LucasArts Announces First Massive Multiplayer Game

Nastard writes "LucasArts announced that they will be partnering with Sony and Verant (the guys who brought us EverQuest) to bring us a massive multiplayer RPG based upon the Star Wars universe. The article doesn't give any dates, but I'm sure we're all gonna be in line for this one. "

Comments

Cool.

[AgentRavyn]

This'll be great, but do we really need more big, hairy, smelly people wanderinf around the internet? ~ravyn
__________________________________________ __

Good idea, bad base?

[natey]

Good and bad...

Verant strikes me as a pretty good gaming company (I'm an EQ addict myself) overall...they're very active within the community they created, have a good deal of direct contact with the players, and make a pretty darned neat piece of software.

But.

Everquest's main problem (IMO, of course) isn't gameplay imbalances or quest bugs or any of the directly game-related issues that are thrown about. To me, the biggest turnoff about EQ is the sheer volume of 12-year-old brats that're running around. (I'm generalizing, of course - some people on EQ are surprisingly younger than they seem for their maturity, and some 35-year-old parents are worse than clueless kids could ever be, but you get the general idea.)

I'm sure Verant's Star Wars game will be a hit - they haven't advertised EQ in months and sales still climb - but I'm not gonna place any bets on what their player base ends up like.

Re:Good idea, bad base?

[ronfar]

The bad folks show up with the inevitability of death I'm afraid. (My signature link is relevant here.)

What is needed is a massively multiplayer version of Foundation in which an illuminated elite can use psycho-history (like Hari Seldon) to control the rabble.

Actually, though, that sounds sort of like what the evil out of Redmond (they've tried to code social engineering in their game) is trying to do with their online entity, at least according to what I've read about it.

I wanna be ...

[(void*)]

that guy who was a squeaky clean kid that shouts "Yippee!", assemble droids, become an ace fighter pilot, get to kiss Natalie Portman, wield a lightsabre, then don blackboots, and a dark helmet, kill millions and millions of innocents, then be forgiven by my talented son, the last of the Jedi ...

Re:I wanna be ...

[Trejus]

Well, he wasn't really the last of the jedi. I believe that Leia trains in the way of the force as well, and she and han have a lot of jedi children.

gamebalance

[jeroenb]

I just wonder how they're going to work out a scheme to make the game interesting for everybody without having a universe where 99% of the population is Senior Jedi Knight :)

The problem is: if you want to make this play like the real SW universe, only a couple of players could be a Jedi and the majority would have to be stormtrooper, tusken raider, ewok, etc. I can see people registering 10.000 times just so they get to be a Jedi and stuff like that. I hope they solve this in a cool way - I wouldn't mind playing a stormtrooper.

I'm not sure about being an ewok though...

Re:gamebalance

[drivers]

That's the thing. Every player should be allowed to be a hero, even if it isn't realistic. This is a game not a simulation. Ultima Online is a little bit less fun due to the fact that so many characters end up building chairs for a living to get ahead. :)

Re:gamebalance

[Perdo]

Paths to proficiency:

Bots: Agriculture bot to IG88

Normal humans: slaves to Han Solo

Jedi: from "The force is strong in this one" to "more powerful than you can possibly imagine"

Although there was cybernetic augmentation whether there was better than human cybernetic augmentation is open to speculation.. e.g. Cyberpunk 2020

Alien growth/power building... such as the more you fight the stronger you get without a limit... or hive structure where you play a "swarm" that grows in members with combined power to rival other sorts.

Fighter pilots? better and better fighters?

To make it Jedicentric would disembowel a potentially rich and diverse universe.

Perhaps "more powerful than you can possibly imagine" could be used as a good anti player killer. If someone killed you, you could then temporarily pass all or double your power to the next opponent they fought. Insures they at least have to give up their own life to take yours.

Re:gamebalance

[El Volio]

I think there's a large contingent of potential players who wouldn't necessarily want to be Jedi. (I would... Obi-Wan was my boyhood hero).

It will be interesting to see how they balance it. The SW RPG (old-school) worked OK because they didn't have to balance thousands of players. Here, it will be a little different. But there's enough going on in places like Corellia and Tatooine that getting mixed up in even local rebellions (or really being on the fringe of the galaxy, where the Empire/Republic, depending on the chosen era) will be easy and fun.

Re:gamebalance

[huddles]

Actually, I've heard that the most popular role will be Jar-Jar Hunter.

Joe

pay-to-play?

[Ater]

Refreshing to see that the gaming industry hasnt totally abandoned the industry (although it seems close), and the Star Wars series has always been a prime setting for rpgs with its huge universe (I'm still holding out for hopes of a multiplayer Fallout though). But it also reminds me of another complaint that I have with the gaming industry today

What does annoy me is that like Everquest and UO, is that this game will most likely be another "Pay-to-play" game with ridiculous monthly charges. Yes I can afford $10-20/mo, but the money adds up, and it is ridiculous to expect a consumer to pay regular fees for a game, or so to speak. One thing I would like to know is why all online RPG's charge for playtime. I never see it occuring in the action, wargame, or real-time strategy field. If I buy Starcraft, Quake III, or even Diablo, I wouldnt have to pay anything extra for online play. Granted, I'm not knowledge about the workings, but I doubt RPG's require such additional online maintainence that it merits a continuous charge. I do realize that the characters and settings are stored, unlike the average strat/shooter game, but again, I hardly see how that would account for any additional expenses.

