Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Zehn - Vhex said:

Oh, and you really shouldn"t complain about marketing buzzwords and then go right along ahead and use marketing buzzwords like "old school mmo" and "meaningful pvp"

<3

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I meant it in the most colloquial sense imaginable I would be a happy panda with just a WoW clone with 1000 more instances and balanced PvP!

I don"t think you are allowed to draw an equivalency between a single player MMO where you do get to fingerbang the princess and WoW, where at most you are a sidekick. In Baldur"s gate the world changes around you in response to actions you take, in most MMOs you can only have a token effect on the world.

Lore in MMOs can serve as a window dressing, but you can never affect change in the world.

Gnome Eater said:

Lore in MMOs can serve as a window dressing, but you can never affect change in the world.

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That"s absolutely, unequivocally not true.

Ngruk said:

That"s absolutely, unequivocally not true.

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See, the problem is, you cannot have 20000 people all feeling like they are the heroes of the world. They can feel as though they are playing along a path, and playing an important role, but you can never have a PC raze an important city so that no other PC can ever head there the way you can in Fallout.

You obviously have more experience than me working alongside designers, but I think you"ll agree that in MMOs, PCs can never have enough freedom over the world as they do in single player RPGs, since allowing one player to change important aspects of the game for everyone else is a recepy for disaster.

It depends how modest your goals are though. If you feel the argent-dawn type system that was showcased in WoTLK counts as affecting serious change, then we probably disagree. By serious change I mean going into a town in fallout, killing everyone there, detonating a nuke, and nobody else can ever go back there.

I guess it depends on how much impact you expect to impart. Are you going to seal off the cave of 2000 developer hours by yourself 20 minutes after you boot up the game? No, of course not.

But phasing has really opened up the gamesphere to more possibilities. You could arrive at a town that"s been recently sacked by bandits, go out and kill the bandits and when you return the village has started to be rebuilt. They ask for a donation and if you give 1000 gold coins and come back in a month they offer to let you sleep with the sassy farmers daughter.

Is the official lore going to state that you, Mcbeefynuts, were the savior of the town? No, of course not.

Hence the two storylines concept. The active story is centered around you and your contribution to the world but when it comes time to push the overall game story forward for the sake of the other 250k~11m people playing, it wasn"t you that slayed the dragon.

This is not an experience unique to MMO"s and not something people should really get hung up on.

Zehn - Vhex said:

This is not an experience unique to MMO"s and not something people should really get hung up on.

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I think this is a disagreement about semantics, not about content. I don"t think it is unique to MMO"s, but I think single player RPGs give players a lot more opportunity to shape their world, especially if it is in a world without a strong pre-written IP.

How many people went around every town in Might and Magic and armageddon"d the entire place down?

Utnayan said:

Amazing everyone tries to copy the mechanics, but don"t have the balls to have open development during beta 1+.

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Man look we still can"t compare WoW with anything else do this very date, I remember like a year+ before the launch of WoW a sandbox of the freaking Alpha client leaked, and even ifofflinerunning around, the mf world was to my memory already complete, the night elves were flipping, the dragons (that you could spawm with some slash commands) rendered and awesome, I think barrens and orgrimmar looked different (right?) but that"s about it.

At launch some problems showed up, but for a Beta? Fuck that was the coolest beta I"ve ever played.

The day a game reaches beta 1 in that state, man no NDA will be necessary - till them, it"s a valid even if weak defense to protect a bad product and your job with it.

Ngruk said:

That"s absolutely, unequivocally not true.

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Hope you can change that sir, because so far, most MMO"s are rock static.. the Redridge Lakeshire workers are still repairing that freaking bridge for many years now, and I doubt it will ever be fully done.

[edit] ..oh well to be honest we had the Sleeper on EQ1, that did change where/what you could raid for good. Good times.

Gnome Eater said:

Lore in MMOs can serve as a window dressing, but you can never affect change in the world.

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How about an MMO where not only can you change the world and shape the lore, but those changes go on to help shape novels put out by a world renowned author ........

"And then some random guys just killed everything that moved, including the child of destiny."

Kuro said:

"And then some random guys just killed everything that moved, including the child of destiny."

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Rofl. About damn right.

Gnome Eater said:

I think this is a disagreement about semantics, not about content. I don"t think it is unique to MMO"s, but I think single player RPGs give players a lot more opportunity to shape their world, especially if it is in a world without a strong pre-written IP.

How many people went around every town in Might and Magic and armageddon"d the entire place down?

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I think it"s two arguments really.

One being the level of freedom players are allowed and the second being if it matters or not. I think we can all agree that no matter the game, your actions don"t really matter because the game designers can and will retcon all your actions to fit the sequel. For example, I decided at the end of Baldur"s Gate that I wasn"t going to kill Sarevok, but invite him to join my side as we march on the rest of the world and bring death and ruin to all.

