Broken Toys

DoubleD> Oh We got great Direct x10 support, but sorry we never thought about a LFG tool?

Well, when you think of a “game”, LFG tool make sense. When you think a “world”, or about immersion, it doesn’t. How can my character magically know about all the warrior, rogues, mages who also happen to want to run the same instance I want to? Immersion-breaking in order to improve gameplay is what makes most MMO unappealing to me :/

The LFG tool could be simulated by typing in guild chat, /say, /yell, general channels, etc. Also, remember that WoW is very mass-market, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most players aren’t even level 70 yet. Casual players usually solo (or duo with RL friends) and invite people who are nearby to help with their current quests. In a game like CoX, FF11, where party play is dominant, I can understand why having a LFG tool is important. But in WoW? Handy, but not that widespread in use.

On the other hand, it’s most likely not the same engineers working on the graphics engine, so if those guys have enough budget and time to get the latest DirectX support in, it would be stupid not to let them do it.

Personally, I’m glad they’ve worked on the LFG feature, it’s shaping up nicely, not that I care that much about it.

Immersion-breaking in order to improve gameplay is what makes most MMO unappealing to me

Strangely enough, I’d say exactly the same thing … only with the words “immersion” and “gameplay” swapped around.

Ha! DR Bartle is just pissed because Blizzard banned his account

Firstly I haven’t read the whole thread and am not going to pretend like I have, mainly beacuse the initial statement is flawed. I have been playing WoW since the the start of the final beta and although some people might not remember or realise, there was a time when WoW wasn’t as wildly popular as it is today. Bartle says that he wants to close it to have better virtual worlds, but once upon a time WoW was one of these better virtual worlds. Does this mean that as soon as a virtual world rises above a certain popularity level then it should be closed down just for the good of the others? The industry would be become stagnant.

Though I can see his logic behind closing it, WoW is performing a vital function of bringing new players into gaming and/or the virtual world genre. As backwards as it may seem I don’t think non gamers get drawn in by great games as much as they should be, it’s only when a game becomes a phenomenon (WoW, Pokemon, Final Fantasy 7 and so on) that they seem to take notice, generalising of course. When I look at the game charts I get disheartened by the amount of times The Sims crops up there, or some crappy game using a movie liscence like Harry Potter, or some half baked sequel. I for one am glad to see that non gamers are enjoying a well designed game rather than buying it because of the brand etc. I personally think WoW deserves all the success and attention that it has gathered.

As I said before I have been playing WoW since it first arrived although I have been thinking about jumping ship or just giving up altogether. I would be interested in hearing what Bartle thinks are the unknown gems that are deserving of the attention of the many millions of WoW players

“I for one am glad to see that non gamers are enjoying a well designed game rather than buying it because of the brand etc.”

Yeah, because WoW’s success has nothing to do with the Warcraft brand or the Blizzard company name.

The problem is that all those people who say they are looking for a WoW alternative aren’t looking for something as good as WoW, they’re looking for something better. All the annoyances, inconveniences, bad design, and delayed implementation that they forgave with WoW they’re not willing to forgive for another MMO. (and don’t tell me WoW was perfect, just think back and remember what PvP used to be like at any point from launch to shortly before now)

This is a catch-22 in certain places – For example, players want a MMO that has raiding, because WoW has it, but they don’t want a MMO that requires lots of time investment, large groups, or other non-casual friendly gameplay. They want a game that has a real sense of achievement, but they want a game that they can log in and instantly be able to play alongside others who have been playing for a year.

Quite simply, if players were to be confronted with two games, one which was an exact clone of WoW, and the other which was WoW but even easier they would complain that the first game was too hardcore, and that the second one “doesn’t have an endgame” or just didn’t hook them because it gave them no sense of acheivement.

Really, developers can’t win, and the only thing that will topple WoW will be the game simply getting dated or deliberately self-destructive design decisions by Blizzard.

Yunk wrote:
I still fail to see the difference between games and other industries.

Perhaps you should learn more about other industries? Let’s look at two other industries in particular: books and movies. I’m going to focus on the base costs to develop a work. Additional costs for creation (printing, pressing, etc.), distribution, and marketing are left as an exercise for the reader. So are examples from still other industries.