Maybe it's just me, but once a game is purchased, you should be able to play it out of the box and enjoy it as intended without having to fork over more money. Even the occasional ad would be sometimes acceptable as an alternative, IMHO. I think that if online RPG providers would stop absurdly charging fees, even more customers would sign up, and idle ones who already bought the game would play more often. I see the high numbers of people that dont seem to mind the charge, yet I also have many more friends who would be dying to join the online RPG world but are sickened by the notion of an extra charge.

Re:pay-to-play?

[thopkins]

One of the main costs associated with these is bandwidth. In QuakeII, id has nothing to do with online play because people set up their own servers. Battle.net is just a match maker service, once the game is started you disconnect from battle.net and are connected directly to each other. In a massively multiplayer game like this, you're always connected to the main server along with 1000's of other people. That much bandwidth becomes very expensive for the company who runs the service.

Re:pay-to-play?

[Loligo]

Everquest and UO take place in a persistent world, with *large* server farms supporting each shard/continent/whatever metaphor.

Those farms are connected to big fat network pipes.

Those farms and network pipes are supported by system and network administrators.

None of these things are free.

-LjM

Re:pay-to-play?

[Obasan]

I'm actually inclined to think the opposite. I can understand why they want a monthly charge (although I think it's a little pricey given the service provided). They need to keep the servers alive 'indefinitely'. True, they can assume that interest in the game will decrease as the game gets older, but with no new sales coming in paying for server admins, server room space and bandwidth is going to be a constant drain on their coffers. And if they ever shut down the service you can bet gamers would cry bloody murder.

What I think is that they shouldn't charge for the game CD at all. I was actually shocked when I found out they were charging for the Ultima Online software itself. That doesn't make sense to me. The idea is to hook people into paying a 'low' monthly fee for using the network service. Asking for a full software title's price upfront and then charging a monthly fee seems excessive to me.

Re:pay-to-play?

[Ater]

I know you think I'm some whiny tightwad, but I honestly do feel that my point is valid. Yes, I can afford the expense, but I'm not on a disposable income as the EQ designers would like to think. I do buy games occasionally, though to be honest I only do so when I have heard from about 10 sources that it is an exceptional game, and then I do wait for the game to cool off a little and buy it at about $20-40. I have no doubt that bandwidth and admins cost money, but still the kind of money they're charging (and making) is a bit excessive IMHO. I could actually go for a pay-to-play thing if they were reasonable enough to reduce the game price to about $10-20 (or maybe even free, but thats wishful thinking) and expand the subscription time (maybe $20-30/year or so).

Re:pay-to-play?

[Sundiata]

You know what? I can think of one great example right off the top of my head as to why these companies need to charge subscription fees.

Remember Subspace?

If you don't, it was a very fun, very addictive top-down multiplayer space shooter developed by Virgin Interactive. It enjoyed a long and fairly public beta life, during which many concerns over subscription fees were voiced. Due in part to tester response, it was decided that Virgin would not charge on a monthly basis after you purchased the game itself. Upon hearing this news, the players were jubilant.

Almost immediately, though, things started going downhill. Servers couldn't handle the increased load of players, and the few people who ran full-time independent servers were usually running at maximum capacity. Virgin didn't have the cash flow to upgrade their servers or their lines fast enough to keep up with the game. Shortly after the release of the game, the game was cracked and distributed; Virgin had to deal with a fresh influx of players without the benefit of having additional money to take care of them. People started finding and exploiting bugs in the game; Virgin was ill-inclined to pay developers to fix bugs in a game that was now obviously not a money-maker. The game exploits turned into service attacks; towards the end of the "official" life of Subspace, it was not uncommon for there to be over 10% downtime of the game/login servers on any given day.

In the end, Virgin had to scrap Subspace entirely. The program was a total loss for them, and as far as I know, they haven't made another trip into the world of MMOG since. Sure, Subspace is still alive, driven by user-run servers and randomly available cracked EXEs, but rest assured that nothing more is going to happen with it.

I would have loved to have seen what Virgin had in store for Subspace 2; unfortunately, that'll never happen. As wonderful as the notion of free access is, when you need to support some serious, heavy-duty servers, high-speed, high-availability internet connections, a developer base to fix bugs and stop exploits, and a legion of in-game moderators and administrators to weed out the idiots who insist on ruining the experience for everyone else, you're talking big bucks. Without financial backing, the closest you'll ever come to massively multiplayer on-line gaming is the deathmatch action in Q3 and UT that so many people erroneously think is what MMOG really is.

Re:pay-to-play?

[ronfar]

That story makes me think that the best way to package this kind of game is as part of a specialized ISP.

