the group play is fun.  Crawling through Uldaman, BRD, Scholo, UBRS, etc to nail all the quests is fun and brings your group together.  Dying, refining tactics, dying, refining tactics, dying, refining tactics with my guild on Onyxia was an intensely social experience.  Same with Mojordomo and a couple other MC bosses.   Last week I and 39 other Hordelings watched our tower burn in Alterac Valley and the alliance press the attack (yes, that’s El Gallo, strident carebear, enjoying PvP because WoW actually made it entertaining and non-punitive–another way WoW obliterated its predecessors).  Then we got our act together and gradually pushed them back and took their base.  I met some new people on the raid, though I knew most of them from grouping or just hanging around in the past.  More than a few really impressed me as players, and more than a fee made me laugh.  When we won, people were shouting all over Orgrimmar that we finally won one, so there was a bond with others in our faction who weren’t even in the fight.   The only major Western MMOG that is this social is EQ.  Now, is WoW perfect on the social front?  Of course not.  Could there be a bit more encouragement to socialize early in a character’s life?  Yes.  Would I like to see integrated voice or voice-to-text so we can have EQ-intensity socialization with WoW’s active combat and low downtime?  Yes.  I’d like to see the next game work on that a bit.  But, yes, I’d call it the summary game on socialization: it modeled itself after the best 1st gen socialization game – Everquest– and sucked out the suck.

Crafting?  I craft more in WoW than I did in EQ or SWG.  Crafting is plenty important.  I use disposable crafted goods (potions, bombs, discombobulator rays, etc) all the time and constantly buy them from and sell them to other players.  Even in the high end game, I use at least some crafted gear all the time and even find myself bagging a lot of high-end boss drops in favor of tradeskill-made gear depending on the situation.  Now, can you spend 6 hours a day with a Punch The Monkey crafter minigame like you can in EQ2?  No.  This does not make me sad.

Creativity?  Not sure what you mean here, but if you mean customization then, yeah, WoW could be a little better.  If you mean emergent gameplay, there is a fair amount of it though not as much as EQ.  If you mean creative combat tatics, WoW blows away its predecessors.

Housing?  You are stretching to say this is a crucial game element.  But I do like houses.  WoW with well-done housing would be superior to WoW right now.  So go make me that game and I’ll pay you money.  But you already told me that your company can’t do that.  What your company can make is a hastily-thrown-together shadow of WoW with decent housing.  We all see how well that is going.

But it's far from having everything that people want, regardless of what numbers it is hitting. So I'd say it is a summary game for a particular branch, for a particular set of features.

Now you seem to be saying that a summary game has to have every feature from every game in the prior generation (which does not jive well with the claim that SWG was intended to be a summary game).  I think that deciding what features are worth spending a ton of time and money on and what features aren’t worth spending a ton of time and money on is probably the most important part of making a summary game.  WoW realized that it is worth it to spend a ton of time and money on:
1. environments (I’m a broken record here, but this is critically important.  Randomly generated content is garbage content.  Blizzard is making Fantasia and Snow White.  Hanna-Barbara cartoons will not successfully compete).  Blizzard learned this from the success of EQ – this was EQ’s best feature – and the relative lack of success in AC and SWG.
2. combat.  This is what the overwhelming majority of people like to do best.  It cannot suck, it just cannot.  AC, AC2, SWG and EQ2 obviously needed total from-the-ground-up revamps on the day they were released.  WoW needed tweaks.  Blizzard learned this from the failures of the aforementioned games, but mostly from simple common sense.
3. polish (on everything: interface, content, systems, etc).  Things will never be perfect, but for the most part things should just plain work and not look utterly asinine.  In EQ2, sharks chase you across long stretches of dry land 10 months after release.  ‘nuff said.      
   

I do think that WoW definitely showed that there's a heck of a lot more people out there interested in the tried and true old gameplay model. I freely confess that I was as blind to that as everyone else, because of my biases.

