One of the things we DON'T hear in all the writings about "how to get great stories/writing" into games is a good analysis of "what percentage of games should be story-related and what percentage should be otherwise, and why?" Games like tetris, solitaire, minesweeper, chess, pinball, card games, etc. are certainly quite popular with little or no story elements, and deservedly so. More story-oriented games like Secret of Monkey Island or the Final Fantasy series have their place too - but it seems clear to me that they'll always account for a minority of the overall game market. Discussions or studies of "what should we do within that portion of the market" are fine with me, but overly broad talk of "what should games do" that imply ALL games should be striving for more story and more writing bother me a bit. Games can validly focus just on action, like robotron, asteroids, or quake 3, they can validly focus just on strategy, luck, trivia questions, relaxation, or socializing. (In studies by GameTrust, when asked "what's your main reason for playing this game", 40% answered "to win", 43% answered "to relax", and 17% answered "to socialize".) What to do with storytelling and writing in an interactive setting is an interesting and useful question for the game industry to keep exploring. But it is less central to the question of how to make games than issues like "What role do different kinds of game mechanics play in the social and heirarchical interactions between human beings, and how could they do it better?" Or "What kind of single player games can best develop inductive reasoning skills?" The Super Mario games were huge hits in large part because they develop a young person's inductive reasoning "mental muscles" in a very satisfying and very rapid way. But discussion of these other types of questions is, I feel, sadly lacking in the game industry.
-- Dr. Cat
I get the impression this survey had a self-selected sample. In any case, their results show that most of the players participating came from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, and that around 90% of the respondents are male. Online gamers as a whole (some 48% of Internet users play at least casual games, according to Gametrust) are around half female, and I'm sure even on more "hardcore" games a much higher percentage are female. On Furcadia more than half of the players are female. I also noticed a heavy bias towards email and web forums for communication outside the game, in preference over instant messengers and voice chat. I think the general population tends more towards IM and voice chat than this sample does - I know our players love both of those.
Netrek is a good game, but it hardly qualifies for "birthplace". Netrek is directly adapted from the Plato game Empire, which was written in the 1970s. Plato terminals had 512*512 graphics back then, the whole system was way ahead of its time. They also had graphic multi-user dungeon games before MUD was even written. Some people have put together a working version of the old Plato system, complete with Empire, Oubliette, and Moria, at: http://www.cyber1.org
- probably worth a look if you're really into the history of computer games. Interesting that they can effectively emulate an old 70s mainframe computer on a dual opteron running Linux these days.
Furcadia is free, has been since 1996 and always will be. We have about 50,000 regular players, and peak at around 3,200 logged on at once (all in the same game world, we don't do "shards"). The elements of the game that persist are somewhat limited, but we're gradually increasing that over time.
I know there are a lot of people that play on unofficial Ragnarok Online and Ultima Online servers for free too. Not really the same thing as an officially released and supported by the original game developer kinda server, though.
I've been saying it for over 20 years now. There's a minority of Developers Who Actually Finish Anything Ever, and a majority of people who Only Start Things But Never Finish Things.
If a project is to have a chance of becoming finished, it needs at least one person involved who is rabidly determined that it will get done, no matter what, no matter how long it takes. This person needs to have the will to take back responsibility/control from anyone who's not getting some part of it done, and the ability to either do all those parts of the project themself, or to find someone else who will do them. If you have a person with pit-bull like persistence and determination on a project, it is decently likely to get done. If you don't, it's hard to finish unless you're doing something pretty easy.
You know, 50 or 100 years from now, there'll be legal precedents, court rulings, and/or laws establishing what does or doesn't happen in the courts when someone steals your castle or your magic sword, who pays real world taxes on what, etc. For better or for worse.
But somehow, I like the era where mostly the courts and the legislators and the police haven't even noticed the idea of "virtual property law" yet. When you might just say "Well, how do I want my game to work" and try and get away with it. It leaves us developers a little more elbow room to try and do that "innovation" thing.
Hopefully, in the long run, we'll end up with laws that do more good than harm. But I like the whole "settling the wild cyberspace frontier" feel in the current marketplace.
I remember the 8 bit Nintendo system being launched at CES one of the years I went there - a definite trade show, where you had to show at least a business card to prove (or fake) that you were some kind of retailer or manufacturer. The existence of booth babes makes perfect sense at a trade show. If some buyer for a big chain store is trying to decide which game to buy 80,000 copies of, do you think the publishers WOULDN'T try to throw booth-babes, neon, after-show parties with free food & booze, etc. at them? I think they're a lot more likely to pay for booth babes for big institutional buyers than for individual gamers. Higher return on investment.
