Read my post again. I wrote, "You might complain about the abuses of the large companies using intellectual property laws, but without the laws it'd be even worse."
That example you quote is what would happen if we didn't have laws protecting IP, as a vocal group of people here on Slashdot like to advocate. As I said, I'm a registered copyright holder myself so I know the benefits.
Here's why my suggestion usually falls down: Searching for independent artists takes a bit of work. You can't just sit on the TV and watch a commercial advertising the latest and greatest independent artist like you can the lastest big-corporation offering.
How do you find local music? Start calling around to bars and ask if they have local music playing there. Ask for dates and show times. Find out what kind of music is playing. Given the nature of the internet, you can probably do a search on a local band's name to find out more about it. This requires the use of a phone book and your phone, but there's worse fates.
Unfortunately, customers have been trained to be passive when it comes to entertainment. It may seem a bit odd to "work" for your fun, but it's more rewarding in the end. Consider some of the places you like to eat. Which is better, McDonald's or the little hole-in-the-wall BBQ place that few people know about? It's easier to eat at McD's, but the food at the small BBQ place is usually much, MUCH better.
To be honest, marketing is one of the hardest parts of being an independent. My own game, Meridian 59, doesn't get much attention, but I try to get the word out. I pimp it on places like Slashdot when I get the chance.:)
In short, become proactive about your entertainment. There's more options available than you might first think. If you're unhappy about what you're being offered, go out and find something that does fit your tastes!
In short. Fuck those people at the record companies who make money and aren't even the people playing the music. And fuck those people with no musical talent riding MTV to fortunes of cash.
And fuck the people that create their art out of love but won't ever be able to complete it because they have to work a day job to pay for rent and food. This statement is a natural extension of your philosophy.
I hate to rely on stereotypes, but I took a look at your linked blog. Go graduate from school first, then we can talk about how much you think that all information should be free when you find your job options severely limited. Life's a lot harder than napping in class and doodling on your notebook.
As a game developer that puts in 16 hour days to maintain and create games, I know how demanding it is to actually work at creating "art". Your suggestion simply doesn't work for games, since the market often demands the latest and greatest technology. A game in development for two years already has to worry about looking "old". A game in development longer because everyone had to hold down day jobs at McDonalds just isn't going to make it.
A more constructive attitude is to say that you'll support the independents. Go find a local band that you like and buy their CD. Find a independent game you like and actually send in the shareware payment instead of playing it for free. Or, sign up for an independent online game for a few months and pay the subscription for a bit. You'll see a lot more useful change in the market than taking the "fuck the artist, I want my shit for free!" attitude. In fact, you're just guaranteeing that the only way an artist CAN make money is to join a large company that has the resources to sue people that have this attitude.
Go it alone. Raise your own money, take your own risks and make your own art. Own yourself. It gets cheaper and easier every day. Be happy with this whatever it brings in terms of money and fame.It's what the RIAA fears most.
I agree with that. I'm an artist (a game developer instead of a musician, though), and I've sacrificed deep to remain independent of the machinery of the computer games industry which parallels the music industry. It's not been easy, and I'm still deeply in debt financing this.
The thing that most people forget is that the same intellectual property laws which allow large companies like the RIAA to fuck over the artist also protect the little guy from being equally fucked over by the large companies. You might complain about the abuses of the large companies using intellectual property laws, but without the laws it'd be even worse.
Let me give an example. Let's say I'm a musician and I put together a few songs of my own. Believing that "information wants to be free", I put my songs up on a website and ask for donations or even offer to ship a CD to someone who gives me a little cash. But, now a large publisher finds out about my songs and visits my site. They take the songs, produce a CD, and I never see a dime from it. The large publisher has the advertising and distribution system to do this, and I'm powerless. And before some idiot comes along and says, "But, that's free advertising for you!" let me say this: What makes you think the publisher is going to put my name on the CD they publish? They have no incentive to do so. In fact, they have incentive to put someone else's name on it, so that they can pay that person peanuts to go lip-synch my songs in front of crowds of screaming fans instead of paying me a decent amount of money to live on.
Yes, I'll agree that the current intellectual property laws are insane. The copyright extensions of "forever minus one day" are just stupid (and I'm a registered copyright holder). But, to abolish intellectual property laws because of this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's real value in protecting the intellectual property of artists so that they can continue to create art, even if this intent has been perverted by the large companies.
Finally, let me say that real change starts with the individual consumer. Everyone here has the real power if they choose to use it. Don't like what the big companies do to artists? Find an independent and support them. The more of us independents that are able to live off of our art, the more it will be seen as a legitimate alternative to the big money machine that crushes the artists. I know in the games industry, people hate what the big publishers do to game developers; the publishers chew them up and spit them out. But, until there's a real, rational way to make a decent amount of money outside of selling your soul to the publisher, only a small number of us are going to risk financial ruin to do what we love independent of the large publishers. Go find an indie game developer, a small local band, or whatever. Let them know that you support them. Encourage them to stay away from the big machine, and to remain independent and free. Get your friends to do the same. This will effect real change instead of posting on Slashdot about how suing P2P users is unfair because people want free music, games, whatever.
Support independent artists and you'll see a real change.
A cool start. It's nice to see game developers getting some recognition for a change. (Of course, I'm a game developer, so my reasons might be a bit obivous.;)
But, it seems there's a bit of bias here. Focusing on game characters instead of games seems a bit unusual. What about exceptional games that didn't have strong characters? Consider the Ultima games, for example; the main character, the Avatar, was an archetype that was supposed to represent the player. Sure, there were character that were fleshed out, but they were intended to play a supporting role. Even in modern games you have games such as DOOM 3 which don't have strong, central characters by design. By focusing on game characters instead of games, they're really limiting which games will get recognition.
Plus, it seems a bit biased toward modern games. The page isn't working for me so I can't see the nominees, but let's assume Pac-Man is running against Lara Croft. Honestly, who's going to vote for Pac-Man over Lara Croft besides a few of us ultra-hard-core dinosaur gamers? But, ignoring boobies for a moment, the little yellow circle's game was probably played by more people and had a bigger impact on the industry as a whole.
Actually, most online games are surprisingly resistent to death. My own game, Meridian 59, was shut down by 3DO then bought and resurrected by a couple of the former developers. We've kept the game going and growing; we just released a new graphical client which includes Direct3D support, dynamic lighting, mouselook, rebindable keys, all things that weren't included in the game when it was released originally in 1996. It's not exactly cutting edge, but it looks pretty fine for a game that's about 8 years old.
Really, I think that online RPGs are probably a much better deal if you want longevity from your games. There's still thousands of people playing Meridian 59. How many games released in 1996 are you honestly still playing? Most people ignore a game after a few years, anyway.
One more thing to remember is that EA has had a startling amount of success in killing old online games. Earth & Beyond joins a long list of games that EA has shut down permanently. This is an aberration, not the norm.
One thing that really helped me is that you also have to mark your good messages as "Not Junk Mail". Highlight all the messages in a folder of known good mail, right click on any of them, select "Mark" > "As Not Junk". Once you do that, the spam filter becomes MUCH better.
It's annoying that they don't explain this. The fact that there's a "junk" button but no "not junk" button is one of my biggest complaints about the UI. It doesn't let you know that you need to mark messages as not junk in order to really get the filter to work well.
The main reason I'm not using Open Office.org is that it doesn't print envelopes properly. I run my own small business and I have envelopes that need to be printed off. My handwriting is also atrocious, so handwriting them is out of the question. Open Office did not print out standard envelopes properly on my setup, and the bug tracker said that this problem wouldn't be fixed until the next major version, whenever that will be. After all this, I uninstalled it and reinstalled Word.
There's also lots of other little annoyances. For example, Open Office did not properly display inline graphics properly in my.rtf files. The program also insisted on moving the images external to the document, meaning that I had to copy a number of files over if I wanted to show the document to someone else. Since I'm a game developer, screenshots are an important part of many documents. Being unable to handle images in the most portable format available did not instill me with confidence.