  What was the first computer roleplaying game you played?  For me, it was Akalabeth.  Basic linear character builder with heavy emphasis on combat.  It was fun.  Let me think of the CRPGs I liked the most since then.  Ultima 4.  Most of the FF’s.  BG.  NWN:HotU.  KoTOR.  What did I spend most of my time doing in those games?  Killing shit.  What were the core mechanics of each of those games?  Character building and combat.  Yes, there were environments and stories that made them memorable, but that was the art you place over a rock-solid foundation of character building.  That’s just what this genre is.  Now, when I think to myself, “how do I make a game for people who liked CRPGs, but with thousands of players?” I think “well, lets make a multiplayer game on that same rock-solid foundation we’ve been using for 25+ years”  I don’t think “because there is a DSL line involved, we must tear down the old paradigm and start anew.”  The evidence was always there: Lineage, Everquest, Diablo.  Blizzard saw it and learned the real lesson of the prior era.

If you want to make a multiplayer business sim, make a goddamn multiplayer business sim.  I could see that being a lot of fun.  But do not market that game as a multiplayer computer roleplaying game.  I really think you are deceived by the unique position of UO as the first MMO of any size in the US.  With no competition, you can get away with that kind of bait-and-switch.  Now that there are games that actually give most players what they want, you can’t.

We should have all known given the situation in Asia--instead, we succumbed to a sort of "Korean exceptionalism" idea that was just wrong. In a way, it was a betrayal of the grand notions we always all had about how important and compelling online worlds could be.”

In the off chance you are still reading, does the “it” in the second sentence refer to WoW or to our notion of Korean exceptionalism?

[Raph]

Years in development, team size, and final bill?

I have answers, but I don't feel comfortable giving out figures for another company. Common estimates for WoW range from $80-100m, and I have reason to believe that this the right ballpark. Years, you should be able to estimate yourself. And you can check the game credits for team size...

At what point in development do you still have room to adjust things based on what you see happening in other games? For example, if someone was working on a game today and they wanted to incorporate things they learned from WoW without seriously derailing their schedule, how far along could they be in the overall dev process?

It totally depends on what lesson it is. Simple interface things? Relatively easy. Core gameplay mechanics? Impossible without major resets.

I would also be interested in the typical breakdown of the MMORPG dev cycle. I assume there is the technology phase, followed by full on art production, quest writing, etc. Could you break that into approximate timelines. For example, given say a 3 year development, at what point is the basic tech set, at what point does production kick into high gear, etc?

For a from-scratch game, you aren't getting to work on the game proper for probably a year and  half to two years. Your content platform will be complete probably after 2 years though you can start generating content before it's all done, just with a fraction of the tools. If you have some tech to start with, you gain some of that time back as well, of course.

You discount that WOW has social gameplay, however.  It doesn't, it has plenty starting at level 20 and on through 60. Instances and Elites are social gameplay, they just aren't Required to advance

That's all combat gameplay. I grant that it is social, but it's still hack n slash.

Too many MMO designers assume "Social Gameplay = Large Raids & Huge Groups!"

Heh--I think you are falling into that trap yourself. By social gameplay I mean forms of gameplay that rely on social roles or constructs.

Without any venom at Raph, he's just not a good lead designer.  Fantastic ideas guy with wonderfuly broad ideas that I'd love to see in games.  However, he's way too cerebral and creative and needs someone to keep him in-check and force him into reality more often.  Management is not a good job for creative personalities. At least that's why I enjoy busting on him the way I do any time he pops up.

That's what producers are for. :)

Even then WOW has some of those.  Naked gnome races, cyborzing elves, fashion contests from those who care to collect sets (guilty).

You're listing stuff that happens everywhere, not stuff that is provided specific support.

Wanting to push everything towards 'virtual world' and expecting everyone to follow is going to leave you with some sparse company in the wilderness while everyone else is Downtown.

WoW with support for weddings, for player houses, for a true shopkeeper role, and so on, is a better game. That's my personal belief. Do you disagree?

I DO agree that actually doing that is Hard(tm), and that by continuing to try some of us continue to run into problems. :)

First off, you are correct. I don't know anything about how Sony / SOE / SCEA is organized. All I know from growing up in the US is that Sony = $. If the title has Sony in the name, Sony is backing them somehow. Big money. Walkmans.

Sony uses a silo model (you can read up on some of that via the articles about Stringer's challenges now that he heads the whole company). What that basically means is that each bit of Sony runs as its own business.

Secondly, I know we aren't talking about War2. War2 was one of Blizzard's first big games...

