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Ultima Forever wants you to learn about yourself
Mythic Lead Designer Kate Flack has an interesting interview up on Gamasutra about her experiences with developing MUDs and how she's rejecting the industry standard when it comes to crafting Ultima Forever (legal disclaimer: This online multiplayer title is not an MMO, but hey, it's online Ultima so shh.). Flack says that because most MMOs are based on a DikuMUD standard, they all more or less play the same. She says that there's a freedom to starting from a different standard and developing from there: "It's a way of playing that doesn't necessarily have the same assumptions underlying them. It gives you a breadth of background and heritage that you can pull from. Just because it's always been done that way doesn't mean I have to do it the same way." Part of this design shift is in asking "sophisticated questions about ethics" to players, which is a vital part of the Ultima franchise. Flack says that Ultima Forever will be more nuanced and involve tough choices that will make a personal impact on gamers: "I want to make you stop, think, and go, 'Huh!' and then learn about yourself, because games can do that."
ESA holding student competition, winners to be shown at E3
The Entertainment Software Association is launching an E3 College Game Competition this year, designed to spotlight some solid student game creations at the upcoming E3 convention in Los Angeles. Over 400 schools have been invited to submit "story details and content assets" for a video game they might make, with the ESA (along with the help of industry veterans and professionals) planning to choose the best five by May.Those five finalists will then be offered the opportunity to present at this year's E3, and get their games and ideas in front of the media and some of the biggest game developers and publishers in the world. IndieCade has been able to show off some of its games at E3 for a few years now, but this competition is designed to honor student work in the same way.ESA president Mike Gallagher says the group "intends to honor student achievement and provide a deserved spotlight at E3." Interested teachers who haven't yet been contacted about the contest can find out more by emailing the ESA; you can find more info in the press release below.
EVE Evolved: Bring on the big expansions!
I don't normally jump out of my seat shouting "hell yes!" to an EVE Online dev blog, but this week's announcement on the direction of future expansions has me a little bit excited. In two somewhat dry and lengthy posts, Executive Producer Jon Lander and Senior Producer CCP Seagull detailed the approach they intend to take to ongoing development in 2013. Instead of announcing any big headline features or making vague promises, the developers looked back at the success of 2009's blockbuster Apocrypha expansion. Apocrypha was hands-down the best expansion EVE has ever had, adding 2500 hidden solar systems accessible only through shifting unstable wormholes. We saw a renaissance of exploration, collaborative research, and colonisation efforts that defied EVE's war-like reputation, and moreover, we saw a rebirth of small-scale PvP. The magic sauce that made Apocrypha work was lateral design: Rather than add one massive vertical feature, the expansion offered a little something for everyone. Apocrypha was EVE at its best, and hearing that developers are going back to that style of expansion honestly makes me a little giddy! In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the future for EVE's expansions, why the Apocrypha model works, and why I'm optimistic for 2013 and beyond.
Ghostcrawler tells 8 year old how to be a game designer
Rarely are the forums heartwarming, but this forum thread not only delivers on the heartwarming aspect but it also gives us a reasonably detailed peek at what companies like Blizzard are looking at when they look for new designers. When forum poster Aaiya made a thread on behalf of his or her eight year old son who is interested in becoming a game designer someday, we first got a solid response from Peratryn and then Daxxari comes in with a response from Ghostcrawler. Not only is it cool that the people who work at Blizzard would take the time to answer the thread in the first place, but upon reading Daxxari's post with Ghostcrawler's response, I know I felt like I'd learned something new, and I figured a lot of us would be interested in reading it over. Rather than pick it apart, we'll reproduce Daxxari's entire post after the cut.
MMO Blender: Mike's spaceflight of fancy
You know what I love? Space. Not real space, so much; real space is a vast expanse of horrors that generally confound and cripple the mind if considered too seriously. I'm talking about "space," as in the setting of some of our favorite movies, games, and cancelled television properties. The problem with space, of course, is that it is a setting and not a story. You can't prime an audience by simply shouting, "Space!" The space needs context. Is it "final frontier" space? Is it the space in which your screams go unheard? The greatest space tales have always used the deep black as a backdrop, not a subject. My perfect MMO would almost certainly take place in space, but the way in which the space is used is what makes it worth playing.