I really would like a free alternative to Office. Unfortunately, the main alternative doesn't fit my needs so I am stuck with Word for now.
That's very interesting. I'm a game developer myself, and this is actually a huge part of the education I give to people when they ask me about getting into game development: Making games is not the same as playing games.
It actually takes a lot of abiity to become a game programmer. In five years I have 2 Bachelor's degrees (BA in Spanish Lit and BS in Computer Science) as well as a minor (in Business). PLUS I had to fit in a healthy amount of game playing in there (*cough*) to keep up with the state of the art.;)
I imagine this is a side effect of the game industry getting more attention. More people wanting in, expecting a well-paying, high profile job. These people will inevitably be disappointed since those jobs are rare, and the "cool" job of coming up with game ideas doesn't really exist, or is held by upper management in most cases.
For people interested in getting into the game industry, here's a great website that details a lot of good advice about breaking in: http://www2.ravensoft.com/getajob.htm
Perhaps you can refresh me of when, exactly, the industry was about the games, not the money.
I think the original poster meant that the primary focus shifted from making cool games to making large piles of money. The industry has always been about both games and money, but there's the question of where the primary focus is.
I'm a game developer that has tried to learn a lot about game development history. In my opinion, the early days of video games were mostly about making cool games more than about making large piles of money. There was a lot of optimism in the fact that this was a fairly new field, and things weren't well-defined yet. There was a lot of creativity required, which means you saw some rather interesting games.
Somewhere along the line, and I don't believe it was a single turning point, things became more about the money than the games. I worked at 3DO while it was still around, and I can tell you that the focus was NOT on making fun games. Rather, the focus was on producing games the management thought people would buy on the tightest schedule possible; less time developing meant more games produced, which was supposed to mean more profit. Whoops. (The humor of replying to a post titled "Army guys" isn't lost on me!;)
I own my own company now, so I know first-hand that money is an ever-present topic in every business. I'm not some idealist that believes that money should never be a consideration for making a game. However, I think that the current game environment is focusing excessively on profits at the expense of making good games. The same people that are turning network TV into an intellectual wasteland are looking to do the same thing to the video game industry; it's a question of what will sell to the masses.
I guess it's a good illustration of how double-standards apply to video-games.
I'm a professional game developer, so I get this a lot.
Scott McCloud in his bood Reinventing Comics had a wonderful insight:
"Public perception MATTERS. As long as the broader community assumes that comics, by their nature, are without social value and, by their nature, are suitable only for kids -- then charges of obscenity will always hit their mark." (p. 89)
Even though he was talking about comics, you can apply this just as easily to any form of entertainment, including video games. People are stuck in the mode of thinging that video games are something that little Tommy does after school, ignoring the fact that Tom Sr. plays games after work.
Anyway, I highly recommend McCloud's previous book, Understanding Comics, to people that are interested in computer games, especially in the development of games. There's a lot of insight in his books that can be applied to video games as easily as they can be applied to comics.
Anyway, to make this post quasi-on-topic: I think the article is a bit incorrect. Tecmo was known for a lot of games before their more recent titles hit the shelves. The original Ninja Gaidens on the NES were classic games. I've also heard nothing but praise for Tecmo Bowl, even though I've never played the game myself. So, a fair amount of people obviously knew about Tecmo before the Dead Or Alive games.
I'm not that great at expressing myself in a polite manner.
Learn to do so. You will get taken more seriously if you can express yourself intelligently and politely.
Anyway....
I'm talking about a game being FUN and APPEALING to more action oriented gamers like myself...
And I explained why it wasn't being done. Games that focus on action tend to be less popular and much harder to do. Your example of PlanetSide wasn't adequate, because the game has not been as popular as other online games. Frankly, LAN-type games do fast action better, so hoping for fast action from an online RPG is like expecting car chases and explosions from an art house film.
...just give me more control over my character instead of me being a passive observer and chatter while the battle takes place.
If this is the case, then perhaps you would be served by trying some of the games I recommended before.
Meridian 59 focuses on PvP and has more action in its combat than most other online RPGs. PvP combat is especially fun given the active nature of the game.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates gives you little puzzles to solve when you take various actions. Your wits and reaction time determine how good do at the action. This game also supports a form of PvP between different pirate ship groups.
Both of these games encourage a more active participation by the player.
Note that, financial success does not a great game make....
I never argued that. I would be a fool to; my own game has significantly less subscribers and thus significantly less moeny than most other online games, but I consider it a very fun game.
However, at the end of the day games are still a business. So, while you and people like you might enjoy more action in their games, this goes against the general trends. The "boring" games you complain about make a lot more money. Most people already complain that PlanetSide is too expensive compared to "free" FPS servers, but the game is making significantly less money than either EQ or SWG. Large companies especially look to maximize profit, so they are going to build the games which attract the largest number of people.
I'm sorry... maybe I am misinterpreting what you mean by 'big impact'? I have to even question if you play MMORPGS, most MMO's have very little penalties beyond experience penalty and most give you a choice to go 'hardcore' and opt in to increase your penalties (challenge of the game) they do everything to make sure the character doesn't lose a significant amount of anything when you die except for a 'death fee' in experience or gold.
And that is enough to make people complain about death. This is one of the problems with our discussion: You do not seem tounderstand the audience for these games. Everyone is not like you. Some games also have very harsh penalties. In Meridian 59, for example, you drop your whole inventory on death. If you don't have a backup set of equipment or some friends to help you out, you could be in for a long period of rebuilding. Items in M59 aren't as vital as in most other games, but being naked has its disadvantages.;) People don't want to experience this just because a router that neither the player nor the game company has control over decides to stop working just then.
Also note that FF XI success is primarily due to the Japanese....
All the other games include worldwide figures as well. EverQuest has been released in Asia and Europe as well as the U.S.
Plus, that chart doesn't even include some of the largest online games from Korea. Lineage 1 has/had over a million subscribers at one time. The largest game called "Mu Online" claimed to have over 5 million worldwide subscribers during E3! This market is bigger than yo
I know about the technical issues I play Quake and you learn all you need to know about ping and latencny playing first person shooters. [...] This isn't a shot at you FYI. So maybe you're not skilled enough or have enough schooling to design game mechanics/network engine around the 'challenge' of latency but other games have done just that.
I'll pretend for a moment that you're not a troll, even though you've tried very hard to not insult me by insulting me.
For what it's worth, I've been working on online games since 1992, staring with text MUDs. I've been doing this professionally since 1998 with the game Meridian 59, which was originally launched in 1996 (prior to UO). I've done quite a bit more than just "play Quake", so I know what I'm talking about. I am recognized by my peers as someone quite informed about online game development, and I'm even on a panel at the Austin Game Conference talking about "Building Massively Multiplayer Games on a Budget".
At the core, it's a design issue and not a technical issue. The root issue is that the primary feature of online games is persistence. That's the reason why you have to pay the monthly subscription fee, because the server stores everything that happens. Everything that happens in the game permanently affects your character.
Consider what happens if you're playing Quake and suddenly you hit a lag spike. Someone nails you without you being able to react. Now what? Well, you respawn, grab some weapons, and go back into the firefight. Your Quake character is a throwaway shell that you don't really care about in most cases. But, now consider what happens in an online game. If that same thing happened, that death would permanently affect your character. You might lose some of your accumulated experience or skill points, perhaps some of the equipment it took you some time to collect. A lag spike leading to death isn't an "Oh, well, try again." moment. Trust me, I deal with this on a regular basis. Therefore, most games are designed to be a lot more latency-tolerant, so that lag doesn't disrupt the game, leading to permanent results.
You specifically mentioned PlanetSide a few times in your post. They've used latency reducing measures in their game, but you'll notice that PlanetSide is more like an FPS than a traditional online game. There is much less focus on persistence in PlanetSide, so they can focus more on twitch gameplay. Notably, a death on PlanetSide has very little impact overall.