I can't speak to why they first got to do it. If one of those first "hold it back" gambles had failed, the company would likely have been gone. But they succeeded thanks to a really good game and a fair amount of luck (credit where credit is due, but at the same time, good games alone do not always win out, as we all know).

There's a snowball effect from there on out. A similar story can be seen with Valve; they started out, luckily for them, in a position where they could hold the game back because they were self-funded. They then hit it big, and were able to take on the even huger budget of HL2, which I have seen estimated at $40-50m--that's a multiple of what SWG or EQ2 cost. But once you have the cushion built up, you can afford to polish to come as close as you can to guaranteeing a hit.

Actually executing is critical too, of course, I do not mean to minimize that. None of this is meant as excuses or anything--I hope this is all taken in the spirit in which it is intended--a frank discussion of what the industry circumstances are and where it all might lead.

I bet they make enough money every other month to develop UO all over again.

Absolutely. At the same time, UO was not given that sort of seed money in the first place. It was considered expensive for its time, but IMHO was done pretty darn quickly. Form Sept 1995 when the bulk of the team was hired (Starr and Rick were on prior to that), to an alpha at E3 1996 six months later, whereupon the client and most of the server was scrapped. Some time shortly after, the entire script system was scrapped too and redone, so we had to rewrite all the gameplay code we had scripted. E3 1997 we were in beta already, so it was one year from almost nothing back to something playable; I recall we had to have GMs spawning stuff right outside the place where we were demoing so that there'd be a steady stream of monsters. Right after E3, the server changed to accomodate 3000 instead of 300 players (it eventually hit around 2600 as a capacity). We shipped end of September. 2 years, 1 month; if you count the time when Rick was implementing basically by himself, 2 1/2 years.

All of those things will net you almost nothing if the core gameplay is not fun. And for most MMOG's, the core gameplay is combat.

Agreed. I don't believe that the fact that the core gameplay of current MMOs is combat is an irrevocable fact, but that's beside the point.

I don’t want WoW over and over.  I want WoW better and better and better (both by refining the elements already there and by adding new elements).  I don’t want to drive a new model T every 2 years for the rest of my life.  I want a new, better car every 2 years.  What I am not interested in is some company telling me that really, deep down, I’d rather ride one of their giant octopi to work.

Point taken. I think there's a large audience of people like you. Certainly all the new folks that WoW brought in are probably like you.

There are limitations to what that will be. No player-driven economy, most likely. Almost certainly not stuff like player cities. There are game systems that just don't fit in that model. But if that is the model you want, then great. I suspect you can look at the text muds and find out exactly what you'll be getting. Assuming anyone licks the problem of doing it 10x cheaper than what it cost to do this time. I am not actually sure that is possible, though.

If this is true, the rest of the industry is going to have to get used to being Blizzard’s bitch for the rest of time.  What you are telling me here is that SoE (and everyone else) lacks the ability to compete.  If they are able to spend time and money to make high quality games and SoE is not able to spend nearly that much time or money, then SoE just doesn’t matter anymore.  Every other MMOG maker will spend the rest of their professional lives scrambling against each other for whatever crumbs fall off Blizzard’s table or hope that Blizzard somehow self-destructs and sinks to SoE et al’s level of ability so they can actually compete.

No, no, not at all. I would say, rather, that competing on those exact same grounds is probably silly. The trick will be in opening new markets (possibly with the same gameplay), finding new gameplay, finding new ways to develop the games. I also think it's probably a safe bet that Blizz overspent to achieve what they did, given the fact that it was their first one and they didn't have economies of scale developed either. This is certainly what all the indie games are going to do, because they have no choice.

I think you are pretty far off base here.

We have different definitions of "summary game." Yes, to me it means "everything that it is good and works in the prior games, done extremely well." To you it means "the absolute minimum, done extremely well." I have no quarrel with that position, but it's not what I meant by the term.

We have differing views on how social a game WoW is, whether its crafting is interesting, and so on. I think all of these are attributable to gameplay preferences. Every single one of your examples is centered on the combat--you seem to define social gameplay as cheering after a fight, you define crafting by whether it gets you nice loot, and you define housing as a trophy case. To me, making these features robust involves playing them without dipping into combat at all.

What was the first computer roleplaying game you played?

