Goodbye, "Majestic"

fonixmunkee writes: "Ack, looks like EA is stopping the very cool, ground-breaking game 'Majestic.' The article is here. I got hooked on this from the very start, and in turn got a bunch of friends into it. It's cool to be out for a fancy dinner and have the game calling you threatening your life. Oh well, I'm sure a new spinoff will rise up."

Comments

The gameplay was too slow

[Therlin]

I was hooked to Majestic and played a couple of the chapters but ended up cancelling. Why? Because the gameplay was too slow.

You would work through certain tasks and then you'd be put on "Standby mode" for about 24 hours and you couldn't do anything else.

I realize that this made it look as if the other characters in the game were working on their tasks but it was frustrating because I felt I wasn't always getting my money's worth of gameplay and at the same time, it would break the mood. You got into the game and were forced to stop.

Trust

[Anonymous Coward]

How do we know that the "announcement" isn't just part of the game?

Re:Trust

[HamNRye]

Oddly enough, I remember that after the Sept. 11 attacks I read a story about Majestic shutting down. Basic point being "Government Conspiracies and terrorism are not appropriate subject matter in light of the attacks."

I was actually considering playing the game, and with that announcement gave up on it. From reading the other posts, I'm glad I didn't.

~Hammy
Nothing4sale.org

The problem with Majestic..

[Ndr_Amigo]

Majestic was good (although not unique) in concept, but very poor in execution.

A lot of people reading slashdot probably had some interaction with "The Beast" - the A.I movie webgame. Besides the stigma associated with the fact it was ran by M$... it was a brilliant game.

Based in several medium - many many webpages, phonenumbers, e-mails etc it was a well executed version of the Majestic concept. Intrestingly enough it ran at the same time Majestic was being developed and finished just after Majestic was announced.

The problem with Majestic is that while the idea of an immersive game is good - anything on this kind of scale must EVOLVE. The puzzles in the game were generally very easy. The pace was set badly, and the storyline did not evolve. You could quite easily guess what was going to happen next.

The people running "The Beast" however (besides the fact it was free) were working full time on constantly adapting the game. They monitored game players communities and if they discovered a plotpoint had been guessed at, they would weave that knowledge into the next puzzle.

Most gamers know that games depend on a community. Majestic was a very stagnent game - for even a traditional adventure game the story was bad, the pace was terrible and it did not emphisize the need to cooperate.

Majestic was being shut down because people were quitting the game at an alarming rate. It's not suprising, because for a subscription-based adventure game it didn't promote any interaction outside of the strict game encounters. It was too linear - something that just doesn't work with game players these days. Besides a highly predictable storyline there was no point to playing the game. Other subscription-based games (like Ultima Online, Everquest, etc) all really relied on a sense of community... you would play not only for the game, but to interact with your online friends.

Technologically and concept-wise, Majestic was close to perfect. But as a game, it missed the point totally.

Re:The problem with Majestic..

[adrian_hon]

There are many reasons why Majestic didn't succeed, and most of them aren't those that are listed above. I wrote an in-depth analysis of Majestic here, contained within a report examining all of the aspects concerning the Microsoft A.I. game. I correctly predicted that EA would have a hard if not impossible time of attracting and retaining the 100,000+ subscribers required to recoup their $10 million investment.

Briefly, Majestic attempted far too much with far too little. It didn't have an engrossing storyline, unlike that of the universally acclaimed Microsoft A.I. game, it didn't have enough content and it overly restricted the activities of players via its cumbersome 'episodes'.

There was little to no direct interaction with real human people and interaction with AI bots was painfully obvious and crude. Due to a focus on a more individual-based game, teamwork and thus the online community was kept rather small, as opposed to the fanatic-like community of the Microsoft game.

But I'm being far too harsh here. As I said in my analysis, most players actually enjoyed the game. Unfortunately, the game wasn't known to that many people, it cost $10/month and it was restricted to North America. Additionally, its demographic was sorely restricted to the 18-35 male player range.

