So here’s the deal: I’m a godless, soulless, technocratic transhumanist. Comments I’ve made in previous posts may have hinted at my love for technology. I like fantasy fine, yeah. It’d double coded, magic is all wonderful; I love World of Warcraft. All these things are fine.

Ultimately, though, my love has been for science fiction since I was a wee tot. Heinlein, Aasimov, Clarke, Stephenson, Gibson … these are the folks that I think of when I go to my happy reading place. As has been noted many times by NPD sales, developers, and money-men, I’m in the minority. Apparently the idea of surgically implanting a stainless steel port into your skull, in order more easily connect with a computer, is something not everyone enjoys. In space no one can hear you scream, and it’s hard to love a robot.

I’m tired of it. The Sci-fi ‘niche’ is a fantastic venue for creative thinking, and it’s an incredibly evocative milieu for gaming. Here are my five reasons why science fiction makes for a better setting than fantasy …

Update: Welcome io9 readers! Make sure to check out Grimwell’s fantasy-oriented response to this post, and my podcast followup to get the full discussion.

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This is now officially the eighth Massive Update, and I’ve been taking pains to do this ’smarter’. As you can imagine, putting that thing together is a bit time consuming. Doing it all in one day is … challenging. So! Now going to be doing this over the course of the week so I don’t, you know, hate it.

This week’s Big Story is just darn depressing.

At a time when we’re seeing the sun rise on so many new and interesting massively multiplayer games, it’s sad to report there will be one less out there soon. NCSoft has announced that they will be closing down Auto Assault as of September 1st of this year. The official announcement was terse, saying that players would be compensated and the service will be going offline at midnight on August 31st.

Warcry got a few more details out of the company:

“After a while it gets to the point where the return we’re getting on what we’re putting into it is just not matching up,” NCSoft Director of Public Relations David Swofford told WarCry after the news hit. “We just didn’t have that many people in the service.” According to Swofford, NCSoft owns the Auto Assault intellectual property. If that does not change before September 1st, there is no legal way that the game can continue on. However, hope may not be gone.

Except there isn’t really any hope. Warcry has a chat with Scott Brown, who says NetDevil isn’t going to do anything with the product. So … that’s pretty much all she wrote.

While I’d like to once again register my belief that honesty is something to be lauded … I’m going to step back and agree that Brad McQuaid’s commentary hasn’t helped at all.

A press release totally unconnected to Massive games actually convinced me of this. The release that changed my mind was a recent missive from Palladium Books. Palladium is a publisher of table-top roleplaying games, and is helmed by a gent named Kevin Siembada. I dunno if things have changed since I followed tabletop closely, but back in the day he was regarded as a right proper ass. My nose wrinkled like I was smelling something foul as I read his dripping message to Palladium customers:

My goal and the goal shared by every Palladium staff member, as well as our freelance artists and writers, is to create some of the most dynamic, exciting and fun role-playing games and sourcebooks on the market. Not just for our own survival, but for the survival and advancement of the role-playing game hobby. We are disappointed by the low number of RPG products being released by other game companies. All of us at Palladium Books know role-playing games have a bright future, and we aim to prove it. In addition to RPG sourcebooks and games, you will soon see an offering of three, new T-shirts, Rifts Postage Stamps, the John Zeleznik Art Book, and a new product line I think is fun, different and something you and ALL fans of sci-fi and fantasy artwork will enjoy. I’m sure some of our detractors will shake their heads, but we think it’s something people will enjoy and use.

I read this, I recalled Siembada’s asinine plea to fans to keep the company afloat (which obviously worked, unfortunately), and I can’t help but think of Brad’s comments to the Vanguard fanbase. Yech. They’re honest, yes, but as with Siembada’s drooling exhortation to buy more of their crap to ‘advance the role-playing game hobby’, they’re essentially penitent excuses laid at the feet of the gamers who are subsidizing Sigil’s existence. “We really really tried. We tried so hard. I know it’s not as good as it could have been. Also: please keep giving us money!”

Moreover, and this is what has been weighing on me, they’re far too little too late. Yes, money was tight. Developing a game on your own often is. Yes, SOE forced them to launch sooner than they were ready. That happens when you let an older boy play with your toys - they might get broken. The bottom line here is that McQuaid and Co. had FIVE FUCKING YEARS to make this game. The official press release wasn’t until 2004, but Sigil has been around since January of 2002. They’ve had that long to get with the times, make changes, realize they were making a horrible mistake, or at least … you know … fix the bugs. The stink is rising from the shambling carcass that is Saga of Heroes, and already the vultures are beginning to take strips of flesh:

Kageru: Meanwhile I have no idea what happened with the game coding. The code seems to already have reached an unmaintainable state where bugs just can’t be fixed. I can’t imagine how else the act of forming a group, or not falling through the world, can still be so flawed. Meanwhile the rate of introduction for new bugs is scarily high.

I honestly can’t see the game holding enough subscriptions to fund the development it needs to be decent.

That, of course, is now the question: Will SOE buy Vanguard from Sigil? There has been lots of discussion on the subject of just what went wrong, and folks are on both sides of the fence. Is it worth saving? Is there any player interest? What does Brad think? (You’ll note he’s been fairly quiet on this particular front.)

My two cents: No, it’s not worth saving. But yes, if SOE can swing it they almost certainly will.

The reason it’s not worth saving? When I talked about throwing a MMOG and no one coming back in Summer of last year, I was talking about Auto Assault. From everything I’ve heard, even though there’s no one (really) interested in playing it … the people who *are* playing it are having a blast. It’s very different, it’s a little hard to understand, but they went out there and they tried something really different. And they fell on their faces. Which happens sometimes. Just like Pauly Shore - at least they tried. Vanguard, on the other hand, is a five-years-in-the-making retread of a game released in 1999 that isn’t even as good as the original game. Yeah, you can make ships and fly cool mounts etc. etc, but the metric shit-ton of content SOE has crammed into EQ over the years makes those extra features look like chump change. The diplomacy game is really neat. I’ll totally give them that. But em … what else is there to get excited about? LOTRO’s got Hobbitses and fancy titles … and you’re offering me a glorified card game?

