Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Never said it meant everything. And you can certainly screw it up like SWG. But it sure does help. And I bet if you polled the WOW player base a large majority knew or played its games prior to the MMO.

Don"t overhype it, man. Vanguard and Brad"s postings on here should be a lesson for everyone in the industry on that matter.

The way I see it, there"s nothing wrong with setting a goal like that. What he says is true - there will be a game that eclipses wow, and there will be MMOs that launch with millions of customers. If nobody is willing to say "yeah, we can do that" then who will do it? At least he seems to be putting alot of thought into how this can be accomplished and isn"t trying to tote some gospel gaming philosophy over all else. I think it"s a bold and progressive stance to take - if nobody will try to challenge the juggernaut that is Blizzard and instead just roll over and settle into a niche then this industry is in alot of trouble. Competition is healthy and facilitates improvements. I see Curt"s outlook as a direct result of that, and I"m glad to see that somebody has picked up the reigns to try to raise the bar on the "super" MMO, which currently enjoys a complete monopoly.

Don"t overhype it, man. Vanguard and Brad"s postings on here should be a lesson for everyone in the industry on that matter.

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What Brad did would have been perfectly acceptable had Sigil delivered on his claims - furthermore, I believe that all of it could have been accomplished in the right house, with the right circumstances, in the right amount of time. The downside to the hype machine has yet to even be possible with 38 Studios.

Yea, he"s pretty tight lipped when it comes to actual details. He isn"t here spouting his ideals and preaching to everyone why he is the gaming messiah come to save the industry. He"s just saying that he has the balls to attempt to achieve more than what has been done. In the end, I think we all do that for our life"s dreams. We all want more.

IMO, this is a different animal than Vanguard. Vanguard tried to be the "dream MMO" and failed; the 38 game seems to be aimed more at widespread appeal, with a simple, solid, and fun core game. The widespread appeal will come from doing a few things REALLY well, rather than attempting to address every issue that someone ever had with another MMO and cramming it all into one game.

I wish 38 the best of luck but just remember several recent names.....

Vanguard:SoH

Dark and Light

Wish

Mythica

etc, etc, etc....

Don"t see much success in there. The only game with success other then WoW is arguably LOTRO soon to be followed by AOC. All 3 of course well known IP"s.

What really caught my eye was when Ngruk mentioned

then all of the sudden you think about 5-20 million people doing the same, every day, and you can see where things just don"t become as cool and ingenious as we like to think they are when we come up with them

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I would be thinking about a few hundred thousand first maybe a million, then grow to several million. It sounds like you expect to jump in with 5 million subs the way you worded it.......going to be in for a really hard landing when you wake up from the dream.

I"d argue that if your goal is to have 20 million people playing, you better design from the ground up operating under that assumption. What"s the con? Has everybody already forgotten login queues? It"s not a direct line to draw from implementation to design, but Blizzard got caught with their pants down in a major andexpensiveway there due to underanticipating their success. It"s perfectly possible that design decisions that wouldn"t require massive up front money(like buying server infrastructure that you don"t think you"ll need would) could be just as important and expensive down the road, whether it be from development costs or, worse, lost subscribers and a bad perception from a disgruntled playerbase. Look at what happened when SOE went in and tried to fix the problems at the root of SWG.

*edit*
I find the whole IP discussion pretty ridiculous. Let"s assume for a moment that it actually is a key element to the success of an MMO, which I don"t really agree with personally. Are you seriously going to compare the following that warcraft/starcraft/diablo/etc generated to the combined following that Curt, Salvatore, and McFarlane command? I"d say it"s a safe bet that there are more followers among that crowd who haven"t even heard of Blizzard than there are people playing MMOs in the entire world.

I just don"t think people should make a game with numbers in mind. Don"t tailor your game to a theoretical playerbase, let the playerbase tailor itself to your game. Make the game you want to, make a game you will play. Make something you are proud to have your name attached to and have no qualms showing every last detail to someone with confidence. Games like EQ and WoW didn"t say "we want to get 100k or 1 million players", they just said "here we are, come and play it" and the rest took care of itself.

I agree with that point as well twobit, but not so much on the WoW part. I didn"t really get involved with wow from the beginning because it was clear to me in early beta that they had gone the exact opposite route. I didn"t see a game that had been developed to a vision, I saw a game that had been crafted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Here"s the simple fact though, while I personally prefer games that were developed in the way you mentioned, like EQ, I represent an extremely small segment of the total market. I"m not so sure that those games will ever become huge again, and really, they never did. The only hope I see is if the right person with the right goals squeezes their way into super mmo status and effects change from that point forward. Anything else is just another little niche game that has no major impact on the direction of the industry.

