First, if you’re coming to this blog, you are most likely already totally up to speed, but if you’re not, here’s the site that includes character silhouettes, and the press information.  Also, here’s a gamespot interview with Jack about the game, and at the time of this writing, provides most of the information about the game.  And from the twitter responses I saw, and the comments at the massively post, everyone seems to be completely and utterly disappointed.  What gives?

Well first, it’s hard to figure out exactly what this game is.  That alone is reason enough for most people to be suspicious.  But going on what we’ve been given..

JE: This is a tough question, if only because it presupposes an organization along traditional MMORPG lines (that is, a large persistent zone with many instances connected to it). This is a co-op RPG, so comparing it to other RPGs such as the original Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion would be more appropriate. Some locations are public; some are just for teammates. But it isn’t quite the setup of a big zone with side instances.

Okay so you know co-op RPG’s are actually pretty damn fun.  Get together with your friends, grab your amazon or your barbarian, and kill a friday night wading through hordes of monsters picking and picking up phat loot!  What’s not to like about that?  The guys at runic games announced Torchlight II as a cooperative RPG and people are ecstatic over it!  In fact to me this is exactly what this sounds like – Diablo.  I mean  seriously people, do you think it’s a coincidence that the very first piece of media for the game is a silhouette of five strong classic archetypes? 

The interesting thing here is I think if Cryptic had announced this very title for a completely new property, similar to Torchlight, or even Champions, then we would be ecstatic.  Okay maybe not ecstatic, because Cryptic’s record is a bit spotty these days, but at least not dismayed. 

And or course the reason for the dismay is that of all the fantasy worlds out there crying to have a large, persistent, online game set within their environs, for many of us Forgotten Realms cries the loudest.  Seriously, there is so much content.  Yes, the picture to the left is a picture of my own campaign addition that is like 10 wall-sized maps and a 200 page booklet describing in mind numbingly excruciating detail the environs for a single city.  And it’s only the tip of an iceberg of campaign supplements, novels, and literally reams upon reams of content already created for a world that for many of us is every bit as much of a home as the Prancing Pony ever was.  And so when we hear that finally there is something new being created in a world we had all but given up hope of revisiting again – when we hear that it’s some sort of small, “travel with my friends CRPG”, well we can’t help but feel a bit – disappointed.

And so to myself, and to all other that share my feelings, I will only say – let’s give this thing a chance.  CRPGS are a lot of fun.  And while this may not be the grand, epic-in-scale persistent world that we long for, it still just might turn out to be a pretty damn good game.  And who knows, who is to say they aren’t considering something larger, and more grandiose in scale, but are building something smaller to see how good the reaction is.  After all, MMO’s ain’t cheap to build you know.  So it just might behoove us to grouch a little less, and to play a little more, in the hopes that one day, when we hit the ‘M’ key while riding across the white sands of The Sword Coast, we are greeted with this.

And as a final cautionary note – at least this *is* an CRPG.  Let us speak not of the travesty of a game that those of us wanting something set in the world of Shadowrun received..

Thoughts on the new genre?  Are you not dreading it and are actually excited?  Speak up!

Well if know me at all and have read my blogs you shouldn’t be the least bit surprised to hear I think it’s an extraordinarily good idea.  I’m not going to go into great detail here why I like this billing model so far.  I have done so in a previous post, and the reasons I expressed their hold just as true today as they did in October of last year.  It is somewhat gratifying to know that when I stated unequivocally this was the future of MMO’s nine months ago, I wasn’t perhaps completely off my rocker.

Rather, I want to talk a short bit about perceptions.  Because as I read through a number of people’s tweets and posts, I’m picking up on a collection of presumptions with respect to the free to play billing model, and I personally, at least, think the reality is slightly different than the perception.

Going F2P?  But I thought they were doing well!!

This one seems really common.  The perception that somehow a subscription model game adopting a F2P business model must be in dire straits.  And this perception is only increased by virtue of the fact that Dungeons and Dragons Online, when it went F2P, was indeed a rapidly fading blip on the MMO radar.  But here’s the thing – and mind you, this is speaking strictly from my own speculation – I dont’ have any inside knowledge to Turbine’s numbers.  I suspect Turbine’s subscription rate was adequate.  Perhaps not stellar, or even as much as they would love to have, but almost certainly enough to cover their costs, and to continue to fund development.  But what the developers saw over at DDO was how much the influx of new players helped the game.  And this is I think is the single most important reason for using the poorly named F2P model.  It’s not that the game is really F2P, it’s that by reducing the entry barrier to your game, you get a sizeable population of people moving through your low level content, and suddenly the game doesn’t feel empty and dying, it feels alive and vibrant.  And to a player that’s checking out your game for the first time, this is extraordinarily important.  And for myself, the last time I played LOTRO some months back, quite a number of the lower level zones (outside of Brie) felt rather devoid of life.  So I don’t think it’s that LOTRO was necessarily doing bad or even hurting, but rather DDO’s experience taught them how many more players they can bring to the game if they reduce the entry barrier.

Holy smokes the game will be full of free-loading asshats bogging down the servers!