Heck if I remember. It would have been on the 8 bit computers. Ultima I? Bard's Tale? U1 was probably the first one I really got into. To be honest, though, my pen and paper playing was far more influential on me than my CRPGing. My text adventure gaming was more influential on me. Wizardry bored me because it was nothing but combat. Again, I think this is a taste difference, and it informs all the above.

Even more so, though, I am coming at it from the background of online worlds. These have existed for as long as the CRPGs have, and while they spring from common sources, have had parallel but separate development for quite a while. Notions of non-combat gameplay have been "standard accepted fare" in online worlds since the days when CRPGs were still on the NES.

To my mind it would actually be quite tragic if MMOs ended up taking their primary cues from standalone CRPG design rather than online world design. A lot would be lost. Not saying that there aren't valuable things to learn there, but the way you phrase things makes it sound like you consider CRPGs the primary source of this. Fact is that the online worlds have a stronger heritage from Zork than from Akalabeth; the earliest games were in a lot of ways not about statistical character building as much as they were about collecting items to put into a "trophy case."

We should have all known given the situation in Asia--instead, we succumbed to a sort of "Korean exceptionalism" idea that was just wrong. In a way, it was a betrayal of the grand notions we always all had about how important and compelling online worlds could be.

In the off chance you are still reading, does the “it” in the second sentence refer to WoW or to our notion of Korean exceptionalism?

The notion of exceptionalism.There has been a sort of general "Asia is weird about MMOs" that implied that there was a much lower cap on the Western markets than there really was. If anything, we should be looking at Asia and saying "WoW has barely scratched the surface of the market potential in the West."

[HaemishM]

We have differing views on how social a game WoW is, whether its crafting is interesting, and so on. I think all of these are attributable to gameplay preferences. Every single one of your examples is centered on the combat--you seem to define social gameplay as cheering after a fight, you define crafting by whether it gets you nice loot, and you define housing as a trophy case. To me, making these features robust involves playing them without dipping into combat at all.

Not to be snarky, but THAT is why SWG had to go through a complete combat overhaul a year after release.

I'm not saying that crafters shouldn't be able to compete in the market or do their thing without combat, because they should. But, and this is key, the primary market driving MMOG's both in this country and in the booming markets of Asia is combat-oriented MMOG's. Lineage (both flavors) and all its clone offs. EQ1. WoW. DAoC. The new EQ-ified SWG. That isn't to say that MMOG's and Virtual Worlds as a medium are totally relegated to combat-oriented gameplay, but in this market, non-combat MMOG's haven't done so well.

Mini-games are great for an MMOG, but you should know your audience, and the audience in this country mostly wants some form of interesting combat or competition (I'm considering sports here too). All the rest need to be firmly supportive of that main form of gameplay. If they aren't, you are in essence nichifying this product within the MMOG medium. In the same way that action movies only toss in a modicum of "love interest" type of things, instead of long-drawn out mushy romance novel shit, mainstream MMOG's need to be combat/competition first.

[El Gallo]

I cannot suppress my tireles rebutter tendencies 

We have different definitions of "summary game." Yes, to me it means "everything that it is good and works in the prior games, done extremely well." To you it means "the absolute minimum, done extremely well." I have no quarrel with that position, but it's not what I meant by the term.

I'd say my definition of a summary game is a game that incorporates all the major lessons of the previous generation.  You and I disagree on what those lessons are.  I think the biggest lesson of the first generation is that combat is king (and the second is that a well-done, handcrafted environment is queen).  Crafting unrelated to combat is mostly a waste while crafting related to combat can attract a lot of interest.  Socialization works best when socialization is encouraged by the combat mechanism.  Actually, I'd agree to your definition.  I just think that WoW does, in fact, incorporate just about "everything that it is good and works in the prior games."  We just disagree on what actually was good and worked in those prior games.

I'm with Haem.  Non-combat mini-games are a plus.  But they are just that: mini-games.99.999% of the people who buy these games do so with the intention to kill things with a sword.  I don't think that will ever change.