Twobit Whore said:

I just don"t think people should make a game with numbers in mind. Don"t tailor your game to a theoretical playerbase, let the playerbase tailor itself to your game. Make the game you want to, make a game you will play. Make something you are proud to have your name attached to and have no qualms showing every last detail to someone with confidence. Games like EQ and WoW didn"t say "we want to get 100k or 1 million players", they just said "here we are, come and play it" and the rest took care of itself.

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That"s acceptable from a base design perspective. Can"t seem to stop referring to Vanguard here, but it"s a prime example of infrastructure problems. Vanguard"s DESIGN (the original one, not what got released) was that - a game by gamers, a game that didn"t make design mistakes of previous games.

But the problem is a game is more than just the basic design. Implementation and infrastructure can kill a great design. Graphics - a good balance between good looks and good playability is difficult. In my humble opinion, VG swung too far one way, and WoW too far to the other. Others would say WoW is very good looking. It"s a matter of opinion, but all that aside, building a game that is playable AND appealing for that many people will be key in determining if it is as big as its creators intend. Server infrastructure, as Requiem pointed it, is another very important aspect. Queues to play SUCK. When I tried playing WoW, that was one of the biggest turnoffs for me - having to login an hour before I actually wanted to play.

And then there"s the actual game elements. Vanguard"s wide open, non instanced world is great in theory, but without the right balance of population, it"s just that - wide open. And empty. So a balancing of ability to instance (too many players) also lets the world be a little smaller feeling - if there are fewer players. That promotes community, but can also divide it - take Guild Wars. Instanced to the extreme, there is virtually no cohesive community because there are just too many people.

So while you are right that numbers should not be the sole driving force in designing and developing an MMO, they sure as hell need to be kept in mind because without a target (realistic) number, and without meeting that number, the game will be hard pressed to keep up.

I"m just afraid that in an attempt to make a game that appeals to such a huge market (10-20 millions players), it will really alienate the "old school" MMO players of the EQ or even WoW days. I think there may be an inverse relationship between the mass market appeal of a game and how much it appeals to the core gamers of that genre. Discounting WoW, looking at some of the most popular online games in the world, most are extremely simple games that have very little in common with what most FoH readers would recognize as a MMORPG.

Now, in terms of a business model that"s a great thing. The content of the playerbase means far less than the quantity of the playerbase. I just hope we haven"t seen the last of the games that appeal to a playerbase of 250,000 people.

Harry Potter the MMO will be the WoW killer... mark my words!



(or a well done Star Wars MMO)

Rythonn said:

Harry Potter the MMO will be the WoW killer... mark my words!

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*shudders*

IMO, the days of those games ended long ago. The MMOs that actually survived wow have adopted so many of it"s concepts that they don"t even fall under that category anymore. The Pillar, EQ, is a prime example of that. It"s not even EQ anymore, and it hasn"t been for a long time. Wow has been so successful and has had so much reach in the MMO market that it has actually shifted what the majority of people find acceptable. At one time it was ok to be forced to look at your spellbook to med, lose one fifth of a levelandlose a considerable amount of additional time CRing when you died, rely completely on your own knowledge of the world to get from point A to point B(no map), find NPCs in cities yourself, have a very capable and balanced group to get much of anything accomplished, etc. Many still argue that things are better that way, myself included, but many more who were there and experienced all of that would consider these things to be completely unacceptable in a game they played today because they have been what I like to call "wowified."

Yes, today, we like to have our map and even little markers for where we"re going. Looking for something? Just ask the friendly NPC, he"ll fix you right up. We like 10 foot radius, non-social aggro. We want to find 4 other random people and wade through legions of mobs in instances set up just for us as if we"re playing Smash TV. Caring about death is so 1999. And hey, if your group isn"t efficient or well balanced and you"re not wading through those mobs at warp speed, it doesn"t really matter since the exp from mobs is pretty much an afterthought.

Massive success reshapes the entire industry, it"s the nature of this particular beast. EQ did it when it came out, wow did it when it came out, and until somebody proves that there"s another way, we"re just going to see more and more of the same.

They took out the spellbook medding thing long before WoW. Luclin/PoP travel came long before WoW as well. But you are right in way, people have changed. They changed because they have seen what other ways things can be done and they like them that way much better. Maybe not everyone, just like I"m sure some people still prefered their horse and buggy to the horseless carraige. I don"t think of it as "wowified", I think of it as evolved. You are also right that it will take something different to pull off another success on the level of WoW, but I am 99% positive it won"t be done by discarding what has come since the original games and going back to the roots.