MMO Blender: Eliot ponders a fantastical fantasy
Fantasy, at this point, is almost tragically boring. That seems like a contradiction in terms. A fantasy setting is supposed to be fantastic by its very definition; you should be surrounded by neat and astonishing things at every term, immersed in a rich and baffling setting where magic is a valid explanation for almost everything. Unfortunately, we've seen so many versions of the same old fantasy setting that it's become boring. It's another round of the same elements with slightly different names, and while you can give them floppy ears and call them Asurans, they're still just gnomes with better public relations. So let's stick a fork in it and say we're done... or maybe not. There's some fantasy out there that could be collected into an interesting state, I think, something a bit further afield of the bog-standard elves and humans and dwarves dealing with dragons and whatever else. So let's mash this stuff up in a blender and see if we can't come up with some fantastic fantasy again.
The Daily Grind: What degree best suits an MMO developer?
Until relatively recently, the idea of a degree in game development seemed bizarre. That means that most of today's industry vets didn't start out planning to make games their career. You might expect programming degrees, art degrees, management degrees, creative writing degrees... but you're likely to find stranger degrees by far, marine biology and ancient history among them. That's even true in games journalism. Massively is staffed by pilots, farmers, historians, claims adjusters, clergymen, artists, salesmen, ex-military, radio announcers, teachers, musicians, and yes, even some full-time writers and editors. It's a weird place, and that diversity widens our perspective. Raph Koster of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies fame recommends that budding game developers acquire a broad education, not necessarily a specialized game design degree. Learn to program, draw, and write, he says, but "don't choose a narrow education. Choose a broad one. History, economics, psychology, art, science. A classic liberal arts education is the best training for a designer." What do you think -- what degree best suits an MMO developer? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Soapbox: The trinity isn't so bad
The role trinity in MMOs has gotten a pretty hard drubbing over the last two years or so. Ask a lot of people with knee-jerk responses and they'll tell you that it's what's killing MMOs. Well, unless they tell you that tab-targeting is killing MMOs. Or themeparks. Or free-to-play. Or World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic or subscription fees or lack of housing, or... All right, so there are people quick to announce the death of MMOs based on pretty much any feature that the announcer dislikes. But the trinity has still been falling out of vogue with players. Guild Wars 2 even made a selling point out of the fact that it didn't have a proper trinity, instead having a series of roles that no one seems entirely clear on. There's a very consistent idea floating around that a game based on the standard trifecta is in some way flawed or not trying hard enough. Except that the trinity isn't a bad thing. Tank, healer, and DPS is not a model that's lacking in some crucial area. And it deserves a bit more appreciation than it gets.
EVE Evolved: How would you build a sandbox?
Themepark MMOs and single-player games have long dominated the gaming landscape, a trend that currently seems to be giving way to a resurgence of sandbox titles. Though games like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series have always championed sandbox gameplay, very few publishers seem willing to throw their weight behind open-world sci-fi games. Space simulator Elite was arguably the first open-world game in 1984, and EVE Online is currently closing in on a decade of runaway success, yet the gaming public's obsession with space exploration has remained relatively unsatisfied for years. Crowdsourced funding now allows gamers to cut the publishers out of the picture and fund game development directly. Space sandbox game Star Citizen is due to close up its crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter tomorrow night, adding over $1.6 million US to its privately crowdfunded $2.7 million. The creator of Elite has also launched his own campaign to fund a sequel, and even the practically vapourware sandbox MMO Infinity has announced plans to launch a campaign. While not all of these games will be MMOs, it may not be long before EVE Online has some serious competition. EVE can't really change much of its fundamental gameplay, but these new games are being built from scratch and can change all the rules. If you were making a new sandbox MMO from the ground up and could change anything at all, what would you do? In this week's EVE Evolved, I consider how I'd build a sandbox MMO from the ground up, what I'd take from EVE Online, and what I would change.
MMO Blender: Beyond Shawn's Thunderdome
If there's one thing I've noticed about these MMO Blender articles, it's that the Massively staff members seem to really like their sandboxes. Maybe it's not even so much a staff preference as it is a statement about where we all are as MMO players. Themeparks have been done and have been perfected, but many of us want to stretch the limitations of a truly persistent and open online world. At least that's what I'd like to think. It's an ideal situation I can dream about, but do we all really want a truly open world with limitless possibilities? What would we do with so few rules? My perfect MMO has what I'd consider to be the best of all worlds. The trick is, of course, getting it all to work in one game.