It's also interesting to note the popularity of each type of game. According to the currently available version of a chart tracking online RPG subscriptions, you can see how some of these games stack up. Sony Online Entertainments two flagship products, EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies are pretty easy to see; EverQuest is the big yellow line that dominates most of the chart. You might have to look hard to find PlanetSide, which is a the small black line down in the lower right-hand corner struggling to get over 50,000 subscribers. Oh, and FFIX, the game you think is dreadfully boring? That's the red line shooting up the right-hand side of the chart, reaching a fairly hefty half a million subscribers. (Caveat: it's widely accepted that some of the numbers on that chart aren't 100% accurate, but they're not too far off the mark.)
There are no interesting game mechanics in MMO's that haven't been done MUCH better in single player games.
Except for the whole being able to play directly with a hundred, a thousand, or even more other people.
Okay, perhaps that's a bit too general. How about a real mechanic, then: political intrigue. There's plenty of that even in Meridian 59. When is the last time your game of Quake had players electing other player(s) to positions that directly affected gameplay? People
Online games can't do proper "twitch" because of latency. The split-second reflexes which make a great twitch gamer would be absolutely ruined when subjected to typical internet lag. Do you really want your character to die just because one of AT&T's routers decided to not play nice and delay your packet by 500 ms, meaning that you missed your block and took a leathal blow? Most people don't.
But, perhaps you should try some different games if you're tired of timesinks. You might expecially want to look toward more independent games.
My own game, Meridian 59 is a pretty typical fantasy game that focuses on combat, but the combat is much more active. Maneuvering and distance is important, especially in PvP play. While there's definitely a learning curve, building a competent character doesn't take a year like it does in most level-dominated games. Yeah, you're still going to have to kill monsters and collect gold, but the pace is faster than most other online RPGs which makes a lot of difference. Plus, the PvP is second-to-none. I might be biased, but I think it's a lot of fun.
A Tale in the Desert features great gameplay and doesn't even include combat. It focuses more on experiencing life in an Egyptian setting, solving puzzles, and competing and cooperating with other players. There's no "hit 'a' and pray" here.
Or, you could try Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates if that strikes your fancy. The game uses puzzles for all meanginful in-game actios. Play a puzzle to pump bilge, or distill rum, or any of the other stuff. Plus, who doesn't enjoy talking like a pirate? It's actually role-playing in this game!
There's lots of games out there to play if you're tired of "timesinks" or the "grind". Go out and enjoy them instead of just complaining.
I hear ya, man! I'm addicted to this "love" thing. I was lucky enough to find one of the rare women that absolutely enjoy gaming. I was completely smitten by her, and I made the decision to spend part of my life with her. It seemed like a good idea at the time....
But, that's when the problems started! I'll often think about her when she's not around. Then I start wanting to talk to her instead of do fun things like watch TV! And, don't even get me started on this whole "sex" thing that I can never seem to get enough of; talk about addictive! I just never have any time for anything that I enjoy.
But, you have it lucky. I don't have a personified "dev" to yell at, only a nebulous concept of a "supreme diety" that is COMPLETELY unresponsive to my complaints! Tomorrow I'm gonna complain about why I have to keep on downloading all this music even though it's all crap that I would never, ever pay for!
Actually, Nick Yee is very accomplished and is working on a PhD at Stanford last I knew. He's done a lot of analysis of collected data about online games and has been quite complete in his methodolgy from reading his previous works. He knows the pitfalls of bad data and has discussed it quite extensively in previous works.
I will agree that there's a bias toward certain types of games, particularly larger games. Most larger games favor the third-person perspective.
It's interesting to note that SWG and DAoC both start users in the third-person perspective by default. I don't know about EQ these days, but one of the big features when it launched was that you could manipulate the camera. Before then, you were usually stuck in one perspective or the other.
I think that games like Eve Online, Meridian 59 and the other smaller MMORPGs have all proven that attentive developers and a dedicated community can keep any game alive.
Thanks for the compliment. I think.;) (I'm one of the devs on Meridian 59.)
It's suprising how often people forget that online RPGs change, especially since that's supposed to be one of the bigger selling points. Many online games change radically as the game gets older and more content is added. The Meridian 59 you can play today is rather different than the game you could have played back in 1996 thanks to 7 updates to the game. Especially after we finish the new client upgrade, the game will be more modern.
The biggest problem is that most game reviewers don't really pay much attention to a game past launch. Most of them are stuck in the mindset of single-player games, where you want to review the game as soon as possible after launch, then you ignore it. It makes some sense; who wants to read a review of Warcraft 2 these days? Yet, a review of Meridian 59 might still be of interest to some people, since the game has changed. The same reviewers that eagerly want to review the newest sequel won't even pay attention to the latest expansion to an online game. (It's even worse for those of us that don't put boxes in stores, since it's often not seen as a "real" expansion [or even a "real" game!] without the box. Yet another reason why you have to pay $40 in the store in addition to a monthly fee for the majority of games.)
I've been marginally involved with an upcoming site that is looking to change how games are reviewed. A new perspective on how to review online RPGs should help solve some of these problems.
As for City of Heroes, it is a good game. I'll counter your assertion that focusing on one aspect is a good thing, however. While the combat is fun, it ultimately comes off as very shallow. Many games have had to endure complaints that there's a "lack of content" when they've trimmed back the game to plan for a more stable launch. The novelty of the superhero genre and CoH's highly customizable character costume creation system gave the game a bit extra time, in my opinion. Initial success is one thing, but retaining customers is very, very important to the long-term health of the game.
It's also interesting to note that the publisher of CoH, NCSoft, is a very experienced online game publisher. NCSoft has plenty of experience to share, and they've hired on some of the more experienced US online game developers.
To be fair the development and running costs aren't exactly equivalent either.
Well, sure, but we're talking about providing theme-park like experiences to people playing online. I also assume that we're talking about providing entertainment for several hundred thousand people rather than a few thousand people as the "single-digit number of developer" places do. These two aspects are what I'm focusing on in my previous post.
If Disneyland is like most places, the majority of their expenses come from salaries and payroll. If we put real actors behind the NPCs to make them more realistic, that'll cost money; although game programmers are smart, we haven't discovered how to beat the Turing test yet. You also need people to maintain the game, to police the userbase to make sure that no one is being unduly disruptive, and to provide the experiences that simple AI cannot such as running custom quests or encouraging role-playing. On top of this you do have to pay for space in data center, buy physical servers (and often lots of them), pay for bandwidth, etc. We don't run these games on $10/month web hosting offers; many of the larger companies find it more cost-effective to run their own data center, even.
My point was that adding the believable NPCs is going to drive up the price of these games because Disneyland shows the price of providing a really focused experience. And while I don't expect the price of an online game to jump up to roughly $40/day, the price will have to go up in order for you to enjoy a "complex, convincing, 'real'" online RPG with all that really entails.
The final state is presumably a 'virtual world' where nothing is scripted and everything is the emergent result of interactions within that world.
That's one possibility that people have advocated. Personally, I think that this is not the likely outcome. Even at Disneyland, which you mention later, the experience is rigrously organized and highly polished. Since people are paying for the entertainment, there are certain expectations. While I could conceive of a movie of various images and sounds strung together and left to the audience to construct something meaningful of it, I don't think that's the best way to entertain people. Likewise, virtual worlds need a bit of structure imposed by a competent developer in order to make it truly fun and worth paying for.
What I mean by that is that I imagine virtual worlds will be something like Disneyland where there are automated NPCs but also people employed to work as an in-game agent to keep the immersive experience running smoothly.
The problem is that the audience isn't willing to pay for it. Doing a quick lookup, the standard 3-day "park hopper" ticket for Disneyland is $124 if purchased in advance. That's only a bit under what you'd pay for a full year of Meridian 59! Yet, you see numerous complaints from people on sites like Slashdot complaining about having to spend $15/month on subscriptions. Honestly, the audience that are interested in virtual worlds isn't ready to pay the price for a focused experience like you get at a theme park like Disney.
