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How to Make, Market, and Maintain a Next Gen MMO:

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  • How to Make, Market, and Maintain a Next Gen MMO:

    Every MMO that’s ever been on the market is a pile of trash because they always fall far short of their potential. In-fact, every MMO ever made has sucked to a great degree. It’s like that great story from high school where the head cheerleader marries the football QB at 18, have 3 kids by the end of college, and then get divorced when neither of them go pro in anything other doing Meth. Almost every major MMO release has been a giant ball of potential thrown in our face with a skeleton staff and a half complete game. It’s no coincidence that you always hear people calling MMO’s pay-to-play betas…and to top all this off now we’re faced with a potential industry meltdown.

    A company finally comes along and does the MMO “right” and that’s a good thing, uh right? I call it the “WoW Factor”. They are pushing 10 million subs and have managed to bring MMO’s attention from the masses, right? A lot of the stories you see printed talk about how World of Warcraft has revolutionized the gaming market bringing MMOs out of mothballs. I completely disagree. People knew about MMOs before. In-fact most people have played at least one. They just didn’t really feel like putting six hours a day into a game to only get two hours back due to crashes, bugs, exploits, hacks, and generally fucked up half done game play. MMOs are the future of gaming and we all knew that 5+ years ago. This isn’t some new theory that WoW discovered.

    Blizzard is notorious for taking a widely accepted concept that has a popular following and making it work properly. They deserve all the credit in the world for making an MMO that doesn’t crash to desktop every hour. I personally don’t consider that an accomplishment worthy of much praise, but that’s just my opinion. My position in the industry for the last 10 years has given me access to speak to numerous Devs. Trust me when I say most of them don’t really play games and when they do they aren’t any good at them. It would be like a designer for Ford never having a Driver’s License and riding a Bicycle to work everyday. Want to know a secret I’ve learned from Devs over the years? You know that guy who runs around in game super fast killing everyone in one shot (obviously exploiting) that everyone complains about? HE’S PROBLY A DEV! That’s literally the mentality of these people, they exploit at the games they develop because they SUCK at gaming!!! Yet publishers pump millions into these development studios? Smert…

    Have you ever wondered why Dev interviews never include a relevant answer about their prior experience…Why they always say: “well I’ve worked in the industry for two years now and have been working on uhm the gaming part of the game developing stuff and we’ve made a lot of great progress that everyone will be very excited about”? They have no experience! You have to have a passion for something to be good at it. Someone who hasn’t played MMOS (More than one stupid) for at least five years shouldn’t be developing one! Go do the art or run a fan site if you want to get your foot in the door! The industry itself hasn’t really set forth any positive examples to build from. You have to play the games to understand them. You would think that MMOs have been around for long enough now that people would know what works and what doesn’t? Well, that’s my point = NO…we already covered this, but I’ll clarify for the “special people”: to be successful the game can’t crash every three hours, can’t come down twice a day for maintenance, and can’t have a support staff that would be lucky to get a job bagging coke naked in Columbia for a cut of said drugs as payment.

    History time!!! The first MMO to ever actually release was UO around 2000ish. I see you saying WTF UO was released in 1997!?! Even though the game had been out since 1997 it didn’t stop exploding people’s comps until 2000ish. By the time it started working properly the content was old and generally sucked (thx Ralphy, aka designer Dragon, now go drown in “pondscum”). Then you had EQ that worked relatively well after a few months (falls through the planet x874365)…hey, DAOC worked after a few months also…and well, unless you lived in Korea and played Linage…next was WoW? WoW was the first finished product to ever launch into the MMO market. So people bought the game and got the chance to enjoy the content without many of those notorious “launch bugs”. What am I getting at here? Well, to make a MMO you have to make sure that it works before you put it in a shiny box and ship it. How do you achieve this lofty goal? I would recommend hiring people who have played MMOs and also have the proper knowledge to do whatever job you are hiring them for…and I almost forgot, they also should be given an IQ test to weed out the ones that have developed the last 30+ MMOs! This is what the WoW staff did right! They didn't mess up the basics!