I mean as far as I can understand the main way AOL gets customers is by presenting itself as entertainment (plus Email and Internet). Well, that and the coasters it gives away.

If I were in charge of a MMRPG, I'd forget about selling the game or selling time, I'd just set up an ISP and tell people "to play game or games X you have to use our ISP."

Hey, when I was a kid, the only reason why I was interested in Compuserve (in those days we didn't use the Internet, Compuserve was just a big BBS) was because they had online games. I didn't get to play British Legends as much as I would have like, but I enjoyed the concept of playing Zork multiplayer....

But if not for that, I would've just used the cheap, local BBSs.

Re:pay-to-play?

[ronfar]

Ok, you sound like a knowledgable person about Asheron's Call so I have to ask this: Does the "social engineering" aspect of the game work to reduce the number of Twinks, PowerGamers and the like in the game, or not?

I remember when I was researching MMRPGs when I was interning for a company that was considering getting into the business, the social engineering aspect of AC seemed interesting. I wasn't sure if it was something that would really work in practice to prevent twinking, though. It seemed to be interesting in a theoretical sense.

I refer to the way people must gather retainers in order to amass power in AC.

Re:pay-to-play?

[Bryce]

UltimaOnline & EverQuest are setting a precedent for massive-multiplayer-games, a dangerous precedent, since most types of games are moving towards that direction.

yup, and not only games. UO and EQ style game architectures and business models are helping establish and prove the concept of subscription-based computing. People have been trying to turn software into subscription-like services for many years (this is why few consumer-oriented file formats are forward-compatible, even though any moderately skilled programmer could figure out how to generalize the design of any file format such that it is both forwards and backwards compatible.) Imagine paying $15 for MS Linux, plus $10/month for the opportunity to download the latest upgrades via "DirectGet" and "SelectX".

The obvious advantages for gamemakers are a steady income even after the game has been released, hardly any problems with warez (the game itself only works with a valid account), and full control over the game (central administration of the servers).

Do not underestimate the expenses associated with running a game server. This issue at play here is freedom, not cost. You are not being given the trust, respect, and honesty of being able to fix and improve your game. You deserve these freedoms and should demand them so that they are aware that you value freedom.

You know that open games will be better games, be they commercial or not. By continuing to buy freedomless games one does a disservice to the game industry by further locking them into that out-moded way of creating games. Insist on only paying only for games that meet your price/performance/openness criteria, and make the ones that don't meet your criteria unavailable to yourself. Let your itch grow, or try to scratch it yourself.

Without other human players, any online game would suck, bots and NPCs can't substitute real people playing. By playing properly, you are having fun, and increasing the fun of the other players. That makes the game more fun and interesting, so people will play more, and more people will buy the game. A nice player is worth more than a fancy feature of the software. Why don't players get paid?

I find this a very profound insight, I hope you don't mind if I borrow it from you. I have always been of the mind that players both figuratively and literally "make the game", and are sometimes, ironically forgotten by game designers.

If they ever close shop, all my stuff will be gone, I can't just keep it.

Keep this desire in mind. I have a solution for this. *grin*

If they really need to make more money, they should place some ads in-game, in a way that makes sense and fits to the game. It's possible and would work just like it does with websites.

I have never seen an implementation of this that was not, IMHO, tacky. 'Amature', in my book, is okay. But gods how I hate 'tacky'. Advertising prior to or after the game would be acceptable, but players deserve to not have the consistency of their game broken with tackiness. Mobile is able to gain the benefits of advertising by sponsoring NOVA, without making Stephen Hawkings oil his chair.

But try turning your idea inside out. Instead of the advertising being inside the game, how about making the game being inside the advertising? I.e., Disney hosting your game for you, using their trademarked characters in the game?

Actually it could work even better if a company would have a virtual subsidiary inside the game world and you could stop by and buy stuff without leaving the game. Lots of possibilities.

Now, this sounds interesting... I would love to see mixes of reality and fiction like this in virtual worlds. VirtualMacy's, where you can shop for and purchase clothing or gifts, or find yourself drawn into a tragic three-way romance destined for heart break and disaster - unless perhaps you can win Caitlen's heart. (Think Macy's might pay a player to be Caitlen?)

Well, personally I'd love to play such a massive multiplayer game, but out of principle I won't pay for it as I just explained. I'll have to wait until a free one comes along.

Thank you, you are doing the Right Thing, and for the right reasons. And I'm joining you.

Current projects like WorldForge look promising, but are still not ready, not yet. Let's wait and see what comes along...

You would wait less if those projects had your help (they especially need coders and non-coders).

Speaking of that, this reminds me of an interesting idea I had: Don't run central servers on a few machines, run small clients on lots of PCs. Just like SETI@home, encrypt the date, and make it very redundant.

This is called "peer to peer" and has some troublesome security issues. But it's definitely worthwhile for some kinds of games. NetTrek uses this approach. (Check out the FreeTrek project.)

There is always another way. Amen. Lack of choice is a symptom of brain inflexibility.

Re:pay-to-play?

[stripes]

If I were in charge of a MMRPG, I'd forget about selling the game or selling time, I'd just set up an ISP and tell people "to play game or games X you have to use our ISP."