Really, this gets into the reasons why we're stuck at the level we are. People have stated what they're willing to pay, and they mostly accept what online games have to offer. Until the market is willing to pay more and demand more, we won't see anything startlingly new.
That said, I think there's some cool things in the future that will turn expectations on their sides. A number of smaller developers have started making some cool games. Including my own game Meridian 59, you can take a look at the wonderful games of Puzzle Pirates and A Tale In The Desert. All these are games that were developed by a group of dedicated people, usually single-digit number of developers. These are games that offer something besides the same-old, same-old.
I'm a game developer with degrees in both Computer Science and Spanish Literature. I know a bit about writing and have some practical experience working on my game Meridian 59.
The biggest issue is that online games involve a level of participation you really don't find in many modern storytelling media. The closest you find are some interactive plays such as Tony and Tina's Wedding or some forms of oral storytelling, notably campfire stories or "egg timer" stories. And, while we have plenty of practice in evaluating traditional literature (I even have a degree in it!), there's less attention dedicated to more interactive forms. One of the more interesting treatments is Hamlet on the Holodeck.
Personally, I think the different media are different enough that it becomes hard to really define online storytelling in traditional terms. Even the title of Lee Sheldon's new book includes the term "Character Development", which is often largely out of the hands of the developer in online virtual worlds; players will develop their own characters, and often not in the ways that would make the most interesting characters and stories. It's very difficult for traditional storytellers/writers to let the players take nearly complete control over the creative direction of the story.
Even in single-player games you run into problems, as one of the most important aspects of good storytelling is pacing, and the player's actions play a large part in the pacing of a game. Highly linear games tend to do good with pacing, but they tend to be restrictive. More open-ended games really focus on the interactivity of the game, but often at the expense of control over pacing. If the pacing isn't right, then that interesting character is going to be of less interest to the player.
That said, I don't think storytelling in online game is a lost cause. I think there will be interesting stories told, but I don't think they'll conform to the forms we've defined for traditional non-interactive media. I think we might see some cool new things, and I especially hope that some of them show up in my future projects.
I think that video gaming has reached a kind of "post-modernism" these days. That basically means that everything than can be done with a screen and a controller has already been done - which leaves very few original ideas left to develop on.
Wow, talk about pessimistic.
I'll give you one example of a game that's doing something intersting: Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga on the GBA. Sure, it's a Mario RPG, but it's also a good game. the interesting bit is the controls where each of the two buttons on the GBA controls one of the characters. An interesting blend of action and RPG in a portable title. You shouldn't write it off just because it's on a portable system.
But, really, as a game developer I can tell you that there's still plenty of ideas that could be made into games. Ideas are cheap, and I probably have half a dozen good ideas before my first meal of the day. The problem is having the resources (time AND money) to make these ideas a reality. It doesn't help that the companies with the money to make innovative games are horribly risk-adverse. Not that you can blame them entirely, the market only occasionally rewards true innovation. The profit margins are easier to predict on games like "Half-Life 2" and "Warcraft 3" rather than back when "The Sims" launched. It's interesting to note that The Sims took a long time to make because most of the business suits didn't think the game would ever do well, so it had to be made "under the radar".
I don't know the Japanese market as well as I do the US market, but I suspect that saturation is probably the biggest reason, as others have posted. We're getting to that lull between console cycles, and there's just not much to buy right now.
I worked at 3DO while it was still in business, and I have similar stories to tell.
I think the trick is that game developers originally wanted to stay long hours because they legitimately enjoyed their jobs and wanted to make the best creative efforts they could. While working on Meridian 59 at 3DO, I came in on holidays to put in extra hours to improve it as much as possible. (I loved the game so much that I now own Meridian 59.)
However, I think it evolved into something that was just assumed by managers and worked into the schedule. On the last project I worked on at 3DO (before quitting, mind you) we were told to put in long hours by our managers. The word "fired" wasn't necessarily used, but there was a strong element of peer pressure at work. We were given 6 months to finish a game that realistically should have taken about three times that. Of course, we slipped a few weeks and were blamed for that. We were supposed to ship one day before my birthday, but since we slipped my request for time off on my birthday was denied, even though all my assigned work was done and there wasn't enough time on schedule for me to pick up a new task. (It shouldn't come as a surprise that I was never able to use any vacation time while I was working at 3DO, and when I quit I was maxxed out on accumulated time.)
As a footnote: I got the last laugh, though, because even though that game was universally panned by critics, the obligatory "good things" that every game review has to include focused on the sound and the map, things I did the programming for!
Anyway, this issue is one of the reasons why I own my own company now. I still have to work long hours, but at least I'm doing it for my own benefit instead of for the benefit of someone else that profits off of my long hours.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this lawsuit. Given the number of companies that do require people to put in the long, hard hours to complete projects, this could have far-reaching effects if it goes against Vivendi.
Skotos has been offering this type of service for a long time.
I'd make note that we make significantly more money on the Meridian 59 servers we host ourselves than the ones we licensed to Skotos. The Skotos server is a bit different (it's the non-PvP version compared to our PvP-focused servers) so it's not necessarily a direct comparison.
That said, I think there's more room for indie developers than people might otherwise think. The biggest thing is that the market needs to support the games the indies develop. A Tale in the Desert and Puzzle Pirates also offer innovative and interesting gameplay you won't find in the larger, heavily-marketed online RPGs.
One of the biggest obstacles I see towards widespread MMO adoption is the current distribution model which emphasizes inital purchase of the "starter" set rather than giving it away.
The problem has many levels.
First, most game purchases are made by people browsing games at the store. Go to your local large chain store and watch people in the game aisles. They look through different games and pick up boxes to look at the marketing on the back. If someone has $40 and I'm in the local Best Buy, they're probably not going to hold off on their purchase just to go check out download-only titles online. My own game, Meridian 59, allows you to download the client without a box purchase, but it's hard to get as much attention because you don't have the store presence, you don't have a store willing to advertise your game in their circular, and there's still an overriding perception that a game that is good will be available in the store not downloaded.
In addition, it's a question of investment. If you pay $40 for a box, you're going to stick with the game a bit longer. All games have learning curves, and online games are a bit worse because you sometimes have an audience as you fumble around the game. It's easy to get embarassed and frustrated. If you only paid $10 or even nothing for a free trial, you are more likely to quit out and not want to play the game again. A larger investment means that you will be more interested in learning the game in order to get your money's worth.
Further, some games just don't lend themselves well to free trials. Meridian 59 is a game that focuses more on PvP fighting than many other games. Allowing for a free trial means that players could distrupt paying customers with the trial accounts. Restricting the activities of these trial accounts means that they could not participate in the focus of the game. Plus you have to consider the additional customer service costs of allowing anonymous people to log onto your game easily; putting more restrictions on the signup will make less people interested in trying out the free trial. So, really, a free trial is sometimes not the answer.
There's a few other reasons, too, but I won't bore you with them.:) Needless to say, I've looked into this area a lot and have a bit of practical experience.
Just so you know I'm not talking out of my ass: I run my own subscription-based online RPG, Meridian 59.
The problem is one of cost. If you've run a D&D session before, you know how much time goes into running a good gaming session. It takes a lot of prep work to do a great gaming session.
This isn't so bad, but the problem is that people simply aren't willing to pay what this service is worth. Look at the people complaining about having to pay the box fee and a subscription fee in order to play online RPGs in this very thread. (Not that I don't agree with them; Meridian 59 has no "box fee" because we want to offer a good value.) Consider that a 5 hour session requires a minimum of 5 hours of prep work and that someone smart and tech-savvy enough to run a game like this could probably easily make $20/hour in a "real" job. Are you and your friends ready to spend $200 for a night's worth of entertainment? How many people do you think are willing to do that on a regular basis? Unfortunately, it seems there are very few people willing to do so.
A perspective from someone actually running one of these games.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Read my post again. I wrote, "You might complain about the abuses of the large companies using intellectual property laws, but without the laws it'd be even worse."