    All this may seem semi-logical for even the most mentally retarded among us (looks around at everyone starring at me), but I can list a couple dozen games off the top of my head that were multi-million dollar projects released incomplete. So what’s this potential industry meltdown that I spoke of? The WoW factor simply means that gaming companies have seen WoW’s success and want to take their projects and turn them into WoW. If one company makes a cool sports game that everyone buys, then the competing company will often make one also! But that doesn’t work well in the MMO world where games are always evolving and subscription based. The gut-shot industry standard reaction to a successful game will not work here. So does this mean we’re doomed to basic boring "newbie MMO" WoW clones that no one will play for the foreseeable future? It certainly seems likely to me.

    The sucky thing for people like us is that any MMO vet already knows this. We just don’t work in the gaming industry because they’re right around 90% stupid and right around 100% broke (minus Blizzard/WoW). So what’s going to turn this around and give us hope? Someone who goes out and hires a staff of relatively intelligent people with MMO experience that is capable of breathing and jumping at the same time. Then they have to make a game worth playing! That’s where the staff with MMO experience comes in. Brainstorm ideas and research each one based on a very complex and specific theme...are you ready? Sure? Ok here we go: Is this going to be fun? Whoa, I know that’s some revolutionary thinking there huh?

    I was fighting some Boss in a game the other day. He’s up on some rotating pillar thing and every few seconds he throws you off. So you have to run around the bottom, catch a little spinning elevator thingy, and run back up to him. You can hit him for about 10 seconds, 5 seconds falling, and another 20 or so running back up. Did I mention that he had somewhere between 6-7 trillion hit points also? Let me tell you, that was a blast! I like it when a battle actually includes more running in circles than fighting? I imagine one of the above mentioned superduper smert devs developing this and sitting around giggling for hours about how cool it is that this boss throws you off a pillar! Most people actually think that Devs are generally cynical twisted fucks that make screwed up content just to piss us off (no joke). I personally just think they’re phenomenally stupid. In the end it doesn’t really matter because the content isn’t fun and doesn’t belong in the game.

    In most MMOs the gaming session for your average monster basher newbie type consists of crash > die to bug > die to exploiter > kill a couple monsters > crash > kill some more > get to the boss > get fucken irritated to no end (if no PC parts are broken at this point proceed) > waste an hour running in circles > crash > kill boss > get no credit because you crashed during the fight > log out > burn the game.

    Good times!!! Devs please ask yourselves, Is this going to be fun? Before you create and release the content.

    So students, What have we covered so far?
    -Hire a dev team with MMO experience that is capable of drinking a beer and walking (at the same time!)
    -Build content that isn’t pointless, stupid, irritatingly slow, broken, and uh oh yah it has to be fun too!
    -Most important of all, before you release the above fun content in a shiny box it has to work (ie not crash…like ever!)

    Phew, that was a lot of highly enlightening shit in one difficult to read post! I was going to give some examples of what kind of content is fun but I’m tired of typing. So in the words of many infomercial geniuses: But wait! There’s more!

    Check Back Later for Part II of Part I: Making a Next Gen MMO! Then All additional parts of Part II: Marketing and Part III: Maintaining.

  • #2
    You forgot about "The Realm" First MMO i know of (unless you actually consider Daiblo to be an MMO like some of those fruit cakes out there).
    It was a Zelda scroll screen type game that started you out in your own house that you could decorate and it had instanced dungeons. You could imbue items with magic buffs but also could destroy a rare item trying to do so. I believe the level cap was 500 and if you turned your PVP option on you just had to find others you could PVP.

    The subscription back then was 50$ a year. I didn't think this game was around anymore but i found it is.

    http://www.realmserver.com/

    Cool graphics for sure!

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    • #3
      Partially agree and disagree.

      I agree with the fact that innovation and creative ground-breaking concepts in the industry are pretty much fucked due to the highly popular success of WoW and the desire to emulate it.

      This will suffocate any hopes of original games coming out.