Well this will almost certainly be true the first month or so after release.  That is, the bogging down the servers at least.  But that’s a hardware problem and one that can be solved, and it’s one you want to have as a MMO developer.  So I firmly believe over time the flow of new people to the game will stabilize, and Turbine will get enough servers online to handle the loads.  So what about the asshats?  Well my own experience has been that the ratio of asshats to helpful players – the general quality of the community for any MMO – has never been a function of the billing model, but rather just a function of the game’s general population.  I find the game with the single largest ratio of idiots to helpfuls is the most popular subscription model game in the world – WoW.  When your community is small, or your game is secular and niche, sure it’s easy for it to be friendly because everyone there is there to help and encourage others to play.  But as the popularity of the game increases, you get an increase of people whom feel entitled to be there – people that for whatever reason feels the game owes them their playtime.  So yes as you see more players in LOTRO, you quite likely will also find an increase in assholes.  But this comes as a function of the game’s general population, and would be the case regardless of whether the game was F2P or subscription.  The nice thing about an increase in population is that if there are more people playing, you’re more likely to find a community of like-minded gamers within that population than you would be otherwise.  Whether you are looking for a hardcore progression raiding guild, or a hard core role-play guild, or one that does both – you’re just going to have a better chance of that with more people in the game.

Crazy company store shenanigans means outrageous prices for Sparkly Ponies!

So certainly WoW’s recent expansion into luxury RMT’s, quickly followed by EQ2 doing the exact same thing, has left a very bad taste in a lot of people’s prices about any game that is using company stores to augment their business model.  And to this I can only say – yeah, you’re right.  But whether your want to call it corporate greed or smart business savvy, I don’t think you can blame a company for making products people clearly want and are willing to pay for.  Especially when you consider they (the MMO developers so far) are continuing to make these things completely optional, luxury items.  I can offer up this bit of perspective though, from my extensive time in DDO.  Cash stores are not just for luxury items.  In fact, I’ve bought a number of things from the company store in DDO, and not one of them has been a fancy hat or a sparkly pony.  What did I buy?  Well there the kinds of things I talked about that I as a player am likely to spend money on in an F2P game.  I bought consumables to make my play experience easier, that augmented my solo playstyle, and I bought content – in the form of adventure packs – that if I were subscribing I would get for free, but as a F2P player the one time purchase allows me to play more, without having to commit to playing always.

And ultimately, that’s what this billing model brings to the table.  More choices to the player.  As a new player, I can now choose to check out the game and see if I like it without committing $50.00 to Gamestop, and then once I am playing, I can choose to pay as I go, picking and choosing the content I want to consume, or I can choose to commit to a full subscription, and get it all.  And in the end, anything that offers the player’s more choices, is in my book, good.

Thoughts and comments?  Offer them up!

But soon  we gathered our forces, and moved through the story, leaving the serene fields of pre-searing Ascalon and stepping into the rubble and destruction of a kingdom in ruin.  We all gathered on the steps, took the prerequisite screenshots, and then set about outfitting our characters with armor and weapons from our storage bins and the crafters and merchants in Ascalon.

For me though, the pleasant surprise I had came some time after the group had mostly disbanded and gone to bed.  For I decided that, given the abundance of Mesmers I seemed to be encountering, perhaps another DPS agent in the field might not be a bad thing.  I really wanted to play an assassin, but getting one from the Shing Jea Monastery all the way over to post-seared Ascalon was going to require no small amount of cash and expenditure of time – far more than I deemed worth it.  So I created a ranger in Prophecies, and set about leveling her to the appropriate level for her to join the others in post-seared.  I wanted her to have as many skills as possible for the trip, so I spent some time on the wiki seeing where to go to make sure I didn’t miss any, and it was in the exploration for those skills that I made a pleasant surprise.  For tucked away on the far side of a sleepy little fishing village, way down in the southern most parts of Regent Valley, I encountered a stalwart fellow standing in front of his house by the name of Aidan.  And it was in seeing him that I broke into a huge smile.

I of course, had seen Aidan many times before.  I’ve never played a great deal of the Prophecies’ campaign, but Aiden is one of the many NPC hirelings that stand around waiting to be asked to accompany you in Factions and Nightfall.  And while I was familiar with some of the lore for some of the more notable NPC’s, such as Cynn, and Eve (each covergirls at different times for Prophecies box art), and of course Mhenlo, I honestly had never even known Aiden had a background.  I had always just assumed he was one of the numerous ‘Henchmen’ available for hire.  And for me, that is the beauty of Guild Wars.  Because Aiden could have been just a henchman.  ArenaNet could very easily have just created some NPC’s, given them names out of a phonebook, placed them in town, and the vast majority of the players would never know the difference.  It certainly doesn’t have any effect on game play. So the trainer in the village could have been just any nameless NPC.  And the henchmen that you find later in Kaineng City could be just any other nameless NPC.  But by combining the two – by starting a line with a character at the beginning of the game, and then drawing that line throughout the campaign, as they have done with so many characters – I feel that much more connected to the world they have created.

Because here I was, standing in this remote corner of the world at the very beginning of a game that was built over five years ago, and learning that not only does this character have a history, and a story, but the game allows me to be a part of his history.  My ranger and he stood there, before a time of trouble he has yet to experience, he beseeching me to show him I was worthy of the skills he was about to impart upon me.