I didn"t directly attribute all of those changes to wow, just pointing out that people"s expectations change with the industry, even the most hardcore people. I like to use the term wowified because that"s when I personally saw the major shift. And about people seeing these changes as better, the sad truth is that most people will never know the satisfaction that comes from enduring all of those things to make a subjective decision one way or the other, and my opinion is that the combined effect of these conveniences remove skill almost completely from the equation. I don"t expect anybody to truely understand where I"m coming from with that statement. Even the FoH people who were along for the whole ride that came from wow to play on progression were shocked at how difficult simple things like grouping in a dungeon meant for your level were(myself included). We had all pretty much forgotten what we used to take for granted, and it was really amazing how much more satisfying the simple things were, even in the "dumbed down" state that progression was versus original EQ.

I"m not trying to say this is how things should be or even putting down the newer games really, I"m just pointing out that I don"t think we can ever go back.

Requiem said:

I didn"t directly attribute all of those changes to wow, just pointing out that people"s expectations change with the industry, even the most hardcore people. I like to use the term wowified because that"s when I personally saw the major shift.

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I agree with what you said, but I even tried to include WoW in the "old school" MMO realm. I"m more afraid of Runescape-style games that are so watered down they appeal to a huge market, but barely resemble a MMORPG.

Two things, not the end all of be alls, but two things are imo of monumental importance.
1) Barrier to entry-Regardless of the target market, hard core to casual, barrier to entry technically and the acutal game play has to be low. IMO above everything else, it"s what the Blizzard folks crushed everyone else on the planet with. In addition to an incredible game, polished and fun as hell, they gave us the lowest, easiest barrier to entry we"ve ever seen for a game hard core players could and would like.
2) You can"t be all things to all people. Trying to capture the heart of several different game playing types means you end up with a hodge podge looking game, that plays hodge podge.

And to those screaming and complaining that there"s too much fantasy, or that it"s overdone I disagree. I think the movie industry, in addition to similarities too numerous to mention on the business and production side, is a great example on the product side as well. Horror movies have been done, ad infinatum. Westerns, sci-fi"s, they"ve all been done. But a great movie still busts the box office record books. How many sci-fi movies came out before the original three star wars movies? How about the 2nd set of them? Bottom line is you make something great, people will watch/play, regardless of the topic/genre.

Ngruk said:

Two things, not the end all of be alls, but two things are imo of monumental importance.
1) Barrier to entry-Regardless of the target market, hard core to casual, barrier to entry technically and the acutal game play has to be low. IMO above everything else, it"s what the Blizzard folks crushed everyone else on the planet with. In addition to an incredible game, polished and fun as hell, they gave us the lowest, easiest barrier to entry we"ve ever seen for a game hard core players could and would like.
2) You can"t be all things to all people. Trying to capture the heart of several different game playing types means you end up with a hodge podge looking game, that plays hodge podge.

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For point one, I would have to disagree mostly with that idea (well, the first part of that). There is nothing wrong with having a "technical" game from that standpoint, just make sure you have a great tutorial to help the new player understand concepts. EvE is a *perfect* example of how to have a technical game, and with a great tutorial even the most anti-tech person can understand the basic concepts. The big problem with online gamers is so many of them are ADD nerds who buy a game and never read any of the manual/do tutorials before diving right in, so they might get frustrated. Also look at the in-game newbie channels in EvE that are so unbeleivably helpful, which also does this other thing in mmo"s which is important--fosters community, right from square one.

It just takes some developer love towards the new player to make the game accessible and actually taking the time to add features to that end, not making gameplay terribly watered down, that goes against the second point you were making. Blizzard simply made WoW so easy (which isn"t bad, just a different approach than EvE) that it didn"t need a tutorial, I think that distinction is important.

As for the second point, agreed 2000%.

Ngruk said:

Bottom line is you make something great, people will watch/play, regardless of the topic/genre.

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QFT

You"re also right about barrier to entry. I think the thing to do that WoW lost would be to keep some of that air of challenge and a certain mystique to attaining the highest achievements in game. Vanguard went for that, but made the game too tedious and not enough high end stuff available (read: none).

So in essence you"d have the ease of entry, the playability and replayability, of WoW, but give it some added flavor, some added challenge (not tedium), and you"ll have a game that people will find easy to get into, but enjoyable to stay in.

Now obviously, it"s easier said than done (and it"s the typical overarching goal of many MMO"s), but I think recognizing where WoW did well and what folks disliked about it will play a huge part in overtaking it and expanding the industry even further.