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Tattered Notebook: EQ Next and Storybricks, sitting in a tree...
OMG! It's EverQuest Next news! No, really. I'm not pulling your chain. It's all official and everything. Namaste Entertainment, the creator of Storybricks, made the announcement that it is collaborating with SOE on EQ Next. So go ahead and do your finally-some-news celebratory dance, I'll wait a moment. Just don't go all out and strain something; you'll want to be able to spring into celebration again when more is revealed, right? Sadly, the news is pretty much summed up right there in that one sentence; we don't have any more details to revel in and no time frame for getting more (well, other than SOE Live, of course!). But when has a lack of specifics derailed fan excitement about an upcoming game? Well we may not have definitive details, but using what we know about Storybricks, we can certainly speculate on what the relationship between the two means for Norrath's next incarnation. And if there was ever a relationship I was happy to see, it's Storybricks and EverQuest Next's.
Storybricks team announces EverQuest Next collaboration
What's the Storybricks team been up to lately? Oh, nothing much. A few tweaks here, an idea or two there, and a whole lot of vacationing in Norrath. What's that, you say? It turns out that Namaste Entertainment has been teaming up with SOE to work on EverQuest Next, of all things. "After several months of working together with Sony Online," the team posted, "we can finally reveal that we are collaborating on EverQuest Next. EQNext is 'the biggest sandbox ever designed' and we are extremely happy to be working on the most innovative MMORPG under development." The post couldn't go into specifics about the project, but it did say that the team is doing "remarkable things" with the game.
Exclusive: Storybricks dev diary expounds on bringing NPCs to life
In much of the MMORPG world, NPCs are nothing more than quest-filled Pez dispensers, human vending machines doling out the standard kill-10-rats chore to each and every player who roams by. They are lifeless tools at best and forgettable backdrops at worst. But the folks working on Storybricks believe NPCs can be more, much more. In this exclusive dev diary, Brian "Psychochild" Green and Stéphane Bura discuss making AI that can interact with players on an individual basis, adapting to individuals' choices, needs, and emotions and even remembering and drawing on past interactions to make a deeply engaging sandbox experience. Check out their thoughts in the full dev diary after the break!
Storybricks demo and interview with Brian 'Psychochild' Green and Kelly Heckman
Namaste Entertainment's upcoming MMO-narrative-building toolset, Storybricks, is quickly picking up steam among the massively multiplayer gaming community. The quirky title recently released a public alpha client to coincide with the project's Kickstarter campaign, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Namaste's Brian "Psychochild" Green and Kelly Heckman for a tour of the client as well as a short interview on what the future holds for the toolbox-cum-MMOG project. Follow on past the cut and join me as I try to pinpoint Namaste's goals for the future of Storybricks.
Why we don't get more innovative games
Innovation is as often as not used as a blank check when asked why MMOs aren't as good as they could be. While the sentiment isn't constant, it's recurring: a vague sense that something isn't there that ought to be. Often, the answer thrown around is that we need innovative games -- but when the people hollering for them are asked to explain what they mean, usually they shuffle, stare at their feet, and reply "well, these would go to 11." We want something new, but we're not sure what, and we're not sure why we aren't getting it. Brian "Psychochild" Green recently wrote up a post on the problems of innovation in MMOs, as well as several reasons we don't tend to get a great deal of it. In short, there are two main reasons. Innovation is risky, which makes a company more and more wary of investing money in a game that might not make any of it back. It also goes directly against another virtue that we look for in our games: polish. By its very definition, an innovative game can't be polished, since there's not as much precedent for refining systems. It's hard to summarize the full essay in a few sentences, however, as it covers a lot of ground and a wide variety of games. If you're interested in why it seems like there's little new under the MMO sun, you could do worse than reading the full thing through.
Near Death Studios closes down
If 2009 hadn't claimed quite enough lives for your tastes quite yet -- in terms of companies, jobs, and games -- you might have a bit of a morbid approach to things. We're just over the border into the new year, but it looks like there was one last item on the chopping block. Near Death Studios, the team behind Meridian 59, is no longer simply "near" death, but over the line into pining for the fjords. Brian 'Psychochild' Green broke the news on his blog yesterday, announcing that while the game wouldn't be going anywhere, it would no longer be a commercial venture run by the now-defunct company. So what went wrong? As Green puts it, while Near Death Studios was able to raise the money and the operational talent to get the game running and keep it in maintenance mode, the game never really grew -- the one shot it might have had at attracting new players was unfortunately timed right around the launch of World of Warcraft. He's not bitter about the experience, however, and he's glad that he had the chance to keep Meridian 59 running for such a long time and help shape something people really enjoyed. It's a sad announcement for a venerable game, though, and we can only hope that this is the last of the fallout we see from the closing-filled year.
The glamorous life of a game developer
As we all know, being a game developer is the pinnacle of wealth and glamor. Women chase you, men want to be you, and the money just rolls in by the wheelbarrow. Cypress Hill even wrote a song about it. Oh, wait, no. The other thing. Brian "Psychochild" Green treated us to an informative (and very entertaining) look at the life of a game dev, straight from the source in his latest blog post. He includes the aforementioned Cypress Hill song, and he's pretty honest: the likelihood is that the big bucks probably won't be rolling in, big time fame is a faraway dream, you've got to pay your dues and work your way up from the bottom, and every random guy who happens across your game and does not do your job thinks he can do it better (and they are more than happy to tell you about that in great detail.) So why even bother? The answer is obvious: to create games for a living -- getting paid to do what you would happily do for free -- is an up that more than outweighs any down the industry can throw at you. Check out the full entry on Psychochild's Blog.
Attacking the holy trinity of MMOs
If you've played MMOs for any length of time, you've probably grown very familiar with the trinity. You can't help but be acquainted with it in any sort of group content, where in more games than not there's that split between the tank, the healer, and the DPS. Certainly there are subdivisions and extra roles, but for the most part those extra roles are slight twists on one of the existing roles. (Controllers in City of Heroes are DPS with a debuffing/controlling aspect and slightly less damage, for instance). Brian "Psychochild" Green has an article on Gamasutra examining the issues with the holy trinity in game design: what purposes it serves, what its drawbacks are, and how useful it might be to get rid of it entirely. Examining the roots of the trinity design in Dungeons & Dragons and common gameplay types it offered, Green goes on to take a look at how the structure has become codified, what other potential systems could be put in place, and if there's even an advantage to doing so. He discusses the issues of hybrid classes, group versus solo design, and proposes a potential alternative that remains rooted in the core elements of the design. Anyone with an interest in design should take a look at the full article, as it contains some interesting insights and analysis of one of the core underpinnings of our genre.