The A.I. game had, supposedly, around two million players. While I loved the A.I. game and was one of the most active players (just check out my Guide if you don't believe me) I honestly don't think it had two million players. That number really means two million unique page views on the game sites. Not that this really matters - the game produced an ungodly amount of publicity, far beyond that of Majestic, and received awards from Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, among others.

I believe a central problem of any game of this type is that for $10/month, you really expect to get constant interaction and stimulation from your game. In games such as Everquest and so on, you can easily play constantly and not get too bored. In these developer-content driven games such as Majestic, there is only so much you can read and only so many puzzles you can solve. You can't play them all the time.

So you have to have a substitute. In the Microsoft A.I. game, that substitute was the Cloudmakers community that formed around the game and spent 24 hours a day speculating about the storyline and hard-as-nails puzzles. I suspect that in future games, user-created content will serve as a substitute, along with more diverse content and puzzles (e.g. real life treasure hunts, role playing, etc etc).

Re:The problem with Majestic..

[adrian_hon]

I forgot to mention this in my previous reply. Essentially, the fact that Majestic was linear had absolutely bugger all to do with its demise.

Why? Two reasons.

1. How are you going to make it fully interactive, exactly? The game is several months long, has FMV, phone calls, AI bots, intricately made puzzles and hundreds of pages of content. Even three or four branch points would increase the workload intolerably, and if you call that interactivity, I'll eat my hat. Most of the A.I. game content was created before the start of the game, and I suspect this was the same for Majestic.

In any case, would the game be interactive for each player, or for the entire community? For full, convincing interactivity (not that cheapo Dragon's Lair type stuff), doing it per-player is impossible, again due to workload. Doing it for the community is slightly easier but then you run into the problem of trying to get the community to make a single decision.

2. In the case of Majestic and the A.I. game, linearity is to be desired. Basically, it's far easier to write a decent story (and that is the *central* requirement of all these games) if you don't have to keep on changing it all the time according to someone else's whims. The A.I. game, contrary to popular opinion, did not allow its players to affect the storyline in any significant manner and it came out perfectly fine.

Could have been a great game

[Quay42]

I got in on this game when it was in its 2nd episode I think. The pilot was of course quite good but after that each part of an episode got too easy. The cycle became:
1) Watch video
2) Look for clue in video
3) Go to website (or do something else) related to that clue
4) Wait a day in "standby" mode

And so on. At first it was really cool to go through all the conspiracy websites (which I was into anyways before I got into the game) but it got so that you realized these weren't at all central to the game itself.

As the poster themself mentioned, it was pretty damn cool/spooky at times to get calls and voicemails at odd hours. One of them even mentioned coming to my house! I almost looked forward to that...but I suppose that would hvae been too much.

The game was positioned as being for people with normal jobs and outside lives, which explained the relatively short play time increments, but they shouldn't have been so easy. It really could have been such an incredible game, consdiering it used email, video, AIM, phones, and fax machines as elements of play to get you into it...oh well. I think the boxed version would be pretty cool for people without high bandwidth connections like me who mised clues because so many frames were dropped in videos.

Cheers,
jw

Re:Receiving Threatening Phone Calls Is Cool?!

[Quay42]

Well the way it worked was you told it when you would accept calls. So you could set it for hours you knew you wouldn't be doing stuff important, and could change it at anytime. You also could set it for "any time" which included like 2 in the morning which is great because your mind isn't totally functioned. As for your second complaint, you had the option of turning on or off the "Majestic Greeting" to make it more real. The voice acting was very good in my opinion and sometimes I would get real calls tat I mistook for in-game (this only happened once, cause they asked for the wrong person...). But generally you could tell that it was in-game because there was no room to respond, they were just long monologues (sometimes threatening, but nothing too bad). The game is meant for 18+ so I had no problem with the swearing and such.

