Metaplace shuts down
Metaplace is shutting down and I know this isn’t supposed to be the appropriate time to disassemble why, but I think that’s part of the point. Everyone has been too polite and reserved toward Raph Koster and his big project. The collective web has been a group of yes men. There’s no grand conspiracy, just a lot of respect. Respect != Honesty. Of course, I’m just as culpable as the next fanboi. It’s too damn easy to critique after the fact, but better late than never.
Content is king. If you’re going to develop a game / platform / whatever that focuses on Community Content Creation, then you better jumpstart it with some seriously good content yourself to begin with. This has been true since Lode Runner and all through Doom, Quake, Half-Life, etc..
When I logged into Metaplace, it seemed cute, but no more compelling than any other Flash-driven avatar system. I know there was more than the usual under the hood, but the exterior never grabbed me. I don’t know if that was everyone’s experience, but that’s my take.
I also feel that trying to trying to compete with Facebook and Myspace is silly. That’s not a market of many successes, it’s a domination of few. The gold rush on mainstream social networking is already over. Although I’m convinced that game communities could wedge into the social networks market, it would require leveraging from a strong game.
I’m curious to hear Raph’s postmortem on Metaplace, which I’m sure is coming. I hope next time he makes a fun game design first, content creation tools second.
Left 4 Dead Tower Defense?
Just like Zubon, I’m a little Tower Defense crazy.
Left 4 Dead strikes me as ripe for a Tower Defense mod. It already revolves around defending as gameplay, plus it has waves and waves of not-so-mindless zombies ready to go. The AI director could probably be tweaked for it nicely. If I had the coding skills (or at least more familiar with the SDK), I’d start a mod project, but I don’t so here it is as a suggestion.
It doesn’t have to be Towers, just auto-targetting / auto-killing devices of some sort. I’m imagining all sorts of devilish traps that could be placed in some of the narrow corridors and hallways typical for Left 4 Dead maps. Maybe movable barriers too, so the pathing of the zombies could be altered. Then the glorious gibbing of zombies would abound!
This could end up a little more like Dungeon Keeper than Tower Defense, but that’s great, since I’d count Dungeon Keeper as the epitome of build-and-turtle defense games.
Gated Communities, Gated Tiers
Suzina hit upon a topic I’ve been pondering lately: Gated Communities.
If I’m gonna join a gated community, it better be a game. Once I’m there, I don’t want more gates to segregate me from my friends.
I can accept the extra gates if there is a significant and relevant difference in immersion as an RPG, but I’m getting tired of the artificial “you must be this high for this ride” level restrictions and whatnot intended to measure out content slowly. If the content itself is harder, that’s a more natural barrier, but gating for the sake of gating is annoying.
Any gating sits on one side of the scale, with the other side of the scale balanced by features like Sidekicking and content that’s regardless-of-level (IE: LOTRO’s music system). If the scale tips too far to the achievement gating side, I’m done.
That’s my biggest dissatisfaction with MMOs lately: They’re leveraging the achieving nature of players so much, they’re pulling friends apart in the process. Once I’ve felt like they’ve driven that wedge, I move on and that about sums up my MMO adventures for the past year and a half. I’d love to settle down in one game again, but it’s gotta be together with my friends, not just as a chat service but playing together with compelling content.
I don’t mind climbing tiers and ladders, and I love challenging content. A few carrots of “you must become part of this tier / group” are fine, they help us mix it up with new folks, making new friends. But that shouldn’t be the bulk of the game, because it’s a trap. There are so many other gameplay aspects and portions of the Bartle Test (Achieving, Exploring, Socializing and er, Killing or competing as I’d put it) that are neglected. Leveraging achieving is probably the easiest path to MMO success. It’s a little more complicated than that of course, because with the gates they’re defining restrictive social ladders as well.
I play MMOs for the social aspect + gaming. MMO design seems often at odds with itself this way, too quick to sort everyone into separate piles. I’d like the freedom to choose who I can make new friends with and most certainly I’d like to keep the subset of my current friends. In the end it still needs to be a game though, I don’t want a glorified gated community social networking app.
I might as well play a single-player game than be restricted from playing with my friends.
Copernicus shows promise by not showing the game
I have no idea when Copernicus will be coming out. That’s a common tease from the games industry and there’s good reason for it: Posting your release date too soon can stretch thin the anticipation, reducing your ability to hype close to launch. Competitors can also capitalize on the knowledge and blunt your launch with their own well-timed press releases and updates.
In the Dark
I have no idea what the game is like. That’s more unusual, but I agree with it. It’s not so agreeable to others: Keen is feeling uneasy. I understand that, gamers are accustomed to being informed and bloggers even moreso. Being in the dark makes us uneasy.