:)
That example you quote is what would happen if we didn't have laws protecting IP, as a vocal group of people here on Slashdot like to advocate. As I said, I'm a registered copyright holder myself so I know the benefits.
Read the entire post. It's educational.
Have fun,
Here's why my suggestion usually falls down: Searching for independent artists takes a bit of work. You can't just sit on the TV and watch a commercial advertising the latest and greatest independent artist like you can the lastest big-corporation offering.
:)
How do you find local music? Start calling around to bars and ask if they have local music playing there. Ask for dates and show times. Find out what kind of music is playing. Given the nature of the internet, you can probably do a search on a local band's name to find out more about it. This requires the use of a phone book and your phone, but there's worse fates.
Unfortunately, customers have been trained to be passive when it comes to entertainment. It may seem a bit odd to "work" for your fun, but it's more rewarding in the end. Consider some of the places you like to eat. Which is better, McDonald's or the little hole-in-the-wall BBQ place that few people know about? It's easier to eat at McD's, but the food at the small BBQ place is usually much, MUCH better.
To be honest, marketing is one of the hardest parts of being an independent. My own game, Meridian 59, doesn't get much attention, but I try to get the word out. I pimp it on places like Slashdot when I get the chance.
In short, become proactive about your entertainment. There's more options available than you might first think. If you're unhappy about what you're being offered, go out and find something that does fit your tastes!
Have fun,
I can't let this pass.
In short. Fuck those people at the record companies who make money and aren't even the people playing the music. And fuck those people with no musical talent riding MTV to fortunes of cash.
And fuck the people that create their art out of love but won't ever be able to complete it because they have to work a day job to pay for rent and food. This statement is a natural extension of your philosophy.
I hate to rely on stereotypes, but I took a look at your linked blog. Go graduate from school first, then we can talk about how much you think that all information should be free when you find your job options severely limited. Life's a lot harder than napping in class and doodling on your notebook.
As a game developer that puts in 16 hour days to maintain and create games, I know how demanding it is to actually work at creating "art". Your suggestion simply doesn't work for games, since the market often demands the latest and greatest technology. A game in development for two years already has to worry about looking "old". A game in development longer because everyone had to hold down day jobs at McDonalds just isn't going to make it.
A more constructive attitude is to say that you'll support the independents. Go find a local band that you like and buy their CD. Find a independent game you like and actually send in the shareware payment instead of playing it for free. Or, sign up for an independent online game for a few months and pay the subscription for a bit. You'll see a lot more useful change in the market than taking the "fuck the artist, I want my shit for free!" attitude. In fact, you're just guaranteeing that the only way an artist CAN make money is to join a large company that has the resources to sue people that have this attitude.
Some thoughts from a struggling artist,
Go it alone. Raise your own money, take your own risks and make your own art. Own yourself. It gets cheaper and easier every day. Be happy with this whatever it brings in terms of money and fame.It's what the RIAA fears most.
I agree with that. I'm an artist (a game developer instead of a musician, though), and I've sacrificed deep to remain independent of the machinery of the computer games industry which parallels the music industry. It's not been easy, and I'm still deeply in debt financing this.
The thing that most people forget is that the same intellectual property laws which allow large companies like the RIAA to fuck over the artist also protect the little guy from being equally fucked over by the large companies. You might complain about the abuses of the large companies using intellectual property laws, but without the laws it'd be even worse.
Let me give an example. Let's say I'm a musician and I put together a few songs of my own. Believing that "information wants to be free", I put my songs up on a website and ask for donations or even offer to ship a CD to someone who gives me a little cash. But, now a large publisher finds out about my songs and visits my site. They take the songs, produce a CD, and I never see a dime from it. The large publisher has the advertising and distribution system to do this, and I'm powerless. And before some idiot comes along and says, "But, that's free advertising for you!" let me say this: What makes you think the publisher is going to put my name on the CD they publish? They have no incentive to do so. In fact, they have incentive to put someone else's name on it, so that they can pay that person peanuts to go lip-synch my songs in front of crowds of screaming fans instead of paying me a decent amount of money to live on.
Yes, I'll agree that the current intellectual property laws are insane. The copyright extensions of "forever minus one day" are just stupid (and I'm a registered copyright holder). But, to abolish intellectual property laws because of this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's real value in protecting the intellectual property of artists so that they can continue to create art, even if this intent has been perverted by the large companies.
Finally, let me say that real change starts with the individual consumer. Everyone here has the real power if they choose to use it. Don't like what the big companies do to artists? Find an independent and support them. The more of us independents that are able to live off of our art, the more it will be seen as a legitimate alternative to the big money machine that crushes the artists. I know in the games industry, people hate what the big publishers do to game developers; the publishers chew them up and spit them out. But, until there's a real, rational way to make a decent amount of money outside of selling your soul to the publisher, only a small number of us are going to risk financial ruin to do what we love independent of the large publishers. Go find an indie game developer, a small local band, or whatever. Let them know that you support them. Encourage them to stay away from the big machine, and to remain independent and free. Get your friends to do the same. This will effect real change instead of posting on Slashdot about how suing P2P users is unfair because people want free music, games, whatever.
Support independent artists and you'll see a real change.
Have fun,
A cool start. It's nice to see game developers getting some recognition for a change. (Of course, I'm a game developer, so my reasons might be a bit obivous. ;)
But, it seems there's a bit of bias here. Focusing on game characters instead of games seems a bit unusual. What about exceptional games that didn't have strong characters? Consider the Ultima games, for example; the main character, the Avatar, was an archetype that was supposed to represent the player. Sure, there were character that were fleshed out, but they were intended to play a supporting role. Even in modern games you have games such as DOOM 3 which don't have strong, central characters by design. By focusing on game characters instead of games, they're really limiting which games will get recognition.
Plus, it seems a bit biased toward modern games. The page isn't working for me so I can't see the nominees, but let's assume Pac-Man is running against Lara Croft. Honestly, who's going to vote for Pac-Man over Lara Croft besides a few of us ultra-hard-core dinosaur gamers? But, ignoring boobies for a moment, the little yellow circle's game was probably played by more people and had a bigger impact on the industry as a whole.
My thoughts,
Actually, most online games are surprisingly resistent to death. My own game, Meridian 59, was shut down by 3DO then bought and resurrected by a couple of the former developers. We've kept the game going and growing; we just released a new graphical client which includes Direct3D support, dynamic lighting, mouselook, rebindable keys, all things that weren't included in the game when it was released originally in 1996. It's not exactly cutting edge, but it looks pretty fine for a game that's about 8 years old.
Really, I think that online RPGs are probably a much better deal if you want longevity from your games. There's still thousands of people playing Meridian 59. How many games released in 1996 are you honestly still playing? Most people ignore a game after a few years, anyway.
One more thing to remember is that EA has had a startling amount of success in killing old online games. Earth & Beyond joins a long list of games that EA has shut down permanently. This is an aberration, not the norm.
Have fun,
One thing that really helped me is that you also have to mark your good messages as "Not Junk Mail". Highlight all the messages in a folder of known good mail, right click on any of them, select "Mark" > "As Not Junk". Once you do that, the spam filter becomes MUCH better.
It's annoying that they don't explain this. The fact that there's a "junk" button but no "not junk" button is one of my biggest complaints about the UI. It doesn't let you know that you need to mark messages as not junk in order to really get the filter to work well.
Hope this helps someone.
Have fun,
The main reason I'm not using Open Office.org is that it doesn't print envelopes properly. I run my own small business and I have envelopes that need to be printed off. My handwriting is also atrocious, so handwriting them is out of the question. Open Office did not print out standard envelopes properly on my setup, and the bug tracker said that this problem wouldn't be fixed until the next major version, whenever that will be. After all this, I uninstalled it and reinstalled Word.
.rtf files. The program also insisted on moving the images external to the document, meaning that I had to copy a number of files over if I wanted to show the document to someone else. Since I'm a game developer, screenshots are an important part of many documents. Being unable to handle images in the most portable format available did not instill me with confidence.