Granted that wasn"t an actual in game option, but I ad-libbed.

So when I fired up BG2 and there was no mention of the terrible butcher of baldur"s gate who had single handedly slain every last civilian within a 50 mile radius and I was informed that Sarevok was dead and there stood Jahira and Minsk who I firmly remember planting more then one sword into I was a little dissapointed.

Which leaves the level of freedom you"re allowed. And I only need to point to Second Life to demonstrate just how little freedom I want other players to have. It"s bad enough I have to group with Mcbeefynuts. I really don"t want him having the power to carve wooden penises out of trees and attach them to his body.

Flight said:

How about an MMO where not only can you change the world and shape the lore, but those changes go on to help shape novels put out by a world renowned author ........

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Uhhhhh

You REALLY want to let players do that? And them "xxxCrackaKillaxxx69" saved the princess, and they lived forever happily ever after, until he found out she was a dude and had a penis.

Which leaves the level of freedom you"re allowed. And I only need to point to Second Life to demonstrate just how little freedom I want other players to have. It"s bad enough I have to group with Mcbeefynuts. I really don"t want him having the power to carve wooden penises out of trees and attach them to his body.

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why do you hate freedom?

Flight said:

How about an MMO where not only can you change the world and shape the lore, but those changes go on to help shape novels put out by a world renowned author ........

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This was offered once and the actual implementation fell flat.

Remember City of Heroes? They had a comic released to help flesh out the gameworld and one of their gimmicks was they"d select people ingame to be in the comic.

Cool, right? My imagination asploded due to not being fully indoctrinated in Zehn-pessimism as yet, as did many others.

FoH-Forum Guild, Go!

We go and level up and whack Hamidon first in release, gamewide. Pissed off a much bigger Beta superhero group that nuthugged the Devs constantly, but fuck them. At the same time, a lot of the smart people in the guild are posting in the forums constantly giving advice on specs and making suggestions since it became glaringly obvious that the game was over once Hamidon died and we were max level.

Did they use the death of the Hamidon, and end boss they knew was going to be added to the game and killed by someone, in the comic? Maybe use the first killers or hell, ANYONE who whacked him, in the comic to have the players make an impact?

No, the comic story was lame as hell and their follow-through in putting players in the comic was selecting some of the players and putting their in-game pics and bios at the back of the comic.

If GMG is the first to actually do this and use players in their promotions (changing inappropriate names like Bizanich to Bizh-Ah-Nich or something appropriately Arr-PEE if they choose a player like that), I"ll think they"ll have something. People will vie to get in the promotions (plus the favoritism drama"d be delicious).

If there is something that MMOs these don"t do enough, it is content that is not supposed to be killed/explored. It sounds insane, I know, but exploring the Azshara crater, walking above the Orgrimmar, exploring CoT before TBC, those were some of my favorite moments simply because you knew that you were not supposed to be there and few people saw it. Then there wasn"t all that much info about those areas. Say all you want, but this really can"t be achieved with linear instanced areas.

I guess that these days you could achieve it by putting in some areas without quests, like Azshara. Shame there weren"t any in Northrend, riding around that area and running into the ghost of Azuregos or the odd Furbolg camp was awesome simply because all the content that *could* be there was left to your fantasy, which is always more interesting than the reality. Sometimes the best content is empty area.

Ngruk said:

That"s absolutely, unequivocally not true.

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Thank Jebus you disagreed.

NativityInBlack said:

Hope you can change that sir, because so far, most MMO"s are rock static.. the Redridge Lakeshire workers are still repairing that freaking bridge for many years now, and I doubt it will ever be fully done.

[edit] ..oh well to be honest we had the Sleeper on EQ1, that did change where/what you could raid for good. Good times.

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WOW touched onto this type of stuff, albeit with kid gloves. The AQ opening was a lore based world changer. I was not in the guild that was forcing the action but at the same time I took part in handing in some bandages and whatnot and remember the hoopla once it opened. That event was set in motion by a small number of people but Blizzard was actually fairly intelligent in that they made sure everyone on the server at least felt a little bit connected to the event.

Then there are the changes to the world in WOTLK. Bolvar Foredragon"s Death in WOTLK takes a town where you can buy stuff and whatnot and changes it into a place where people will not stop bloody screaming and simply run in fear. There are a few places in WOTLK where each person finishing a quest changes the area for good for them, the Son"s of Hodir quests change the lake spawns and the burning forge area for example.

I will admit that Blizzard did not go terribly deep into doing this stuff, but they did do some and proved it was possible, the changes of the world for each person based on their actions is a huge step in the right direction IMO and should be alot more prevalent in future games. If a company wanted to I would imagine with some work a guild could be given these types of events and changes as well that would alter the world as they completed raid content.