"now that the Cold War is over and now they want to wipe me out because I am useless."
I would paraphrase this a bit. Rather than "want to wipe me out" I'd say something like "Back in the cold war they were more willing to go way out of their way to put up with my incredible amounts of bullshit, but now they have no reason to do so. Therefore if I break laws now I am treated the same as any other lawbreaker would be, and by the way I didn't actually break any major laws back then as I did in 1992 anyway."
I think at the top levels of the US government the attitude would be more like apathy than caring whether Fisher is "wiped out" or not. If Dubya Bush were asked about it I imagine he'd say something like "Bobby who?"
I feel Toejam and Earl is even more derivative of Rogue - it's clear the designers used Rogue as a starting point and made some changes to make it more videogamey. A number of the touches they added are very original and work well, and the alien characters and all the animation are a lot of fun, but overall it maintains a lot of the same basic "feel" of Rogue. Playing Rogue or playing Toejam and Earl is like eating potato chips. You have the urge to keep trying another quickie game till you win one. Diablo is much heavier fare, it takes a lot longer to play and tries to throw more "story" and other elements in. I need to get a working copy of T&E set up somewhere, it's one of those few games I could always go back to and play one more time.
I also think there was a more directly rogue-based game for the short-lived Turbo Grafx console from NEC, that was actual dungeons and not weird aliens looking for their spaceship parts. But it never was a big hit, and I forget what the title was.
I think instead of this "old school" model of "put in millions or tens of millions up front, then ship a boxed product that's real slick and flashy"... The huge risk in this area, coupled with the player's being not only willing to accept continual upgrades of the software with new features and art, but actually wanting it... These two factors suggest to me a model where a publisher makes a number of FAR less expensive prototypes, and then picks out the one or two that players are going nuts over and people are swarming in to play, and decide "THAT is where we're going to add five or ten million bucks worth of art and finish the job".
Hmmm, I think I need to send some emails to some other people I know in the industry.:X)
I've seen bit by bit what little was left of Origin dissappear more and more. Richard left the company after Ultima 9. Then I went to the wake at Lord British's place when they cancelled UO2, with the big bonfire. Then they shut down what was left of the Austin office altogether. But for me, once Richard left, it really was about a big corporation trying to make money out of a franchise they bought - the name "Ultima".
To me, one of the high points of my career was working on Ultima 5 and 6. (And some of the more obscure spinoffs, like the Gameboy Ultima I got to design). I started out as a fan, buying Ultima I right when it came out. I met my best friend 'Manda when she was hired to work at Origin, and she started out as a fan too - a huge admirer or Ultima IV. To me, the series was always about what Richard's vision was for the next game to be. Sure, he did worse with some of them, better with others, but all together the whole series, 1 through 9 (as well as Savage Empire, Martian Dreams, Serpent's Isle, and Ultima Online) were the results of his ideas and vision for what he wanted them to be.
Seeing an Ultima X that was made by someone else would be, for me, a little like seeing Peanuts comic strips done by someone other than Charles Schulz. He managed to keep that from happening to Peanuts, though the syndication company tried to make that happen. A lot of other comic strips HAVE been moved over to other creators when the original artist retires and/or dies, and I always found the results a little unsettling. Not that I'm against it, if that's what the creator wants. But in this case, I'm glad that the main numbered Ultima series will stand in gaming history as the results of one man's work and vision and game design over a period of 20 years or so. (And a lot of us who helped him do it, yes, but primarily they're the games he wanted to make, the way he wanted them to be made).
Now if somebody could just tell me why the name "Atari" will never die, I'd be a happy cat. My personal theory is it's been bought and sold so many times it's turned into a vampire-mummy-zombie-liche. Yeah, that must be it. (Did you know Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender and Robotron and more, used to work at Atari before hooking up with Williams? So did Steve Jobs. Ok, enough pointless digression. Bye bye Ultima X.)
I remember pitching my first MMORPG, DragonSpires, to Interplay back in 1994. Their company president at the time was looking to get started with a project for about half the budget I was asking for. I talked to their producer a bit about how we could do something on that size budget. Then we met with the president briefly, showed him what I had, and he explained why he'd rather do a game based on their D&D license. Sounded plausible to me. Back to the producer's office, and he says "Ok, what I think we should pitch to him is that we simultaneously develop a D&D game AND your game with your engine". I was speechless. Didn't that just double the budget back up to what the prez had said was more than he wanted to invest into the MMORPG market right then? Sure enough, he decide to pass on his producer's proposal.
