Posted By Fozzik on August 2, 2010
In all the community discussions going on over at the Rift official forums, one central point has become clear to me. Our community needs a name.
I don’t mean the community around Rift specifically, I mean the community of players who have been looking for a spiritual successor to EQ. We’re a loose community, to be sure…mostly just showing up and hanging out together during the early development phases of each new game that claims to be a fantasy MMORPG.
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Tags: Community, MMORPG's
Posted By Fozzik on May 7, 2010
I’d love to be able to say that just because everybody repeats something all the time, it doesn’t make it true. Sadly, reality is so often only what we make it. Sometimes if something incorrect or founded only in opinion and not fact is repeated enough and by the right people, it becomes a self-fulfilling thing. One of the most common of those “transient truths” that we all run into a lot on any MMORPG message board is the following:
“You can’t do X, players in the modern market won’t stand for it.”
I’d submit that this is wrong in multiple ways, even though it’s repeated more often and by more people than just about any other line in the community. You hear it from devs, from gamers, and even from people on the outside looking in (investors, publishers, etc). I’d like to break down a few of the misconceptions that lead to that statement being uttered so often.
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Posted By Fozzik on April 27, 2010
Trion Worlds opened their kimono a bit yesterday and revealed details about the three games they are attempting to develop simultaneously. It’s a foolhardy proposition, especially considering they’re all MMO games…one of which is usually enough to break a standard development house. With that in mind, one can’t help but be a bit intrigued by a group of folks willing to try to do three at the same time. Sounds silly…but maybe they’ve got something more up their sleeve than just balls of steel (wait, what?). All we can do is wait and see.
The game that interests me, of course, is the newly rebranded MMORPG that Trion is developing. Rift: Planes of Telara got a new name, a new website, and some official forums. I’ve been watching Trion for a while now, and I’m certainly liking the graphical style and a few other promising tidbits that I’ve discovered in the new videos and write-ups on the site.
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Posted By Fozzik on April 17, 2010
Here’s yet another incomplete thought I’ve been having. I was thinking about some of the ways the industry has changed since the last time I really enjoyed or felt pulled in by any game in the genre. There are lots of differences, of course, including many of things I post about. One I haven’t really covered is the “multi-player” part of MMORPG. In this case, a little more specifically, playing with friends.
I’m sure all of us old geezers who’ve been around for more than a few weeks in the genre can recall a happy moment that was made sweeter, or something painful where the sting was lessened, by sharing the experience with friends. It’s of course one of the central aspects that makes this genre go, or at least it should be. I’ve been thinking about an underlying change that I believe could be at the heart of the much shorter retention and overall less satisfying experience that people are having in these games lately.
It seems to me that in earlier games in the genre, I used to actually make new friends. In all the games more recently, I feel like the focus of the game is much more on me playing with friends I already have.
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Posted By Fozzik on January 29, 2010
One of the hardest things about not having a game to play is avoiding the pitfalls of expectations. I, like many others, learned this the hard way. Most of us have the best of intentions…we’re just looking for an experience we enjoy or something new to fill the void left by some previous game. The problem begins and ends with us, though. The real reason why game developers and PR departments are so successful at what they do seems to be because it’s fairly easy to make us believe what we WANT to believe.
To me, it seems like showing us what we want to see is relatively easy. I know it works in every industry, not just games. A few of the right key words and phrases that will be interpreted differently by each of us, a few hints and tidbits of information to lead us along, and a whole ton of obfuscation and ambiguity, and we’ll soon be marketing the game to ourselves. We end up creating a filter by interpretation, picking and choosing the parts that prop up our false image and anything that disputes it is explained away or ignored.
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Posted By Fozzik on January 20, 2010
I was just thinking to myself today about what the possibilities are that someone will wake up and take the MMORPG genre back to its roots and build a truly up-to-date spiritual successor to EQ. Well, not just today…I think about it a lot.
Brad McQuaid certainly made an attempt, at least in the very beginning of Sigil with his original vision for Vanguard, but failed to ever come close to realizing that game. There are plenty of folks out there who will say that Vanguard’s failure is a referendum and repudiation of the concepts in Vanguard’s original FAQ. I obviously disagree. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems pretty clear to me that the failures that lead to the game that Vanguard was at launch (and subsequent extreme poor showing in the market) were failures of execution, of management, and of character, not failures of concept or direction.
I don’t have any false hope about the chances. The name and theme of my blog probably make that pretty clear. I have little doubt that the industry will go right on believing whatever it is they believe, and the genre I remember will continue to be a graveyard of failed attempts to copy and somehow “beat” World of Warcraft at its own game.
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Posted By Fozzik on January 18, 2010
Does it seem to anyone else that MMORPG developers feel there are only two possible games you can make in this genre? With everyone thinking non-original thoughts, and feeling like they have to agree with the so-called experts in order to be considered credible, there seems to be no room for anyone to have even the most rudimentary common-sense thoughts about what’s been missing for years.