Books are different than games (particularly MMOs) because it only takes one person to create the core of the book. Often other people are involved in editing the book, but they do so in series and not in parallel. So, a book is written by a very small group of people. Books also have a much lower cost to develop: even if you pretend that the equipment used to write the book are only going to be used for the book (a laptop and word processing software for each person), that’s still below the $100k to $1M (or more!) required to write a small-scale MMO. (There are opportunity costs for the writer, especially one without a contract, but these are not precisely measurable and similar to the opportunity costs of the developers of an MMO.) Also note that a “big budget” book doesn’t cost any more to create; it costs J.K. Rowling about the same to write the latest Harry Potter book as it would take for me to write something publishers will (probably) handily reject.

The big issue here is that for writing, it’s hard for new authors to get recognition from the traditional publishing system. Publishers are hesitant to give new authors a chance, and will often desperately underpay them; Rowling reportedly made only about $4000 on the first Harry Potter book, for example. Of course, this is similar for MMO development, where publishers also won’t even talk to you if you don’t have some history, or if you have the whole game ready to publish (that is, managed to fund the game yourself). Even if you do get published, don’t expect a good deal, or expect one that will even allow you to stay in business in some cases. Plus, players tend to be hesitant about supporting an indie MMO because it’s not backed by a large company. (The logic goes that if the game were any good, obviously a large company would want a piece of it. Don’t laugh, someone told me that line as an excuse not to try M59.) But, this is where the similarities with games end. Selling 100k books makes you a best-seller. Having 100k subscribers makes you an awkward “not small, but not large, either” game like EVE.

Now, let’s look at movies. One big difference is that the costs can vary widely, but they don’t necessarily impact the quality of the film in the same way budget impacts the quality of a game. On the high end, most of the cost goes to pay actors. One of the celebrity magazines I saw while waiting at the grocery store said that Daniel Radcliffe, the star of Harry Potter, made $50M. That’s approximately the cost of our largest MMO ever paid for one actor! Of course, there’s an entire system set up to cover the costs of making a movie and allowing actors to be paid that much. The only way anyone, even the top-tier celebrity designers, made that much money in games was to sell out to a large publisher (and then watch their company die slowly, in most cases).

On the low end of costs, you have The Blair Witch Project which reportedly cost $22,000 to make. That will almost get a mocap studio to give you a few decent animations. (And, remember, as Jarnis said above, if your animations aren’t superb or if you don’t have enough content, your game sucks.) And, while Blair Witch didn’t look all that great (even if the shaky camera work was an artistic decision), nobody’s complaining that the shadows aren’t realistic and therefore writing off the movie entirely. Enough people were interested in the movie’s premise to go see it despite the low-budget. Now, if you ignore the mainstream and go truly indie, YouTube has shown that with very little budget you can create some pretty interesting movies. But, with that same budget you can’t make an MMO game, unfortunately.

And, if you’re one of those people that want to pass off that old lie about “it’s the gameplay, not the graphics”, I have one answer for you. I think I’m legally allowed to slap anyone stupid who still tries to that old defense.

And, yes, I will admit there are some exceptions to the rule. But, if success stories like Runescape were easy to duplicate, it would have been done already. Alternatively, even though Sherwood Dungeon has 1.3 million unique players per month, it’s questionable if it fits in the same category as other persistent worlds (but, that’s another long debate topic, I’m sure). In the end, I haven’t seen anyone even mention these games as alternatives, and I don’t anticipate people flocking to these games as real alternatives to WoW.

So, let’s summarize why MMOs are different than other media:
* The cost to compete with the market leader is too high.
* Further, there are no adequate ways to fund a high-end game.
* The costs to do an indie MMO game are not low enough to do independently.
* Primarily because you cannot do a true MMO with 1 person.
* An MMO game, particularly an indie game, will always have some flaw that allows people to “hate” it.
* People judge an MMO by the amount of money that went into it more than they do for other media.

Any further proof will require you to enroll in a business course, or to start paying me for business consulting.