There's also lots of other little annoyances. For example, Open Office did not properly display inline graphics properly in my
I really would like a free alternative to Office. Unfortunately, the main alternative doesn't fit my needs so I am stuck with Word for now.
My view,
That's very interesting. I'm a game developer myself, and this is actually a huge part of the education I give to people when they ask me about getting into game development: Making games is not the same as playing games.
;)
It actually takes a lot of abiity to become a game programmer. In five years I have 2 Bachelor's degrees (BA in Spanish Lit and BS in Computer Science) as well as a minor (in Business). PLUS I had to fit in a healthy amount of game playing in there (*cough*) to keep up with the state of the art.
I imagine this is a side effect of the game industry getting more attention. More people wanting in, expecting a well-paying, high profile job. These people will inevitably be disappointed since those jobs are rare, and the "cool" job of coming up with game ideas doesn't really exist, or is held by upper management in most cases.
For people interested in getting into the game industry, here's a great website that details a lot of good advice about breaking in: http://www2.ravensoft.com/getajob.htm
Have fun,
Perhaps you can refresh me of when, exactly, the industry was about the games, not the money.
;)
I think the original poster meant that the primary focus shifted from making cool games to making large piles of money. The industry has always been about both games and money, but there's the question of where the primary focus is.
I'm a game developer that has tried to learn a lot about game development history. In my opinion, the early days of video games were mostly about making cool games more than about making large piles of money. There was a lot of optimism in the fact that this was a fairly new field, and things weren't well-defined yet. There was a lot of creativity required, which means you saw some rather interesting games.
Somewhere along the line, and I don't believe it was a single turning point, things became more about the money than the games. I worked at 3DO while it was still around, and I can tell you that the focus was NOT on making fun games. Rather, the focus was on producing games the management thought people would buy on the tightest schedule possible; less time developing meant more games produced, which was supposed to mean more profit. Whoops. (The humor of replying to a post titled "Army guys" isn't lost on me!
I own my own company now, so I know first-hand that money is an ever-present topic in every business. I'm not some idealist that believes that money should never be a consideration for making a game. However, I think that the current game environment is focusing excessively on profits at the expense of making good games. The same people that are turning network TV into an intellectual wasteland are looking to do the same thing to the video game industry; it's a question of what will sell to the masses.
All in my opinion, of course.
Have fun,
I'm a professional game developer, so I get this a lot.
Scott McCloud in his bood Reinventing Comics had a wonderful insight:
Even though he was talking about comics, you can apply this just as easily to any form of entertainment, including video games. People are stuck in the mode of thinging that video games are something that little Tommy does after school, ignoring the fact that Tom Sr. plays games after work.
Anyway, I highly recommend McCloud's previous book, Understanding Comics, to people that are interested in computer games, especially in the development of games. There's a lot of insight in his books that can be applied to video games as easily as they can be applied to comics.
Anyway, to make this post quasi-on-topic: I think the article is a bit incorrect. Tecmo was known for a lot of games before their more recent titles hit the shelves. The original Ninja Gaidens on the NES were classic games. I've also heard nothing but praise for Tecmo Bowl, even though I've never played the game myself. So, a fair amount of people obviously knew about Tecmo before the Dead Or Alive games.
Have fun,
I'm not that great at expressing myself in a polite manner.
Learn to do so. You will get taken more seriously if you can express yourself intelligently and politely.
Anyway....
I'm talking about a game being FUN and APPEALING to more action oriented gamers like myself...
And I explained why it wasn't being done. Games that focus on action tend to be less popular and much harder to do. Your example of PlanetSide wasn't adequate, because the game has not been as popular as other online games. Frankly, LAN-type games do fast action better, so hoping for fast action from an online RPG is like expecting car chases and explosions from an art house film.
If this is the case, then perhaps you would be served by trying some of the games I recommended before.
Meridian 59 focuses on PvP and has more action in its combat than most other online RPGs. PvP combat is especially fun given the active nature of the game.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates gives you little puzzles to solve when you take various actions. Your wits and reaction time determine how good do at the action. This game also supports a form of PvP between different pirate ship groups.
Both of these games encourage a more active participation by the player.
Note that, financial success does not a great game make....
I never argued that. I would be a fool to; my own game has significantly less subscribers and thus significantly less moeny than most other online games, but I consider it a very fun game.
However, at the end of the day games are still a business. So, while you and people like you might enjoy more action in their games, this goes against the general trends. The "boring" games you complain about make a lot more money. Most people already complain that PlanetSide is too expensive compared to "free" FPS servers, but the game is making significantly less money than either EQ or SWG. Large companies especially look to maximize profit, so they are going to build the games which attract the largest number of people.
I'm sorry... maybe I am misinterpreting what you mean by 'big impact'? I have to even question if you play MMORPGS, most MMO's have very little penalties beyond experience penalty and most give you a choice to go 'hardcore' and opt in to increase your penalties (challenge of the game) they do everything to make sure the character doesn't lose a significant amount of anything when you die except for a 'death fee' in experience or gold.
And that is enough to make people complain about death. This is one of the problems with our discussion: You do not seem tounderstand the audience for these games. Everyone is not like you. Some games also have very harsh penalties. In Meridian 59, for example, you drop your whole inventory on death. If you don't have a backup set of equipment or some friends to help you out, you could be in for a long period of rebuilding. Items in M59 aren't as vital as in most other games, but being naked has its disadvantages.
Also note that FF XI success is primarily due to the Japanese....
All the other games include worldwide figures as well. EverQuest has been released in Asia and Europe as well as the U.S.
Plus, that chart doesn't even include some of the largest online games from Korea. Lineage 1 has/had over a million subscribers at one time. The largest game called "Mu Online" claimed to have over 5 million worldwide subscribers during E3! This market is bigger than yo
I know about the technical issues I play Quake and you learn all you need to know about ping and latencny playing first person shooters.
[...]
This isn't a shot at you FYI. So maybe you're not skilled enough or have enough schooling to design game mechanics/network engine around the 'challenge' of latency but other games have done just that.
I'll pretend for a moment that you're not a troll, even though you've tried very hard to not insult me by insulting me.
For what it's worth, I've been working on online games since 1992, staring with text MUDs. I've been doing this professionally since 1998 with the game Meridian 59, which was originally launched in 1996 (prior to UO). I've done quite a bit more than just "play Quake", so I know what I'm talking about. I am recognized by my peers as someone quite informed about online game development, and I'm even on a panel at the Austin Game Conference talking about "Building Massively Multiplayer Games on a Budget".
At the core, it's a design issue and not a technical issue. The root issue is that the primary feature of online games is persistence. That's the reason why you have to pay the monthly subscription fee, because the server stores everything that happens. Everything that happens in the game permanently affects your character.
Consider what happens if you're playing Quake and suddenly you hit a lag spike. Someone nails you without you being able to react. Now what? Well, you respawn, grab some weapons, and go back into the firefight. Your Quake character is a throwaway shell that you don't really care about in most cases. But, now consider what happens in an online game. If that same thing happened, that death would permanently affect your character. You might lose some of your accumulated experience or skill points, perhaps some of the equipment it took you some time to collect. A lag spike leading to death isn't an "Oh, well, try again." moment. Trust me, I deal with this on a regular basis. Therefore, most games are designed to be a lot more latency-tolerant, so that lag doesn't disrupt the game, leading to permanent results.
You specifically mentioned PlanetSide a few times in your post. They've used latency reducing measures in their game, but you'll notice that PlanetSide is more like an FPS than a traditional online game. There is much less focus on persistence in PlanetSide, so they can focus more on twitch gameplay. Notably, a death on PlanetSide has very little impact overall.