Just about every discussion on message boards like Silky Venom invariably comes back to a central point. There are a lot of people hanging around who are dedicated fans of the MMORPG genre since its inception and now have nothing to play. I’ve talked about untapped audiences before, and I think there’s a lot of reasons why this is the case. Most of these players are to one degree or another jaded or bitter about a particular game or games and the direction it/they took. Most of them can name some games they enjoyed, but in most cases they are experiences that occurred years ago. Most of them have played…or at least followed the details of…pretty much every game that’s ever been released in this genre.
Despite the high level of game and genre knowledge that your typical player has these days, and despite most developers coming from (in one capacity or another) this pool of players, many or most of them would have a difficult time even agreeing on the definitions of terms when it comes to the foundations of any particular game. I think this has lead to a wide gap between the two “specs” that most games follow in their design these days. Complexity is the enemy, it seems, because it’s just too hard to tackle complex concepts when two groups aren’t even speaking the same language.
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Posted By Fozzik on January 16, 2010
I’m coming way way late to a party, but I’ll explain why. It’s funny, the roundabout ways we end up discovering relevant things on the internet. This post is a response to a discussion that was started and played out over a few MMO developer blogs almost 18 months ago. I didn’t read it then, I wasn’t really paying attention to blogs at that time. What’s funny is that now, 18 months later, the discussion (and hopefully my response) is no less relevant to what’s happening in the industry. In fact, there is likely even more evidence today…after another 18 months of craptastic, failed MMO releases…to back up the points I’m going to make than there was if I had taken part in the original discussion.
I was checking out the list of upcoming MMORPG’s again, as I do far too often, hopeful that I might stumble across something new, or something I’d missed, that might provide a ray of hope. I checked out what little information is available on a title called Heroes of Telara. It’s probably a long way from release (just based on how little there is on the website), but it seems like something that will bare a second glance as more information becomes available. Because of the extreme lack of anything else to do on a Saturday morning that comes from several years of being homeless in the game space I love, I started researching the backgrounds of some of the employees working on Heroes of Telara.
A somewhat familiar name popped up right away… Scott Hartsman. Ah-ha. Someone I sort of recall something about from SOE. This usually leads to a big sinking feeling, because of my feelings about SOE and what they’ve done to MMORPGs in general…but I’m willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt and at least go find out what they think. Also, it’s just about impossible at this point in the genre to find a new company that doesn’t boast the services of at least a few folks who worked at SOE, and being an eternal optimist (ha ha), I have to assume that not everyone who works or worked there is completely, inherently evil.
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Posted By Fozzik on August 16, 2009
I haven’t written in quite a while…I have no real excuse as to why, just some ideas about the way I am. I tend to write what I would call a complete post in my head before I ever flip to the “add new post” screen. I don’t like coming to the table with nothing but random thoughts. I like a nice, complete, and coherent thought process with a bit of a punch for an ending. I probably give myself too much credit, but I usually feel like I write pretty well when the ideas come together for me. Lately, they haven’t. I do have random thoughts or small comments I’d like to make, but they never really end up completing themselves in my head, so I never write them down.
Maybe it’s how busy life is right now, or maybe I’ve succumbed to the numbness of too long a time without a game or anything to be excited about online. Maybe computers, the industry, and the hobby have burned themselves out for me. Maybe I should buy a boat and go fishing instead…let my computer continue to age until I forget all about how to use it, and all about the good times we used to have together. In the meantime, until I make a decision on things like that, I think I’ll just write down some thoughts as they come, whether they are organized and complete or not.
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Posted By Fozzik on June 15, 2009
Brad McQuaid tossed up a couple of new blog posts, and says he’s interested in getting involved in game development again. I was really interested to read what he had to say, because I was thinking maybe he would finally own up to what happened and take responsibility. His vision…his baby…never became a reality for a lot of reasons, many of which were not directly his fault, but some of which most definitely were.
Brad’s baby never really existed. The game that Vanguard is now has little or nothing to do with the game he “envisioned” and talked about in the beginning. I saw a bit of the game Sigil had tried to make: The game as it was when I first played it, in the very first friends and family beta. They had already fallen so far behind at that point…everything was so far from being fleshed out and completed…it could hardly have been called a video game at all (more like a concept demo). That’s as close as his Vision ever got to being a reality.
Saying that the game failed because of performance (as he seems to be saying) misses the fundamental point… he never made the game he said he was going to. Vanguard at release wasn’t remotely like the original concept, and the problem that held it back all along (its highly unfinished state) still plagued the new design just as strongly as the old one. Instead of fixing and finishing, Sigil basically scrapped the design, started over, and made a bad, inconsistent, and unfinished clone of other games on the market. From his blog posts, it would seem he still doesn’t understand.
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