“this is analogous to saying Mozart, or Shakespeare or Muhammad Ali should have buggered off and made way for someone better.”

Well Muhammad Ali was forced to “bugger off and make way for someone better” when he had his licence to box revoked, and was jailed for refusing the draft.

Still came back and kicked ass though.

My first online game was Shades, which was great fun, but expensive (we had to subscribe per minute played, on top of per minute connection fees back then – not unusual for some to have monthly bills over £1,000.00, a few went over £3,000.00 pcm. Most I paid was a bit over £800.00 one month, and I capped it at £300.00 pcm after).

I tried WoW in beta, thought it great for new MMO players, but sucked for anyone that had been around a while like me, due to far too much ‘Same ‘ole, same ‘ole’ and the inclusion of so many tiresome MMO mistakes, such as plumping for the gear driven nonsense affecting mechanics, which is definitely discredited. Plus I have astigmatism of the eyes, acute glaucoma in both, and a laser eye op that went wrong and welded the inside of my right eye so the muscles are fixed open, so the graphics aren’t just dire, they actually give me very real physical pain (I can be used to test systems for optical suitability, because if what I see sucks the big one, I get chronic migraine within 20 minutes of looking at it – works for monitor testing too).

I honestly don’t think Wow raised any bars at all. I think it lowered them (which is what makes it such a tremendous entry level game). The danger is, those bars get moved down more. Games do get dumbed down, devs listen to pathetic whiners on boards, and talk themselves into doing things they shouldn’t do – pandering to whiney little ‘biatches’.

There is no point creating more WoW’s, because WoW does WoW, fabulously. Attempt to recreate WoW, and that project is, IMHO, dooming itself from the start. Any WoW player moving to such a game, would likely move back to WoW in a week tops. Any new player looking at the two, would more than likely choose to play the established known quantity.

People playing WoW, want better stuff to go to. Stuff that has actually taken note of the MMO failures over the years that WoW ignored and included rather than excluded.

Better stuff is happening, and I find it significant that nobody has mentioned a game that has ALREADY pushed the envelope forward, developed some exciting new things (especially perhaps its highly efficient networking and bandwidth efficiency), and been a SUCCESS doing so, in the exact same timeframe that WoW has been in existence (launching slightly later), and has attracted over 2 million sales in the process.

I’ll repeat that so it sinks in – OVER TWO MILLION SALES!

Maybe it hasn’t been mentioned because the devs are some of the original people that worked on WoW (including the project lead programmer) and left Blizz, and also people that worked on Bnet and left Blizz.

That game is Guild Wars.

Guild Wars 2 is now in development, and I think some of you people need to look to your laurels, and do some fast shaping up.

The size of the Global online gaming market is only just starting to get into gear, and there really isn’t much out there that’s worth playing (or at least worth paying a monthly fee for). Too much is in th ehands of accountants, that are the ruination of gaming (accountants and gaming? you got to be joking!). SoE, dominated by accountants; VU, dominated by accountants; EA, dominated by accountants.

It’s the ACCOUNTANTS that are screwing the market up, and chronically holding it back.

In 10 years, games sales should make what WoW has achieved, extremely small beer indeed. But if accountants keep having an influence on product, than that great future for gaming could fail to materialise for us all.

‘Safe’ works for washing machines and Volvo’s.

‘Safe’ isn’t what gaming can ever be about.

Brian wrote:
Games don’t remain unknown merely because they suck. I could list a few dozen games you probably haven’t played that are superb games. An easy example is Beyond Good & Evil. The game did terribly in sales, but most people who have played it agree it’s a truly wonderful, fun game, worthy of being in “Top N Lists”. Just because people aren’t playing a game doesn’t mean it’s not fun.

That’s an interesting example, because I believe deep down everyone who played Beyond Good and & Evil would agree that it was a fine game (myself included) but it was very clear when playing it that it wouldn’t be a commercial hit. Yes it’s fun to play, but being fun and being a commercial success aren’t the same thing. It wasn’t innovative enough in offeing new gameplay elements to overcome the fact that the core gameplay (including the main character) wouldn’t broadly appeal to the market. I’m certainly not claiming that in some senses it wasn’t a better game, but like other entertainment industries what can be a better game with deeper appeal to a small audience translate to big success. There’s a reason pop bands in music sell huge numbers, and certainly I think most music critic’s wouldn’t point to the depth of quality. Yet, if you were to round up and kill all the current pop music stars, pretty quickly you’d find pop music was back with mass appeal. It’s not that the people listening to pop music are merely listening because that’s all their aware of, there really is a big market for that type of music.

