Broken Toys

DAOC FO LYFE!!1

The Fantasy MMO, tell us about it.

“Sure your framerate is going to hell and you’ll die a horrible death, but you’ll never have another experience like that in a different game. That’s what makes MMOs special. ”

Indeed it is.

“[O]ften, if you throw a lot of money at a game, you probably will get a big hit – it’s the Titanic of MMO design. You’ll have a big enough budget and have enough time for polish and hire the best people in the field and you’ll make a great game. That’s just going to happen. [...] Those people are going to succeed simply because they’re going to sink enough money into the game to succeed.”

This seems to me demonstrably false, or else circular to the point of — uh — pointlessness. So the big-budget six-year effort on (say) Tabula Rasa wasn’t a big hit? Well then, clearly those weren’t the best people in the field, and they didn’t sink enough money into it, and they didn’t have enough time for polish. Sort of a Calvinist view, defining quality and sufficient money and time as obviously self-evident, but only post-hoc.

In fact, to argue that “the bigger your budget, the more likely you are to succeed,” as you clearly do in this interview, is to implicitly approve the megabuck blockbuster mentality, which is provably prone to disaster. But wait, your later responses seem to argue against that mentality: “There is a point of diminishing returns where you can only throw so many people and money at a problem.”

So what were you actually trying to say?

“We don’t want to get hopes up to high because we’re doing some very ambitious things.”

Sounds like Whamadoodles OL to me.

Eveything Scott says is reasonable and gets at the point – provide the player with what they enjoy.

But if you ask Scott about leveling(as opposed to skills) he says you need it to succeed even in a game with PVP.

Why not put all your resources into endgame content. Just skip the growing “taller” stage altogether and go straight to growing wider.

I really wasn’t paying attention to the unannounced NCSoft project, but Scott… you said ALL the right words in the right order and now I’m all tingly and excited to see/hear about what you’ve got your dirty little claws into.

That just might be the lunchtime margaritas taking effect though.

Really enjoyed the interview. Looking forward to more info on the MMO .

I enjoyed the interview as well. I’m really interested in what you’re working on now. I try to be more productive with my time than to play MMORPGs these days… but sometimes I wish I could recapture the feeling I had when playing UO, EQ and DAoC. The epic scale of these games made them truly amazing.

I trust you will not lead us astray.

I don’t agree with the Titanic example.

From the outside it looks like a random thing that eventually happens. From the inside it’s like a number of things aligning and working right. But it must be dragged onward by a vision.

WoW worked right not only because of a lot of resources. But because it was able to observe and solve a lot of critical points of that kind of MMO design.

Today you don’t see that critical approach or will to surpass some positions.

It’s not a matter of money. It’s a matter of not trying to actually solve the few things that still aren’t working correctly. The new games imitate with marginal polish, WoW went still with the same model, but with a few radical changes in critical aspects that now are so foregone that no one sees them anymore.

Just look at features lists. They are now just cut & paste between games.

Let’s see a game that tries to fix and change something.

I sometimes wonder if I’m the only person who believes WoW’s greatest asset was blizzard’s brand recognition value..

Glad you all like the interview! Scott was more than nice and definitely answered the questions with flair. Any misunderstandings are probably due to my inescapable hatred of transcribing. *smiles*

I’m not knocking anyone when I say, “All game developers say almost the exact same things. It wouldn’t be hard to break down all game developer interviews into three categories:

1. I’m a nice guy and want to make a good game.
2. I’m a gaming god and my game will be good because I’m working on it.
3. I’m not sure how I got this job! Help me!”

I say #2 during interviews, and then #3 when I get the job.

Guild drama is considered content by developers? Isn’t that like saying a root canal is entertainment?

The social interaction of guilds is fun. Working in a team to achieve a goal can be fun. Over inflatated egos bickering over fixed resources stretchs the word “content” to meaningless.

But great interview. I really enjoyed it, well done. As a non-deveopler, I love listening to developers ideas. It sounds like a really exciting time to be making games.

@VPellen: I don’t think you’ll find too many people that will argue that brand recognition isn’t an asset but if they don’t have a focused team working on it and delivering a fun,playable game all the brand recognition in the world isn’t going to help you ala swg.

I think brand recognition helped to sell boxes at release. I don’t think it had anything to do with retention after that.

“So I’m not arguing that a large budget necessarily indicates a large success – simply that, if you’re going to try to clone WoW’s success (which, by the way, I don’t particularly think is a very wise idea, from a design or a business case) you have far less a chance of doing so if you don’t have the budget to match.”

But what do you consider WoW’s success? If it’s the release of a well designed, polished game, it doesn’t take a large budget to do that (it just takes a good team and the ability to say “no” to suits who want to release the game early). If it’s number of players, Raph has pointed out that games like Habbo Hotel and Maple Story have a larger player base, and it at least appears that they’re made on a much lower budget than WoW.

A wonderful interview with, great questions and points made in my opinion.

So we know that Scott’s new MMO is a fantasy one.. And he’s into open-world PvP (Duh). He seems to emphasize the distinction between the PvE and PvP mindset.. “Grinding is Bad” ©…

….. Anyone else clinging to the hope that he’s essentially making UO2, just without the UO namesake?

Reasons I come to this conclusion (Sorry for the excessive citing of UO, but it should be obvious I’ll have to do so to make my point):

1) Levels = Grind. This implies a skill system. True, fundamentally skill systems are a grind, but if done properly, are a much less painful one.

