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Speaking With the Designer of an Indie MMO Project
PsxMeUP writes "Love is a persistent online first-person shooter that will let players build structures, permanently manipulate the environment and share resources — all in real-time. Action will be similar to a real-time strategy game as seen through the eyes of a grunt. The game is being completely designed by a man named Eskil Steenberg, and GameObserver had a chance to interview him. Steenberg talks about how all MMOs offer an egocentric experience where character growth is the most important aspect, and how he intends to change that. He also explains how mainstream MMOs have too many players, which basically trivializes accomplishments that have an impact on the entire server. 'If you imagine Civilization where you invent your stuff or build new stuff, imagine playing one of those characters on the ground doing that. And being able to do something minute in your world and see that impact in the major world,' Eskil explains, when asked what his game will be like. 'I want to scare people in a direction that is different from this sort of "me-centric" style of games. It feels that pretty much all games are going into that Diablo direction of collecting and building up my characters, and it's all very egocentric about creating your own powerful character,' he clarifies when asked how his game will be different from other MMOs. Love is well into development, and Steenberg has already posted some incredible gameplay demos. Levels, for instance, are all procedurally generated. The game also offers open-source tools, like UV editing — not a small feat considering the whole thing was designed by one man."
Sounds like the first Communist MMO! But more power to him, I just don't see how one guy is going to put out a game changer, these games tend to be "mecentric" for a reason. People want to see that last boss, kill that god, but not everyone is willing to put in 40 hours a week.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
"Love is a persistent online first-person shooter ...", try explaining THAT to my girlfriend!
I have no idea why my son is so excited about this particular game, but every month or so he keeps asking if it's out yet. We saw some of the demos and evidently it stuck with him. I think he likes the idea of being able to change the world.
being able to do something minute in your world and see that impact in the major world
How do you plan on achieving that? I've had a game idea like this for a while but I can't think of an excellent way to go about making small details effecting the outcome, except for market prices.
Even playing WoW often gets to be too much like work.
I can see how this might be a better approximation of real society or have better ideals or whatever than WoW etc, but WILL IT BE MORE FUN?
Honestly I dont care about the humanist validity of a game. I only want to play it if its an enjoyable and escapist experience. In fact deliberate unrealism is often more entertaining.
Do I want to have more "realistic life issues" thrown at me for pleasure? no. Its for that reason I already hate all reality TV shows.
Sounds more like Ministry of Love to me.
--
flag@whitehouse.gov
"..Levels, for instance, are all procedurally generated.." my processor just ran out the windows© with my IGP onboard
Derek Smart. BattleCruiser 3000AD
Production was always moving along and there were videos and screenshots of the game, but for the longest time there was simply no game for anyone except Mr. Smart to play.
Sadly to say, for all the people eagerly anticipating BattleCruiser 3000AD, the game sucked.
Let's hope Steenberg and his little game are headed in the right direction.
I like his idea, but I want to touch on his game for a moment.
It seems that he has an interesting way of doing the game art or graphics.
http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This guy is the upper league. I met him a few times at the Blender conference. He's on the OpenGL Standards Team and has forgotten more about coding than most of us will ever learn. Just watching him demonstrate his 3D tools is jawdropping. Listening to him when he talks about 3D and real-time multi-user networking is a feast. He's in the upper league of coding *and* in the upper league of taste and design. If anybody can pull something like this through it's him. Go and watch the demos if you don't believe me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This kind of collaborative building effort was done in ATITD. (A Tale in the Desert.) It was really great, but an interesting thing happened...
Guild houses and other structures require LOTS of raw materials. Gathering these were very labor intensive. The 'less dominant' personalities were relegated to these tasks while the Type-A guys did fun things like detail-work and planning. There were players who literally logged in and spent hours making bricks or gathering straw. They'd hand these off the the guild leaders when they were done and start over.
The only reason this wasn't slave labor is that there was no coercion, it was just a class system based on your personality, your 'need to be accepted' and your willingness to do the grunt-work. The social dynamic of the whole thing was one of the most interesting parts of that game.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
'oh Planetside wherefore art thou?
That was a fun game. Eskil Steenberg is right; there is much potential for a game that ISN'T about wealth or levels. PlanetSide had a low cap on character development; basically 4-6 weeks of causal play and you were done 'leveling'. After that the only dimension of growth remaining was player organization and politics.
Later Sony ruined the game by adding new 'skills' and new equipment that required level grinding via leeching. The players left. Most of them, anyhow. Had they made the environment modifiable (for instance,) instead of creating a grind for 'command skills' or crazy overpowered transformer suits, I'd probably still be there.
Before that, however, we players developed into amazingly well organized, trained and disciplined outfits. We planned our attacks, stormed on to the field, took our objective and moved on to the next target. I spent hours defending a hallway against the hoards and with my PlanetSide friends. It was a blast.
Maybe a MMO FPS can as much fun with only 200 on a server... That limit would be a benefit in two ways; it would prevent excessive lag and it would ensure enough people are participating in the 'scene' to be worthwhile. On the other hand part of the appeal of PlanetSide was that you had an entire world in which your outfit could deploy against a vast hoard of targets; there were no explicit limits on population.
The guys who put in overtime get paid more, the people who don't help at all (me and you) don't get paid at all, but we all get to use the road when it's finished.
I damn well get to use the road seeing as my tax dollars paid for it. Not helping? I work 60 hours a week and pay a lot of taxes.
"He also explains how mainstream MMOs have too many players, which basically trivializes accomplishments that have an impact on the entire server."