Given how they did with things like Engage Games Online, frankly I'm glad they said no. Interplay did manage to publish some very good games over the years, but their management was always kinda strange as far as I could tell. (Hopefully they don't have enough nickles left in the petty cash drawer to get a lawyer to sue me for saying they were strange.:X)
I thought about this kind of model a long time ago. The main issue for me however, even bigger than cheating, was that you can't control quality of service. Someone whose connection to you is suffering from major netlag, dropped connections, or bandwidth problems because they're foolishly trying to host 100 people on a dialup modem are going to make the game often become frustrating. As the game developer, people's overall perception of whether "your game is fun or non-fun", whether they want to try your next game, whether they think you're cool or you suck, and whether they want to buy anything from you, that's all impacted by whether they're getting inconsistent and/or lousy performance from the network. Especially in the mid 90s, when we were starting out with DragonSpires and Furcadia, it was a pretty safe bet that many/most people would get lousy quality of service. Today I would imagine it'd be significantly better, but still not as good as you can get by paying for a good high quality server farm at a hosting site with good private peering and lots of fiber.
Sony is also offering a subscription plan like this. Right now it's $21.99 a month to get access to Everquest, Planetside, Infantry Online, Cosmic Rift, and Tanarus. It does NOT include access to Star Wars: Galaxies though. I imagine they'd have a lot more luck selling the package if it included two hit games - but I suspect the terms of their deal with Lucasfilm didn't give them enough flexibility to do that.
You could let people play as fans sitting in the stadium, that would add tens of thousands of players that could participate in a single session. Beginners could start out by buying and eating hot dogs. Successfully completing "The Wave" would give experience points to all the participants - with enough advances on your Wave skill, you could do it without spilling any of your beer. Advanced players can try to subtly influence the impact of the game by hurling their empty beer bottles at the referees at strategic moments! When the next add-on pack comes out, you can look forward to shaking your pompoms as a cheerleader, playing the cocaine-snorting team owner in his private box, or if you master the secret bizarre combination of skills required you can play the most coveted character of all - stadium janitor.
The challenge is making version 1 commercially viable."
You can say that again. I think a big part of the problem these days is that when your project has huge amounts of funding, it's almost impossible to keep touch with reality. There had $35 million in funding. The Sims Online was well up into the tens of millions also. When a project has that kind of money spent on it, they get a lot of staff, their burn rate is very high, and most people in the company will have one of two attitudes. A) They believe in sales projections that forecast phenomenally high sales/susbscription rates, which would lead to the game being profitable even with its high costs, and maybe everyone can keep their jobs, or B) having some vague (or not so vague) sense that it's hugely risky and a bit crazy to spend all that money, they just try not to think about the financial realities of the situation and keep working on the game as long as they still have a job.
Neither of these attitudes is conducive to doing a savvy, realistic assessment of what's practical, sensible, and maybe even profitable. Having the huge investment up front to make back precludes a lot of approaches, and forces them into a "swing hard and get a home run or strike out trying" approach. The Sims Online peaked at around 100,000 subscribers, down to about 80,000 now, and that's a "failure" because they needed the home run. We have only 50,000 players, none of whom are required to actually spend anything, and we're supporting a team of half a dozen reasonably well. (Up from the two we started with, and an initial budget a bit over 1/1000th the size of There's!) Other than our starting money, we haven't spent anything until after the game earned it - keeps us firmly grounded in reality, which I like.
So Brian's right, you CAN make an MMORPG with a small team. (Hi Brian!) But when it comes to social games, maybe there's an argument to be made that you SHOULD have a small team, for now. In the combat oriented fantasy games, we know at least one "hook" that can, potentially, make a game hugely profitable. In social games, while a lot of people have good ideas, there's nothing that's proven itself capable of being a huge moneymaker. Until that happens, this type of game is a huge risk to invest in. Well, "even huger" - games are a huge risk compared to other types of investments to begin with! Given that, I think it might make more sense to keep the risk down to a few million or less. The field doesn't necessarily merit a $35 million gamble. And I think it doesn't necessarily need one - the social market doesn't require tens of millions of dollars worth of eye candy for something to succeed, the way the "blockbuster summer movie" market does, or the "latest hottest videogame" market does. Look at something like ICQ - a huge hit in social software, and how much art does it have? The right features may be more important in the social market than winning the "computer graphics arms race" against Everquest 2 or what-have-you.
I worked with Warren back in the Origin days, on Ultima 6. He's a great guy and fun to work with, I can't buy any "nobody could get along with Warren" theory. The guys at Looking Glass insisted on having him as their producer for every project they did for Origin (Underworld, Underworld 2, and System Shock), he got along great with them too.