It was man but on EQ you had to give up something (raiding sleeper"s) to move on the history. AQ was pretty much a win/win open the sesame kinda of thing.

Anyone back from those days remember the sheer amount of drama/glory that fell into the guilds that freed that dragon and cockblocked the rest from raiding it. Luckily my server did sort of a joint guilds effort so I got to see / get killed by it.

Sorry on the grammar folks I r Brazilian and I learned most of my half-assed english from you guys and TS/ventrillo raids hah (never had any classes).




Hope Copernicus can find a way to let uschangethe world.

Okay, I"ll bite...

Flight said:

So, "Industry Prediction".
The "Next Generation" of MMORPGs is coming.Did I hear a "*cough* bullshit *cough* at the back ? Let me explain. Next gen won"t be technical. It"s not going to be virtual reality or 3D graphics. It is games that have learned the very basic lessons that the short history of the industry have to offer.

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I"m quite literal and thus a generation is defined by an iteration and building upon the best of what came before. Since MMO"s take roughly 5-6 years from inception to completion let"s use that with the overlap. Given that, I"d say we"re in the midst of generation 2 and working on generation 3. I"m also keeping the focus to subscription and "classic" style MMO"s, adding the other branches gets unmanageable and I want to stick to one family tree.

Generation 0: IRC, play by e-mail, web games, MUD"s (This is obvious)

Generation 1: (1999-2004) Asheron"s Call, EverQuest, Ultima Online, Meridian 59, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, and others.

Generation 2: (2003-2008) World of Warcraft, EVE Online, EverQuest II, Warhammer, Conan, Star Wars Galaxies, Final Fantasy, Matrix Online, City of Heroes, Vanguard, and several others.

Generation 3: (2009-2014) Whatever Blizzard is making, Star Wars: Old Republic, Whatever Carbine is making, Heroes of Telara, whatever else Trion is making, Copernicus, and others.

Now let"s play evolution...
Generation 1: There were three main models that passed on their genes -- Ultima Online, EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. There were traits that the second generation inherited from all the other games but the primary evolutions in generation 2 came from those three.

What did generation 1 teach us? MMO"s work. Playing with other people is fun. Raiding is cool. Organized PvP is cool. Emergent gameplay is not always a bad thing. Among a whole host of other things, but it was all new.

Generation 2: What defines generation 2 is a refinement of the main ideas from the prior generation. In this, one game had one very key adaptation: Accessibility. Other evolutions happened they just were not as successful.

But what has Generation 2 taught us? People like to play "around" others but not necessarily always "with" others. Accessibility and polish are of critical importance when there are choices. Focus on what your game IS not what it COULD be. (A corollary is that radically changing a game mid-flight is probably a bad idea). Building massive worlds and system generated content to fill them is bad.

Generation 3: We"re just starting here. But there are now two generations to learn from. Not all the ideas from generation 1 were refined in generation 2 since they were so overshadowed by the one big adaptation of Accessibility and polish. I think those are a given by now, if you don"t have that adaptation you can"t compete in the natural selection. The question is, will Generation 3 hit on anything like that adaptation and be a clear trait to carry forward? Perhaps... a lot of us are guessing what it could be, and it might be that there is more than a single answer.

What do I think generation 3 teach us? Story (personal and world focused) is more important than people guessed. You can successfully apply the working models to more genres than fantasy. You can make a massively single player game and still be successful. If you don"t seriously include socialization as a goal you"ll have a serious retention problem.

Flight said:

From mid 2010 we are going to see truly fun, quality MMO"s appearing on the market. For the first time, WoW is going to see serious competition.

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I agree here. Though you will still see MMOs coming out which do not have quality built into their DNA, they"ll be obvious and you"ll see the same pattern as the last few MMO releases until someone gets it right. And trying to play Xerox and copy WoW without understanding the practices that produced WoW is missing the point and hasn"t really inherited that trait.

Flight said:

The "type" of the company is driven from the very top and depends on the senior staffs commitment to quality and openness to change.

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Good leadership is vital to any company. It just happens that with game companies the views of the leadership are *directly* reflected in the games those companies produce.

Tropics said:

Then there are the changes to the world in WOTLK. Bolvar Foredragon"s Death in WOTLK takes a town where you can buy stuff and whatnot and changes it into a place where people will not stop bloody screaming and simply run in fear. There are a few places in WOTLK where each person finishing a quest changes the area for good for them, the Son"s of Hodir quests change the lake spawns and the burning forge area for example.

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There"s a big difference between "world changing" (the world changes, for you) and "world shaping" (you change the world, for everyone).

One is relatively easy, the other is horribly hard to do well (and an enormous uneconomical proposition in terms of dev hours, usually).