Gleefully Touching Third Rails

Your inline links got a little borked somewhere along the line in that article. Otherwise, a good and enjoyable read, as always.

Great article! You have a very entertaining and witty style, combined with some cutting analysis.

I also enjoyed your article about Star Trek online, it’s very close to my overall impressions of the game, but it still makes me nervous when you say this article about failed MMO’s that Hellgate London’s mgmt team is over at Cryptic.

Looking forward to your follow up article. It’s amazing the lack of reflection in the industy, dev’s seem to keep making the same basic mistakes and never learning from them. Then again, that’s not a symptom of the MMO industry in particular: a failed pizza parlor is replaced by a burger joint, which fails and is replaced by a fine-dining establishment, which in turn fails and is replaced by, etc. Each new restaurateur thinks that he can do it better by offering something slightly different, when really it doesn’t matter what kind of restaurant it is, the location and area can’t support one.

Re: AC2… you should replace “engineers” with “Microsoft executives”. Turbine’s folks absolutely did not want to use MS’ chat servers but were forced to by the publisher.

Is it at all possible that UO slow growth and the release of Trammel are not related? I mean back than every year more and more people had access to a proper internet connection and decent gaming hardware, so the overall pool of players was increasing. I think this also explains EQ1′s growth as well, it’s not just that it was a great game, but simply that each year more and more people could actually, you know, play it.

Rather than going with Trammel, it’s entirely possible that UO could have continued, refined some of the rules a bit (thinking EVE Empire space), and flourished rather than becoming a 2d EQ1 that slipped into irrelevance.

Syncaine, I think Scott was being sarcastic. The phrase “subscriber numbers held steady in its wake” implies that Trammel wasn’t a mistake (at least compared to what happened to Galaxies).

But on the other hand, if Trammel wasn’t a mistake, including it in the article just confuses the issue.

So funny, and so true. Thank you for this!

Rohan :Syncaine, I think Scott was being sarcastic. The phrase “subscriber numbers held steady in its wake” implies that Trammel wasn’t a mistake (at least compared to what happened to Galaxies).
But on the other hand, if Trammel wasn’t a mistake, including it in the article just confuses the issue.

I think the point that Scott was making was that NOT having Trammel from the start was the mistake. UO in its original incarnation was the game that showed everyone that “complete player freedom” translated into “complete freedom to be asshats” to other players. Not that everyone is an asshat – just enough to spoil things for way too many of the others.

geldonyetich :

… but if that kind of freedom could be harnessed, truly harnessed in such as way that I would enjoy it, then that would be rather interesting. These MMORPGs we play today would be but pale toys in comparison.

There may be enough masochist sheep out there to feed the wolves to make this profitable… You never know!

There may be enough masochist sheep out there to feed the wolves to make this profitable… You never know!

What I’m trying to say is it would be harnessed in such a way that you don’t need to be a masochistic sheep or wolf to enjoy it.

Tremayne :

Rohan :Syncaine, I think Scott was being sarcastic. The phrase “subscriber numbers held steady in its wake” implies that Trammel wasn’t a mistake (at least compared to what happened to Galaxies).
But on the other hand, if Trammel wasn’t a mistake, including it in the article just confuses the issue.

I think the point that Scott was making was that NOT having Trammel from the start was the mistake. UO in its original incarnation was the game that showed everyone that “complete player freedom” translated into “complete freedom to be asshats” to other players. Not that everyone is an asshat – just enough to spoil things for way too many of the others.

And my point is that rather than going 180 and adding Trammel, Origins could have attempted to fix things a bit more naturally while still retaining what made UO so great. Turning UO into a poor-mans EQ clone might have allowed them to keep 100-200k subs back then and slowly fade, but perhaps fine tuning the real UO might have lead them to still be relevant today. If EVE can be at it’s peak 5 years after release, why can’t the same be said for UO after 10?

“Has there ever been a dumber character class in any game than “image designer”?”

I loved my image designer. It may not have been to your taste but your post suggests you you don’t have any.

Trammel could well have been called “Ultima: Exodus II”, given that for all of the talk of PvP being core to the experience, 97% (or some figure in the upper 90s) migrated to the new non-ganking section of the game when it went live. At least, if memory serves. It’s easy to say from here (armchair + hindsight) that UO “might still be relevant” if they didn’t put Trammel in, but the more likely scenario is that UO *wouldn’t exist anymore at all* if they didn’t give that 97% what they wanted.