That will piss-off any potential customers that have a faster-then-dialup connection (cable modem, DSL, ISDN, FracT1...). It will also piss-off anyone that signs up and then has more trubble with "your" ISP then their old ISP. It will also piss off anyone who bought another ISP serice to play another MMRPG that required it.

Face it, most people allready intrested in most MMRPGs allready have an internet connection, and most people arn't that excited about changing it!

The closest I think you could get is to find an ISP who will roll the price into their service (or do one of those "virtual ISP deals" where you look like an ISP, but someone else does all the work), offer "free" service to anyone using that ISP, and charge anyone else a "modest" fee.

I do find the other idea in this thread intresting. Have the monthly fee, and a free version of the game, maybe a download-only, or a CD in shrinkwrap. You could still charge for a box with a printed manual and goodies, but make it free for people to start playing and paying the $10/month.

Not only would a good game get more customers, the customers could try the game for a far lower investment!

More info and date for LucasArts game

[RobotWisdom]

You guys are slipping! My weblog had Reuters' story about this last Thursday. (It says next year.)

Sony Online

[rickward]

I find it interesting that Lucas is partnering with Sony. Doesn't Fox (the studio that released the SW flicks) have an online entertainment/gaming division? And does this signal a keiretsu-style relationship between Lucasfilm and Sony where Sony becomes an important SW toy licensee? (I'd love to have a Sony lightsaber, myself...)

Re:Sony Online

[Cironian]

I'd love to have a Sony lightsaber, myself..

I suddenly get this weird mental image of an ad... A white hallway, a fallen robe with some burn marks, a familiar shadow on the wall... And the words "Its a Sony"

Never again.

[Patton]

I played EQ for quite some time to 50th level character and 25th level character.

"Playing" is a misnomer. Its a job. An exercise in frustration. You have to sit for days to get a decent piece of equipment or buy it on Ebay. If you don't have that nice shiney equipment then people don't want you in their groups.

If their starwars is -anything- even remotely close to EQ it definitely isn't for me. I just have a bad time with any game where you sit for days waiting for an npc to spawn and still have to compete with 15 others to get that item. Or the joys of instantly dieing w/o any means of protecting yourself (Plane of Fear for example).

I cancelled my EQ account and swore hell would freeze over before I bought any game Veriant creates ever again.

Its still quite warm down there from what I've heard.

I get dibs on Nerf Herder

[Squeeze Truck]

I always wanted to be a nerf herder in my own online universe. This is a dream come true.

sorta OT, sorta not

[Pope]

Went to a store today to ask after a G4 (my sales guy was out, so I gotta wait til Monday) and saw Pod Racer on that sweet-ass Cinema Display. If you ever want to see something cool, Pod Racer runs in the CD's native resolution (1600x1024).
Ohhh lord do I wish I had one of those!

I hear Pod Racer's kinda lame, but it looks nice....

Pope

Different from your normal RPG

[Webmonger]

One of the biggest differences between the SW universe and your standard fantasy universes is there's a war on.

Players will probably get to choose Alliance, Empire or Rogue instead of Good/Evil/Neutral. How long will the war last? Will Alliance/Empire players have to deal with a military hierarchy? And what does it feel like to be an ace pilot on the losing side?

Whatever it is, I'm sure it'll be different to have some high drama. Probably the Generals will be NPCs, though.

Re:Finally!

[dotgpb]

This could be a very good game, if it is set in the right time period.

What time period will it be set in? I'm hoping it will be pre-Episode One, or Post-Episode 6. Running into Luke, Anakin, Leia, Chewbacca etc would be cool, but would get old real quick. If it is set during the Ep. 1 to Ep. 3 time period, I'll probably skip it due to possible spoilers. The best timeperiod would probably be either a hundred years or so before Anakin is born, or a few hundred years after the Empire is defeated. Avoiding having to deal with movie, comic, or novel plot details would most likely make for a better game.

Jedi Knights...

[RoLlEr_CoAsTeR]

To make it Jedicentric would disembowel a potentially rich and diverse universe.

I would think that to become a jedi knight would be a feat that would require much working up through the ranks, and much skill/test of knowledge, etc. I'm going to assume that somehow, somewhere, they'll have a Jedi who can initiate/train other Jedi, (because you've got to get your example of Jedi-ship from somewhere) but I obviously don't know how they'll choose that person.
Maybe, as my first thought was, they'll have one of the creators begin the game a a Jedi,and, over time and as worthy individuals arise, new Jedi will emerge, and then the original can either continue or, if so chosen, retire from the position/die (if they have other things to do besides continue the game, etc...)
Anyways, it's an interesting idea. Kudos if they get it working well.

2 Ways It Could Turn Out

[GeekLife.com]

Ultima Online problem:
Everyone'll want to be Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo. But for the Star Wars universe to work at all there have to be hundreds manning all those market stores in Tatooine, and pushing those buttons on the Death Star.

EverQuest problem:
I can see a group of players spending hours standing around the Sand People respawn point, just waiting to bonk some uglies with their light sabers so they get another pixel added to their XP bar.