One big issue is marketing. It’s hard and it’s expensive. So, if there were a small gem of a game out there that can’t afford big advertising, it’ll probably get lost in the tidal wave of people that can afford marketing. Numbers I’ve heard for WoW’s marketing budget are larger than many MMORPG budgets before WoW launched.

This is very true, and Blizzard’s reputation really did help them beyond that. In fact I think if you look at reputation gone wrong, you can take an example like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and see a game that really was hurt by the brand’s recent legacy (Prince of Persia 3d was a terrible game, in the relatively recent past when it shipped, and I’m sure that hurt it’s numbers.)

Newbie designer mistake #1: Assuming everyone will react the same way you do.

In retrospect, I suspect that completely closing down WoW would have an effect that Dr. Bartle didn’t intend: since the majority of WoW’s players are in China, all those Chinese players would support different Chinese games. This would give those games a boost, perhaps enough to jump to other markets easier. In the end, this would probably be a big boon to Chinese games.

No, believe it or not, I quite understand I’m just one person, and I agree that people would be looking for a new online experience. In fact I agree with you that in China and Korea this would probably have a significant benefit to local designers. However, I think you’ve made a bigger mistake looking at your post, you are falling into the trap of thinking about great as defined by a connoisseur, not great from a business success perspective.

When you rapidly fall into the trap of saying dismissal of minor points of LOTR mean that Jarnis is looking for a reason to hate anything that isn’t wow, that’s a connoisseur’s argument. When he’s quite plainly saying (though I suspect failing to articulate all o fthe reasons the game didn’t successfully hook him) that he gave the game a try and found it lacking. Then cited that the graphics were a big issue for him. The reality is, graphics are a big issue in the gaming industry, that shouldn’t be news. Yes a game with bad graphics can be great, but bad graphics immediately hurt it’s chances of commercial success. The fact of the matter is, with what should be an aging game engine, you can show people who’ve never played wow the graphics today (a 3 year old game now) and have people impressed by the graphical look of the game. Even though new mmorpgs with more advanced engines are coming out, they are having a hard time competing graphically for various reasons. For example, compare Age of Conan to World of Warcraft, clearly the engine in Age of Conan is much more powerful, but I would argue that the art style quickly hits the uncanny valley problem, and I’d argue that in the market graphically that will give it the edge when the mass market mmo audience is comparing screenshots.

Perhaps the issue is you misunderstood my point, I’m not arguing that because I like or don’t like a given mmorpg the market will or won’t. I’m merely saying that it’s pretty easy to see there isn’t any competition in the market now that would snap up the majority of World of Warcraft players were it to disappear tomorrow. Sure many games would get a boost (particularly in the short term,) but I don’t think any mmorpgs in the market today have what it takes for the level of mass market success WoW maintains. That doesn’t mean the other games aren’t better for their particular markets, merely that like pop music, there’s a reason pop music exists, and people buying pop music aren’t avoiding other artists merely because of the current pop artists who are out there, but because there is a real market for pop music and even if you wipe out the current pop music artists, you’ll just have the recording industry tailor a new generation of pop artists to take the place of the old ones, and exploit the market.

Sorry for the double post, but look beyond movies, many industries have 600 lb gorillas that feel impossible to compete against. Again, it’s not a new problem. Get rid of WoW and some other gorilla will take it’s place soon enough. The small guys will still have that same problem always. I’m not saying those problems aren’t there, just that if someone throws their hands in the air and gives up, they will never succeed, and it will be their own fault, not the fault of the gorilla in the room.

Brian The Barman wrote:
“Well Muhammad Ali was forced to “bugger off and make way for someone better” when he had his licence to box revoked, and was jailed for refusing the draft.