MMO Blender: Larry's anti-power-creep MMO
On Tuesday, I suggested ways to get rid of power creep in MMOs. You know power creep: the constant treadmill of stats that keep getting better and strong but ultimately start to feel like more of a grind? It's very annoying to long-term players, and I'd imagine that it's frustrating to game designers because it's time and talent wasted when game content is no longer useful to anyone. In my quest to find the ultimate MMO, I have searched for game elements that reduce the amount of power creep but still come together to support a themepark game. Let's be honest: Sandbox games might suffer power creep, but because most sandboxes are skill-based, that power creep is not as prevalent or can easily be mitigated by tweaking classes. But themeparks are linear by design, and to remain fun, they have to retain part of that linear quality. Progression and continually racking up numbers and achievements is enjoyable to a large number of MMO players, otherwise it would be games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies dominating the market, not World of Warcraft. Believe it or not, there are online games that have done a tremendous job of trying to defeat power creep, but unfortunately, they do not exist as one game... until now in my Anti-Power-Creep MMO!
MMO Blender: Eliot's rock odyssey
I'm upset with bards in MMOs. Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that they exist. But every single game that features bards uses them wrong. The bard is always a back-line character, someone who sits in the back and heals people through gently strumming on a lute. And that depresses me, because I want to see some bards that actually rock. I want to see some music used offensively. I want to have the option of making my bard kill things through careful use of sweet riffs. You can say it sounds ridiculous, but tell me that it's somehow more ridiculous than having a bard heal you via magical singing and I will call you a liar. So let's go for it. Let's dedicate an entire MMO to bards who aren't about muzak and nurturing new age songs, but bards that are going to defeat things through the unmitigated power of rock. My only regret is that this is a week too late for Rocktober.
MMO Blender: Jef's SWG/Star Citizen mashup
Thus far I've managed to keep my nose out of Massively's MMO Blender column. This is primarily because I don't need 1000 words to describe the ideal MMORPG when a short phrase like "Star Wars Galaxies minus the IP" basically sums everything up. That said, something happened a couple of weeks ago that caused me to expand on this idea. Chris Roberts returned to the ranks of gamemakers, and when he announced his Star Citizen multiplayer title (which I desperately hope he renames, incidentally), it set in motion an MMO flight of fancy that I would love to experience.
MMO Blender: A real-time Farmville MMO minus the Zynga
Let's talk about FarmVille for a minute. Yes, I mean the Zynga-produced FarmVille, the one that helped social gaming become what it is today. There are a lot of things that have been said about the game, like "it's not even a game" or "it preys on gamer's addictive natures" and all sorts of sufficiently evil-sounding things. Say what you want about the evil monster that is Zynga and make all the jokes that you can about FarmVille and other social titles, but I want to tackle it from a different view. Let's look at it as the sandbox game that it is and use that example to invent a brand-new MMO, although I'm sure ours would not meet with even a fraction of the success that FarmVille has. FarmVille is arguably the most popular sandbox title in the world. We've defined "sandbox" a million times on this site, but it's easy to see just how open and flexible FarmVille is. Is it limited to the confines of its unique set of tools and designs? Of course, but so is every sandbox. FarmVille has successfully introduced the wonders of sandbox gaming to people who might never give a similarly described game a chance.
MMO Blender: Eliot swings for internet spaceships
Honestly, EVE Online always depresses me. I know some of you really love the heck out of EVE Online, and that's great. The problem isn't that the game is bad but that it's a game which holds basically zero interest for me except for the fact that it's a game about spaceships that you play on the internet. That part interests me because it's almost a textbook description of the things that I find interesting. Throw in some giant robots and psychological horror and I'm completely sold. Move on to open PvP, corporate warfare, and shuffling through spreadsheets while playing the ore market, and you've lost my interest. This isn't a lamentation on the fact that games exist that aren't meant to please me. No, this is a lamentation of the fact that I want another internet spaceships game. I want my spaceships on the internet, but I want them to be my kind of spaceships. And so with all due respect to the existing contenders, I'd like to talk about my version.