Even in the Star Wars universe I don't want to pay a subscription fee to have the equivalent of a service industry job.

The Ecology of MMP

[Robert Link]

This is exactly the problem that MMP games have had so much difficulty dealing with. If you make 90% of the population inkeepers and bartenders and other such drones, then the game is only fun for the few that get to be heroes. On the other hand, if you make everyone a hero, then the ecology and the economy of the game world get completely unbalanced. Treasure becomes meaningless because you can always find someone who has an extra sword of flaming doom that he's willing to sell, and once you've bought it, good luck finding any monsters to kill with it. They've all been wiped out by the plague of heroes swarming over the land.

None of the currently operating MMP RPGs has found a completely satisfactory solution to the problem, and it may be that none exists. One thing that would help a lot would be to have death be for keeps. As it stands, whenever the monsters manage to take down a player character, it is an empty victory at best; he'll be back within minutes, perhaps with a slight XP penalty, perhaps without some of his equipment, but nevertheless largely unscathed. However, most players seem to resist the idea of death being deadly pretty fervently, so don't expect to see it any time soon.

Call me a fuddy-duddy, or whatever you will, but I don't have a lot of confidence that MMP games will ever "get there" as far as capturing the RPG experience. There is an editorial at Games Domain that sums it up pretty well. When I play an RPG I want to have at least an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the campaign world; however, in any campaign world few people have that opportunity. In a game with only half a dozen players, the deck is stacked in your favor; by design you get to play the characters that have a chance to make a difference. In MMP games there are simply too many players for that to be practical. The result is stagnation and boredom, which isn't really what I look for in a game. So, here's hoping they get it right with this one, but I'm not holding my breath.

-rpl

Re:The Ecology of MMP

[Robert Link]

I agree, fleshing out the gameworld with NPC ords is not difficult at all. The hard part is providing enough adventure for 10,000 (or, worse, 100,000!) PCs. There's only one death star to blow up, only one evil henchman to the Emperor, only one student of the jedi master, and so on. Most of your PCs are going to be a lot closer to "Many Bothans died to bring us this information" than they are to "Great shot, kid, that was one in a million."

Think back to any face-to-face rpg you played in, or good fantasy novel you read. For a single (say, Greyhawk-sized) continent, within the course of, say, a year of game time you probably encountered something like:

• half a dozen PCs.
  
• half a dozen henchmen.
  
• two dozen major NPCs (rulers of major kingdoms, high priests of important religions, powerful wizards, PCs' mentors, etc.)
  
• a dozen recurring villains.
  
• a dozen gods, legendary heroes, and other personages of distinction.
  

And that's pretty much it for the people who really move earth and heaven; everyone else is just part of the backdrop. Even being generous with the numbers, I doubt they top 100, and even at that most of those roles are arguably unsuitable to be filled by any but the most experienced PCs. How do you scale that up to tens of thousands of PCs? I'm not saying it can't be done, but the simple approaches have been tried, and (IMO) they just don't work. In EverQuest there aren't enough monsters to go around. In Ultima Online you sit around baking bread all day. In neither game is anything resembling high fantasy a regular part of most players' gaming experience.

Give me peasant revolts. Give me evil priests whose dark rituals must be stopped before they unleash a demon horde across the countryside. Give me plots, schemes, dragons, and the stuff legends are made of, but whatever you do, don't give me "kill monsters so you can gain experience and gear so that you can kill bigger monsters and gain more experience and better gear, so that..." ad nauseum. Don't give me anything that reeks of the real, mundane world because I get plenty of that on a daily basis thankyouverymuch.

I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they promised me it would be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled up mess it is. --Oscar Gordon, hero

-rpl (not a hero, but likes to pretend occasionally)

Who knew?

[cybercuzco]

"Star Wars online will be a phenomenon that transforms online gaming for both gamers and casual game players," says Lisa Simpson, president of Sony Online Entertainment.

Hmm, I guess this means that Lisa is no longer on Fox, and has decided to stop doing the Simpsons sitcom. Fox officials said that they were sorry to see her leave the show, but at 18, she was no longer the little girl that america fell in love with. I know that ill be sorry to see her leave, but this just means maggie has to step up. ;-)

Those other 99% are just background.

[TheDullBlade]

The shopkeepers, the miners, the staff officers, bureaucrats, and various other varieties of drudge should not be players. You don't interact with them in meaningful (i.e. non-mechanical) ways, anyhow.

It's the bounty hunters, ambitious military officers, rebel agents, etc. that are the fun roles to play, and the people you want to be unpredictable allies or opponents.

If you don't fill out the worlds with simulated normal, boring people, there is no sense of reality.

Don't worry about not meeting them, your common interests will draw you to each other.

Re:I smell a rat

[Sundiata]

I challenge you to find a group of users who would be willing and financially able to buy and maintain the kind of server environment necessary to host and run a massively multiplayer online game. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of computers alone; not to mention the additional monthly cost of an OC3 line or three (or faster) running to your center, the tech staff required to run and maintain the servers, the game staff required to keep the game world from sinking into a mess of blithering spamming idiots that drive everybody else away from the game, and the development staff needed to constantly tweak, patch, and bug fix the bloody thing. Sound like something you and your buddies are up for?