      I also agree most devs are fucking retarded and forget the concept of fun when designing games.

      That's about all I agree with though.

      Here's what I disagree with.

      You assume the WoW impact is all "bad" while I think the WoW impact has some significant bright spots. First of all is the fact that WoW's success has generated an industry-wide understanding that POLISH is important. You don't release half-assed games or they tank horribly. People (devs/publishers) are FINALLY understanding this. First impressions are big and they need to hit a home run.

      Games like WAR that are coming out have specifically stated they wish to delay its release date because they understand the importance of a successful launch and how it pertains to the longevity of a game.

      I don't think these concepts would have been understood fully w/o WoW's prominence.

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      • #4
        I would also like to add your lack of visual aids makes it very hard for me to follow...

        I LIKE PICTURE BOOKS

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        • #5
          Uh i 2nd the picture comment. I was going to read the news post and i noticed that there are no visuals so i said Fuk it.

          your post was a bad date.. Alot of work to get through - and in the end there was no visual stimulation.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Godamus
            You assume the WoW impact is all "bad" while I think the WoW impact has some significant bright spots. First of all is the fact that WoW's success has generated an industry-wide understanding that POLISH is important. You don't release half-assed games or they tank horribly. People (devs/publishers) are FINALLY understanding this. First impressions are big and they need to hit a home run.
            I agree on the polished aspects of future games. I really enjoyed WoW. I loved UO. I also tried EQ (level grind, entertaining game, lack of pvp on non pvp servers), DAoC (just generally not entertaining, another level grind), Shadowbane (good pvp, bad game, more level grinding), Guild Wars (totally different concept, cool, lost interest after beta), Final Fantasy Online (another poorly developed, stupid game, had crash issues too), and now Vanguard.

            Of the games i've played, the only ones that ever seemed fulfilling or satisfying to that side of me that wants to game were UO and WoW. Initially Vanguard was entertaining but the levelling treadmill has killed my interest in even logging in.

            I think some of the problems associated with Vanguard come from the lack of community, the levelling grind, and the difficulties behind levelling. I think, ultimately, that Vanguard has the right idea, they just aren't moving fast enough to make this game what it SHOULD be. Fun.

            UO and WoW both seemed to provide a very close community, there were always people on to fight with, or group with, or simply communicate with if you had questions or problems. Granted UO started to make poor development choices which ultimately caused its downfall in my eyes, they still did it right for years. WoW offered the same thing, high end content which kept griefers out of lower level zones, allowing players who started later, or started up new characters the ability to safely, effectively and efficiently utilize their in game time to maximize their characters gains.

            Also both UO and WoW offered something to the casual gamer that I have seen very little of in other games. UO had power hour, WoW offered rested XP reward. I have a life outside of the game, a very busy one. I don't have hours a day to play a game, I don't have the time to develop strategies for levelling and things of that nature. I don't need instant gratification but in a game like Vanguard, where it seems to have become, the first person to Level 50 wins, as a casual gamer I am always going to lose or be left in the dust.

            Comment


            • #7
              I feel like a major problem in these games is that they have made the combat systems overly complex. The system of aquiring very rare armor, weapons, and items through PvM means that there will almost always be a distinct advantage to one player. On top of this, the popularity of having 500 different classes - each with their own distinct abilities - makes for constant unbalances which are then countered by nerfs, which in turn create even more unbalance. The beauty of UO's fighting system (well, pre-factions) was that everyone was able to deal similar amounts of damage with the same attacks, it was just up to the player to decide how best to use them; players shouldn't be confused as to what someone else is attacking them with, but rather with how to fight back. Low level combat areas and the ability to "duel" is very important as well as it allows players to learn and practice combat without going out and getting wrecked.

              Future MMO's are REALLY going to have to rethink the idea of travel time as well. Many are prevented from playing often because of the sheer amount of time it takes to get somewhere, much less actually do something worthwhile there. Devs need to consider the fact that there is a large audience of hardcore gamers who have grown up a bit, juggle school/work and can no longer play for marathon sessions or even longer than an hour or two.

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