Cheers,
jw

Re:i'm not too crushed

[b0r0din]

What would really be cool to do with a game is allow players to interact with each other, to have two players in the same area be called upon to meet at a designated location to share their information.

Now that would be groundbreaking, but it would be a little scary. Still, you could have the option of receiving your info through emails; this would just make it more immersive.

This is a sign of some sort of cultural deficiency

[aussersterne]

I didn't play Majestic, but...

Am I the only one here who thinks there is something desperately wrong if you wish to turn your entire real life -- as in your walking, talking self and your working days and nights -- into one large video game -- a fiction?

Even more to the point, getting death threats is cool? How do you know they aren't real? Are you about to say that you relish the day when reality and fantasy blur to the point that you can't tell which is which?

When this type of product becomes ubiquitous, we will be watching the news wondering whether we are really at war or whether it is a part of the latest game. When you hear that so-and-so that you know was shot and can you please come to the funeral, you will go with your game face on, taking notes and playing detective, not sure whether your friend is really dead or whether it's all a part of the game, and you won't care because you're so engrossed and because you're paying good money.

And when the general populace becomes very, very involved in the same games, might it not become a part of the game if you get murdered in cold blood by another, rival player? And since you're a participating character in that game -- might everyone not be thrilled at such a "plot development" and attend your funeral not to eulogize, but to play or make some kind of breakthrough?

I'm sure you had to sign some sort of user agreement to play Majestic. It isn't hard to imagine a user agreement in which you agree that the "designers" can use any event in any player's life as a part of the developing plot, and that you as a player agree not to hold them liable for the actions of other players, including actions taken against you or your family...

Games should stay on a board, on a screen, on a field. Americans are too rich, safe and complacent for their own good if they are so bored that they must turn their real lives and identities into gamepieces for entertainment purposes.

I suppose I'll get flamed and called a luddite, but I liked it when smart people used to get degrees and go do research for the greater good, rather than just signing up to receive death threats for entertainment purposes.

Why not make your own Majestic?

[Robotech_Master]

Check out the Hogshead "new wave" roleplaying game De Profundis. It's an epistolary RPG of the Cthulhu mythos, focusing on playing in the horror milieu (either in the 20s and 30s, or the present-day) by writing letters, journals, diaries, and so on. I've got some friends who are running a game via a Livejournal group; it's not too hard to imagine something sort of like Majestic growing out of several groups getting in contact with each other.

And hey, it's only $7, how can you go wrong?

Goodbye Majestic

[JPawloski]

I actually knew someone who worked at EA (not anymore, unfortunately) who helped develop the AI for the game. Needless to say, EA created a unique AI scripting language from scratch, which is pretty much a requirement for a game of this scale and a goal this ambitious.

I was talking to him on AIM once when he was scripting, telling me that he was working on an AIMbot that would give information. I was already familar with some AIMbots (add "SmarterChild" to your AOL list and say "hello" to him -- he is hellacool!) so I enquired as to how they were implementing the system at a time. I was a little disappointed when he told me it was keyword based (the bot would scan for certain words) - this is archaic technology that has been around since the late 70s and early 80s.

Even though it did make *some* attempt to parse the language, such as searching for negative words and helping verbs ("not the gun" would invoke a different response than "that gun") and it did take into account misspellings, the bots were too "mechanical" for the average non-programmer to use.

And that's the problem with trying to develop a game like this - our AI technology is not advanced yet. Not until we make significant gains on a Turing machine (on home computers, no less) will games like this become successful.

On the other hand, I was surprised to see how little attention this game received compared to other "ground breaking" games such as UO and EverQuest. We've all seen sci-fi movies where games become reality, and I thought it was an interesting twist for reality to become the game. I thought it was a really good idea, and when I explained the concept to friends they thought it was a good idea too. I don't know what went wrong with the project, but I suppose this can be blamed on marketing or something.