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Talking the past and present of MMOs with Brian 'Psychochild' Green
If you've been MMO gaming for more than a few years, you might be familiar with Brian "Psychochild" Green. Approaching his 15th year professionally developing in the genre, Brian started out with Meridian 59 and most recently headed up the Storybricks team. But now that he's back to being a free agent, we jumped at the chance to sit down and talk shop. Follow along after the jump for Brian's thoughts on modern MMOs, how the genre may be enjoying a rebirth, and which game he'd save if given the chance.
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.
The Game Archaeologist seals up 2011
You know what I love about the end of each year? The lists. Man, but I'm a sucker for lists, especially when they come in "best of" varieties. In the lull between Christmas and New Year's, there typically isn't a lot happening in the world of entertainment, so it's a good time to look back before we head forward. And so it is for The Game Archaeologist. 2011 marks the second year I've been doing this column, and it's been one of my personal favorite series to write. Every week I'm learning more and more about the history of the MMO genre, and I'm encouraged to see just how much passion and interest there are for the titles that started it all and got us to where we are today. So before we head into 2012, let's take one last glimpse back at the road we've traveled. If you've missed out on any of these columns or want to revisit your favorite classic MMO, I've compiled a huge list of everything I talked about this year, from histories to interviews to player stories. There's also a special request for you (yes, you) at the end of this column, so do me a favor and hit that jump!
The Game Archaeologist crosses Meridian 59: A chat with Brian Green (part 2)
Welcome to the second part of our interview with former Meridian 59 developer Brian "Psychochild" Green as he reminisces about running one of the oldest graphical MMOs in history. If you missed the first part, I heartily recommend you catch up on it before continuing further. And now, for the exciting conclusion... The Game Archaeologist: What's one of your favorite stories from your experience running Meridian 59? Brian Green: One time I was at Dave & Busters restaurant one evening after a day at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC). I was chatting with Raph Koster about the conference, when from behind us someone says, "Oh my god, are you Psychochild?!?" Raph, who has always been more high profile than I am, gives a grin and leaves. Turns out they were fans of the game and bought me a drink as thanks.
The Game Archaeologist crosses Meridian 59: An interview with Brian Green (part 1)
Last week we began to examine one of the most significant MMOs in history: Meridian 59. While it never rose to the level of fame and subscriber numbers as its successors did, Meridian 59 was a daring pioneer that paved the way for all that followed. Its story is almost like a movie, with the title born from the fruits of two amateur programmers, surviving studio shutdowns and huge competition, and persevering from 1996 through today. As I'll recount over the next two episodes of The Game Archaeologist, I sat down with Brian Green, a blogger and game developer who oversaw the resurrection of Meridian 59 in the early 2000s and ran it for the better part of a decade. Green graciously agreed to participate, saying that he always loves talking about games -- and this one in particular. The Game Archaeologist: Hi! Please introduce yourself and your current position and project. Brian Green: I'm Brian "Psychochild" Green, a long-time MMO designer and programmer. I'm known for my professional blog and my work on Meridian 59. I'm currently working on the Storybricks project as the MMO Wizard. We're a startup, so that means I do whatever needs to be done at the moment.
Namaste Entertainment trumpets upcoming Storybricks beta
If you're part of the crowd that grouses at unoriginality in the MMO genre and are craving a fresh breath of minty innovation, then you might have been intrigued at the ideas put forth by Namaste Entertainment's Storybricks toolset earlier this year. But when would this become reality? Turns out the answer is sooner than you'd think. Namaste announced that Storybricks' beta is scheduled for February next year, and if you want to check it out, all you need to do is sign up for the newsletter and you'll be on the list. The beta will be a "skeletal version" of the toolkit without the associated game, but it should allow players to fiddle around with creating their own MMO scenarios and worlds. During the beta process, the devs will be actively creating Storybricks content and releasing it for testing as well. To cement the good news, Lead Designer Stephane Bura and MMO Architect Brian "Psychochild" Green have put forth their first developer diary talking about the lead-up to beta and what is planned for early next year. Feast your eyeballs and eardrums on the excitement after the jump!
The Game Archaeologist crosses Meridian 59: The highlights
A colony founded through a magical nexus, Meridian 59 had it all going on -- until, that is, the portal to the colony collapsed and it was left to fend for itself. Monsters swarmed over the land, politics split the community into factions, and adventurers were called to rise up and become the heroes that were desperately needed. And all it took was $10.95 a month and an internet connection. Welcome to 1996 and one of the very first -- if not the first (more on that later) -- graphical MMOs to hit the scene. Meridian 59 may not have been one of the biggest games in the genre, but it was arguably one of the most important, the John Adams to World of Warcraft's Abraham Lincoln. If you were wondering, Darkfall was Chester A. Arthur. It seems fitting to end 2011 by touching upon this significant title that, against all odds, continues to operate today. Meridian 59 weathered studio shutdowns, newbie developers in every sense of the word, and a world that wasn't quite sure what to make of these fancy-schmancy massively interactive roleplaying games. MIRGs! Oh, that would've been such a better acronym, but I digress. Let's set the wayback machine to 1978 to see how one amateur game led to another that led to the birth of an industry.