UO, EVE and the original SWG are the only mainstream examples I can think of of MMO games that really strived to be worlds rather than theme parks (excepting explicitly social constructs like SL, of course). It *is* a shame the market moved away from worlds and toward theme parks, in my opinion, but moving out of gankytown is generally a good thing.

I think one of the main problems with pre Trammel UO was teleportation.

There were those of us that were devoted counter gankers, but that is hard to accomplish when the pkers you were hunting could dissapear to the other side of the world anytime something vaguely resembling a fair fight showed up.

The teleportation abilities basically made it next to impossible for those with the power and desire to police their realm to do so.

JuJutsu :

Vandermint :Well, I didn’t pay $50 plus $13 a month (or whatever) to be a space hair dresser, so you’ve got me there.

What did you pay $50 plus $13 a month to be? You run around shooting people with blasters or swinging a light saber and then sneer about what someone else does in a game? This should be informative.

I’m not sure why you’re so hostile. I’m glad you enjoyed your experience as an image designer. It was certainly a very MUD kind of profession. However, that design approach to a Star Wars game (making a “world” game and fitting the Star Wars universe around, whether it made any sense or not) is IMO the chief reason SWG was a failure. In a setting where they have space stations that can blow up planets, you had to be careful not to be eaten by space bears and space boars just outside the cities. It was just a terribly silly use of a license, and one always had the feeling Raph and co. just wanted to make their world game and the SW stuff just got in the way. IMO, the colossal stupidity of the NGE has served to whitewash many of SWG’s flaws.

Can we at least agree that, as much as some of you prefer worlds to theme parks, Star Wars (which is as space opera-tic as a setting can get) wasn’t the best choice for one? To react surprised that most people buying a Star Wars box wanted to wield lightsabers, not scissors, wasn’t one of the brightest moments in MMO history.

@Guy

A 10-year-old computer? Only good for the dump. I remember that the one I bought in 1999 had a 10 GB hard drive, which was then quite average, with maybe 20 GB being top of the line.

I also remember some of the games of the time I used to play (and continued to play for some time thereafter: Baldur’s Gate I and II, Icewind Dale, Arcanum, and so on). Today, they look rather outdated, to the extent that I sometimes ask myself how I could ever have enjoyed them, while games from 2003 are still fresh. MMO’s might be works in progress, but how much improvement can you bring to an old isometric game like UO? Might as well tear it down and start over.

I can’t remember where I read it, probably Wikipedia, but it said UO is now being played mostly in foreign countries without high-speed internet access. Certainly would make sense.

Also, I know the improvements to World of Warcraft prevent it from providing a particularly enlightening example, but it does date from 2004, and I faintly remember something to the effect that it is still popular today, albeit mildly.

@Geldon

ATITD: Tried it briefly, for 24 hours. It might have been an interesting game to play, but I was getting the impression that the game was on its way down. I saw no other players in-game, the last news on the website dated to March (and that was last December), and the unofficial forums seemed half-dead. Also, there seemed to be a little too much collaboration between established players, for example having waiting lists to build obelisks (which had to be taller than their predecessor to get whatever benefit). I chose not to subscribe because of all that; it didn’t seem to be worth $15/month, but I would definitely like to see a more accomplished game on the same model.

Also in the news recently: Pirates of the Burning Sea is going from 5 to 2 servers. I wonder if Scott’s second part to his article will discuss this, and other games still in business that don’t happen to involve NCSoft.

SB.exe killed SB star?

You are losing your touch Lum. Where is firebrand “PvP won’t work in mmorpgs” preachings we all grew to expect out of you?

Tell us how SB failed because it had PKs in it. Please? One more time for nostalgia sake.

@Geldon

Your premise seems to be that action & adventure settings are suitable for themepark games but not virtual worlds/sandbox games. I don’t buy it. I would argue that the only necessary component for action & adventure is combat; you have to be able to kill stuff.

As for SWG in particular, Iconic said it better than I could: “Either way, SWG was, by any standard except WoW, a very successful game until the decision to blow it up and turn it into WoW in space.”