And ArenaNet does this time and time again with many of their NPC’s.  There are even lore books you can acquire that open up quests and allow you to go back in time and assist a notable NPC with should important part of their past.  Another great example is Zho.  When I first encountered Zho she was first a trainer, and then later an NPC henchman.  And at all times, Zho wears an eyepatch.  Much later in the game, in Eye of the North, you are allowed to face her in combat, and if you win, you are awarded with a journal.  The journal tells a detailed story about how she came to lose the eye, and actually opens up a quest line for obtaining and hatching your own black moa chick. 

In all of these places, ArenaNet could have just used nameless or generic NPC’s.  And many MMO designers do exactly that, because I think they fail to realize that the world is more that just the sum of its parts.  That it’s not just about crafting and abilities and combat and pvp and quests.  And it’s easy to say “oh well YEAH we all know story is important!” it’s not just about having story, but by how you present it.  Background and lore for your world doesn’t have to be painstakingly spelled out in wall-of-text form through a series of dull quests the player is just going to click through so he can see the “objective” line on the right side of his screen. 

By creating characters – and letting players discover the nature and history of those characters, bit by bit, as they progress through the game – then in the end, the players actually do start to feel like they’re doing more than just collecting Murloc Eyes or killing ten rats.  In the end, players start to feel like they’re actually helping people get through a difficult time.  And ultimately, as a designer, that is the holy grail.

So I killed the ten rats (in this case aloe husks) he asked me to kill using the skills he taught me.  But I was glad to do it.  Because I knew that even though my ranger Kerelyn will face much difficulty in the days ahead in post-searing ascalon – so will the trainer from whom she learned her skills.  And later in their virtual lives they will encounter each other again, and he will have his own stories to tell.

There’s no comparison!

So one of the things I learned back in my days with the team at Ensemble, when we were pushing new titles to Microsoft, is that the marketing guys in Microsoft were greatly concerned with what they call “comps”.  A comp is a “comparable product”, and it’s used to gauge everything about the likelihood of success for a new endeavor – from feature set, to how many they think the market will bear to – oh yes – asking price.  Now, I’m not an economist – I’m not really even a business “guy”.  But I can say with confidence that, at least within the gaming and entertainment industry – comps rule pricing.  The price that you pay for something is ruled almost entirely by how much you, as a consumer, have already learned to expect to pay for it.  Console games cost $60.00 US, new.  PC Games cost $50.00 US, new.  The typical monthly subscription for an MMO is $15.00 US.  A movie ticket is $7.50, US, and $10.00 for 3D (Thank you James Cameron. :/).  Now prices vary from region to region, but for the most part, they are capped by people’s expectations.  To give you an idea just how strongly expectations dictate price, consider that the average price of a new video game has not changed since 1996, despite the skyrocketing costs of game production.

So guess what – in the brave new world of virtual goods, there are no comps.  This means that producers are pretty much free to charge what they want.  The average consumer has no expectation of what something like six bag slots or a virtual steed or new hair for their character should cost.  The only limit upon the price of a virtual good is what they are willing to part with.  And guess what – it turns out consumers are willing to part with quite a bit to get something they want.  And what’s more, right now not only are there no real good comparisons from which consumers can use to base their decisions, but the comps pricing is being set by those producers.  For instance, there is already an expectation of what you would expect to buy a new pet for in WoW – it’s about $10.00 a pet.  If Blizzard were to release a new pet for sale and charge $15.00 for it, you would say NO WAY that’s a rip-off, because you already know Blizzard Pet’s are “worth” about $10.00 each! 

Competitive markets can’t exist if I own the world!

So a popular cry by those that aren’t happy about where the virtual goods pricing comparisons are being set is to “vote with your wallet”!  Don’t buy those goods!  Well if you’re thinking you might have some influence on those prices by “not buying” one you’re sadly mistaken.  Because for each of you that stand proudly by your convictions and thumb your nose at those ridiculous prices, there are a hundred – hell perhaps a thousand – who will gladly part with that money to get something they want.  The only thing that will drive that price down is for someone else to release a competing product at a lower price.  And as another company can’t create mounts within World of Warcraft, the chances of that happening are pretty slim.  Interestingly enough, the degree to which a publisher can control the prices of their virtual content are directly related to the extent to which their players are committed to their game.  People that play only World of Warcraft are completely and utterly at the mercy of Blizzard and Activision for the pricing comps of their virtual products.  But people that play a number of different MMO’s are actually going to have a broader perspective of comparative pricing, and consequently those consumers are going to have a better set of comps by which to judge a product.  If I buy a content pack in Dungeons and Dragons Online for $4.99, and then Cryptic tries to charge me $10.00 for a “new zone and some quests”, in my mind those products are roughly equal – I play both games about the same amount, and in my mind I’m buying roughly the same thing from both companies – only one is charging me $5.00 and the other twice that amount.  Guess which I purchase?  But for those that play WoW and only WoW, well if Mythic started selling “celestial dinosaurs” for in-game mounts at $5.00 a piece, those consumers are oblivious to the fact that other companies are charging less for comparable products. 

I think this alone is a pretty compelling reason to start broadening your entertainment perspective.  Because the more committed you are to any single game for all of your virtual world play time, the more beholden you will be to their virtual good pricing structure.  And make no mistake – virtual good marketplaces are here to stay as a permanent part of your game.