It's also interesting to note the popularity of each type of game. According to the currently available version of a chart tracking online RPG subscriptions, you can see how some of these games stack up. Sony Online Entertainments two flagship products, EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies are pretty easy to see; EverQuest is the big yellow line that dominates most of the chart. You might have to look hard to find PlanetSide, which is a the small black line down in the lower right-hand corner struggling to get over 50,000 subscribers. Oh, and FFIX, the game you think is dreadfully boring? That's the red line shooting up the right-hand side of the chart, reaching a fairly hefty half a million subscribers. (Caveat: it's widely accepted that some of the numbers on that chart aren't 100% accurate, but they're not too far off the mark.)
There are no interesting game mechanics in MMO's that haven't been done MUCH better in single player games.
Except for the whole being able to play directly with a hundred, a thousand, or even more other people.
Okay, perhaps that's a bit too general. How about a real mechanic, then: political intrigue. There's plenty of that even in Meridian 59. When is the last time your game of Quake had players electing other player(s) to positions that directly affected gameplay? People
Online games can't do proper "twitch" because of latency. The split-second reflexes which make a great twitch gamer would be absolutely ruined when subjected to typical internet lag. Do you really want your character to die just because one of AT&T's routers decided to not play nice and delay your packet by 500 ms, meaning that you missed your block and took a leathal blow? Most people don't.
But, perhaps you should try some different games if you're tired of timesinks. You might expecially want to look toward more independent games.
My own game, Meridian 59 is a pretty typical fantasy game that focuses on combat, but the combat is much more active. Maneuvering and distance is important, especially in PvP play. While there's definitely a learning curve, building a competent character doesn't take a year like it does in most level-dominated games. Yeah, you're still going to have to kill monsters and collect gold, but the pace is faster than most other online RPGs which makes a lot of difference. Plus, the PvP is second-to-none. I might be biased, but I think it's a lot of fun.
A Tale in the Desert features great gameplay and doesn't even include combat. It focuses more on experiencing life in an Egyptian setting, solving puzzles, and competing and cooperating with other players. There's no "hit 'a' and pray" here.
Or, you could try Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates if that strikes your fancy. The game uses puzzles for all meanginful in-game actios. Play a puzzle to pump bilge, or distill rum, or any of the other stuff. Plus, who doesn't enjoy talking like a pirate? It's actually role-playing in this game!
There's lots of games out there to play if you're tired of "timesinks" or the "grind". Go out and enjoy them instead of just complaining.
Have fun,
I hear ya, man! I'm addicted to this "love" thing. I was lucky enough to find one of the rare women that absolutely enjoy gaming. I was completely smitten by her, and I made the decision to spend part of my life with her. It seemed like a good idea at the time....
But, that's when the problems started! I'll often think about her when she's not around. Then I start wanting to talk to her instead of do fun things like watch TV! And, don't even get me started on this whole "sex" thing that I can never seem to get enough of; talk about addictive! I just never have any time for anything that I enjoy.
But, you have it lucky. I don't have a personified "dev" to yell at, only a nebulous concept of a "supreme diety" that is COMPLETELY unresponsive to my complaints! Tomorrow I'm gonna complain about why I have to keep on downloading all this music even though it's all crap that I would never, ever pay for!
Preach on, brother!
Actually, Nick Yee is very accomplished and is working on a PhD at Stanford last I knew. He's done a lot of analysis of collected data about online games and has been quite complete in his methodolgy from reading his previous works. He knows the pitfalls of bad data and has discussed it quite extensively in previous works.
I will agree that there's a bias toward certain types of games, particularly larger games. Most larger games favor the third-person perspective.
It's interesting to note that SWG and DAoC both start users in the third-person perspective by default. I don't know about EQ these days, but one of the big features when it launched was that you could manipulate the camera. Before then, you were usually stuck in one perspective or the other.
Some clarification,
I think that games like Eve Online, Meridian 59 and the other smaller MMORPGs have all proven that attentive developers and a dedicated community can keep any game alive.
;) (I'm one of the devs on Meridian 59.)
Thanks for the compliment. I think.
It's suprising how often people forget that online RPGs change, especially since that's supposed to be one of the bigger selling points. Many online games change radically as the game gets older and more content is added. The Meridian 59 you can play today is rather different than the game you could have played back in 1996 thanks to 7 updates to the game. Especially after we finish the new client upgrade, the game will be more modern.
The biggest problem is that most game reviewers don't really pay much attention to a game past launch. Most of them are stuck in the mindset of single-player games, where you want to review the game as soon as possible after launch, then you ignore it. It makes some sense; who wants to read a review of Warcraft 2 these days? Yet, a review of Meridian 59 might still be of interest to some people, since the game has changed. The same reviewers that eagerly want to review the newest sequel won't even pay attention to the latest expansion to an online game. (It's even worse for those of us that don't put boxes in stores, since it's often not seen as a "real" expansion [or even a "real" game!] without the box. Yet another reason why you have to pay $40 in the store in addition to a monthly fee for the majority of games.)
I've been marginally involved with an upcoming site that is looking to change how games are reviewed. A new perspective on how to review online RPGs should help solve some of these problems.
As for City of Heroes, it is a good game. I'll counter your assertion that focusing on one aspect is a good thing, however. While the combat is fun, it ultimately comes off as very shallow. Many games have had to endure complaints that there's a "lack of content" when they've trimmed back the game to plan for a more stable launch. The novelty of the superhero genre and CoH's highly customizable character costume creation system gave the game a bit extra time, in my opinion. Initial success is one thing, but retaining customers is very, very important to the long-term health of the game.
It's also interesting to note that the publisher of CoH, NCSoft, is a very experienced online game publisher. NCSoft has plenty of experience to share, and they've hired on some of the more experienced US online game developers.
Some more information for those interested.
Have fun,
To be fair the development and running costs aren't exactly equivalent either.
Well, sure, but we're talking about providing theme-park like experiences to people playing online. I also assume that we're talking about providing entertainment for several hundred thousand people rather than a few thousand people as the "single-digit number of developer" places do. These two aspects are what I'm focusing on in my previous post.
If Disneyland is like most places, the majority of their expenses come from salaries and payroll. If we put real actors behind the NPCs to make them more realistic, that'll cost money; although game programmers are smart, we haven't discovered how to beat the Turing test yet. You also need people to maintain the game, to police the userbase to make sure that no one is being unduly disruptive, and to provide the experiences that simple AI cannot such as running custom quests or encouraging role-playing. On top of this you do have to pay for space in data center, buy physical servers (and often lots of them), pay for bandwidth, etc. We don't run these games on $10/month web hosting offers; many of the larger companies find it more cost-effective to run their own data center, even.
My point was that adding the believable NPCs is going to drive up the price of these games because Disneyland shows the price of providing a really focused experience. And while I don't expect the price of an online game to jump up to roughly $40/day, the price will have to go up in order for you to enjoy a "complex, convincing, 'real'" online RPG with all that really entails.
Hope that clarifies!
Have fun,
Thanks for the kind words. :)
A few thoughts about your comment:
The final state is presumably a 'virtual world' where nothing is scripted and everything is the emergent result of interactions within that world.
That's one possibility that people have advocated. Personally, I think that this is not the likely outcome. Even at Disneyland, which you mention later, the experience is rigrously organized and highly polished. Since people are paying for the entertainment, there are certain expectations. While I could conceive of a movie of various images and sounds strung together and left to the audience to construct something meaningful of it, I don't think that's the best way to entertain people. Likewise, virtual worlds need a bit of structure imposed by a competent developer in order to make it truly fun and worth paying for.
What I mean by that is that I imagine virtual worlds will be something like Disneyland where there are automated NPCs but also people employed to work as an in-game agent to keep the immersive experience running smoothly.
The problem is that the audience isn't willing to pay for it. Doing a quick lookup, the standard 3-day "park hopper" ticket for Disneyland is $124 if purchased in advance. That's only a bit under what you'd pay for a full year of Meridian 59! Yet, you see numerous complaints from people on sites like Slashdot complaining about having to spend $15/month on subscriptions. Honestly, the audience that are interested in virtual worlds isn't ready to pay the price for a focused experience like you get at a theme park like Disney.
