Bloody hell I’ve written a lot in the last two weeks. I’ve barely had a chance to get a free moment to do 3vil, let alone type at you people. Others, however, have been more dedicated to their sites.

Kendricke fires one off at the ‘my game can beat up your game’ argument.

“Seriously, I think I get it. World of Warcraft has a lot of subscribers. It’s a good game. This doesn’t make it the only good game. I think we’ve come to this place where we rely on subscriber numbers too much to gauge a game’s health. Certainly, too many people seem to rely upon the numbers to gauge a game’s worth or design, too. These type of discussions really seem to bring out the Monday morning quarterbacks though - myself included.”

I completely and utterly agree; especially with that new site thats picked up where Bruce has let off. I uhh, don’t want to spit in anybody’s tea, but I am told that his numbers … not so accurate. Of course, I think we’ve all had doubts about Bruce’s numbers all along, so thats not too surprising, right?

Ultimately, subscriber numbers are immaterial to the bottom line (and I’m not talking financial): is a game fun, or isn’t it? You can tell if a game is ‘working’. It’s easy to see. When you log on, are there people there? Can you get groups? Does what you’re doing in the game make you happy? If not, either the server you’re on is freakishly underpopulated (unlikely), or you’re not playing a very good game.

When LOTRO launched smooth as silk, and there were people overflowing the Shire, and everyone was chatting happily about their experiences in Middle Earth, you knew that the game was a success, right? It doesn’t matter that Turbine won’t give out stats: it’s easy to see from our location on the ground. Likewise, you didn’t need a graph to tell you people would be cancelling out of Vanguard almost as fast as they entered it. Servers that were more like ghost towns, bountiful bugs, grindy and unfun gameplay … it was easy to see from a single player’s perspective that the game wasn’t doing well.

Bah on numbers.

 edit: Ken and Darren do a great job riffing off these concepts over at Common Sense gamer.

Lauren at Mystic Worlds pines (but not really) for the game whot must not be named - a Harry Potter MMOG. In the end, she sort of talks herself out of that idea:

“You won’t be Harry or Dumbledore. I’m certain of that fact. No, you’ll just run into them some where along the way. You’ll turn a corner or enter a room, and there one or all of them will be, mumbling repetitive non-sense to the adoring masses. It’s rather demeaning in a way. That in order to be a part of their world, we must trivialize them – almost dethrone them from the pedestals on which they should rightly stand alone, so that we may stand along side … Hmm, so maybe as much as I’d like to be a young wizard learning her craft in Hogwarts, and racing to the aide of Harry and his companions, it’s probably better for them, the books and Rowling’s legacy, that I never get that chance.”

This is the thing that stops me from wanting a lot of my treasured IPs and world settings translated into a Massive format. Outside of the playerbase, the ‘world’ in Massive titles is resoundingly stale. It would break my heart to walk into a Forgotten Realms game and see Alustriel Silverhand ‘mumbling to herself’ in the soulless center of Silverymoon, or click on Elminster to get a quest and not hear Ed Greenwood’s voice coming from my speakers. I’ve *met* Elminster, man. I’ve shaken his hand. No stupid NPC is going to live up to that.

Other setting I don’t want to see made into MMOGs: The Young Wizards series, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Dragonlance, almost any Star Wars time frame but KOTOR, and Planescape. KOTOR is an exception to this because it’s so wide open that a game set there would be epicly free. Dev like the wind, Bioware!

Finally, Cuppy comments on a GameDaily article about Conquering the Massive Market. The article itself is a good read, as Cuppy suggests, and her points are well seen as well.

“The final idea of the article is to promote user-friendliness. I feel this goes hand in hand with promoting community, because you really can’t have one without the other. User friendliness = more users = $$. The article states that games should have low system requirements, mass market appeal, the ability to accomplish something meaningful in a short time, and the ability to play alone if chosen.”

At this point I’m meta-meta commenting on content, so I’ll make my point quickly: Raph completely has it right; it doesn’t have to look good for people to like it. It doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles; as long as it’s ‘good enough’, and that ‘good enough’ hits a broad enough audience, you’ve won. Then get them talking to each other and you’ve made a fortune.

The theme for this week’s Escapist is gaming oopsies. I’ve got an article in it, with boobs!

The Breasts That Broke the Game

Halfway through 2006, a huge story went unnoticed by game journalists. Barely a cursory glance or raised eyebrow marked its passage. Early in May the Entertainment Software Rating Board quietly changed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s rating from “T” to “M,” forcing a recall and re-labeling of the game, and costing Bethesda a fortune. The problem? Bethesda had nothing to do with it.