Is World of Warcraft. Every battleground, arena, or PvE instance is now a waiting line for your raid to get on the ride and come out looking like someone went crazy with a rubber stamp for progression. I swear standing around Org/Ironforge/Shat/Dal is like the scene of a bad photocopier accident some days.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I did not RTFA, but the idea I gathered from this, that I would like to build myself is an RTS /Civilization hybrid where the players are peons, and me, I am the grand master moving the troops around. OK, maybe there's a second god too, otherwise I have no one to play against.
Picture a bit of the Tribes commander position, but it would be a really detailed view and I could select a peon and yell at them via VOIP, or pick them up and throw them in the ocean for not following orders.
YEAHHHHH!!!!
The MM in MMO stands for Massively Multi-player! If the servers are limited to 200 registered players averaging 50-70 online most of the time (as stated in TFA), I wouldn't call it an MMO. I've played on wolf-et servers with more than 70 players.
I sincerely hope he finds a way to become profitable and to find a way to keep the game play experience he wants players to have and still host more players... I doubt he can be profitable on just 200 registered players. If he can turn this into something he can make a living off of it will give me a lot of hope for aspiring developers out there. Lately it seems only people with millions in VC to burn get anywhere.
[signature]
Since you're asking for polite corrections, you might want to know that the words "English" and "German" should be capitalised.
The gameplay video on his site doesn't appear to be working (at least for me). Here's a YouTube copy of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc-MmieTyLQ
As said above he really is a good designer, though you can see in the video that he grewup playing Quake and editing in Realsoft 3D.. :-)
In this ep. of coop. Quoting:
Belief is the currency of delusion.
At least post the link... ;)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
No evidence of any sound yet, I really hope he uses similar principles for generating audio as the game seems to for other content. I'm really looking forward to games taking up a more dynamic approach to audio, synthesis could be so much more fluid and immersive than samples. And this looks like the perfect opportunity for showing people it could work especially as visually its quite stylised, so people might not expect such a 'realistic' sound world.
I like the concept and the look of the game. I'd love to try it. But I'm very afraid of getting trapped into the Noctis V waiting game with Love. Noctis IV is a great open ended space simulation "game" where you simply explore stars, planets and moons in a galaxy. it was released over 10 years ago and people are still charting and naming celestial bodies today. it run in DOS and fits on a floppy. and it was all done by one brilliant person: Alessandro Ghignola.
and so, when he showed some screen shots of the next release, Noctis V, we all flipped and waited eagerly for a beta or anything playable. that was 8 years ago.
Love looks really good, but my heart has already been broken in the past by another. so i'm not going to get my hopes up right now.
'If you imagine Civilization where you invent your stuff or build new stuff, imagine playing one of those characters on the ground doing that. And being able to do something minute in your world and see that impact in the major world,' Eskil explains, when asked what his game will be like. 'I want to scare people in a direction that is different from this sort of "me-centric" style of games. It feels that pretty much all games are going into that Diablo direction of collecting and building up my characters, and it's all very egocentric about creating your own powerful character,'
Obviously he hasn't played A Tale in the Desert.
I always favored War Points in PvP MUDs assigned by the other players. Sure you'd get douches, but its a good system if people respect the game.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Next time relax your grip. I know a first post on /. is exciting, maybe next time you should just try to keep your hand off your junk.
Don't know if any remember Allegiance. It was a space 3d combat game with resources and objectives and building units and the like, but one player was designated the commander, and he viewed the entire battle from a tactical perspective, ordering units to go do objectives much like in an RTS.... the players would get the orders he gave them as objective way points and the like, but it was up to them to actually pursue them (or not). And the commander could assign better resources (ships, missiles, etc) to people who carried out his orders better (or just on whatever criteria he wanted). It was not a persistent game in terms of continuing combat (though there was some kind of overall campaign scoreboard based on which factions won), but the RTS/Personal dual nature described here reminded me of that. I played and enjoyed it for awhile but moved on at some point. The game had a fairly steep learning curve and for new players to jump into the thick of it against people who had mastered the basics was intimidating. I gather it wasn't a financial success for Microsoft, who developed it, and some time back they open sourced the entire thing. There are still that support it, though haven't checked on it in a long time...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I enjoy the fact that both you and the FP troll were moderated the same.
Reading the article i get the impression that this would be something new, the ability of making everything yourself from scratch. Note that this is my impression. Well it's not very new.
As stated by Marc_Hawke (130338) there's also A Tale in the Desert, haven't tried that myself though. But i've tried Wurm online which is a java based MMORPG where you can make everything yourself from scratch and manipulate the enviroment as you go. This for me got very tireing after some time chopping down trees and flattening the ground to make a road. And my tools got dull after some time aswell. Then without having neither a bunch of new tools nor a blacksmith anywhere close i was was up *****creek without a paddle.
I sincerely hope that this guy will be able to pull this off better than the guys in the WURM team. The idea is good buy very hard to execute while getting people to stay and play the game.
Just because no one is going to lose tens of millions of dollars in venture capital if Love fails doesn't automatically make it low-risk. Love is high risk for the developer, Eskil, who is spending several years of his life with no income to write a game that may or may not be successful. It is high-risk in the sense that it employs some unique game mechanics that haven't been copied from other large, successful games.
You can resign yourself to nothing you do being original, because there's nothing new under the sun. Once you do that (and it's a painful realisation) you can start working on seeing that even so, you can still do things that are *good*.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
lol, get over yourself.