That's all combat gameplay. I grant that it is social, but it's still hack n slash.

you seem to define social gameplay as cheering after a fight,

You seem to think that "real" socialization can't happen when you're fighting.  Just in the past couple months I talked to a guy about trouble his young daughter is having, a woman who just put her dog to sleep and a guy who got a promotion and was jumping for joy.  Since I started playing these games 6 years ago, I've talked to people about their weddings and their divorces, about their kids' weddings and divorces, and their parents' weddings and divorces.  I've talked to all kinds of people about politics, love, music, books, sports, yadda yadda.  All those people were people I met fighting with in combat-oriented MMORPGs (EQ, AC, WoW).  You talk about game tactics, then start shooting the breeze about real life, and next thing you know you have a friend and are part of a real community.

Why isn't that "real" socialization?  I don't really know what more you could want.  None of that would happen for me in a game with shitty combat, because I wouldn't play it long, and none of that would happen in a game with solo combat and Designer Approved Socialization Areas (TM), because it feels awkward and forced -- I just wouldn't go out of my way to go there.  There wouldn't be many others there, anyway.

[Margalis]

I feel this is sort of a circular argument. "Combat is king" in MMORPGs but only because they are designed that way. Now, El Gallo made the point that CRPGs are combat-centric, so MMORPGs should be too. Then again, FPS games are combat-centric but look at all the stealth-based games in the genre now.

I think I would phrase it as this: If you expect the vast majority of players to spend the vast majority of time doing 1 thing, that 1 thing better be pretty good.

In SWG players are clearly expected to spend most of the time fighting. The license is about fighting. Most of the gear is fighting-centric, as are most professions. Most of the landmass is devoted to monsters. Jedis are about fighitng. Star Wars is fundamentally a cheeseball adventure. There are players that can do other stuff, but it's very clear that fighting is what the game is ultimately about. Even the professions that are not directly fighting professions exist largely to buff fighters, create equipment for them, etc. Combat is the core of the game.

[Arthur_Parker]

Loved Merusk's post.

On crafting, in SWG shortly after release a checkbox was added to delete a crafted item as soon as you created it, everyone thought it was a great idea.  If the two highest priority problems with your crafting system are people running out of backpack space because of crap items and your item database filling up with crap items, maybe your crafting system is crap.  Especially if everyone thinks the vast majority of items created deserve to be deleted immediately.

I like WoW crafting, "create all" is my favourite button.

[WindupAtheist]

Raph, here's your job:

1 - Take WoW.
2 - Make character skills more customizable.
3 - Make avatar appearance much more customizable.
4 - Make all the best items player-crafted.  All.
5 - Let critters drop mid-range items and rare crafting ingredients.
7 - Let endgame critters drop uber crafting ingredients.
8 - Let all items inexorably wear out over a long period of time, so they need to be replaced.
9 - Make sure that engame monsters drop enough crafting stuff to keep #8 from hurting too much.
10 - Branching quests with multiple outcomes.
11 - Let the quest choices I make (good/evil) affect how the world reacts to me.
12 - Faction PVP system that affects the world enough for carebears to notice.
13 - Faction PVP system that doesn't affect the world enough to wreck it for those carebears.
14 - Housing please.

There's your automatic transmission and heated seats.  Hop to it.  If you can find a non-leveling system that satisfies the masses as much as a ding does, that'll be a nice bonus.  But don't go crazy, it's not imperative.

PS:  I understand that Sony wasn't willing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into SOE for MMORPG development.  The lesson WoW teaches is, they should have been.  The really big money is here.  Amateur hour is over.

[schild]

That's the best post you've ever made. You just jumped the internet shark.

[Trippy]

PS:  I understand that Sony wasn't willing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into SOE for MMORPG development.  The lesson WoW teaches is, they should have been.  The really big money is here.  Amateur hour is over.

I don't see how that would've helped EQ II. Perhaps it might have helped SWG but that's the only major NA MMORPG I haven't played yet so I can't comment on that game. The problems with EQ II are from bad design and gameplay decisions made early on that they have been painfully trying to correct since even before release. If your designers can't design a fun game I'm not sure how spending more money is going to help that process unless it's used to replace the team and start over from scratch like NCsoft has apparently done with TR. Spending more money can help you produce more content and increase the production values in the game but EQ II was never lacking in those areas.

Edit: fixed typo

[El Gallo]

WUA, nice post.  However, I am not sure about most of your suggestions. 