Much more interesting? A great loaded look by Allen Varney at one of the biggest debacles in MMOGdom: The SWG NGE.

As WoW barreled toward 5 million subscribers, SOE launched SWG’s Publish 25. The NGE replaced the combat system with a shooter-style twitch game, reduced the value of crafting and entertaining, and collapsed 34 professions into nine classes. Jedi Knight powers, once obtained only after torturous grinding, were now widely available. Creature Handlers and Bio-Engineers, previously stunted by the CU, vanished.

The launch, like the original game’s, went horribly: awful bugs, broken quests, lag. But these paled beside the main problem. For an unexpectedly huge number of players, the issue - the overriding issue that has burned in their heart down to, lo, this day and hour - was betrayal.

edit: After reading some comments by Raph over on his site, I went back and read to the end of Varney’s piece more carefully. He starts off fairly strong, but strays into the realm of fantasy. Smed’s apologized about a billion times for the NGE, for starters. Bad play, Varney.

edit2: And again, they still will not let it go. Sorry Jeff. “Flunky”? You should complain. I’ve got email addresses if you want em’.

Over at Gamasutra you may have seen the rest of the interview I did with John Smedley back at SOE’s Gamers Day. People seemed to enjoy the first one, and I’ve seen this one mentioned all over as well.

Probably because of stuff like this:

“Those games don’t have that kind of mass level of accessibility, I think, even World of Warcraft notwithstanding. We’re not aiming for those kinds of numbers with FreeRealms, we’re aiming for a lot bigger. I think that bringing something that I can play with my kids to the market is a big deal.”

I don’t think FreeRealms is going to be my thing; indeed, it’s not “for” me. Just the same, it’s crazy interesting to see the company hanging its hat on something so completely different. Add The Agency into the mix, and you’ve got a lot of newness.

In celebration of the Agency’s coming out party, I’ve changed my banner. Something about that piece of concept art really gets to me. The seekrit reason? The Agency is the closest thing to a Shadowrun MMOG I’m going to get for a very, very long time. I’ll tell you right now: assuming I can get some friends to pony up with me, I am going to play the crap out of that game. Both UNITE and PARAGON sound like a kick in the pants, though I’m probably more of a tux-and-silencer type.

It’s hard not to love them, even if they sound like crazy-talk. TenTonHammer is theorizing that mayhap (mayhap) the Bioware MMOG is going to be set in the Forgotten Realms, based on Dungeons and Dragons.

The Forgotten Realms is the most logical choice for an MMORPG. The flavor of the realms is familiar to gamers, and the environment has the potential to be completely immersive. The Realms already has a cast of iconic characters like Drizzt Do’Urden, Elminster the Sage, and Storm Silverhand that have made their mark on the fantasy genre.

Bioware’s greatest chance of success – in my opinion – is to create a Forgotten Realms MMORPG. This will guarantee sales, and will bring many tabletop gamers who are not in the market of MMORPG’s into its ever increasing fold. In any case one thing is for certain, no matter the license used, Bioware is going to produce a game of superb quality.

I think this is highly unlikely to be true, for a number of reasons.

1. Iconic characters actually detract from the goodness of a game experience. Witness SWG. On the table, iconics are something you want to keep out of your game; they take the thunder away from the PCs.
2. FR is a beautiful setting … that would be incredibly hard to capture ‘right’ in a Massive format

My money is still on KOTOR.

update: CVG says the game is due out in 2009.

I’ve been hanging on to a link over at Kill Ten Rats since the month started. Entitled simply, MMORPGs Are Too Easy, Ethic touches on the ease of playing a Massive game after a complainy post in their forums. Says big E,

While I agree that MMOs are pretty simple to play, at first, they do actually get complicated as you gain skills and levels. It’s part of the “easy to learn, difficult to master” theory. The fact is, to the veteran MMO player things are simplified, but to the new MMO player they are struggling just to get the movement figured out. I have always been of the belief that the technical nature of a massively multiplayer online game tends to put some restrictions and limitations on the ability to put a lot of skill requirements in that you might find in a FPS game. I do, however, think there is a lot of room to add more “skill” to today’s MMOs.

The question here is really one of accessibility vs. challenge, I think. As we’ve discussed numerous times around the ’sphere (a term that I’ll go on record as saying I like), WoW’s success can be directly related to the game’s low barriers of entry. It puts the fun up front, and doesn’t make you wait for hours and hours before you’re actually playing the game. Veteran massive players who hear newbies complaining about getting to 60/70 in WoW can’t help but laugh; It’s easily the ‘easiest’ game to reach max level in, across the genre.