Still came back and kicked ass though.”

I am well aware of this. It was actually part of my point

This is certainly a fascinating thread. Long may it continue! …..

“I’ll repeat that so it sinks in – OVER TWO MILLION SALES!”

I thought this statement was worth updating.

“According to co-founder Jeff Strain, the series has sold more than 3.5 million copies since release, a figure that he attributes to the non-subscription nature of Guild Wars.”

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/guildwarseyeofthenorth/news.html?sid=6174936&om_act=convert&om_clk=multimodule&tag=multimodule;picks;img;4

After a year or two away playing WoW, I’ve returned to GW and I’m pleasantly surprised (again) that such a great experience can be had for no monthly fee. It may not have many “worldy” features, but it sure is entertaining.

Another alternative explanation for venture capital drying up (if that’s what’s indeed happening) could be (from my own experiences chasing venture capital): WoW has changed the market so a few good ideas are no longer enough to merit an investment. They’ll only be willing to invest in either 1. a safe investment that will get some money, or 2. bet on a great idea.

The problem is the “good ideas” are no longer good enough. So to the people trying to get venture capital, to them it sounds like no one is willing to take a chance anymore, because they’re only looking at it from the point of view of a designer trying to raise capital. BUT, those venture capitalists are certainly willing to bet big on great ideas, they are simply a lot more demanding about those ideas.

Most people get caught in the middle, they don’t have what a venture capitalist thinks is a great idea so they get stuck in the safe zone. They may think venture capital has dried up, but that’s only because they are too close to the problem and can’t see it from the outside. (this applies to me too). And note to them great ideas make money, as opposed to satisfying critics. That’s how the venture capitalists I know think (sorry I don’t know anyone willing to invest in games though )

It hurts to keep getting rejected, I know I’ve been there. At first I also thought “they’re not willing to take a chance” but I realized they were, but they were demanding more of me. I’ve always found the writeups VCs have provided me to be invaluable for my business. These are people who’ve seen many businesses both succeed and fail, and what they would say we needed to do was like great free advice I’d have had to pay a consultant thousands of dollars for otherwise.

My old company had ideas but when we needed more funding we couldn’t go with the product we had, we were told it wasn’t innovative enough, too similar to our big competitors (Motorola and a few others had moved into the market since we started ). Basically we had a choice: be like someone else just a little better and hope to get bought out or reach higher and prove we can execute it as well.

(of course we had other problems like my two partner’s arguing with each other’s wives and stupid crap like that that imploded the company).

Obviuosly there are people not willing to take chances, usually you find these in management of market leaders and middle management in any large company, since the larger a company the harder it is to innovate – they have to either protect market share, or grow their business, etc. Which is why Gates completely changed Microsoft around after reading The Innovator’s Dilemma.

DaveN wrote:
“Some of them are re-jacketing classic series like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, while others are casting about for new authors and titles.”

I just want to say that Susan Cooper is a legend, and that the Dark is Rising rules. I have not read a Harry Potter book, so I cannot really comment on this one.
When I have something constructive to say, I will. But for now, I’m enjoying the thread…

aaaah!

My shared university connection is responsible for this double post. The first one just hung and I had to close the browser.
At least I’m able to play online games. Lots of my friends on campus are not so lucky. Many go through an entire degree unable to experience a MMO.. and as computer games students, being unable to play things like Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, etc. is starting to get on our nerves.
Personally, I’ve had to reject a major project/dissertation on virtual worlds, in favour of a one player module. Simply because there’s no way I can run a server through the University firewall.

I’m sorry for the rant, I just hate it when my connection screws up!

Baseless assumptions are baseless assumptions.

Pretending that if Warcraft wasn’t there people would need to play a game, and therefore seek out other games is simply unproven. Does EQ2 spike during WoW patch downtime? I’m going to guess probably not, and I have to think that people play Warcraft because they like “warcraft”. Not a need for a fix from an MMO specifically, and if anything in my experience it’s community aspects (Wow has more people = more interaction, instant gratifcation, etc etc) that keep them their beyond the initial sheen.

Guesstimates beyond that as to behavior are slippery slope at best.