#2 is something I always see people ask for, but I'm not sure they want.  WoW has a fair number of balance issues already, between classes and between talent builds in the same class.  Even more skill customizability = more balancing nightmares, more time spent buffing and nerfing, and more time spent on content designed for each of the 100,000 different effective classes you now have.  Frankly, I'd like to see more diversity through different gear sets.  That avoids most of these problems because everyone has access to them.  If you could swap gear and switch from a shadow/disc priest to a disc/holy priest, the priest class would be a lot more able to function well in all areas of the game.  More specialization/customization would just make these problems worth.

#3 is nice if it does not come at the cost of interesting gear options.  But if you can significantly customize your body, you will end up with a much narrower range of gear looks.

##4-7, 9 I just don't get.  UberDragon drops Sword of Roxxorage and it goes to Joe Fighter.  Yippee.  UberDragon drops Ore of Roxxorage and Susy the Rogue/Blacksmith (or Susy the Guild Blacksmith Mule) clicks "combine" and out pops a Sword of Roxxorage, which goes to Joe the Fighter.  Uh, double yippee?  To me, it seems like the exact same thing only more annoying.  I don't understand why a crafter would find that system anything other than dull, and maybe even degrading.  Then again, some people profess to actually enjoy being buffbots.  Anyway, I don't care either way -- it wouldn't keep me from playing a game but it doesn't seem to have much point to me, either.  I certainly wouldn't want the dev team spending a lot of resources on this system rather than building us a fun Grendel's Great-Great-Grandmother encounter (with the Sword of Double Roxxorage!).

#8 players just hate this.  Hate hate hate.  I don't mind it that much, but mention the word "decay" and there's blood in the water on your message boards.  This just won't fly.  To the extent this is intended to combat deflation, bind-on-equip/pickup takes care of this.  To the extent this is intended to keep lowbie crafters able to sell their wares to lowbie players, BoE/BoP fix that as well.  To the extent this is intended to keep high end crafters busy creating Swords of Uberosity to replace worn-out Swords of Uberosity, people will hate it.  People want to fight to advance, they don't want to fight to keep from deteriorating.  You need to continually introduce better things to replace the old ones.  If they are crafted, you can keep your crafters just as busy as they would be under a decay system, and keep your adventurers just as happy (i.e. Instead of needing to buy a new Sword of Uberosity each month to replace the one that falls apart, which sucks, I need to buy a better sword each month to keep up with the Joneses).

## 10, 11, 14.  Thumbs up!

##12-13: No.  This is the classic cry for "PvP that matters but also doesn't really matter" which just won't work.  If there are real winners and real losers, you will have perma-winners and perma-losers, and you will screw over people who don't care to pvp.  That's unacceptable.  WoW's utter uninterest in doing 12 or 13 is one key reason WoW is vastly better and vastly more successful than its PvP-oriented competitors.

PS:  I understand that Sony wasn't willing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into SOE for MMORPG development.  The lesson WoW teaches is, they should have been.  The really big money is here.  Amateur hour is over.

Totally agree, but I also agree with Trippy that SoE appears to just plain lack the ability to make a game that good.  Maybe management is screwing the pooch, maybe McQuaid took most of the game-making talent with him.  Whatever the reason, SoE is second-rate now.

[Cheddar]

Raph, here's your job:

</gnarly list plus coherency>

I agree completely WUA, though I believe the highest end items should not necessarily NEED rare components to craft, that is something I would have to think about more.  I remember playing UO (Only game I can think of with true item decay, I know there are others) and chatting with blacksmiths as they repaired my metal armor and weapons.  It was a good way to keep the item portion of economy going circular, and it made people more careful of what they used ("maybe I should save my Sword of Godliness for special occasions and just use this other weapon instead!").

I like your list enough to go play Ultima Online now.  Seriously.

[Calandryll]

##4-7, 9 I just don't get.  UberDragon drops Sword of Roxxorage and it goes to Joe Fighter.  Yippee.  UberDragon drops Ore of Roxxorage and Susy the Rogue/Blacksmith (or Susy the Guild Blacksmith Mule) clicks "combine" and out pops a Sword of Roxxorage, which goes to Joe the Fighter.  Uh, double yippee?  To me, it seems like the exact same thing only more annoying.  I don't understand why a crafter would find that system anything other than dull, and maybe even degrading.  Then again, some people profess to actually enjoy being buffbots.  Anyway, I don't care either way -- it wouldn't keep me from playing a game but it doesn't seem to have much point to me, either.  I certainly wouldn't want the dev team spending a lot of resources on this system rather than building us a fun Grendel's Great-Great-Grandmother encounter (with the Sword of Double Roxxorage!).