Really, this gets into the reasons why we're stuck at the level we are. People have stated what they're willing to pay, and they mostly accept what online games have to offer. Until the market is willing to pay more and demand more, we won't see anything startlingly new.
That said, I think there's some cool things in the future that will turn expectations on their sides. A number of smaller developers have started making some cool games. Including my own game Meridian 59, you can take a look at the wonderful games of Puzzle Pirates and A Tale In The Desert. All these are games that were developed by a group of dedicated people, usually single-digit number of developers. These are games that offer something besides the same-old, same-old.
Some further points to ponder.
Have fun,
I'm a game developer with degrees in both Computer Science and Spanish Literature. I know a bit about writing and have some practical experience working on my game Meridian 59.
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The biggest issue is that online games involve a level of participation you really don't find in many modern storytelling media. The closest you find are some interactive plays such as Tony and Tina's Wedding or some forms of oral storytelling, notably campfire stories or "egg timer" stories. And, while we have plenty of practice in evaluating traditional literature (I even have a degree in it!), there's less attention dedicated to more interactive forms. One of the more interesting treatments is Hamlet on the Holodeck
Personally, I think the different media are different enough that it becomes hard to really define online storytelling in traditional terms. Even the title of Lee Sheldon's new book includes the term "Character Development", which is often largely out of the hands of the developer in online virtual worlds; players will develop their own characters, and often not in the ways that would make the most interesting characters and stories. It's very difficult for traditional storytellers/writers to let the players take nearly complete control over the creative direction of the story.
Even in single-player games you run into problems, as one of the most important aspects of good storytelling is pacing, and the player's actions play a large part in the pacing of a game. Highly linear games tend to do good with pacing, but they tend to be restrictive. More open-ended games really focus on the interactivity of the game, but often at the expense of control over pacing. If the pacing isn't right, then that interesting character is going to be of less interest to the player.
That said, I don't think storytelling in online game is a lost cause. I think there will be interesting stories told, but I don't think they'll conform to the forms we've defined for traditional non-interactive media. I think we might see some cool new things, and I especially hope that some of them show up in my future projects.
My thoughts,
I think that video gaming has reached a kind of "post-modernism" these days. That basically means that everything than can be done with a screen and a controller has already been done - which leaves very few original ideas left to develop on.
Wow, talk about pessimistic.
I'll give you one example of a game that's doing something intersting: Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga on the GBA. Sure, it's a Mario RPG, but it's also a good game. the interesting bit is the controls where each of the two buttons on the GBA controls one of the characters. An interesting blend of action and RPG in a portable title. You shouldn't write it off just because it's on a portable system.
But, really, as a game developer I can tell you that there's still plenty of ideas that could be made into games. Ideas are cheap, and I probably have half a dozen good ideas before my first meal of the day. The problem is having the resources (time AND money) to make these ideas a reality. It doesn't help that the companies with the money to make innovative games are horribly risk-adverse. Not that you can blame them entirely, the market only occasionally rewards true innovation. The profit margins are easier to predict on games like "Half-Life 2" and "Warcraft 3" rather than back when "The Sims" launched. It's interesting to note that The Sims took a long time to make because most of the business suits didn't think the game would ever do well, so it had to be made "under the radar".
I don't know the Japanese market as well as I do the US market, but I suspect that saturation is probably the biggest reason, as others have posted. We're getting to that lull between console cycles, and there's just not much to buy right now.
Some food for thought,
I worked at 3DO while it was still in business, and I have similar stories to tell.
I think the trick is that game developers originally wanted to stay long hours because they legitimately enjoyed their jobs and wanted to make the best creative efforts they could. While working on Meridian 59 at 3DO, I came in on holidays to put in extra hours to improve it as much as possible. (I loved the game so much that I now own Meridian 59.)
However, I think it evolved into something that was just assumed by managers and worked into the schedule. On the last project I worked on at 3DO (before quitting, mind you) we were told to put in long hours by our managers. The word "fired" wasn't necessarily used, but there was a strong element of peer pressure at work. We were given 6 months to finish a game that realistically should have taken about three times that. Of course, we slipped a few weeks and were blamed for that. We were supposed to ship one day before my birthday, but since we slipped my request for time off on my birthday was denied, even though all my assigned work was done and there wasn't enough time on schedule for me to pick up a new task. (It shouldn't come as a surprise that I was never able to use any vacation time while I was working at 3DO, and when I quit I was maxxed out on accumulated time.)
As a footnote: I got the last laugh, though, because even though that game was universally panned by critics, the obligatory "good things" that every game review has to include focused on the sound and the map, things I did the programming for!
Anyway, this issue is one of the reasons why I own my own company now. I still have to work long hours, but at least I'm doing it for my own benefit instead of for the benefit of someone else that profits off of my long hours.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this lawsuit. Given the number of companies that do require people to put in the long, hard hours to complete projects, this could have far-reaching effects if it goes against Vivendi.
Have fun,
Skotos has been offering this type of service for a long time.
I'd make note that we make significantly more money on the Meridian 59 servers we host ourselves than the ones we licensed to Skotos. The Skotos server is a bit different (it's the non-PvP version compared to our PvP-focused servers) so it's not necessarily a direct comparison.
That said, I think there's more room for indie developers than people might otherwise think. The biggest thing is that the market needs to support the games the indies develop. A Tale in the Desert and Puzzle Pirates also offer innovative and interesting gameplay you won't find in the larger, heavily-marketed online RPGs.
Have fun,
One of the biggest obstacles I see towards widespread MMO adoption is the current distribution model which emphasizes inital purchase of the "starter" set rather than giving it away.
:) Needless to say, I've looked into this area a lot and have a bit of practical experience.
The problem has many levels.
First, most game purchases are made by people browsing games at the store. Go to your local large chain store and watch people in the game aisles. They look through different games and pick up boxes to look at the marketing on the back. If someone has $40 and I'm in the local Best Buy, they're probably not going to hold off on their purchase just to go check out download-only titles online. My own game, Meridian 59, allows you to download the client without a box purchase, but it's hard to get as much attention because you don't have the store presence, you don't have a store willing to advertise your game in their circular, and there's still an overriding perception that a game that is good will be available in the store not downloaded.
In addition, it's a question of investment. If you pay $40 for a box, you're going to stick with the game a bit longer. All games have learning curves, and online games are a bit worse because you sometimes have an audience as you fumble around the game. It's easy to get embarassed and frustrated. If you only paid $10 or even nothing for a free trial, you are more likely to quit out and not want to play the game again. A larger investment means that you will be more interested in learning the game in order to get your money's worth.
Further, some games just don't lend themselves well to free trials. Meridian 59 is a game that focuses more on PvP fighting than many other games. Allowing for a free trial means that players could distrupt paying customers with the trial accounts. Restricting the activities of these trial accounts means that they could not participate in the focus of the game. Plus you have to consider the additional customer service costs of allowing anonymous people to log onto your game easily; putting more restrictions on the signup will make less people interested in trying out the free trial. So, really, a free trial is sometimes not the answer.
There's a few other reasons, too, but I won't bore you with them.
Have fun,
Set up an MMO world that plays like D+D.
;)
Just so you know I'm not talking out of my ass: I run my own subscription-based online RPG, Meridian 59.
The problem is one of cost. If you've run a D&D session before, you know how much time goes into running a good gaming session. It takes a lot of prep work to do a great gaming session.
This isn't so bad, but the problem is that people simply aren't willing to pay what this service is worth. Look at the people complaining about having to pay the box fee and a subscription fee in order to play online RPGs in this very thread. (Not that I don't agree with them; Meridian 59 has no "box fee" because we want to offer a good value.) Consider that a 5 hour session requires a minimum of 5 hours of prep work and that someone smart and tech-savvy enough to run a game like this could probably easily make $20/hour in a "real" job. Are you and your friends ready to spend $200 for a night's worth of entertainment? How many people do you think are willing to do that on a regular basis? Unfortunately, it seems there are very few people willing to do so.
A perspective from someone actually running one of these games.
Have fun,