Are you outraged that you pay a monthly subscription for cable? Internet access? Car insurance? Electricity? Gas? Does it seem to you that all you should really have to pay for is the wires they hook up to your house? Or do you have some understanding of the fact that these companies need a constant flow of money to continue providing you with the services you want? Had it ever occured to you that the very same example just might hold true in the case of a massively multiplayer online game?

By the way, Quake 3 isn't a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It's essentially Doom with a nice little directory server built in so you can find plenty of net games easily. There's no need for a game server to be up 24/7, and you'll get the exact same gameplay if you log on under a different name or on a different server. Game #427 for you is no different from game #591; start at zero, frag, maybe cap a flag or two, tally up the scores at the end. Repeat. Q3 is a multiplayer online game, but the only thing "massive" about it is that there are tons of little nobody game servers out there.

Star Wars RPGs

[Mur!]

You know, there are already a number of Star Wars based online RPG games that have been around for a number of years. Just because an RPG isn't graphical, doesn't make it any less of an enjoyable role playing experience. Some of the Star Wars MUSHes are some of the best MUSHes out there, with great role play. Though I haven't played on any of the big online RPGs, I would venture a guess that the level of role-playing is minimal, due to the constraints that a graphical interface is going to present. While, when your interface is plain text, the roleplay often approaches literary levels, and the world immersion (I think) is far more intense.

Mur!
Jacinda@ChivalryMUSH

Worldforge

[Kalana]

Thanks for the mention. Unfortunately, our web site is down at the moment. Altima changed its name to Worldforge in order to better reflect its goal, basically: "To create an Open Source MMORPG". This involves many subgoals, including art, music, clients, servers, content creation tools, rules, game systems, etc. Some of our objectives are:

• Openness: It's free software, so that's a given. It's a good thing in itself, and also adds to the player experience. How many times have you heard "Oh, $GAME is great, except..." or "If I was $GAMECOMPANY, I'd..."? If it was open source, you (or someone else) could fix it, try it out, and try to convince other GMs to use your changes. But I don't need to convince slashdot of the benefits of free software.
• Flexibility: You aren't stuck to a certain platform or type of game. We intend to have clients of as many types (currently we're working on 3D, 2D iso, and text) for as many platforms as possible (and of course, you can write your own), and the ability for GMs to easily design their own world and rules, and combine and modify existing worlds.
• Accessibility: We want the barrier of entry for both DM'ing and playing low. You won't need the latest and greatest 3D card, processor, or OS to play (of course, if you do have them, it'll be faster and prettier), and you won't have to have a T3 and know how to code to run a server (but you might nto be able to support 50,000 players). Got DSL, a PII, and know a reasonable amount about computers? You can run a server.
• And much more. The thing about a project with this broad a scope, and with so many people involved, is that everyone has different goals, skills, and interests, and still work together to achieve our common goals.

Just so nobody misunderstands me, this is all heavily in development. This means you can't play yet.

If this interests you, and you want to help make it happen, hit the web page (when it's back up), or join us on irc at irc.worldforge.org. BTW, you don't have to be a master hacker to help out. There are plenty of non-coding things to do, such as graphics, music, writing, and coordination work, and there's always room for enthusiatic newbies to learn by doing.

Re:Worldforge

[Bryce]

The problem is... even if you do make your changes, it's a monumental amount of work to a) get *anyone* other than a select few of your friends to play your variation and b) you have to either somehow get your changes merged into the main tree, or spend the rest of your natural life maintaining your own branch, and mergeing in changes from the main tree.

Very valid and astute concerns. Keep them in mind and hold us (WorldForge) to providing you a solution to this problem.

There are many, many projects which have creatively solved the user-customization problem. We have many precidents to choose from. Scripting, world/engine separation, or well designed modular interfaces, for instance. (We are currently exploring all three of these. Can you think of more solutions we could try?)

EQ Burnout?

[Jia]

Far be it from me to start a flamewar, but it seems to me that you might be experiencing EQ burnout and therefore giving EverQuest a harsh representation.

My experience with EverQuest has been pretty positive. I started beta testing for the game a little bit over a year ago and continued to play it past the release for six months. During that time, I played a variety of characters up to level 20.

If you yourself played EQ long enough to build up a 50th level (highest level possible for you people who don't play the game) and 25th level character, then something must have brought you back to the game night after night.

Both the best and worst part about EverQuest is its addictiveness. It's been called "EverCrack", a name that suits it pretty well. I remember when I was in the high point of my addiction cycle I would stay up into the wee hours of the morning questing with friends. March 16th was EverQuest's one year anniversary and according to EQ Vault, they hit their 200,000 active subscribers mark. Obviously, despite all the people who have quit the game to its negative aspects (camping, large time investment, ebay item farmers), a large number still remain faithful to the game.

