Slashdot Mirror
Vendetta Online Lets Users Create New Game Content
Incarnate-VO writes "Multi-platform space MMO Vendetta Online is now allowing users to create missions and submit other content for use in the game via their new 'Player Contribution Corps' system. Any game subscriber can join the PCC and gain access to a web-based mission editor, permitting them to build and test new missions on Vendetta's test-server. Once the player believes the mission is ready for prime-time, they submit it to the greater PCC community for testing and feedback. The community may then sign off on the mission and push it up to the developer staff for final oversight and propagation into the game."
Seriously, cause when I tried the game there was maybe 20 people online. Only a game with a very small fan base can do this. Imagine if WoW tried something like this.... Not only would they get crazy amount of submissions, but people would end up getting angry their submissions were not accepted.
So it's basically Web2.0 applied to an MMO ;)
City of Heroes/Villains is going to try something like this out. They've delayed it because it's proven to be a bigger project than they anticipated, though. http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/archives/2008/08/letter_from_pos_1.html
The angry players isn't something I thought about before, but even if your map isn't approved for general distribution, you can still play on it yourself or with friends, so I don't think it'll be a big issue.
MMO's still have the problem that the developers cannot keep up with the players. Players consume content at a rate MUCH MUCH higher than any development team can hope to match in terms of creation.
This has been a problem for EverQuest for the last 8 years, and for WoW to a lesser degree. Hard-core players simply devour content and no amount of development staff on payroll can hope to stay ahead. This change will really help to alleviate the issue, and give MMO's a greater amount of potential.
Speaking from experience, I've designed or conceived of multiple zones and encounters for EverQuest, and of at least a couple of really good (I thought) battleground ideas for World of Warcraft, so with tools for this kind of thing I could have created the zones, and given the development team a really solid idea of what I was proposing. Better, at least, than I was able to convey with a crappy Paint image and a page-long email.
It's a good thing. Feed your creative spirit AND get to play a cool MMO. WoW needs to do this soonest.
You aren't paying to play your -game-, you're paying to play your -content-, in the same way that you don't pay to drive your car when you go to a race track, but you pay to drive your car on their track.
As an FYI to the person who said we'll draw the ire of Linux and Mac fanboys.. the game is available for Windows, MacOS Universal, Linux/32 and Linux/64. See our site's front page. We were also multi-platform since launch, as our 2004 retail box art shows.
I actually included the supported platform list as the final sentence in my slashdot post, for this specific reason, but it seems to have been edited out. Oh well, hopefully people will gather that from the "multi-platform" mention at the beginning.
The big deal is that Vendetta is a MMORPG/Space Sim. I'm not aware of any other MMORPG allowing the players to create content. You?
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Community is a double edged sword.
The first thing is that now that games are so popular, the community is HUGE. You don't really see the same faces that often online gaming. A small mud, or any small online game, you see the same faces, and bump into each other more often, which creates the community you know.
EQ maintained some of that because of the forced grouping aspect. When I leveled it was like Oasis, then to the kunark area to the uh lake area (forget zone) then eventually on to dreadlands and so forth. You would go there, form a group, walk by all the camp areas and find a spot (seeing familiar faces in the camping spots) and start leveling up.
In something like wow, there are a ton of players. You don't really see the same people that often. Around 70 if you start pugging raids, you will start to see some familiar faces, but leveling up, its just random people's alts, or you are just off on your own.
I like wow for that aspect, but miss the community. I guess that is what the large guilds are for though, to create that psudo community.
I had the same sort of experience playing warcraft 2 on a small online service way back (kali), moving on to battle.net where there were a bajillion people and you never played the same guy twice unless you set it up.
I don't know. I like the variety with large populations and the freedom (more people to find), but miss the large scale community aspect of the smaller games. It might be also the form of the games are getting away from needing a community. Certainly a small MUD with a political system of some sort is going to have a way different landscape from an all instanced rpg game.