Right. As a player, this would actually turn me off. I like playing combat oriented characters and I like getting uber loot as a reward for killing monsters or completing quests. If ALL of the crafted items are better than what I can loot and most of my loot is crafting components you've just taken away one of the biggest aspects of the game for me. I like crafting as part of a game, but as a combat player I don't like feeling like the crafters' bitch. I'd rather see a balance between the two.

## 10, 11, 14.  Thumbs up!

Not that it matters anyore really, but UXO actually had branching quests (some with more than one branch) implemented and working at the time it was cancelled. A lot of developers shy away from this because they feel it means each quest takes 2x the amount of work. In reality, it's only about 33% more work and if you build a good quest tool you can make up for that. We could build a quest with full branching, cinematics, NPC reactions, and everything in about 4-6 hours depending on complexity. Of all the features we had, I was most excited about seeing how players reacted to this one and since UXO will never be I hope someone does it someday.

[Toast]

I would like to see branching quests that offer variable risk/reward tradeoffs.

One branch could lead to a small chance at a really nice quest reward (random) with a large chance of an average to mediocre reward.

The other branch could be the safe, middle of the road option: An above average reward almost guaranteed.

I also would really like to see more cinematics tied to quests. It would be really cool to activate a quest and have a cutaway movie start playing. The cinematic would signify that, yes, this is an important quest. I can imagine doing quests just to see cool cinemetics. MMOs can learn a lot from story-driven single player RPGs.

[Trippy]

I also would really like to see more cinematics tied to quests. It would be really cool to activate a quest and have a cutaway movie start playing. The cinematic would signify that, yes, this is an important quest. I can imagine doing quests just to see cool cinemetics. MMOs can learn a lot from story-driven single player RPGs.

FF XI has these in the major storyline quests. WoW actually has mini "in game cinematics" where some NPCs will act out things when you do quest turns-in and stuff (like the two Gnomes in Dun Morogh that give out the radiation quests for Gnomeregan).

[Hoax]

2 - Make character skills more customizable. - I dont understand what this even means, so instead of being a 1hs knight I'm a bastard sword expert who specializes in overhand swings?  How about instead just use something that is less talent tree and more SB level complexity when it comes to character templates.  Discipline runes are a great idea, as are character creation runes, the mechanic for farming/obtaining them from disc droppers was not.
4 - Make all the best items player-crafted.  All. - How about no?  Your going against point #1 here, if your taking WoW its too fucking late to make a player based economy.  Like Gallo pointed out who cares if you need to kill uber mobs to get the key component to make uber sword XYZ?  I dont have a good economy solution for you but making it crafter dependent doesn't work in a game that isn't designed from the ground up to work like that.
7 - Let endgame critters drop uber crafting ingredients. - why?  This is the kind of thinking that gets us the stupid formula WoW is following now:  release new endgame raid, make drops from that be the best in the game, rinse, repeat but you added in the extra step of clicking combine 60,000 times for each crafting tree per guild so you can MAKE your uber item out of your uber drops.
8 - Let all items inexorably wear out over a long period of time, so they need to be replaced. -- This doesn't work if you have uber items


12 - Faction PVP system that affects the world enough for carebears to notice.
13 - Faction PVP system that doesn't affect the world enough to wreck it for those carebears.
So pvp on/off with world implications?  How do you see that working?  If it matters enough carebears will feel forced to pvp and complain (they are 90% achievers).  If it doesn't matter enough pvpers will be annoyed because it becomes another: why shouldn't I just play <insert fps here> for my pvp if its not going to matter?  As hotkey clicking and auto attack do not the fun make and what does it matter if your persistent character's action of choice doesn't mean squat to the big picture?  Its the same complaint crafter/economy types have when none of the items they can make matter as uber raid loot is better.