2) If you have a strong PvP mindset, you realize the issues inherit with levels, especially in open world PvP. (Ganking comes to mind). More reason to exclude levels, or at least reduce the impact of “levels”.

*Sub-Point to 1 and 2 – To “get to the fun”, it would seem to imply that even at the earliest onset of the game, you can still participate. Now in UO (Old UO, not the post AoS period), you could start a character with 50 Sword/Tact, go out, and attempt to PvP. Granted, someone with greater skill levels would give you a sound thrashing, but at the very least, you’d be able to (arguably) put up a fight. And at that point, you didn’t stand to lose much because you had nearly nothing invested.

3) PvP environments would favor a shallow itemization curve. If you remember UO, it did have itemization, but it wasn’t so steep as seen in other games. You had POS drops, GM crafted, and various degrees of magic items. The beauty of this was, yes, there was the guy with the suit of Inv. Fortified Plate branding a Supremely Accurate Katana of Vanquishing, but if you did a few hours of work and bought a GM crafted exceptional suit and weapon (Once they made exceptional quality items, well, exceptional.. Don’t remember if that was always the case or not.) you could still put up one heck of a fight, one-on-one. The guy who worked for his gear would still have an easier time than you, but it certainly wasn’t in God Mode.

4) PvP favors itemized simplicity, to a degree. See the UO itemization reference. The properties were simple to understand. Vanquishing meant a kick in the gonads. Invulnerable? Duh… There was differentiation WITHOUT excessive complexity. You didn’t need an Excel sheet to optimize your character, or a Wiki site listing all the possible properties and their maximum values.

Of course these are my personal views, and intentionally generalized. Even though many of us wish for the UO of old to be made modern, with the currently accepted MMO design paradigms, we know that such a thing would never come to pass, weather you believe they should or not.

But if anyone can give us a UO experience in the WoW world, I’ll put my money on Lum.

..and here I thought this was more of Lum’s political commentary.

Just don’t forget what’s important, young padawan:

- You WANT the painting on that wall, you NEED the painting on that wall, and that’s why you stack the 18 fish steaks.
- If levels must exist, walk down the hall and talk to the super geniuses that put these concepts in their game: “sidekick” & “mentor”
- Running across a desert in AO at night, an insane number of stars burning bright, and hearing the accompanying (f’ing brilliantly done) music score.
- Fishing & sea serpents, checkers & backgammon, roleplayed casinos.
- Treasure hunts.
- Gates.
- /pizza

Trivial for the truly *big* budget..

:0)

I keep hoping for a UO2 made by people that have some clue as to how run a MMO. I don’t think it will ever happen…

That was a fun interview. I think large budget does make the game to be more likely to be successful, as long as the content is good. If you just make a cheap game, even with good content, no one will know it.

However I don’t think do away with leveling is a good thing. Grinding sometimes is necessary, to make the game more fun. The reason is, if the fun content is too easy to get too, it became another quake or Warcraft III. If you allow a gradual build up, that takes reasonable amount of effort to get to certain content, people will feel more value on their chars (someone will think twice before deleting a level 70 character).

I would just like to thank this thread for making me google Whamadoodles:

http://www.gasbanditry.com/Whamadoodles/gameprd1.html

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I wouldn’t fly out to Iceland for anything!
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Pish posh!

Scott, just curious, have you tried Age of Conan’s PvP? I started out thinking it would be a ganefest, but I have since come around. If you just want to quest, the GM’s are actively banning spawn-campers, and if you are outnumbered, you just change the instance you’re in and go along your merry way. For me, it is the only game that has brought back even the slightest glimpse of that feeling in UO so long ago. I think their open PvP model is working, mostly because the players have choices. They are not lambs herded to the slaughter by big ganking guilds.

The best part of it for me right now is, I see a stupid name (RP-PvP server here), I kill it. I meet an asshole, I kill it. Arguably Shadowbane did the same thing, but Shadowbane wasn’t instanced, and… had some other… big… problems.

“Scott: Be more demanding. Don’t accept mediocrity. Don’t accept games that try to deliver less polish. WoW has set the standards that we have to meet, and if games don’t meet it they will fail and deserve to fail. That standard has now been set and we have to meet it.”

This is why I’m glad you’re working on an MMO, Scott.

Scott, I generally agree with you about everything in the interview. Of all the things you discussed, though, the one thing that stuck in my mind is “You are going to see games like Grand Theft Auto Online.”

That truly frightens me, yet I’m fairly certain you are correct and we will see something that vile and reprehensible come to be. I’m extremely curious, though, at what general or OOC chat might be like in GTAO. I mean in fantasy games where people have chosen a side in a fictitious, fabricated war and we’re supposed to be helping each other and generally treat each other with good will because the enemy may come attack us at any moment, we see all the nastiness that humans can possibly pile upon each other verbally. So throw people into the seedy environment of GTA and how are they supposed to treat each other? Will GTAO be the social shocker where people in OOC are actually nice to each other? Will it prove to have the karmic balance that all MMOs have been missing? Will it be the Yang to WoW’s Yin – great game with rude people vs. nasty game with friendly people?

Like many MMOs have been, it’s a social experiment waiting to happen.

Grand Theft Auto Online would not be socially horrifying. It will be just like a Counter Strike server – if you pick a well regulated server that bans the occasional visitor who enters voice chat just to spam racial slurs, it settles down to a nice, tight knit community of friendly competition among the regulars. The conversation and the laughter is of the sort you’d hear in a locker room. It’s not that scary.