It will get better

Back in the late 80’s, before the world wide web had taken off, there were a number of companies competing with each other to be your “home information provider”.  CompUServe was the most famous of these, but several players were quickly entering the market.  “The Source”, “GEnie” – all of these offered services where you could connect with your modem, and download news, movies, shopping information – even play games!  There were no prior products or services anywhere like this – that is, there were no comps.  And those companies charged by the connect hour.  The established competitive price and structure was something like $12.00 per connect hour at a slow speed, and $24.00 per connect hour at a reasonable speed.  And a lot of people paid those prices, because we wanted the service, and there was  nothing else comparable (including yours truly – at different points I subscribed to all of them).  And then a company called Prodigy came along, backed by IBM and Sears, and they said “Screw that.  You connect as much as you like, and you’ll only pay $10.00 a month!”  And they crushed the competition.  The market was drastically changed.  The other providers could only either go-along, or go out of business.

You’re already seeing an erosion of the price point in the “average monthly subscription”.  MMO’s like DDO, Wizardry 101, and Free Realms are changing peoples expectations about what they should pay per month for an online game.  Over time, in the broader market of virtual goods as a whole, you’ll see the same thing happen.  Someone will come along and either offer these services for free, or bundle them up with something else you want, or come up with some other pricing structure we haven’t seen yet, and then the idea of paying $25.00 for a virtual steed or $10.00 for a virtual make-over really will sound ludicrous – just as insane as paying $24.00 per connect hour to connect to the internet would seem now.

But for now, It’s a scary time

So right now, if you’re participating in the virtual goods marketplace, you have the luxury of knowing that you’re one of the very first to participate in an exciting marketplace where the laws have yet to really be set.  You should also know though, that if history is any teacher, you’re likely paying the most anyone will ever pay for these types of goods and services – because over time, they can only go down.  Blizzard knows this.  Allods Online knows this.  Zynga and Playfish know this.  So a few years from now, when all the virtual steeds are free, don’t beat yourself up too badly knowing you were one of the ones that ponied up $25.00 for one. 

After all, it’s a brave new world!

First, I want to be clear on semantics.  When I say social media games, I’m essentially talking about facebook games.  Farmville, Mafia Wars, the games that are getting the lion’s share of attention from both press and VC funding these days.  And when I say MMO’s, I’m talking about old school, full blown virtual worlds with stand-alone clients.  Browser launched or not, I’m talking about DDO, WoW, Free Realms, etc.  There’s a lot of blurring of the lines these days, with elements of each bleeding over into the other, but for the purposes of this discussion, those are the semantics I’m choosing.

I talked earlier about how I get that social media games are here to stay, and even though a lot of us old school gamers and developers may not care for them all that much, we should still practice calm.  And I also talked about how I’m not really all that interested right now in building social media games.  But that hasn’t stopped me from playing them – checking them out, and thinking about them.  Now if you’ve been to any conference or symposium in the past two years you’ve heard all about the key to these games is the virality of them.  That they must involve means of pulling your friends together to assist you, and the more friends you get playing the game, the more people are playing the game, and the more people playing the game the more likely they are to buy things, and so the more money you make.  And while I certainly think this is true, I got to thinking about how much this sounded like the old school developers of MMO’s.  And then I realized that social media games *are* working around social interactions, but they’re doing it in a slightly different way.  And it’s very profitable: They allow you to buy your way out of social dependencies.

Time for some history.  Back in the golden days of MMO’s, before WoW came along, the golden rule of MMO development was that social bonds were crucial.  It was a well understood (and completely true) notion that the games players formed social bonds in were the games players stayed in.  And as we all billed on a month to month basis, we wanted players to stay as long as possible.  So the idea was to create situations that encouraged (or more often required) social interaction as much as possible.  So the way MMO designers like Brad McQuaid and Raph Koster answered these problems back in the day was that they said “after you’ve been introduced to the game and have pretty much learned how to play it, we’re going to make things hard – so you’re forced to group together to progress.  And we’re going to create interdependencies on things you build or craft – so if you want to make something, you must interact with other players to make it.  And by forcing players to play together, players will create social bonds, and by forming social bonds they’ll stay in the game.  And to a certain extent this worked.

But then in 2004 some very smart people over at Blizzard, whom loved these kinds of games and wanted to make their own, realized, simply, that a lot of people just didn’t like being forced to group with others to progress.  So they came up with a solution.  They said, “okay, social bonds are good, and we’re not sure about this, so we’re going to create some content that requires people to group in order to progress.  But what if we just allow people to play our game, without help, from beginning to end.  What if we provide a development path that allows even traditional support roles to progress on their own, all the way to the very end of the game.”  And guess what.  Millions more people loved this.  They paid their monthly dues and they didn’t have to group, and in fact it was often faster and more efficient not to group, WoW pretty much crushed every other MMO known to man.  And immediately what you saw was entire games scrambling and tearing things up at the root to realize this new design paradigm – that it was better to just let people play.