I was just talking to one of the Ion Storm programmers a couple weeks ago (he lives across the street from me), and he was happy to be working there, didn't mention any problems or turmoil. Whatever changes are being made have almost certainly been decided upon by Eidos, that's the way these things go. Most game developers, when they get a steady, paying job, will try to stick with it until they don't have the option to do so any more. There are the highly publicized exceptions, of well known teams with a recent big hit under their belt splitting off to do something new, but those are pretty rare compared to the vast majority of folks just trying to stay employed and keep making games.
Actually we've been up over 7 years now, and in the evenings we generally have somewhere from 2000 to 3000 people online. It does drop down below a thousand in the wee hours. We estimate that we currently have about 50,000 players who are active on a regular basis (logging in once a month or more). I hope we'll get a lot more after a few more updates, but we're making a comfortable living now. The scripting language is powerful enough now that we've had people cloning a variety of arcade games in Furcadia, along with the expected combat systems, quests, puzzles, rides, etc.
Even though several of my friends had jobs working on There, I have to say I always found Second Life to have a lot more potential and to be a lot more interesting. The Sims Online and There were both projects that I thought might come along and beat us to the punch with some of the things we wanted to accomplish with Furcadia - but then they failed to live up to their potential. Second Life, so far, looks like it's doing a pretty good job & is certainly ahead of Furcadia in a number of ways. My hats are off to 'em, I hope they manage to turn it into a profitable ongoing concern.
It's not a situation of a single monopolistic force rather than "a few big publishers" rather than "a lot more little publishers and developers. And while that might lead to somewhat less creativity, that's not the big problem. There was certainly a fair amount of variety in the days when the 8 bit Nintendo was so powerful in the market that Nintedo could make even Toys 'R Us dance like a puppet on their strings.
More of an issue is that games are so much more expensive now that anyone willing to invest the money at all to cover a development budget is likely to be a lot less willing to take risks. Which usually means churning out clones. I remember watching (and working on) the Ultima series when it went from Richard Garriott churning out an entire game with just hard work (and a little help with the music from his buddy Ken Arnold), to a $50,000 budget for Ultima 5, to a $250,000 budget for Ultima 6, then on up into the millions. Ultima 9 was well into the tens of millions from what I've heard.
The only way a game company is likely to take a risk on a totally new type of gameplay with multi-million dollar budgets is if they have a "name" developer like Sid Meier or Will Wright. A few of the shareware and budgetware and college student developers that aren't busy churning out clones of Tetris, Pacman, and Shanghai will turn out new things from time to time. But of course they'll never have the flashy graphics of the big expensive titles. Want to look for and/or support innovation? Download some of their work. Maybe someday the mainstream game industry will develop something like the Independent Film world, though so far they haven't gotten too far in that direction (just one festival, the IGF).
While having a few big publishers rather than a lot of little publishers might lead to less creativity in games...
Don't go outside. Play Furcadia and we'll arrange for someone else to go outside for you. Then they'll come back in, log on, and tell you all about how it was out there.;X)
Actually Lineage approached Richard before Destination Games had even existed long enough to really even get started on Tabula Rasa. Both sides thought working together was a good idea, it helps get Tabula Rasa into Asian markets, and helps NCSoft get into the US market and get some really good talent to work with. It didn't have anything to do with Richard running out of money at all. Frankly I think it was a good idea for both parties involved too, I can't fault them for the decision they made. And I'm looking forward to seeing how Richard does with his next game.
-- Dr. Cat
I've seen a number of games that cut loose all ties of "reminiscent of the real world". Even Tetris is pretty close - it has gravity, but not much else from the real world. Neither do solitaire card games, or some arcade and home computer games I recall from the 1980s. The Atari coinop vector graphics game Quantum is a good example. But as for defying logic, well, most videogames and computer games stick very strongly to whatever the principles of their internally defined reality are. Programming itself is sometimes referred to as "logic", making a game work consistently is kind of like "carving with the grain of the wood".
I know some card games and party games that are about changing the rules of the game as you go, but even those involve following the rules about how to change the rules (even if those change over the course of the game), strictly adhering to what the rules are at any given time, etc. I guess the most willfully and deliberately illogical game I can think of is the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, by Douglas Adams. At least in the early parts (I never got far), you had to perform actions that would, after you try them, happen to trigger lucky side effects you couldn't possibly have predicted from anything you were told before, you just had to try things until some combination of actions worked out for you. Though there was the internal logic of being able to try the first three steps and fail on the fourth, then try again knowing that the first three steps would lead to the same result again (even if you had to go back to a saved game to do so).