In my opinion, Verant Interactive is the best developer of massively multiplayer online games currently out there. EverQuest easily dominates over its competition. While Ultima Online was created first and Asheron's Call offers some innovative features, both lack the customer service and addictive quality that make a truly good online game stand out. One of the reasons I quit EQ was to beta test for Asheron's Call, which I highly regret doing now. Despite being the newest online RPG on the market, the game was poorly developed and rushed prematurely to meet the holiday season. How typical of M$. However, Verant's game design and customer policies allow me to rank it high amongst game developers, almost equaling Blizzard. My advice to all you Star Wars fanatics out there is to keep your eye out for news of when Verant will begin accepting applicants for their beta test and book your spot.

On a side note, The Ruins of Kunark, a expansion to EverQuest is due to be release next month. I'm planning on buying it to begin my relaunching into the world of Norrath.

I thank you for your sweetly faked attention.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

A letter from the year 2002

[Travoltus]

Dear Travoltus:

Hi, it's me. Travoltus. 2002 edition, that is. I just wanted to inform you that last year, I met this wonderful girl named Matilda on Lucasarts' Star Wars Online (SWO), and now we're getting married.

Yup. We met while standing in line at the Rebel Academy with 200000 other players. I picked the highly ignored Han Solo and she picked Princess Leia (she was the first female player in the game, hehe). Everyone else was battling it out to be - you guessed it - Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

Matilda fell in love with the way I slaughtered that entire ewok race right off the forest moon of Endor, but after my single handed annihilation of Jar Jar Binks and the Gungan species, she totally wanted muh bod. We had some sizzling hot virtual sex and, well, the rest is history :)

BTW, since this is the first marriage between two Star Wars Online players, George Lucas gave away the bride. I looked good in my Han Solo uniform, and Matilda, well, that dress, oooeeeeeeeeeowwwwwwwwwwwww baby! The downside was we were married by a 6' tall guy in a Yoda suit, who spent more time laughing than actually joining us in holy matrimony. The upside is we both got special edition copies of all 4 Star Wars movies, including The Phandom Menace: The Jar Jar-Free Edition - on DVD! (Oh and don't tell anyone we got this stuff on DVD, Lucas made us sign a shut-up agreement...)

Matilda and I are expecting a little jedi in 5 months. You keep hanging on out there in the past, ok Travoltus? And please.. get the game!

Death to the Gungans!
- Travoltus

========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,

I think we'll run into a little problem, though

[NoWhere Man]

"...bring us a massive multiplayer RPG based upon the Star Wars universe."

How many people are going to be fighting over who plays which character? COuld you imagine if they brought this for multiplayer over the internet? Youd have tons of people fighting over who should be Darth Maul, who would make a better Darth Maul, whether or not there can be 2 Darth Maul's.

If they were smart about this, they would create a StarWarsNet and have people log on to the net and exist as a character. Have one big StarWarsNet for everybody around the world. (Okay I know big bucks, big up keep, but you gotta admit it'd be damned popular).
But it'd be also cool if you could RPG with separate servers. People create their own universes. But the the StarWarsNet idea, no matter where you go in the star wars universe, you carry everything with you; instead of starting from scratch every time you log on or creating different characters depending on the server.
The possiblilities of a MULTIPLAYER RPG are endless if not very complicated. If they pull it off though, think of how easy it would be to keep adding new features to the universe. One planet suddenly becomes populated, one star destroyer suddenly gets built, while another gets destroyed; making some territories easier to live and worse in others.
With single player RPG's not much changes, territory remains the same, maybe the occasional elf might come up to annoy you. But not much. But alot can chnage in this game cause everybody is doing something. Hell you could be on your way to a planet, with pratically no fuel, hopeing to land there (cause its your only hope)...then Darth Vadar comes along and blow it up (Or some other character who happens to gain control or build his own Death Star).

One thing is for sure they're going to have to find some way to keep track of everyone's individual characters or all hell is going to break loose!

Remember the fate of MEO...

[unclei]

Every time I hear about a new MMORPG based on popular fiction, I start to wonder about how the developers are going to mess it up. Anybody who followed the development of Middle Earth Online will know what I mean. The original developers set out to create a world VERY consistent with Tolkien's Middle Earth, and to eliminate lots of the problems that made games like UO such a waste of time for players into doing some serious role playing. True to the Lord of the Rings, there would be few (if any) conventional wizards, elves would be a rare sight, etc., etc.
The development team was doing a fantastic job. Game engine done, they were getting close to a beta release...and then the top level management decided that the game as it stood didn't appeal to enough of a mass market. Ya see, 12 year old assholes WANT to run around wearing a loincloth yelling "I AM C00l1CU$ D00D1CU$! PH34r mY 1000000 point fireballs, L4m3r!" And if they think that they can earn $20 extra a month, the producers will grab it, at the expense of the story, and at the expense of all the prospective players who want to actually role-play inside a deep, powerful, and awesome world.
So they fired the entire dev team and scrapped 2-3 years worth of work, and started over. I suspect that the game will now turn out to be a UO knockoff with hobbits and 20000 Glamdrings.