Now, imagine for a moment if those clever folks at Blizzard had come up with a different solution.  What if they’d said this:  You can download and play World of Warcraft completely for free.  No monthly dues whatsoever.  And you get into the game, and for much of the game, you can play quite nicely by yourself.  But occasionally things are going to get hard, and you’re going to need friends in order to progress.  No worries, gather up some of your friends, and get to it.  Or, if you like.. for a very small one time charge of $5.00, you can progress completely on you’re own!   All you have to do is click this button in-game and we’ll bill the credit card whose information we already have on file and you can complete the entire instance on your own!  AND, you’ll get the exact same items at the end of the instance that your friends whom worked together did.  Now, in 2004 Blizzard might have been run out on rails for doing this. But if you did this today, it would be absolutely 100% successful.  How do I know?  Because this is exactly what social media games do.

Social Media games don’t rely on you being social to make their money.  Rather, they rely on the fact that you don’t want to have to socialize to progress, and you’re willing to pay to avoid it.  Social Media games set up complex interdependencies that require cooperation – granted, asynchronous cooperation, but nevertheless cooperation – in order to progress.  In exactly the same way MMO’s did 10 years ago.  But the difference now, is they allow you to spend real money to bypass those interdependencies altogether.  So you can ask for bricks from your friends, or you can spend farmbucks and buy the bricks yourself.  And of course, to get farmbucks, you have to buy them with real money, or spend weeks and months in the game waiting for the slow trickle of the occasional farmbucks to accumulate.  Now of course there are still millions of player buying vanity items and spending money pink bales of hay or better clothes for their avatar.  And companies like Zynga and Playdom aren’t offering up any breakdowns on things like what percentage of people spend money on vanity items versus game progression items.  But when I look across my fellow player’s farms and I see the kinds of things that they have, and I think about the things that I would be most likely to want to spend my money on — well it’s things that I could use to progress right away.   Things that I wouldn’t have to spam my friends to ask for help on.  Because I don’t like spamming my friends.  I don’t like asking for help, it’s uncomfortable.  And if I could pay a small amount to just continue playing – well that’s sorely tempting.

The other MMO mechanic of course that is being bypassed through real money transactions is downtime.  Back in the day, downtime was seen as a primary way of (1) keeping player’s in game, and (2) again, forcing them to interact.  People sitting around “studying spells” or waiting for hit points to slowly regen would fill the time talking to each other, or so the theory went.  And again, forming social bonds.  And today, in social media games, again, we see downtime being used as a mechanic that you can buy your way around.  Play a little bit, now you have to wait until tomorrow to play some more.  OR..spend a little bit of money, and you can keep playing right now!

If there aren’t MMO’s out there already re-working their billing model to account for this, I guarantee you you’ll be seeing them coming very soon.  Because social media games have taught us that people are willing to pay, and to pay big, to actually avoid the social interactions that these games tout as key to their success.

Comments and thoughts?  Send them up!

And I realized that Mr. Jenning’s post over at MMORPG actually summed up my own feelings on the current state of the industry pretty succinctly.

Simply this: what we’re seeing isn’t an extinction-level event. It’s growth. The market is growing, past where one size fits all. And part of this means that is in growing in areas that traditional gamers (such as I, and presumably you) have little interest.

Farmville has 80 million players. That is… quite a lot. But it does not mean that World of Warcraft’s 8+ million players suddenly stopped raiding Icecrown Citadel and got to work on their virtual gardens. It does not mean that 30 million Xbox 360 owners are going to suddenly trade in their consoles and HD TVs for a netbook that can run Mafia Wars.

It means that game developers have the opportunity to reach people – and there are quite a lot of them – who aren’t interested in raiding Icecrown Citadel, or upgrading to a 1080p TV. It means that we have the opportunity to make more money, make different games, and reach more eyes. It means that the industry is working.

Nicely said Mr. Jennings.  I couldn’t agree more.  Also, as I was re-reading these rather grim comments from a VC funding panel over at Gamasutra, I came across what I thought was a particularly insightful comment.  It was from one Jacek Wesolowski, and here is the relevant bit:

I think what we’re looking at is a bit like the story of cinema vs. television. Cinema is all about large, complex spectacle. A single project may cost hundreds of millions of [insert your favourite currency here]. In addition to large businesses, there’s also indie cinematography that does essentially the same, if on a somewhat smaller scale. Interestingly, cinema is mostly about direct payment – if you want to watch a show, you need to buy a ticket.

Television is all about news, game shows, episodic fiction. It’s bite-sized content. And it sustains itself with advertisement and subscription. Projects may cost a few million, sometimes more, but they’re generally smaller and more disposable. There are less "shows" and more "events".

The point is, cinema and television coexist, and they offer business and creative models that complement each other, rather than competing. They operate side by side, in large part because they cater to different needs of the audience. Whether or not new technologies are making the old system obsolete is another matter.

Gaming, and game development, are growing in some very new and very exciting ways.  Social Media gaming is not going away.  In fact, it’s actually been here for years.  It’s just needed the right platform and the right billing model to explode into the limelight. 