Now, all that said, SOE is definitely going to buy it if they can. The reason: Because they can. They’ve already got their foot in the door by publishing the thing, and I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Vanguard would probably be pretty cheap to pick up right now. Poor dealings with Microsoft in the past and awful subscriptions rates in the here-and-now have to be making it hard for those guys to be making payroll let alone focusing on future development. So SOE slips some cash in a few pockets and bingo-bango: a 95% complete Massive game that just needs a few months of work to get the kinks ironed out.

Yes, it’s a lot like their two flagship products. Yes, it’s leaving a really bad taste in the mouths of gamers right now. Yes, people are going to yell at them and call them mean and nasty names for ‘butting in’ to ‘Brad’s sacred realm’. All those are good reasons not to. But, as I’ve tried to point out in the past, at the end of the day the Massive industry is a business. From a business standpoint, there’s a wounded competitor lying at their feet. You pick him up, dust him off, and soon enough he’s working for you. Why let the guy die when you can turn misfortune into an opportunity for profit?

(I’m mentally picturing Ferengi rubbing their lobes right now, so consider that as you mentally say the word ::profit::)

All this is just conjecture of course, but why not? Hell, it’s SOE’s money to throw away, not mine. At this point I wouldn’t invest in Vanguard with um … a twelve foot pole.

You tell me, though: What’s a real and honestly good reason for Sony Online Entertainment not to purchase Vanguard?

Officials from South Korean-headquartered MMO publisher NCsoft have released details of the company’s second quarter financial results, in which NCSoft saw a small loss, despite an increase in sales, partly due to Auto Assault’s disappointing market performance … The downturn in income was explained by a write-off of 12.6 billion won ($13.1m) in costs related to the failing MMO Auto Assault. Without this significant failure, then operating and pre-tax income would have grown by 64 percent on the previous quarter and fallen by a less marked 17 and 11 percent, respectively, from the same period a year ago.

Gamasutra - NCsoft Slips To Loss As Auto Assault Disappoints

At only slightly more that 10,000 subscribers, I wouldn’t call Auto Assault a failure so much as a debacle. Every other title NCSoft has released to date has had some measure of success. Lineage 2 has never been the bee’s knees here in the states, but abroad it seems like it has quite nicely taken up the reins from the original title. City of Heroes/Villains is a cult favorite, with its 150,000 some players enjoying the game for what it is. A new expansion, or bright-n-shiny new content, will undoubtedly bring those numbers up again for a while too. Guild Wars is very much its own thing (no numbers on MMOGChart, of course), and Dungeon Runners looks like it’s at least going to be pretty.

The spectacular failure of Auto Assault, then, is very disheartening. This isn’t a company with a dodgy track record or some new kid on the scene. NCSoft is one of the real powers in this industry, and their failure to get this thing off the ground really says something. Massive Online Gamer might suck, but they did provide a few pieces of information:

• 44 People on the Auto Assault development team.
• 15,000 objects in the game
• 15,000 special effects (wtf?)
• 240,000 work hours were spent making the game
• 600 square miles of space inside the gameworld

The only one that really matters to me are those 44 people and their 240,000 work hours. What a waste. 240,000 hours of time spent on a game that some 10,000 people are playing. All that time spent on assets and content that will never really see the light of day.

So what happened? Why the splat when it hit? Is ‘Car Wars Online’ too niche for most gamers? The overwhelming attraction to fantasy titles should have prepared the company. The knowledge that they wouldn’t do amazing well should have been self-evident given the current state of the industry. I’m all for non-fantasy MMOGs, though. EVE’s done a tremendous job, and with titles like Tabula Rasa coming up to the plate the non-fantasy MMOG may soon have its day in the sunshine.

I don’t have answers. I’d really love to know. I do know that, personally, I was never interested in the title. A friend of mine played the trial period, and other than some vague amusement with the amount of destroyable scenery, he said it was pretty much a waste of time. The failure of Auto Assault, I think, point to something larger. WoW’s 50% of the MMOG market isn’t just a number.

It may actually be getting harder to garner interest from a market that has-the-game-it-wants-to-play-thank-you-very-much.

In the August issue of Edge, they take a quick look at LOTRO. Their opinion isn’t that it’s boring and a waste of a license.

“… in a market that has been slow to capitalize on WoW’s success - following it with a slew of strange imports and niche experiments - LOTRO’s matured, formulaic approach is almost as strong an asset as the license.” - Edge Issue 165, pg. 34

Niche is apparently bad. Imports are bad too, apparently. I disagree, but I’m one man. I respect Edge’s opinion, and in this case actually fear it. Is this really what the lesson of Auto Assault will be? That if your game doesn’t have elfy-welfies, it’s doomed from the get go?

That’s not a MMOG industry I want to be ragging on. That’s a MMOG industry I’ll just watch from the stands.

I’ve mentioned once or twice Beckett’s entry into the sphere of ‘reporting’ on Massive games - Massive Online Gamer. I received my first issue of the quarterly magazine just before we left for San Francisco, so I haven’t had the chance to really sit down and take a look at it yet.

Tonight I did, and I regret it. Reading it, picking it up, paying money for it … perhaps even getting interested in Massive games, so terrible is this ‘magazine’. My only consolation is that this thing will probably only ever see one or two more issues before they fold it like an ugly sweater.

Read on for my impressions of this tabloid excuse of a gaming magazine.
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