I think the main purpose of having game controls, physics, etc. not behave in any kind of consistent way that you could learn or deduce and then use to try to play the game better would be in a gag game made to frustrate or annoy people until they realize it's a "joke" and give up. Even then, certain kinds of formalized behavior produce better humor and practical jokes than total randomness and total unpredictability, I would say.
Maybe I should contact them and grant them the rights to use my two trademarks that appeared in Ultima V, "Dr. Cat" and "The Cat's Lair". Not that anyone probably cares.
I do hope their project and all the other re-creation projects do well. It's nice to see some of the older classic games kept alive, I've met too many people these days that think the only Ultima game is Ultima Online!
Ultimately I think any solution to helping people find the best content has to involve the players rating it in some way. Otherwise it won't scale well. But there's already been a lot of work on the web on user-rating systems that can be leveraged. Recommendation systems that say "if you liked thos things you might like this too", based on what groups of things other players liked, could have application here as well.
Another thing I've seen in a lot of the early wave of games that focus on user-created content is that the tools seem to be aimed at some specific skill level and type of creator. I think we need to see tools that support a broader range, where people with less skill, less experience, or simply less motivation can still create something a little bit interesting, and the people who really master the tools have a lot of power and flexibility to do really amazing things.
Anyway I do think this area will grow a lot, as better tools & games are developed. My comparison has always been to the free web-hosting services like Geocities, Angelfire, etc. that got really big based entirely on user created content. RPGs or virtual worlds built this way are, I think, particularly suited to encouraging socializing, as they often lack any combat or obsession-feeding goal structures, while they provide a never-ending source of new things to see and explore that provide potential conversation subjects.
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One of the things we DON'T hear in all the writings about "how to get great stories/writing" into games is a good analysis of "what percentage of games should be story-related and what percentage should be otherwise, and why?" Games like tetris, solitaire, minesweeper, chess, pinball, card games, etc. are certainly quite popular with little or no story elements, and deservedly so. More story-oriented games like Secret of Monkey Island or the Final Fantasy series have their place too - but it seems clear to me that they'll always account for a minority of the overall game market. Discussions or studies of "what should we do within that portion of the market" are fine with me, but overly broad talk of "what should games do" that imply ALL games should be striving for more story and more writing bother me a bit. Games can validly focus just on action, like robotron, asteroids, or quake 3, they can validly focus just on strategy, luck, trivia questions, relaxation, or socializing. (In studies by GameTrust, when asked "what's your main reason for playing this game", 40% answered "to win", 43% answered "to relax", and 17% answered "to socialize".) What to do with storytelling and writing in an interactive setting is an interesting and useful question for the game industry to keep exploring. But it is less central to the question of how to make games than issues like "What role do different kinds of game mechanics play in the social and heirarchical interactions between human beings, and how could they do it better?" Or "What kind of single player games can best develop inductive reasoning skills?" The Super Mario games were huge hits in large part because they develop a young person's inductive reasoning "mental muscles" in a very satisfying and very rapid way. But discussion of these other types of questions is, I feel, sadly lacking in the game industry. -- Dr. Cat
I get the impression this survey had a self-selected sample. In any case, their results show that most of the players participating came from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, and that around 90% of the respondents are male. Online gamers as a whole (some 48% of Internet users play at least casual games, according to Gametrust) are around half female, and I'm sure even on more "hardcore" games a much higher percentage are female. On Furcadia more than half of the players are female. I also noticed a heavy bias towards email and web forums for communication outside the game, in preference over instant messengers and voice chat. I think the general population tends more towards IM and voice chat than this sample does - I know our players love both of those.
Netrek is a good game, but it hardly qualifies for "birthplace". Netrek is directly adapted from the Plato game Empire, which was written in the 1970s. Plato terminals had 512*512 graphics back then, the whole system was way ahead of its time. They also had graphic multi-user dungeon games before MUD was even written. Some people have put together a working version of the old Plato system, complete with Empire, Oubliette, and Moria, at: http://www.cyber1.org - probably worth a look if you're really into the history of computer games. Interesting that they can effectively emulate an old 70s mainframe computer on a dual opteron running Linux these days.
Furcadia is free, has been since 1996 and always will be. We have about 50,000 regular players, and peak at around 3,200 logged on at once (all in the same game world, we don't do "shards"). The elements of the game that persist are somewhat limited, but we're gradually increasing that over time. I know there are a lot of people that play on unofficial Ragnarok Online and Ultima Online servers for free too. Not really the same thing as an officially released and supported by the original game developer kinda server, though.