Here’s a story for you.  Just a little less than ten years ago I sat in on a panel at GDC with some of the multiplayer gaming giants, and they were talking about the future of multiplayer gaming, and specifically billing models.  I think Richard Garriot was there, a guy from Everquest (I can’t recall who), and amongst these virtual world alumns was a woman from America Online.  She represented the casual gaming market, and ad generated revenue.  And everyone’s talking subscription numbers, and she had a number that quite frankly stunned the audience.  Because at a time when the best virtual worlds subscriber count was in the hundreds of thousands, America Online was recording close to eight million people a day playing solitaire and bejeweled.  Now just think if attitudes towards virtual goods purchases were then what they are now.  America Online would be one helluva bigger company, I promise you that. 

Facebook has provided the first large enough platform, and attitudes towards virtual goods have evolved enough, that we’re seeing the right confluence of conditions for the perfect storm of the explosion of social media gaming popularity.  And yes, the storm will subside.  But in its wake gaming and game development will be changed forever. 

Which leads me to the next part of my post.  The rest of this post is less about my analysis of the industry, and more about Windstorm Studios.  But it’s my blog and I’m allowed to pontificate from time to time. 

Why in the hell aren’t you making an iPhone or Facebook game?

Which is a pretty damn fair question, and quite honestly something I struggle with every day.  And my reasons are as much personal, as they are economical, which as any sensible entrepreneur will tell you is no way to run a business. 

Right now, if you’re an independent game developer looking to bootstrap a company, there has never been a better time – provided you are creating iPhone games, or creating a company that makes Facebook games.  Period.  Right now I currently have no plans to do either (Note I said currently.. even I can only stand against the harsh winds of economic reality for so long).  Here’s why.

Virtual worlds are not dead – but they are changing
In 2008 and 2009 there were a number of really high profile, expensive, disappointments in the MMO world.  The two largest of these being Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.  These weren’t (and still aren’t) by any means failures, but these were really large, really expensive titles to build that didn’t do anywhere near what their developers and publishers hoped they would do.  And beyond those, there have been a number of other MMO launches that have been, if not failures, at least not as successful as their developers would like. 

But beyond those stories of titans falling, there are some other stories of real successes.  And those come from developers that have realized how the audience is changing, how expectations are changing, and how it’s more important than ever to reduce barriers to your game.  I think there are enormous opportunities for a studio, even for an MMO, if you are willing to start small, keep the costs low, and target your audience in the right manner.  Of course, that last bit is the key.

Everyone says that browser-based is the way to go, so why do they keep buying apps??

Right now there’s a huge amount of talk about building browser-based MMO’s, browser-based games, and browser-based experiences.  Here’s a tip for you.  By far and large, people don’t want browser-based applications,because for the most part they suck.  Don’t believe me?  Given then the choice between using twitter through the web, and a specific twitter based client, which do you choose?  On your phone, if you can choose between accessing a service through the web, or accessing an application built specifically for that service, which do you use?  People don’t want browser-based applications – what they want is what browser-based applications give them, which is instant access through something their already using.  The browser just happens to be the vehicle we’re all using to get to our information.  Apple already knows this.  This is why they won’t support flash.  They don’t want you surfing the web using crappy flash applications to consume your media.  They want you to consume your media through user-developed applications that provide a more targeted experience, upon which they provide and control the platform of delivery.  And collect a nice commission off of as well. 

So I’m not pursuing flash-based development and chasing the golden browser-based goose because I honestly think you’ll see the pendulum swing more and more back towards actual applications.  What will be important is giving million of users access to your application though, which is why I think technologies like Facebook Connect and Unity’s browser-based launcher, and Instant Action’s imbed technology are absolutely key.  There is, by the way, some evidence that I’m not entirely off my rocker in this.  Zynga has already launched Farmville.com, a standalone web-based portal to their game. It’s not an application per se, but does show their desire to get you to come to their site to play, rather than just hang out at Facebook.  After of course, they’ve got you hooked through Facebook.   And if you look at City of Eternals, you’ll see a game that is also working on the transition, by providing a gateway through Facebook, and a standalone application for those players that want more.

I don’t want to make American Idol

And so this last reason, well this is pretty much just a personal reason.  But I think it’s important as well.  I worked at Ensemble Studios for close to ten years.  For the vast majority of that time, I worked on RTS’s.  I gained an extraordinary amount of experience in game development, and worked with some of the best talent in the industry, making absolute triple A games.  I put my heart and soul into some of those games, and yeah, we worked some damn long hours.  I mean, for two of those games I was the guy that was in charge of pathing.  Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in charge of pathing for an RTS?  After Age of Mythology my wife said I was so hard to get along with that she forbid me from ever taking the job of pathing in an RTS again.  And I did.  Right up until the point where they asked me to do it again for Halo Wars.  But I digress.  The thing is, I was never really all that into RTS’s. I enjoy them, and I used to play them quite a bit, back in the day.  But they’re not my passion.

So  when Microsoft closed us down and I decided to start my own studio, I decided then that Windstorm Studios would make games I was passionate about.  Because, quite frankly, if you’re even a little bit talented, there are plenty of games out there for you to work on that you don’t care one whit about.  But then iPhone gaming really took off and now social media gaming is exploding and I’m faced again with the prospect of building games I really don’t much care to play because well, I most likely could be more successful doing it. 

But that’s not why I started this company.  And that’s not to say that things can’t and won’t change.  I continue to play close attention to social media gaming and to play them and try them out.  And if I figure a way to build a game that I think is fun to play and feels more like my kind of game and yet still take advantage of this current gold rush, well I’ll probably follow up on it.