I will make the obligatory nod to the inaccuracies possible in charting subscription numbers but they are at least as good as anec-data about populations. Look at either MMO Data or MMOGChart; numbers were pretty stable till the end of 2005. There doesn’t appear to be any ‘arterial’ bleeding of customers till the you-know-what…

“Well, if you define “very successful” at about the range of 300,000 players, then sure it was.”

I’m comfortable with that definition. The only 2 games with substantially bigger numbers were Lineage 1 & 2. EQ and Final Fantasy XI had bigger numbers but were in the same ballpark. I don’t doubt that they made a comparison to EQ, it was their game.

But the point I’d make [like Iconic] is that by any reasonable standard of success, it was a success…and a sandbox. I don’t see it supporting the story that action & adventure can’t be done with a sandbox format.

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that if SWG had started as the NGE it would’ve crashed and burned with the same numbers as the NGE got after the switcheroo. But, on the other hand, I don’t see anything to support the claim that it would’ve been a resounding million+ launch either.

geldonyetich :A license such as Star Wars should pull in higher-than-usual numbers. If you’re only getting relatively-standard numbers then you screwed up in leveraging it. That’s fairly obvious, no?

Except that, so far, no licenced IP has brought in massively higher numbers than the leading (non-WoW) non-licenced games. LOTRO figures are estimated to be in the !00K-300K region. Age of Conan – initial subs about the same ballpark as Warhammer (a licence, but not a huge one outside the gaming community) and Aion, Star Trek – too soon to call.
The take away may be that getting a big name licence DOESN’T boost your numbers significantly, whether you do it well or not. In which case, spending that money for the licence isn’t a great move…

Well, good thing then the control group’s MMO is launching next year … and Bioware’s take on Star Wars seems as theme-parky as you can get. Will be interesting to compare the figures.

IP seems great from the standpoint of creating a world, having known places, actors, and items, cool stuff to see and visit.

When an IP is based upon a heroic storyline, I think its tough to balance that out in the MMO world. There are so many people that have played SW games where you get to be the hero … the perception seemed to be that was what was missing in SWG.

Original SWG, like many MMO’s, seems to follow the line from a different movie: Well, the world needs ditch-diggers too.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that SOE had more than enough reason to believe that being forced into the role of a ditch-digger is why they didn’t retain a whole lot more players.

The reason why? Because their cancellation surveys told them this. Millions of them. That’s hard data which is difficult to ignore (although you might argue easy to interpret when the data came from a survey that said “check this if you didn’t’ think it was Star-Warsy enough.”).

I don’t have anything against virtual worlds, I certainly prefer innovation to more Diku-mud clones, but the writing is on the wall: in SWG’s case, it was a bad IP match.

Even so, you can’t just swap out the game half-way through. The number of players you’ll entice back to the game who have already left is just a drop in the bucket compared to the number who will try a game because it’s newly released.

Knowing this, you’ve no choice but to focus more on pleasing your existing playerbase than trying to suck in a playerbase who won’t even give you the time of day anymore. Water under the bridge now, of course.

Caya :Well, good thing then the control group’s MMO is launching next year … and Bioware’s take on Star Wars seems as theme-parky as you can get. Will be interesting to compare the figures.

Without going to far into star-wars-geek mode, the big mistake SOE made was time period for the setting…a mistake Bioware avoided. Sure everyone wants the be a Jedi. But how many were there during the period of the original trilogy? If you allow everyone and their sister to be a Jedi against canon then massive nerdrage ensues on the part of the population that you’re trying to entice into the game. Bioware has a time period where you can have half the population playing Jedi [and the other half playing Sith] without the nerdrage.

I hope Bioware does MASSIVE numbers. I’ll do my part. The next best thing compared to a star wars sandbox is a star wars themepark.

Vetarnias :
ATITD: Tried it briefly, for 24 hours. It might have been an interesting game to play, but I was getting the impression that the game was on its way down. I saw no other players in-game, the last news on the website dated to March (and that was last December), and the unofficial forums seemed half-dead. Also, there seemed to be a little too much collaboration between established players, for example having waiting lists to build obelisks (which had to be taller than their predecessor to get whatever benefit). I chose not to subscribe because of all that; it didn’t seem to be worth $15/month, but I would definitely like to see a more accomplished game on the same model.

Yeah, ATITD seems to have done a much smaller-scale SWG thing. It threw out a lot of its virtual worldiness and replaced it with quests and levels. So it alienated a lot of its original users in favor of nonexistent ones.