If a project is to have a chance of becoming finished, it needs at least one person involved who is rabidly determined that it will get done, no matter what, no matter how long it takes. This person needs to have the will to take back responsibility/control from anyone who's not getting some part of it done, and the ability to either do all those parts of the project themself, or to find someone else who will do them. If you have a person with pit-bull like persistence and determination on a project, it is decently likely to get done. If you don't, it's hard to finish unless you're doing something pretty easy.
You know, 50 or 100 years from now, there'll be legal precedents, court rulings, and/or laws establishing what does or doesn't happen in the courts when someone steals your castle or your magic sword, who pays real world taxes on what, etc. For better or for worse. But somehow, I like the era where mostly the courts and the legislators and the police haven't even noticed the idea of "virtual property law" yet. When you might just say "Well, how do I want my game to work" and try and get away with it. It leaves us developers a little more elbow room to try and do that "innovation" thing. Hopefully, in the long run, we'll end up with laws that do more good than harm. But I like the whole "settling the wild cyberspace frontier" feel in the current marketplace.
I remember the 8 bit Nintendo system being launched at CES one of the years I went there - a definite trade show, where you had to show at least a business card to prove (or fake) that you were some kind of retailer or manufacturer. The existence of booth babes makes perfect sense at a trade show. If some buyer for a big chain store is trying to decide which game to buy 80,000 copies of, do you think the publishers WOULDN'T try to throw booth-babes, neon, after-show parties with free food & booze, etc. at them? I think they're a lot more likely to pay for booth babes for big institutional buyers than for individual gamers. Higher return on investment.
I would paraphrase this a bit. Rather than "want to wipe me out" I'd say something like "Back in the cold war they were more willing to go way out of their way to put up with my incredible amounts of bullshit, but now they have no reason to do so. Therefore if I break laws now I am treated the same as any other lawbreaker would be, and by the way I didn't actually break any major laws back then as I did in 1992 anyway."
I think at the top levels of the US government the attitude would be more like apathy than caring whether Fisher is "wiped out" or not. If Dubya Bush were asked about it I imagine he'd say something like "Bobby who?"
I also think there was a more directly rogue-based game for the short-lived Turbo Grafx console from NEC, that was actual dungeons and not weird aliens looking for their spaceship parts. But it never was a big hit, and I forget what the title was.
Hmmm, I think I need to send some emails to some other people I know in the industry. :X)
To me, one of the high points of my career was working on Ultima 5 and 6. (And some of the more obscure spinoffs, like the Gameboy Ultima I got to design). I started out as a fan, buying Ultima I right when it came out. I met my best friend 'Manda when she was hired to work at Origin, and she started out as a fan too - a huge admirer or Ultima IV. To me, the series was always about what Richard's vision was for the next game to be. Sure, he did worse with some of them, better with others, but all together the whole series, 1 through 9 (as well as Savage Empire, Martian Dreams, Serpent's Isle, and Ultima Online) were the results of his ideas and vision for what he wanted them to be.
Seeing an Ultima X that was made by someone else would be, for me, a little like seeing Peanuts comic strips done by someone other than Charles Schulz. He managed to keep that from happening to Peanuts, though the syndication company tried to make that happen. A lot of other comic strips HAVE been moved over to other creators when the original artist retires and/or dies, and I always found the results a little unsettling. Not that I'm against it, if that's what the creator wants. But in this case, I'm glad that the main numbered Ultima series will stand in gaming history as the results of one man's work and vision and game design over a period of 20 years or so. (And a lot of us who helped him do it, yes, but primarily they're the games he wanted to make, the way he wanted them to be made).
Now if somebody could just tell me why the name "Atari" will never die, I'd be a happy cat. My personal theory is it's been bought and sold so many times it's turned into a vampire-mummy-zombie-liche. Yeah, that must be it. (Did you know Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender and Robotron and more, used to work at Atari before hooking up with Williams? So did Steve Jobs. Ok, enough pointless digression. Bye bye Ultima X.)
