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The Barbarians At The MMOG Gates
Posted by
Zonk
on Friday October 19, @08:36PM
from the don't-forget-to-loot-and-pillage-before-you-burn dept.
from the don't-forget-to-loot-and-pillage-before-you-burn dept.
simoniker writes "Areae president Raph Koster is perhaps best known as a designer of Ultima Online and the previous CCO of Sony Online Entertainment, and in an in-depth Gamasutra interview, he discusses his views on 'game grammar', the uniting of MMOs and online worlds, and the software patent problem. In particular, he's been talking about the 'barbarians at the gates' for hardcore MMO makers: 'Even the creation of the MUD in the first place was that. It was the Internet-based reaction to the stuff that had existed on the microcomputers and the Plato network and all of that. All of a sudden, "Oh, wait! We can put a text MUD on Arpanet!" And it was like, "Whoa!" and it spread like wildfire, and all of a sudden, all of that other stuff went away. So it's really possible for that stuff to be happening now with microtransactions, with portals versus traditional publishers, with digital distribution publishers versus traditional publishers, and with MMOs from MTV versus MMOs from Sony or EA or NCSoft.'"
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Firehose:Koster On The 'Barbarians At The Gates' For MMOs by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Meh.
(Score:4, Insightful)I don't like coffee, therefore starbucks = failure
(Score:5, Insightful)(Last Journal: Friday August 17, @06:34AM)
The world doesn't revolve around you. Learn to accept this.
More precisly, it doesn't revolve around your demographic, there are enough persons who are willing to play a monthly fee and who want to play in a multiplayer enviroment.
Different tastes, is that so hard to accept? No, it doesn't mean you are old, just means you have an over-inflated ego. Frankly that isn't age dependent.
Every single story about MMO's you get some person complaing about monthy fees and somehow the world is supposed to care. Here is a newsflash for you. Blizzard is RAKING it in. WoW should be closing in on the billion dollar revenue mark by now. That is hard to ignore. Game companies that struggle while they see thousands of people downloading their games for free and here is a company with an OLD OLD OLD game still raking it in. You think these companies care about you? They got a choice, spend fortune developing a single player game that will be obsolete in months, hopefully get them a onetime income and maybe some sparechange for the value release with tons of players using their forums for support a full week before the game is actually OUT (pirates move fast, and leechers have no shame) OR spend that money on an MMO and get a ton of cash each and every month. Gee, difficult one.
Re:Why Offline will matter
(Score:4, Insightful)That's the trouble. MMOs have the same time-sink mentality. If you travel with a group, you'd better keep up with them, because if you get to be more than 2-3 levels behind them, you can't do the same quests as they do. So they either redo the easy quests with you, or leave you behind. So you'd have to play several hours a week -- in order to play the game.
Now compare the above to an offline RPG. I own the disk. No one's going to charge me to use my copy of FF12. No one will delete my lvl 60 party for nonpayment of fees. I don't have to set up a time to play it so that I don't fall behind the rest of the party. I could set the game aside for 6 months, never touch it (say if I get busy, or if I simply *don't want to play it*) and everything will still be exactly as I left it. I'm not going to lose out just because I didn't have enough time to play this month.
That's what I love about offline gaming. I don't feel pressured to put tons of hours into a game just to get a little pleasure from questing with my buddies. I don't want to feel like I'm losing money because I'm not playing as much as I did last month. Offline does that.
Re:Meh.
(Score:5, Insightful)(Last Journal: Wednesday July 11, @09:27PM)
I prefer MMOGs to single player, not for the chatting or guilds, but for the fact that humans make for more interesting teammates or opponents, than the computer does. On the rare occasion that you have teammates in a single player game, they never do anything interesting or novel. Having other characters in my game world that make choices that haven't been tweeked by a game designer make the game more interesting for me.
On the 99% of everyone is an annoying twat thing: I've spent hours in City of Heroes, doing missions with a good team, where hardly anything not game related was said in the chat box. Sure there are a lot of junior high kids in MMOs who want to talk trash, but the same can be said for going to a baseball game or the mall or anywhere else in the world were there are teenagers. Usually they adore the PvP aspects of a MMOG. Personally, I usually stick to the PvE aspects of the game (and out of guilds or clans or whatever) and have quite an enjoyable time, with a minimum of immature brats and idiots. If MMOs aren't you cup of tea that's cool, but as the genre matures so do a fair portion of the players, don't paint us all with the same brush.
