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Raph Koster On Sony Online's MMO Plans, Hopes
Thanks to Warcry for its interview with Sony Online's chief creative officer, Raph Koster, as he discusses his relatively new job ("My job is primarily to help the teams make their games better, not to have them make my game. I know a lot of folks have been wondering if I'm here to change EverQuest to be more like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies, and the answer is no"), the evolution of the MMO ("I see a little bit of a backlash here and there against the MMORPG in its classic form. There's maybe a sense that we haven't advanced the genre fast enough. My main answer to that one is 'it takes three years to make one of these things, give us a break, we haven't actually gotten to iterate very much yet'"), and why it's not just about designing the game ("I've been reading more and more in psychology and anthropology and sociology... Game design is only one facet of online world design, frankly.")
I was a bit disappointed that Koster didn't get into more details about what he thinks needs to be done. Granted, he shouldn't give away any trade secrets, but saying more might assure the reader that he really understands the problems. For example, as others have said here already, RPGs are also about telling a story. What I've been looking for is a story that totally engulfs you and permeates everything. Having played EverQuest and SWG, I can say that they've got the massive world to explore thing down pretty well, but I never felt a part of any larger story that I cared about. Yeah, the socializing is okay, but that's not really why I play, I want a story that blurs the line between fact and fiction, something I'll waste time thinking about at work...
One thing I think Mr. Koster needs to do at all costs is to get into the games. Get in there and play, so that he has a really good feeling of what the players are experiencing and sometime griping about. I know that MMORPGs are very complex beasts where there is no escape from paying the beta test. There's just no way to get it all right on day one (though FF XI is doing a good job I hear). Given that, maybe the best way to evolve and move the game on is from the inside. Live it, breathe it, eat it! Grok it!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
If you hate games so much and game companies in general, why are you reading and posting in the games section? Leave this to those of us who actually like these subjects.
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Dude, why do you have to be so freakin' linear? Life is not black and white, nor does it have a left hand constantly fighting the right for wank-factor.
Even though I have an aversion to this industry, this does not preclude me from having an opinion, nor should it mean that my voice has any weight, + or -, over anyone elses. Insight doesn't always have to come from the 'experts', the chosen few, or the holy order of ordained monks. It can come from cynics and counter-culture, all the same.
Its amazing how, if you paint your box pretty colors of black and white, its still a box.
As to your question vis a vis what constitutes a 'waste of time', I would say that yes, entertainment is a complete waste of time. For the sake of 'relaxation', or 'art'. Like any human activity, it has its excesses. I, personally, consider that numbers on the orders of magnitude of '36 hours on-computer-time, straight, no breaks' as a result of a video-game junkie getting his fix to be a pretty serious social condition.
Entertainment, fun, or 'play' are not the sign of prosperity eternal justification which many people presume they ought to be. Play for 18-hours straight, with no exercise or other required health-sustaining activities, on a persistent and long-term basis, is an excess which certain aspects of this society cannot afford to bear. Yet, to the online-game-company fat pink executive, an '18-hour stint' is gold.
And yes, I happen to disagree that this is an acceptable condition for a society to allow its citizens to accomodate, all in the name of 'art', or 'entertainment'...
The Romans fell into that trap too, you know, ending up worshipping their own hedonism in month-long orgies of counter-productive spectacle.
The Worship of Leisure is a cultural navel-gaze with which even Modern Man is afflicted, and if you navel-gaze long enough, you will eventually disappear
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That was a solid gold rant. The only problem is that the "online-game-company fat pink executive" would actually prefer that the player pay his monthly fee and never ever log into the game. These games have monthly fees, not access fees. What does that mean for your rant? Basically that your fundamental premise was wrong. The companies want you to buy the game and then play as little as possible to not use their server resources.
Now as to why insight comes from "the 'experts', the chosen few, or the holy order of ordained monks", well its because they wouldn't pop into the games section to troll with such blatant ignorance. Good game.
>>Those of you who have been around me in the various games know that I place a high premium on interacting with players and being honest with them.
This from the man who closed the SWG forums so they cannot even be read unless you are paying a monthly fee. If SWG honestly became a great game today, we would have no more information than the standard marketing nonsense.
A typical single player game has 20-40 hours of content.
In MMORPGs players average 18-20 hours per week. A player may stay for 6 months or more. So for even an average player, that's around 500 hours of content. How much are you willing to pay for this?
What you're missing, though, is that in a typical single player RPG the amount of content you experience in 18-20 hours (I also can't see that being an average player, though it may be an average for players that play 5+ days a week) is significantly more than you experience in an MMO game. 18-20 hours into the average single player RPG you're a fairly high level character either at the mid-point or near the end of the game. In an MMO game you've achieved very little in terms of character level and probably not experienced much outside the initial starting point (assuming you're not power-levelling with friends and getting high-end equipment from them for your low-level character).
Of course, the slower level of progression is justified by a necessity to keep players coming back, keep them subscribed to your game, paying the fees. What it misses out on is the wish by players to experience a game, to explore a new world, without spending 90+% of their time on a treadmill. Diablo 2, for instance, is a fairly small game content-wise, but people keep playing despite a somewhat tedious mid- to end-game and a high amount of repetition beyond the first 5 hours of play. The content in your average MMO game is far beyond that of Diablo 2, yet you experience more of Diablo 2's content in a short timeframe than many players experience in the average MMO game over the same time period.
People usually play games to feel empowered, to get away from reality for a while, and to be entertained. MMO games, for the most part, instead make people feel their characters are weak, need to be built up, and require work from the player. People find it entertaining for a while, and some people get sucked into it for various reasons, but in the end people don't want their wookie running away from a crab or to spend 30 hours killing bats to gain 1 level simply because they die in 2 minutes if they venture beyond the bats. Furthermore, they want to know why they're killing bats, why they're gaining levels, and so on. Many of these games just don't give you that feeling of an overall purpose, and you end up with short term goals that are replaced with new short term goals as you accomplish them, and even the most long-term of goals is only made long-term by the grossly inflated times it takes to acheive anything of merit.
As for player-created content, there are 2 major drives behind players wanting that capability:
1) a lack of decent developer-created content
2) a wish for the ability to actually have an effect on the world around them and to personalize their part of that world
If players feel the game has engrossing content provided by the developers and the game gives them a feeling of being able to change the world around them, the need for player-created content would diminish dramatically.
-PainKilleR-[CE]