Given how they did with things like Engage Games Online, frankly I'm glad they said no. Interplay did manage to publish some very good games over the years, but their management was always kinda strange as far as I could tell. (Hopefully they don't have enough nickles left in the petty cash drawer to get a lawyer to sue me for saying they were strange. :X)
I thought about this kind of model a long time ago. The main issue for me however, even bigger than cheating, was that you can't control quality of service. Someone whose connection to you is suffering from major netlag, dropped connections, or bandwidth problems because they're foolishly trying to host 100 people on a dialup modem are going to make the game often become frustrating. As the game developer, people's overall perception of whether "your game is fun or non-fun", whether they want to try your next game, whether they think you're cool or you suck, and whether they want to buy anything from you, that's all impacted by whether they're getting inconsistent and/or lousy performance from the network. Especially in the mid 90s, when we were starting out with DragonSpires and Furcadia, it was a pretty safe bet that many/most people would get lousy quality of service. Today I would imagine it'd be significantly better, but still not as good as you can get by paying for a good high quality server farm at a hosting site with good private peering and lots of fiber.
Sony is also offering a subscription plan like this. Right now it's $21.99 a month to get access to Everquest, Planetside, Infantry Online, Cosmic Rift, and Tanarus. It does NOT include access to Star Wars: Galaxies though. I imagine they'd have a lot more luck selling the package if it included two hit games - but I suspect the terms of their deal with Lucasfilm didn't give them enough flexibility to do that.
You could let people play as fans sitting in the stadium, that would add tens of thousands of players that could participate in a single session. Beginners could start out by buying and eating hot dogs. Successfully completing "The Wave" would give experience points to all the participants - with enough advances on your Wave skill, you could do it without spilling any of your beer. Advanced players can try to subtly influence the impact of the game by hurling their empty beer bottles at the referees at strategic moments! When the next add-on pack comes out, you can look forward to shaking your pompoms as a cheerleader, playing the cocaine-snorting team owner in his private box, or if you master the secret bizarre combination of skills required you can play the most coveted character of all - stadium janitor.
You can say that again. I think a big part of the problem these days is that when your project has huge amounts of funding, it's almost impossible to keep touch with reality. There had $35 million in funding. The Sims Online was well up into the tens of millions also. When a project has that kind of money spent on it, they get a lot of staff, their burn rate is very high, and most people in the company will have one of two attitudes. A) They believe in sales projections that forecast phenomenally high sales/susbscription rates, which would lead to the game being profitable even with its high costs, and maybe everyone can keep their jobs, or B) having some vague (or not so vague) sense that it's hugely risky and a bit crazy to spend all that money, they just try not to think about the financial realities of the situation and keep working on the game as long as they still have a job.
Neither of these attitudes is conducive to doing a savvy, realistic assessment of what's practical, sensible, and maybe even profitable. Having the huge investment up front to make back precludes a lot of approaches, and forces them into a "swing hard and get a home run or strike out trying" approach. The Sims Online peaked at around 100,000 subscribers, down to about 80,000 now, and that's a "failure" because they needed the home run. We have only 50,000 players, none of whom are required to actually spend anything, and we're supporting a team of half a dozen reasonably well. (Up from the two we started with, and an initial budget a bit over 1/1000th the size of There's!) Other than our starting money, we haven't spent anything until after the game earned it - keeps us firmly grounded in reality, which I like.
So Brian's right, you CAN make an MMORPG with a small team. (Hi Brian!) But when it comes to social games, maybe there's an argument to be made that you SHOULD have a small team, for now. In the combat oriented fantasy games, we know at least one "hook" that can, potentially, make a game hugely profitable. In social games, while a lot of people have good ideas, there's nothing that's proven itself capable of being a huge moneymaker. Until that happens, this type of game is a huge risk to invest in. Well, "even huger" - games are a huge risk compared to other types of investments to begin with! Given that, I think it might make more sense to keep the risk down to a few million or less. The field doesn't necessarily merit a $35 million gamble. And I think it doesn't necessarily need one - the social market doesn't require tens of millions of dollars worth of eye candy for something to succeed, the way the "blockbuster summer movie" market does, or the "latest hottest videogame" market does. Look at something like ICQ - a huge hit in social software, and how much art does it have? The right features may be more important in the social market than winning the "computer graphics arms race" against Everquest 2 or what-have-you.
I was just talking to one of the Ion Storm programmers a couple weeks ago (he lives across the street from me), and he was happy to be working there, didn't mention any problems or turmoil. Whatever changes are being made have almost certainly been decided upon by Eidos, that's the way these things go. Most game developers, when they get a steady, paying job, will try to stick with it until they don't have the option to do so any more. There are the highly publicized exceptions, of well known teams with a recent big hit under their belt splitting off to do something new, but those are pretty rare compared to the vast majority of folks just trying to stay employed and keep making games.
