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The Barbarians At The MMOG Gates
simoniker writes "Areae president Raph Koster is perhaps best known as a designer of Ultima Online and the previous CCO of Sony Online Entertainment, and in an in-depth Gamasutra interview, he discusses his views on 'game grammar', the uniting of MMOs and online worlds, and the software patent problem. In particular, he's been talking about the 'barbarians at the gates' for hardcore MMO makers: 'Even the creation of the MUD in the first place was that. It was the Internet-based reaction to the stuff that had existed on the microcomputers and the Plato network and all of that. All of a sudden, "Oh, wait! We can put a text MUD on Arpanet!" And it was like, "Whoa!" and it spread like wildfire, and all of a sudden, all of that other stuff went away. So it's really possible for that stuff to be happening now with microtransactions, with portals versus traditional publishers, with digital distribution publishers versus traditional publishers, and with MMOs from MTV versus MMOs from Sony or EA or NCSoft.'"
Am I the only one who prefers sitting by myself with a controller playing a good single-player game? Am I the only one who still refuses to pay a monthly fee for a video game? Am I...getting old? :)
Why the hell does anyone even care what this guy thinks when he's brought ruin and strife to more MMO communities than most people will ever subscribe to?
Raph's ideas and theories have REPEATEDLY proven inaccurate, unworkable, stupid, and wrong. The gaming industry as a whole would be better off if he were filtered off into the black hole of FAIL with Romero.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
*incredulous deadpan*
... 'get it'...
raph koster... standing in the corner shaking his fist.. at... large MMO companies.. that.. don't
this is the the guy that drove UO and SWG into the ground... failed to keep EQ relevant
WoW came along and ran over them like a mac truck over a 90 year old grandma.
Blizzard created the genre defining title and expanded the MMO market to its current level
the only thing koster expanded was his beltline
Demented But Determined.
The world doesn't revolve around you. Learn to accept this.
More precisly, it doesn't revolve around your demographic, there are enough persons who are willing to play a monthly fee and who want to play in a multiplayer enviroment.
Different tastes, is that so hard to accept? No, it doesn't mean you are old, just means you have an over-inflated ego. Frankly that isn't age dependent.
Every single story about MMO's you get some person complaing about monthy fees and somehow the world is supposed to care. Here is a newsflash for you. Blizzard is RAKING it in. WoW should be closing in on the billion dollar revenue mark by now. That is hard to ignore. Game companies that struggle while they see thousands of people downloading their games for free and here is a company with an OLD OLD OLD game still raking it in. You think these companies care about you? They got a choice, spend fortune developing a single player game that will be obsolete in months, hopefully get them a onetime income and maybe some sparechange for the value release with tons of players using their forums for support a full week before the game is actually OUT (pirates move fast, and leechers have no shame) OR spend that money on an MMO and get a ton of cash each and every month. Gee, difficult one.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, there's plenty of antisocial shut-ins left in the world. Look at the SomethingAwful forums, if nothing else...
Seriously though, there's nothing wrong with a "good single-player" game. The problem is there are so FEW of those on the market today, and finding time to lock one's self away on the off chance that a game actually turns out to be good is just not high on most people's priority lists. Even a bad game can be fun with friends, but giving up human contact for something that turns out to be mediocre is just pretty lousy...
I tried to play Okami, it's a genuinely great game, but why should I play Okami when I can play something with my fiance? See my friends? Hell, even Gears of War was nowhere near as fun as when my brother sat down to play it co-op with me... And killing dumb NPCs in Oblivion can't compare to fighting real people in WoW. Why should I be stuck w/ a linear game playing experience when I can choose my own path elsewhere?
Single player games will never disappear, but I'm pretty sure they'll never be taken as a serious force in gaming again. I'd expect most of them to fit the "casual" category from now on with a few rare holdouts like Square-Enix.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I love offline games. The reason that I don't like paying a monthly fee for games is that in order to get the money back, you have to set aside time to play it. Not paying for a month means that lvl 60 Bard you've been working on gets deleted.
That's the trouble. MMOs have the same time-sink mentality. If you travel with a group, you'd better keep up with them, because if you get to be more than 2-3 levels behind them, you can't do the same quests as they do. So they either redo the easy quests with you, or leave you behind. So you'd have to play several hours a week -- in order to play the game.
Now compare the above to an offline RPG. I own the disk. No one's going to charge me to use my copy of FF12. No one will delete my lvl 60 party for nonpayment of fees. I don't have to set up a time to play it so that I don't fall behind the rest of the party. I could set the game aside for 6 months, never touch it (say if I get busy, or if I simply *don't want to play it*) and everything will still be exactly as I left it. I'm not going to lose out just because I didn't have enough time to play this month.
That's what I love about offline gaming. I don't feel pressured to put tons of hours into a game just to get a little pleasure from questing with my buddies. I don't want to feel like I'm losing money because I'm not playing as much as I did last month. Offline does that.
Any MMO can be played "singe player". There are a ton of people who play WoW "single player". The other people that run around them, sell them items on the auction house, and try to converse with them? They might as well just be computer NPCs. And that's the extent of it. Really. Some people like to play WoW by leveling up multiple characters on their own. They never group with others, they aren't in guilds, and yet here they are, still paying the monthly fee to play WoW. Some people play in the Battlegrounds only. They never actually talk to anyone, and the players they fight might as well be computer NPCs too, because they never communicate, they just fight and forget.
The cool thing is that even though they've been playing WoW "single player" for all this time, at any moment they can decide to "get out there" and join a guild and get together with people. That's always an option for them, and I've seen it happen. Then the game becomes truly multiplayer, when you are working with others on common goals.
But make no mistake, single player is not doomed. It will never, ever die.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I prefer MMOGs to single player, not for the chatting or guilds, but for the fact that humans make for more interesting teammates or opponents, than the computer does.
Game AI is definitely one of the things that makes me not want to play video games any more. Why? Because game AIs suck, so instead they either make the enemies stronger and faster than you (bosses), or they put more of them up against you (everything else), so that your human AI advantage is countered by overwhelming force. I got tired of the whole combat video game back when side-scrollers were king.
If MMO has changed that, maybe it's time I looked into it again... because so far I've pretty much avoided the whole combat MMO thing in favor of social MMOs because I've gotten so used to combat being a boring slog.