Storybricks: Opening the Pandora's box of MMO design
"I could make a better game than this!" At one point or another, we've all said this, usually in disgust after we've become fed up with another tired MMO trope or lazy quest design. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the good fortune to work for a major game studio and thus will never see our brilliant ideas come to fruition. Except that this may no longer be true. Enter Namaste Entertainment's Storybricks, a bold and intriguing concept aimed at putting game design in the hands of Joe and Jane Gamer. Namaste is a small startup that began in 2010 when its team members got tired of derivative titles and mechanics in the industry. Storybricks is the team's first project, and while it's still in its infancy, it's already started to capture the imaginations -- and excitement -- of gamers everywhere. At this past week's GenCon, I caught up with Brian "Psychochild" Green and the rest of the Namaste crew as they publicly demoed Storybricks to the gaming crowd. Hit the jump as we look at why this program may just be the answer to a question you've never fully asked.
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.
The Daily Grind: How easy is too easy?
Difficulty in games is a contentious issue at any point. Brian "Psychochild" Green recently had a musing on the topic of difficulty as it applies to most games, but even that discussion stops shy of discussing MMOs, where multiple difficulty levels are rarely an option. Designers can make harder events, but if the rewards are the same as something easier, no one will bother making life harder on themselves. That makes the "hard mode" more than just an increased challenge, and sets up a hardwired and sometimes arbitrary challenge-to-reward ratio. On the flip side... well, it's not fun to have the game just hand everything to you. We want to feel as if we're accomplishing something when we play. So today, we ask you, what's too far in either direction? What sort of penalties or challenges make something so ridiculously hard it's not worth bothering? By the same token, how simple does something have to be before you're annoyed at the ease of it all? What levels of difficulty can be tinkered with without making the game unpleasant, and what elements of gameplay are best kept at a set level?
Exploring need, greed, and team play
Brian "Psychochild" Green and Ferrel at Epic Slant recently discussed an ongoing challenge facing game developers: designing for the team instead of for the loot. Balancing game mechanics and rewards with player goals and desires, while still encouraging people to play as a group has always been tricky. Players are there to have fun, which usually translates into some sort of reward system, be it in-game cash, leveling up, further quests, or better loot. The foundational goal of an MMO in this case is for there to be a learning curve: go out with your group and learn how to succeed at this encounter by working together as a group, playing off of one another's strengths and weaknesses. In the end, learning and succeeding is the reward. Unfortunately, this gets lost quickly in the race for better loot - that drop that you need to advance. Players forgo groups in favor of solo farming, or wind up bickering with their group over who gets the loot, moving away from what many consider to be the main purpose of the game. Psychochild and Ferrel explore some ideas and solutions, as well as suggestions for balancing the goals of both players and developers.
Learning from the newbies
Playing over someone's shoulder is always an interesting experience. You get to learn from what they do and interpret their experience from an outside perspective. But what's really interesting is not what the experienced player does -- rather it's what the inexperienced player does.Psychochild just tackled this very topic over on his blog as he watched his better half get addicted to playing Lord of the Rings Online. While she avoided the temptations of Meridian 59 and World of Warcraft, Psychochild notes that it was a familiar setting that got her into the game.
Crafting, what is it good for?
Crafting in MMOs is a complex and widely varying thing. While most games include crafting in some form or another, it doesn't seem like there's much of a consensus on what purpose crafting is supposed to serve, and similar systems are often received radically differently depending on the title in question. Brian Green of Psychochild has had crafting on the brain recently and simplified the perceived goals of crafting into three areas (which I have further simplified): fun, utility, and money sink. His analysis is pretty in-depth, but he stops short of offering his own version of a crafting system, which we would have liked to have heard.It's interesting that something as valuable to a rewarding MMO experience as crafting is so routinely put on the back-burner. Age of Conan and Tabula Rasa are both glaring examples of recent releases whose crafting systems are either incomplete or mostly useless as they exist in the game. We'll be interested to see whether Warhammer Online's crafting system will be as interesting as it seemed when it was explained to us, or whether it will join the ever-growing pile of time wasting duds.
Age of Conan on single player mode
Age of Conan has gotten an intense amount of exposure lately on virtually every site that covers games. You might have noticed. The influence of AoC is ever-present, burned into the retinas of most of the Massively team as they slash their way through Hyboria. The title seems to have breathed new life into massively multiplayer spheres, with people everywhere either talking about it, reading about it, or playing it. While the AoC launch went smoothly, this is not to say that the game itself is perfect. Psychochild takes Age of Conan to task in his latest Weekend Design Challenge, for what he perceives to be a potential flaw in the game's design: much of the low-level experience, despite being a massively multiplayer title, is essentially a single-player game. He contends that the point of online games is to interact with people in one way or another, but the difference between instances in AoC is literally night and day. Night quests give personal instances that are wholly isolated from other players. This creates a split where daytime quests are multiplayer; night quests are single player. While a benefit is that players can opt for the night quests to take on their own spawns unchallenged by competitors, doesn't this defeat the purpose of AoC even being an MMO title?
The challenges of early-stage MMO development
Brian "Psychochild" Green has up a post to his personal site discussing some of the steps massively multiplayer games take on their way to market. His article was based partially on a post to Elder Game we discussed here on the site early this week. Brian notes that the earlier post took the right tone: actual game development can be a sometimes-haphazard and often-confusing process. Roles are blurred, important steps can get lost in the shuffle.Mr. Green lays out the different disciplines that are involved in bringing an MMO to fruition. He moves on from there to describe a 'blue sky' version of milestones for a game in this genre. Over00's Dave Toulouse points out how similar these milestones are to your average software project's. For anyone interested in software development or getting into the games industry, the post is an interesting insight into the process. It is, of course, important to remember that the list is an idealized version of reality; SOE's Grimwell notes that putting 'Feature Complete' before the 'Beta' phase could be seen as a note of humor. "I'm not sure we've ever seen that goal accomplished," he states.
