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Friday at the Austin Game Conference
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Sep 09, '06 04:44 PM
from the next-year-gadget-next-year dept.
from the next-year-gadget-next-year dept.
This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup: "The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."
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How They Made World of Warcraft 140 comments
SiliconJesus writes "Rob Pardo, VP of Design at Blizzard, gave an interesting keynote at the Austin Game Conference outlining the Blizzard philosophy on designing game content, core and casual players, and why story should always drive the game." From Raph's writeup: "If you extend the leveling curve too far, it becomes a barrier. You hit a leveling wall. Our walls are shorter and there are less of them. The short leveling curve also encourages people to reroll and start over. We had some hardcore testers who would level to 60 in a week. There was much concern within the company. But I would tell them that we cannot design to that guy. You have to let him go. He probably won't unsubscribe, he's going to hit your endgame content or he'll have multiple level 60s. In games with tough leveling curves, it discourages you from starting over." More is available from the conference, with Gamasutra having a rundown on Mark Terrano's writer's keynote, and Gamespot's piece on the MMOG Rant session. Paneled by the likes of Matt Firor, Lum, Rich Vogel, and Jessica Mulligan, that must have been entertaining to see live. One more thing - WoW has 7 Million subscribers now.
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Thursday at the Austin Game Conference 33 comments
Much talk yesterday in Austin centered around Rob Pardo's keynote, but there were several other events you might be interested in. Dell Chairman Michael Dell talked about that company's gaming plans in a 'fireside' chat. Movie producer Jon Landau spoke on the role of gaming in the entertainment industry. Gamasutra has several pieces from smaller talks, with titles like The Death of Cinematics, New Models for Game Stories, and Writing for Digital Actors. Finally, Raph Koster offers an ultimatum to the games business: evolve or die. From that article: "The end result, according to Koster, is the current hit-driven state of the game industry, which focus on the top 20 percent of games. 'The particular adaptation that we've made to this is to not bother making or stocking or selling the other 80 percent,' Koster said. 'So when you walk into your friendly neighborhood GameStop, you won't find the game that is 21 on the charts. Because of limited shelf space, they just don't want it around. It's just not worth having it compared to game number 20 twice, or better yet, The Sims and all of its expansions.'"
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Austin Game Conference 2006 in Depth 21 comments
New games site OGX has up an overview of last week's Austin Game Conference. The piece touches on the big talks (Rob Pardo, Jon Landau, Vernor Vinge), and gives some informational tidbits about the always-interesting panel discussions. From the article: "Community was also a topic that was frequently the primary driver behind a panel, or as a secondary topic that rose up in relation to the topic at hand. Gordon Walton, Studio Director for Bioware Austin held a particularly radical presentation entitled 'Rethinking Service Offerings.' Walton noted that the player perspective about customer service amounted to 'No matter how we do service, we suck.' and questioned why companies spend energy on a perception based challenge that they have not been able to overcome. Walton's premise was that since the customer service infrastructure for a MMORPG eats the most revenue and generates less than favorable results, it may be entirely possible to cut customer service offerings down entirely to a set of automated tools and save the money spent designing for satisfied customers."
Offsite: Gamasutra 'Men in Tights' Coverage
Offsite: Gamespot 'Men in Tights' Coverage
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Friday at the Austin Game Conference
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l like having experts figure what I want to play
(Score:2, Interesting)Why fantasy is winning...
(Score:1)*gasp*
(Score:1)i think that sums up the biggest problem right there, its the reason most people I used to play with have quit WoW. I dont want to seem niave, I mean, its a buisness and this is the strategy they chose to ensure future profits. Unfortunatly, it is what makes rationalizing non-play easiest.
More To It....
(Score:1)(http://www.gamersradio.com/)
For example, Eve Online and Anarchy Online. When I hear those names, I know nothing about them. In order to experience the story line, I have to find a reason to jump into the game. This is a huge hurdle for the game and one of the reasons why they are offering Free Trials and even Free Play with Ads in the case of AO. They need something to suck you into the world in the first place.
However, let's take a few games that are not fantasy based and do not currently have a MMORPG. How much do you know about the storyline, the environment and the history of the game?
StarCraft
Command and Conquer
Total Annihilation
If Blizzard takes what they have learned about MMORPG's from WoW and applies it to a MMORPG featuring the Starcraft Universe, I dare say it will be bigger than WoW is today.
C&C and TA may not be as big, but they have enough history to create an interesting and already familiar environment.