But for now, we’re building worlds.  Wish us luck.

Games I Hated, and then Loved

Champions Online serves to remind me of something that I too often forget.  And that is that, with the exception of World of Warcraft, just about every one of the MMO’s that I’ve come to consider some of my most favorite games – top of the line MMOs – are games that I initially didn’t much like.  When I first placed City of Heroes, I remember I loathed their random mission location distribution over the entirety of a zone.  What idiot designer thought it would be okay to have a level 3 player playing dodge/skip/flee around red and purple conned mobs in order to get to their level 3 mission door! And their contact system made it next to impossible to allow you and a friend to follow the same story arc at the same time.  And don’t even get me started on Perez Park, which they through you into at the tender age of level 7.

And I still have a review I wrote in 2005 on Guild Wars after my first night in the game.  And I’m here to tell you that review is pretty scathing.  Of course you couldn’t jump, everyone hated that.  But more than that, I didn’t really care for Guild Wars’ “Dungeon Siege” style zone design, where you walked along the road until bad things popped out of the ground or aggroed you, you killed them, then continued down the road to the next mob of mobs.  And at level 6, when I first got to post-seared Ascalon, and this beautiful game I had been playing turned downright ugly, and I died over and over and over again trying to solo the instances because the game had never taught me that it *expected* (even demanded) you to fill your group up with henchmen at all times, well I walked away vowing to never come back. 

But I did come back, (granted it wasn’t until much later) and I came to absolutely love Guild Wars and I still play it to this day.  The same is true for City of Heroes – I have a level 50 in CoH and a level 42, both achieved before they broke the game with custom mission AOE grinding.  The same is true for Lord of the Rings Online, and Everquest II. 

So what is it? What is it about MMO’s that for so many of them I’m turned off initially, but then can find something later to enjoy, and even dig into, and stay with it.  Am I just a naturally forgiving, second-chance kind of guy?  Not so much.  But here’s what I do think it is.

MMO’s are like Girlfriends – without the Sex

More than any other game genre, I think we approach MMO’s with a very specific idea of what we want that game to be.  Unless you’ve never played any other MMO before the game you’re about to play (an increasingly rare individual these days), then you go into the game with a pretty clear collection of game conventions, playstyles, and content that you are expecting from the game and want the game to present to you.  This is true whether you admit it to yourself or not.  And also I think, more-so than any other genre, this collection of expectations for the game is vastly different for each person playing the game.  Some people love the crafting and the creation, and some people hate crafting.  Some people love the social elements, and some people hate the social.  Some people want to log in and grind mobs for 20 minutes and log out, some people want a deep, engaging story, and some people want to shape and mold the world itself.

And this collection of expectations is more important for us in MMO’s than it is in any other game because with an MMO, we are eyeing this game with the prospect of a long term commitment – both in time and money.  If I think the story in a freshly launched shooter is lame, I don’t mind so much because I know I’m going to be in and out of that game in about 10 hours, tops.  And if the skirmish mode of a new RTS is unbalanced that’s okay because again short commitment, and if the campaign was great, then I got my money’s worth.  

But when we sit down to play a new MMO, rolling around the back of our head is this one fundamental question – Is this the one?  Is this where my friends will stay and play?  Does this game have everything I want, or if not everything, is what’s here at least good enough for me to want to stay?  So we have this rich collection of expectations about the game, and our criteria for success is more stringent than it is for other games. How can any game succeed under those conditions?  But here’s where it gets worse.  Here is the real shocker.

What the Developer’s Aren’t Telling You

The developers have their own idea of the kind of game they are building.  I know right?  And the thing is, it most likely isn’t exactly what you thought it was.  And to make it worse, due to a variety of factors, whether it be changing design, marketing and publishing pressure, or last minute changes due to a poor beta, in most cases the developers will not communicate to you exactly what kind of game they are building.  You will know some broad things, sure.  We know Star Wars, The Old Republic is all about the story.  Before it launched, we knew Star Trek Online was some mix of space flight and ground combat, and had lots of character customization.  And before Warhammer: Age of Reckoning launched we knew it was going to be all about the PvP.  But in none of those games did we know exactly how they were going to go about fulfilling the expectations they’d set.  But two things were still true:  the developers had their own ideas, and we had our own.   

The Key to Any Relationship – Better Communication

So, up until the game launches, I can forgive developers of not providing specifics about the game they are building because quite frankly, for the reasons I mention above and many more, until the game is launched they themselves don’t know exactly what it’s going to be.  But once the game is launched, I think this is where most developers fail.  Most MMO developers completely fail to communicate to you exactly what their game is.  And so we go into the game with a set of expectations, and these clash against the expectations the developers built around, but because we don’t know or don’t understand those expectations, we simply proclaim the game as a failure to meet our needs, and we walk away.  Whereas if we had understood better beforehand the expectations that were used in designing the game, we could adjust our own accordingly, and enjoy and appreciate the game for what it is.