*Ahnold Scream*
(Score:3, Interesting)It's Raph "Galaxies" Koster
(Score:2, Insightful)Raph's ideas and theories have REPEATEDLY proven inaccurate, unworkable, stupid, and wrong. The gaming industry as a whole would be better off if he were filtered off into the black hole of FAIL with Romero.
Please stop
(Score:2, Interesting)Every time someone talks about some evolution of something we have now they go and mention MTV.
MTV provides nothing but attention whore PR.
Please stop mentioning them in your next-gen-extreme-thing PR.
-ts
koster again
(Score:1, Insightful)raph koster... standing in the corner shaking his fist.. at... large MMO companies.. that.. don't
this is the the guy that drove UO and SWG into the ground... failed to keep EQ relevant
WoW came along and ran over them like a mac truck over a 90 year old grandma.
Blizzard created the genre defining title and expanded the MMO market to its current level
the only thing koster expanded was his beltline
Future of Single-Player
(Score:4, Insightful)Does he really talk like that?
(Score:4, Funny)(http://www.liverpops.net/)
It's Crush from Finding Nemo! "Saw the whole thing, dude. First you were all like "whoa", and we were like "whoa", and you were like "whoa..."
STFU Koster, you still owe us for SWG
(Score:4, Insightful)(http://www.execyte.com/)
Any MMO can be played "singe player". There are a ton of people who play WoW "single player". The other people that run around them, sell them items on the auction house, and try to converse with them? They might as well just be computer NPCs. And that's the extent of it. Really. Some people like to play WoW by leveling up multiple characters on their own. They never group with others, they aren't in guilds, and yet here they are, still paying the monthly fee to play WoW. Some people play in the Battlegrounds only. They never actually talk to anyone, and the players they fight might as well be computer NPCs too, because they never communicate, they just fight and forget.
The cool thing is that even though they've been playing WoW "single player" for all this time, at any moment they can decide to "get out there" and join a guild and get together with people. That's always an option for them, and I've seen it happen. Then the game becomes truly multiplayer, when you are working with others on common goals.
But make no mistake, single player is not doomed. It will never, ever die.
Could someone post a 5 line summary
(Score:2)(http://dirac.ruc.dk/~gnalle)
Ideally the slashdot abstract of the article should have provided me this 5 line abstract, but somehow the slashdot editor failed at this task.
He got one thing right...
(Score:2)Seems to me that game designers and companies are speaking the language just fine. Are there a variety of systems that cannot relate to each other because they use different game systems? Sure. That's called variety. That's called different points of origin. It's called originality of the designers.
Should game designers learn to speak a universal language of game concepts, design elements and terms? Why should they? This would imply that they're going to be collaborating on the games they make. Do game designers of different companies need to speak to each other in a common language of terms? No, because the level of detail about their games should not be discussed with others outside of the company due to IP and NDA limitations.
I compare this to the music writing systems (like Raph did). Yes, having a notation system makes it easier for those with the creative skill to create something in the technical realm so that technical people can analyze it. Can the techs then improve on the creativity by crunching numbers, changing the flowchart and tweaking the terminology? Doubtful. Great games are works of genius and inspiration, not the digital architecture underneath. Granted the implementation affects the overall outcome of the game, but the soul of the game is what keeps people playing. Two examples comes to mind. Magic (Microprose, early 90s) was a fantastic, turn-based game. It had major technical issues that caused sound incompatibilities and frequent crashes, but people kept playing it and clamored for a sequel. Even Ultima IX I considered a success because of the story it concluded and the elements of the story that unfolded while I played it. Technically it was crap because EA wanted to hit the Christmas rush and wouldn't let Origin quality test it.
Just because you can break something down into its components and analyze it does not mean you'll be able to improve upon it or even make any noteworthy discoveries about it. Obviously, Blizzard found the magic formula of MMOs. I doubt any game grammar or analysis could help them improve it any further. It will take a step in evolution of MMOs to unseat Blizzard as the MMO king. With a common gaming grammar, I foresee more cookie cutter games with the exact same mechanics but with different skins. Hmm... sounds just like what Raph's company is trying to produce: a generic MMO engine.
Also sounds like Raph would be a great EA employee getting all the assimilated studios to use the same gaming grammar to more easily fit into the EA template.