So don't hold your breath hoping for a star wars rpg with a small number of jedi, and a reasonable race balance.

I 4M D4r7h D00D1Cu$, n4k3D $1th L0rD fr0M H3LL!

Re:Lookee here

[Bryce]

There was a project called Altima, which was meant to clone Ultima Online, I believe. But they seemed to have teamed up with some other folks to create a generic engine. Open Sourced, of course.

Altima never died, but instead reevaluated, refocused, and renamed to WorldForge. We were coming up with ideas that were much more ambitious than a simple UO cloning effort. The team composition and skills were more appropriate to doing original work than making copies. Of course, this meant it would take longer, but the team really seemed to resonate with envelope pushing.

Probably we ought to be putting out more announcements here on Slashdot but this site only seems to mention in-development games if they are closed source, so we may have to wait a bit. If you'd like to track our progress, send an email to announce-subscribe@worldforge.org.

The engine looks good and the graphics look great.

Thanks! The multi-disciplinary nature of game development is tough for typical free software development approaches, but we've hacked our project organization to handle this I think. We'll be putting out a few quickee games (not "massive") to demo art and technologies as we go. Bryce P.S., sorry the website's down. We're suspecting foul play...

Names are not the problem you should watch for

[Zed Pobre]

The entire point of it is that it is for multiplayer over the internet. And nobody is going to be Darth Maul because that will almost certainly be a reserved name.

Assuming that Verant continues on the same model as Everquest (and considering the low development time, I find it likely that they will), there will be a number of separate servers, all run by verant, all hosting the same world. Each world will have a limited PC namespace, handled on a first-come first-serve basis, with offensive names (usually) being rejected by the system or by any GM that notices.

Unfortunately, if they design the world the same way as Everquest, it is going to be mind-numbingly tedious, with no real sense of accomplishment other than to watch numbers go up. The world system doesn't allow players to interact with it in a permanent sense. Fighting is actually handled by timed respawn, and it doesn't take more than a few months for players to learn the timing. If they opened up the interface specs, I might come back for the sole purpose of writing bot code to play, kind of like an expensive version of gnurobots, but the fact that this is feasable shows how limited the world is.

The other problem that I expect is server overloading. Currently, each world can support comfortably about 1000 users. On average, there are about 1500 users on each regular world, with peak hours driving this figure up as high as 1800 or 2000. This is apparantly by design, as the official word from Verant has been that the 1500-2000 loads are acceptable, despite noticable overcrowding (and the resultant antisocial behaviour) in most zones.

Middle Earth

[finkployd]

Let's hope they pick up some of the great ideas that the Middle Earth team came up with. For those of you who don't remember, Middle Earth was going to be a massive RPG along the same lines as this, but it had some unique features (perminent death being one of the most argued). However, in typical fashion, Sierra killed it and fired all the designers. It was a real shame too, as the designers were in close contact with the potantial game players the whole way through the design phase by e-mail, web, and irc. They were attempting some things that had never been done before.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'd like to see something new and original, not an UltimaOnline clone with lightsabers :)

Finkployd

What I want in an RPG

[Graymalkin]

I've been playing pen and paper RPGs for many many years now. The best thing about them is that you've got a set of rules and a world to play in but the stories, quests, ect. is up to the GM to make up (or someone else). I've yet to see an online RPG that was like that. Some of the better MUDs I tried had good replay value but never much questing. What I want in a MMRPG is a huge world with thousands upon thousands of quests and play possibilities with oodles of noodles of items and such (like Rogue). for replay value I thought Diablo was pretty good, it was like a hack'n'slash MUD but the number of items you could possibly find was nice as was the fact that the dungeons were randomly generated so playing more than once could be fun.
I think this RPG ought to be based off the pen and paper game by West End Games. I've been playing that forever and it hasn't become old or boring. I'm skeptical so far about this game because in my opinion all the rest of the Lucas Arts SW games blew goats. They were fine for the first level or so but then they just became more of the same. The multiplayer aspect was nice but the only difference between Jedi Knight and Quake was lightsabers. In a universe as rich as Star Wars you would think even a single player game would have tons of interaction between you and NPCs but with JK they only wanted to emulate Quake.Thats what Lucas Arts is good at, emulating everyone else. None of their games have been terribly original, merely some game with a SW theme, the only barely original games were Rogue Squadron and Yoda Stories(sp?). Replacing grunts with Jedi or Zergs with Imperials is not my idea of innovation.
Personally I think a game similar in gameplay to Resident Evil or FF7&8 would make an awesome MMRPG, of course with oodles more places to explore. Oh well, I think I'm going to stick to paper for a while longer.

It's being worked on ...

[P_Simm]

Someone mentioned this in a reply post to something else above already, but since you asked ...

WorldForge is an open-source MMORPG project, working on not just a single game but a complete gaming system. Servers, clients (different platforms AND different interfaces), protocols, artwork, world design, the whole nine yards.

Check out the website for more info, and drop by the IRC server or get on the mailing lists if your interested.

Hey, lookit that, the link is in my sig too ... :)