The games industry loves pre-release hype, it’s a long standing tradition that goes back to the earliest game magazines. Talking about the future is more exciting than the current. That just might be indicative of a attention-deficit fanbase, but if games have truly become mass-media: Any given game should be able to punch through that tradition and explode on the scene closer to launch.
38 Studios has been downright cryptic when it comes to talking about their game. I think that’s wise, especially if their game is uniquely different as they say. They’re in control of their product, nobody is reacting to any given feature and making assumptions based on current games.
Too many MMORPGs lately have been chasing the pot-o-gold that World of Warcraft revealed. There’s been this widespread theory that if you slap the right elements together you’ll dominate the world. And that’s how the current crop of games have been made, by “listening to the fans” and maybe a bit of “market research“. Some of them haven’t been half bad, but most have had a core of promise that failed to deliver. The more corporate attempts have been soulless. At best, they’ve provided a decent world in the same model as WoW.
Maybe, just maybe, 38 Studios is trying to make their own game without being too influenced from outside sources that would shape their product into more of the same.
What we know
We know it’s an MMORPG and we know Curt Shilling loved Everquest, so he’s likely to give a few nods in that direction. We know it’s fantasy, they’ve made it clear they don’t think fantasy is over-saturated at all, they argue it just needs better games. We know they’re in it for the long haul and they’ve got a business plan. Curt Shilling is a crafty guy, savvy and relentless, he has all the elements for a good businessman. I know that and I don’t even watch baseball.
I think Keen is looking forward to this game as much as I am. He recognizes Curt Shilling has amassed a significantly talented workforce to make the game Curt Shilling wants to play. He’s hired from the top down, respecting that he doesn’t know the industry, so he started with people that do. He also created his talent team around R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane, two names that are bound to turn heads when they do need to hype, but are also likely to give his story and art direction a strong focus.
There are some parallels here to BioWare. Good businessmen that started a game company to make games they wanted to play, in a non-corporate way. A deep respect of the RPG genre, but a desire to produce unique changes to that genre. Hiring the right people for an MMORPG and letting them do what they do well.
I’m hoping 38 Studios keeps their mouths shut until they’re good and ready. If all goes well, Copernicus could arrive as a unique, complete and compelling game. Sure that’s vague, but if it’s true we’ll all play it.
Level Editing
I was going to dig into the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools (Beta), but Michelle pointed out Steam has a sale on Unreal Tournament 3 this week (10 bucks before Sunday). So here I am, downloading UT3 Black and reading up on the latest corresponding map editor.
I couldn’t help myself and loaded up good ol’ Quake to peruse my old maps, at least one of which I’ll probably port to UT3. Damn it’s a rush to jump into Quake Deathmatch again. I’m gonna have to setup Painkeep at some point too.
I’m no Levelord, but I have fun with it.
Convenience Trumps All
There are essentially five driving forces for MMORPG players. These games, by their very nature have numerous (or at least multiple) activities and each player is motivated by the following:
- Progression – Experience to level, or obtaining gear at Endgame.
- Rewards – Gear, currency, notoriety or any other status-symbol or in-game possession.
- Fun Factors – Is the activity just plain fun to do, or awe-inspiring in some way?
- Competition – Many players are keen to compete and compare their performance with other players / groups / guilds / factions.
- Social Interaction – At the core of any multiplayer RPG is the basic social satisfaction from hanging out with your friends & guildmates, teaming up in a cooperative way and meeting / interacting with new people. Human desire to be accepted as part of a group should not be overlooked.
Each of these can motivate players in different directions. For instance, an activity could be fun, but the players may feel discouraged if it doesn’t provide experience. It’s great to be social, but if solo’ing is the fastest way to level, players will shun teaming up.
The first two motivations can be considered incentives in their purest form, in a way they are both rewards although it’s important to separate them because one will motivate a certain type of player whereas the other may not.
In an interview with Ten Ton Hammer, Mark Jacobs repeated an established adage in MMORPGs:
[quote=Mark Jacobs]
Players are always going to look for the quickest way to level. That’s true for any MMO. Any developer that doesn’t see that hasn’t been paying enough attention.
[/quote]
I’d call this more truthiness than truism, because it’s missing an important element–
Add Convenience
Convenience is the sixth motivator and it’s the trump card. You can take any combination of the above and mix in convenience and whatever the activity is, it will go over in a big way. One example is if quests are trackable on a map, most players will naturally complete the quests that are closest rather than any sort of story-progression.
Players will always find the shortcuts.
For Warhammer, Scenarios match multiple categories, they’re certainly competitive and fun and if the queues are short the experience is good. But above all, they’re super-convenient.
Mythic may try to nerf Scenarios, or more likely boost the incentives for other activities, but the fact of the matter is that they need to boost all of the motivators, not just exp and rewards if they hope to make their game more well rounded and get players deeper into RvR and Public Quests.