Even though several of my friends had jobs working on There, I have to say I always found Second Life to have a lot more potential and to be a lot more interesting. The Sims Online and There were both projects that I thought might come along and beat us to the punch with some of the things we wanted to accomplish with Furcadia - but then they failed to live up to their potential. Second Life, so far, looks like it's doing a pretty good job & is certainly ahead of Furcadia in a number of ways. My hats are off to 'em, I hope they manage to turn it into a profitable ongoing concern.
More of an issue is that games are so much more expensive now that anyone willing to invest the money at all to cover a development budget is likely to be a lot less willing to take risks. Which usually means churning out clones. I remember watching (and working on) the Ultima series when it went from Richard Garriott churning out an entire game with just hard work (and a little help with the music from his buddy Ken Arnold), to a $50,000 budget for Ultima 5, to a $250,000 budget for Ultima 6, then on up into the millions. Ultima 9 was well into the tens of millions from what I've heard.
The only way a game company is likely to take a risk on a totally new type of gameplay with multi-million dollar budgets is if they have a "name" developer like Sid Meier or Will Wright. A few of the shareware and budgetware and college student developers that aren't busy churning out clones of Tetris, Pacman, and Shanghai will turn out new things from time to time. But of course they'll never have the flashy graphics of the big expensive titles. Want to look for and/or support innovation? Download some of their work. Maybe someday the mainstream game industry will develop something like the Independent Film world, though so far they haven't gotten too far in that direction (just one festival, the IGF). While having a few big publishers rather than a lot of little publishers might lead to less creativity in games...
Don't go outside. Play Furcadia and we'll arrange for someone else to go outside for you. Then they'll come back in, log on, and tell you all about how it was out there. ;X)
Actually Lineage approached Richard before Destination Games had even existed long enough to really even get started on Tabula Rasa. Both sides thought working together was a good idea, it helps get Tabula Rasa into Asian markets, and helps NCSoft get into the US market and get some really good talent to work with. It didn't have anything to do with Richard running out of money at all. Frankly I think it was a good idea for both parties involved too, I can't fault them for the decision they made. And I'm looking forward to seeing how Richard does with his next game. -- Dr. Cat
I've seen a number of games that cut loose all ties of "reminiscent of the real world". Even Tetris is pretty close - it has gravity, but not much else from the real world. Neither do solitaire card games, or some arcade and home computer games I recall from the 1980s. The Atari coinop vector graphics game Quantum is a good example. But as for defying logic, well, most videogames and computer games stick very strongly to whatever the principles of their internally defined reality are. Programming itself is sometimes referred to as "logic", making a game work consistently is kind of like "carving with the grain of the wood". I know some card games and party games that are about changing the rules of the game as you go, but even those involve following the rules about how to change the rules (even if those change over the course of the game), strictly adhering to what the rules are at any given time, etc. I guess the most willfully and deliberately illogical game I can think of is the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, by Douglas Adams. At least in the early parts (I never got far), you had to perform actions that would, after you try them, happen to trigger lucky side effects you couldn't possibly have predicted from anything you were told before, you just had to try things until some combination of actions worked out for you. Though there was the internal logic of being able to try the first three steps and fail on the fourth, then try again knowing that the first three steps would lead to the same result again (even if you had to go back to a saved game to do so). I think the main purpose of having game controls, physics, etc. not behave in any kind of consistent way that you could learn or deduce and then use to try to play the game better would be in a gag game made to frustrate or annoy people until they realize it's a "joke" and give up. Even then, certain kinds of formalized behavior produce better humor and practical jokes than total randomness and total unpredictability, I would say.
Thank you for the excellent example you've provided of how to play the game well. I see that your maneuever was successful and gave you a score of 5!
Maybe I should contact them and grant them the rights to use my two trademarks that appeared in Ultima V, "Dr. Cat" and "The Cat's Lair". Not that anyone probably cares. I do hope their project and all the other re-creation projects do well. It's nice to see some of the older classic games kept alive, I've met too many people these days that think the only Ultima game is Ultima Online!
Another thing I've seen in a lot of the early wave of games that focus on user-created content is that the tools seem to be aimed at some specific skill level and type of creator. I think we need to see tools that support a broader range, where people with less skill, less experience, or simply less motivation can still create something a little bit interesting, and the people who really master the tools have a lot of power and flexibility to do really amazing things.
Anyway I do think this area will grow a lot, as better tools & games are developed. My comparison has always been to the free web-hosting services like Geocities, Angelfire, etc. that got really big based entirely on user created content. RPGs or virtual worlds built this way are, I think, particularly suited to encouraging socializing, as they often lack any combat or obsession-feeding goal structures, while they provide a never-ending source of new things to see and explore that provide potential conversation subjects.