14 - Housing please. -- Margalis was spot on when he said that Mog houses or the equivalent should be in every MMO

[shiznitz]

Regarding character appearance customization, does it really have to be tied to your actual equipment? If a player wants his platemailed fighter to look like a cowboy, is that bad? Anything wielded could be "as is" but everything else shoudl be up to the player. There can be defaults, certainly: leather, studded leather, spiked plate, bikini plate that can be colored to fit tastes, but would it be a bad thing to let a warrior benefiting from armor appear to the rest of the world as a shirtless kung fu hero? CoH shows that it is fun to just appreciate player creativity even if it mean not being able to determine what class someone is by their look.

edit: How about going so far as to make body equipment not even slot specific? Instead of looting armor, you loot +ac or +fire resist charms that fit onto your character. You character has X number of slots. There is still the gear component to the game but appearance is completely discretionary.

[Margalis]

I have to echo what people say about crafting drops. It's really just the same thing. Instead of dropping a super-sword, it drops a piece of metal I can turn into a super-sword. How is that really different, other than forcing me to rely on crafters if I don't have that crafting skill? Seems annoying for a player with a small group of friends.

[Merusk]

I had an idea that MMOs should allow COH-level of customization, but define certain 'looks' depending on what your overall armor was.  A "plate" setting, a "leather" setting, etc.  The bonus is you also eliminate the "WTF My Ultra-Pious Conservative Paladin looks like an electrified stripper!" arguments.  Those who want cheesecake can do so those who don't can do so. Win-win.

Then, for those with the 'but I can't showoff my uberlootz' syndrome, aquiring a piece of uberloot can unlock a new model palette for that part of the body.  Unlocks are already used in MMOs.. they're called Faction Grinds.  They also satisfy a lot of casual achiever problems, so long as it's not tied purely into a 'you must sit on your ass 8 hours straight.' situation.

[shiznitz]

I had an idea that MMOs should allow COH-level of customization, but define certain 'looks' depending on what your overall armor was.  A "plate" setting, a "leather" setting, etc.  The bonus is you also eliminate the "WTF My Ultra-Pious Conservative Paladin looks like an electrified stripper!" arguments.  Those who want cheesecake can do so those who don't can do so. Win-win.

Then, for those with the 'but I can't showoff my uberlootz' syndrome, aquiring a piece of uberloot can unlock a new model palette for that part of the body.  Unlocks are already used in MMOs.. they're called Faction Grinds.  They also satisfy a lot of casual achiever problems, so long as it's not tied purely into a 'you must sit on your ass 8 hours straight.' situation.

I have no problem with unlocking "clothing" options, as long everyone has a very broad selection to begin with.

[ahoythematey]

Star Ocean: Second Story had my favorite crafting system to date.  I'm thinking devs might want to look outside the MMO spectrum for novel ideas on how to implement a player-controlled item economy.  Also, I agree with Calandryll that while crafting is nice to have, I don't want to be the crafter's bitch, because I see that as just a bad environment for grief as open-pvp, if not worse.

[Pococurante]

WoW implements a fraction of the total possible economic game surrounding crafting... and it CAN be a very fun game taken as a whole, though it's definitely for the more strategic type of player interested in business sim-style gameplay.

I also know there's a lot of people for whom forms of play surrounding housing have been fun. *shrug* Different strokes for different folks, probably.

I am very much in that camp.  WoW did just enough to make me happy even if it's not as interesting as it could/should be.  Reverse auction, more varietal resource gathering, and housing would do it for me.  My slumlord days in UO were some of the most fun I've ever had in a multiplayer game.

IMO, WoW & CoH's main contributions are that coercive implementations of grouping and interminable leveling are not required to make a game profitable, and in fact past products that went that route simply introduced the escape pressures that inevitably damage retention when alternatives like WoW are released.

[Nija]

I don't know if I like having mobs drop crafting ingrediants. I would like to see some more 'visual' loot. If you kill a goblin who was wearing a leather skirt and had a spear, you'd be able to loot a leather skirt and a spear. If you killed some plate wearing brigand, you got his plate, along with what was in his backpack or fanny pouch or whatever. If you kill Archmage Doan, and he's got the hypnotic dagger equipped, you get to loot that. If he's using the staff and wearing the cape, he doesn't drop the dagger. Let crafters be able to use the leather from the skirt to to make stuff. Let the plate be able to be melted down and used towards something else.

I'm not big on the whole 'epic items - must catch the newest pokemon' type of gameplay that seems to be so popular. The kind of stuff I like would probably bore most people.