Which is why it was great, at MMOGIG 1, to hear the opinion of someone who did find it difficult to play through WoW. Cao was the gentleman’s name, and he was at the meeting primarily for the purpose of networking, getting to know people. Even still, his presence was immensely useful as an outsider’s view. He was a right intelligent gent, with loads of single-player experience under his belt, and he followed our mindless ramblings without a jot of effort.

That view was vastly outnumbered by the ‘hardcore’ viewpoint, of course. It’s a problem I’ve noticed in a lot of our discussions; we simply don’t want the same things as the vast majority of game players. The hardcore have more time, or interest, or are simply crazy. :)

But, in a good way, you know? EVE Online will never be ‘mass market’, but that’s for the best. In the recent discussion of EverQuest 2’s appeal, the phrase “we wouldn’t want them in the game anyway” came up a bunch, discussing the b.net kiddies who swarmed into WoW when it launched.

The truth, of course, is that there are bratty kids playing EVE and incredibly serious groups of players in WoW. The character of EVE, though, requires a level of seriousness at the higher levels that is missing in WoW. You can eventually raid dungeons in WoW simply through sheer effort over time. Skill is an impermeable barrier, of course; the highest-end dungeons require that raiders actually have the strats, experience, and technique to overcome them. That said, WoW puts the vast majority of its content within reach of 5 and 10-man groups.

Is this ‘easy’? Cao would say no. There’s still a great deal of effort required to get to that content. Bioshock is a title coming out this summer on the 360, been in development for years, and it’s highly anticipated. If you take your time with it, it’s slated to be about 25 hours of content. That’s perhaps a fifth of the time it would take you to reach level 70?

That, then, is the only barrier that WoW still hasn’t broken down. Time. It takes a great deal of time to get to max-level in a Massive game, and that’s just not something most folks are willing to do. Until the kids playing Club Penguin grow up and start paying for their own monthly fees, the average American citizen is not going to ‘get’ 20 hours a week of playtime. After all, TV is so much easier. ;)

The ‘mass market’ MMOG that’s been on the mind of a lot of commentators not only won’t be something ‘we’ like … will it have levels? Will it require ridiculous time commitments? Will it have xp?

There are still lots of barriers to drop, believe it or not.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I respect Jason Hayes. He was involved in doing the music for a bunch of Blizzard titles, including World of Warcraft. The theme that is technically known as “Legends of Azeroth” but I’ll always think of the ‘login theme’ will probably be something I can hum on my deathbed. Gamespot has up an interview with the composer, who reveals he’s now working on NCSoft on an as-yet-unannounced project. I am serious when I say I’ll probably have to play it just to hear his work.

With a massively multiplayer online game like Warcraft it’s a very long creative timing around the game. If ever I can find an excuse to play music, where I can find something to hang my hat on–like you walk into Stormwind and you see that wonderful entryway with the statues and you have almost an establishing shot for the human city. Whenever a moment like that comes up, it’s great because I can say, “now I can bring in the big Stormwind regal theme and let the music take a little bit of a special moment to explain something about what you’re seeing.” It’s looking for those hooks to be able to find a good reason to have music come in in a way that feels meaningful instead of just a wallpaper treatment that’s draped over the background of the whole game.

Yesterday, as I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to participate in a chat on the XFire service about the big consoles. I think I acquitted myself rather well, actually. Brandon and Chris definitely had the best lines, but I wasn’t a drag on the proceedings. That’s something. Plus, I plugged these crazy multiplayer virtual worlds every chance I got. Cuz … what good is a console without a MMOG to play on it?

… Man I want to play FFXI again.

egmshoe: RedMage: So, whats the next big fad in gaming? We’ve seen the motion sensor now with wii, where do we go now?
[Slashdot] Michael: The ‘next big thing’ is already here: Massively Multiplayer games.
[Joystiq] Chris: Ever see eXistenZ? That’s what’s next.
[Slashdot] Michael: Now they just need to hit consoles.
(GDM/Gama) Brandon: not for me, but for you know…those people that like that stuff. I think that’ll be the perception among developers (and CEOs especially) to the extent that it’ll happen
[Xboxic] Niels: Huxley!
[Joystiq] Chris: You can’t argue with Blizzard’s money printing service,
(GDM/Gama) Brandon: MMOs killed my dog
[Joystiq] Chris: Was your dog a level 6 wraith?

For the sake of completeness, if you’re interested in the unsupervised chat they had alongside our little debate, that transcript is available as well.