The Soapbox: Own your game's mistakes
To the developers of the MMO industry, I say this to you: Your game has some pretty big issues. No, stop. Don't go consult the PR team. Don't talk with the community managers. Don't spend time explaining why those issues aren't really issues. Just say it with me. Your game has some pretty big issues. I don't care what game you call your own; it's still replete with issues, including ones that by all rights should have been fixed months ago. Just say that with me, and then possibly follow it with a "sorry." There. That wasn't so bad, was it? Kind of liberating, actually. There's a lot to be said for owning up to the failures of your game and admitting that some things are just plain wrong. I can think of great reasons to just take a deep breath, eat crow, and just say that part of your game is a mess.
MMO Blender: Eliot's online brother from an offline mother
We don't need to go online to have a good time, oh no. Obviously Massively's writers like us some online games. I am no exception to the rule. But I also started playing video games back when the internet existed only in its most nascent form. I started out by liking video games, period, and the online component came much later, with a lot of benefits, to be sure, but I still love some offline action just as well. I don't feel the need to bring every game into the online arena. There are games that just don't work as well in a multiplayer environment. But there are also a lot of offline games that translate quite well to an online space, and I'm not just talking about ones that play like MMORPGs stripped of the first three letters. Today's MMO Blender is taking inspiration only from games that do not have a primary online component. Let's see about making a nice big MMO from single-player offline offerings.
The Soapbox: Diablo III's endgame is fundamentally flawed
Diablo III was arguably the biggest online game release of the year, but its predecessor's decade of consistent popularity left some pretty big shoes to fill. Despite being the most pre-ordered PC game in history and selling more than 6.3 million units in its first week, Diablo III has started to seriously wane in popularity. I've seen over a dozen friends stop playing completely in the last few months, and Xfire's usage stats for D3 have dropped by around 90% since June. Guild Wars 2's timely release accounts for some of the drop, but there's a lot more going on than just competition. The Diablo III beta showed only the first few levels and part of the game's highly polished first act, and soon after release it became obvious that parts of the game weren't exactly finished. PvP was cut from release, the Auction House was a mess, and Inferno difficulty was a poor excuse for an endgame. Poor itemisation made the carrot on the end of the stick taste sour, and the runaway inflation on top-end items is crying out for some kind of ladder reset mechanic. But there is hope for improvement, with new legendary items, the Paragon level system, and the upcoming Uber boss mechanic taking a few steps in the right direction. In this opinion piece, I look at some of the fundamental flaws in Diablo III's endgame and suggest a few improvements that would make a world of difference.
MMO Blender: Using older MMOs to build a perfectly paced world
One of the issues I have with so many modern AAA titles is that when I play them, I immediately feel forced through a series of noisy and chaotic moments. I know that these tutorials are supposed to make me feel as though I am stepping into a sort of world-on-fire, but to me it just feels like a mess. RIFT is a great game, truly, but every time I want to start a new character or try the game out again, I dread going through the annoying tutorial. It's so demanding. It grabs my hand and pulls me through a linear series of non-discoveries. Now, this might just be my fading gamer memory, but I distinctly remember how it felt to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere in an MMO. While there are a few modern titles like Wurm Online that basically do the same thing, the mystery and immersion of those first few levels in most major MMOs has been replaced by sheer noise. I don't like it. Good pacing is a wonderful thing. If it's tweaked just right, players feel immediately invested in a world even while feeling completely lost. I'd like to make this week's dream MMO using those older-game designs. It's time to slow down.
EVE Evolved: Has EVE Online boxed itself in?
When I was first introduced to EVE Online in 2004, it was an empty shell of a game. There were only three classes of ship, no alliances or starbases, and neither exploration complexes nor level 4 missions existed yet. EVE consisted of 5,000 systems of almost completely empty space populated by less than 50,000 players. The user interface was an order of magnitude worse than it is today (if you can imagine that), and the tutorial just dropped you in the middle of space with the ship equivalent of a pea shooter and a less-than-enthusiastic "good luck!" Though much of the game was empty, it sat before players like a blank galactic canvas. Not only could players paint their own stories into the game world, but EVE's highly active development team was updating the game at lightning speed. Players instinctively filled the voids in the game with their hopes and dreams, projecting all the things that EVE could be into the gaps. People shared ideas on the forum directly with the developers, and practically anything was possible. Things aren't quite the same today, as new ideas have to be compatible with over nine years' worth of updates, and developer CCP Games really can't afford to rock the boat and potentially lose subscriptions. In this week's EVE Evolved, I consider whether the past nine years of development has boxed EVE in, forcing the gameplay down an ever-narrowing branch of choices.