In every MMO that I came back to and learned to enjoy, in every instance, I can trace it back to a point where I learned something fundamental about the game’s design that the game didn’t teach me, but that players and personal experience did.  And, having understood that, I could play the game for what it was, and stop wringing my hands over what it wasn’t.  In Guild Wars, once I learned that the game expected you to fill your group with henchmen when you walked out into a zone, I immediately started enjoying it.  In City of Heroes, when I learned the game expected you to run around those reds and purples, and even provided powers designed to assist in that, then I stopped bitching about it (mostly) and was able to enjoy the other aspects of the game.  The same was true for their contacts.  Once I read a thorough a guide on how their contact system actually worked and understood the random nature of them, I could plan around them, and voila!  Suddenly my game experience was actually fun! 

And in no game have I ever played is this more true than in Champions Online.  When I sat down to play Champions Online – what I wanted, what I expected, was a spiritual successor to City of Heroes.  And so every aspect of the game was evaluated against the criteria of how well this game provided me with that experience and built upon it.  And oh boy does Champion’s Online fail in that regard.  From a design standpoint, the similarities between City of Heroes and Champion’s Online absolutely end the moment you leave the costume designer.  When I came back to Champions Online, I came determined to try to figure out what the game actually was, and to play that game, instead of the game I wanted it to be.  And I came across this excellent guide over at Elitist Jerks.  First, if you find yourself wanting to return to Champions Online, or if you want to try it out for the first time, I absolutely recommend you read this guide from top to bottom.  About half way down, you’ll find the following expletive:  “Holy Fuck I’m only level 5 do I really have to know all this?”.  And the answer, both in the guide and me telling you – is absolutely yes!  I still think it was a terrible design choice to build a game in which you have to have such a fundamental knowledge of so many of the game’s mechanics before you make your first choices in the game, but that is the game they built.  When you visit the powerhouse for the first time and select your first own powers, you really do have to be armed with that knowledge.  But regardless of my thoughts on the design decision, that is how the game works, and I’m past that.  And now that I know how it works, I’ve built a character that is plenty playable and survivable, and I’m having fun.  Furthermore, now I’m getting into all the nuances of their power-system, and how the gear augments it, and a dozen different mechanics that weren’t explained in the game, but I’ve learned through pouring over player guides and forum posts on how they do work.  Does it suck that I had to resort to forum posts and player guides to learn how to play Champions Online?  You bet it does!  Am I having fun now though that I do know what the game is?  Definitely!

So if there are some MMO’s you’ve recently dropped because they just didn’t do it for you in the first month you played, maybe they are worth a second look.  And it might mean you have to stop looking at it in the light of it not being the game you want, but rather in the game that it is.  And to figure out what that game is, it might mean spending some time gathering information from outside the game.  While I agree it shouldn’t be that way, the reward might be that you find a game you actually do enjoy playing, even if it’s not the game you expected.

And finally, as developers, the onus is on us to do a better job.  It’s easy for me to pick on Champion’s Online, but the truth is most MMO developers are failing to inform their players exactly how their game works.  If you’re building a complex game, then don’t try to hide the complexity from the players simply by failing to tell them about it, and relying on your community to inform the players how the game really works.  Let players know what your expectations were as developers.  Most of us them are adults – they can handle the truth.

I know, long-winded again, right?  If you actually got to the bottom of this, and have your own experiences of leaving a game and then coming back to stay, and can recall exactly what it was that got you to stay the second time around, I’d love to hear them!

It’s an emergency!  You’re our only hope! Now read this wall of text!!

It started with City of Villains.  In CoV, when you created a character, you were placed.. in prison.  And there were sirens.  And flashing lights.  And smoke.  And your initial contact is.. a prisoner, in an orange jumpsuit.  You talk to him, and he tells you you’re in the middle of a prisoner breakout, and it’s every man for himself!  Make a dash for the wall!  First though, I need my pain meds. 

The point is, every visual and audio clue you have screams at you with a sense of urgency.  That this is a huge action moment!  But it is against this incredible, immediate sense of imminent peril that they then ask you to learn the game.  And to do it by performing relatively menial and chores and tasks, and by reading incredibly large volumes of text which attempt to explain the game’s very complex systems – all of them – while chaos reigns around you.  In other words, just about the worse scenario imaginable in which to learn something.

Now I know where this philosophy comes from.  It comes from what I think is a misguided attempt to correct the blasé beginnings of MMO’s of the past.  Back in the bad ‘ol days, when you created a new character in an MMO, you were essentially a farm boy with a stick.  And you were told to go out and use that stick to beat rabbits senseless until you were given a slightly bigger stick and told to go beat up wolves.  And players complained vehemently (and rightly so) that beating up rabbits with sticks wasn’t heroic.  They wanted to feel like a hero right from the get-go, they didn’t want to wade through 40 hours of play to feel like a hero, and if games wanted players to stay, well then by gawd they better let them be heroes.  So in attempt to make that better, some game designers decided that the best way to let players be a hero is to throw them smack into the middle of a dire situation.  And the player is the only person that can save the world from the dire situation.  The action gets going, you do some quests, and by the end of the action you’ve saved the day and feel like a hero.  Or at least you should.

No where is this more evident than in Champion’s Online.  You’re even given a sweeping cinematic of just how bad things are, with the city in chaos and flames, evil nasty looking bug creatures swarming over the city, and a camera fly by that drops you smack in the middle of the chaos and a voice-over that urges you to go get them hero!  No one can save them but you!  And in Star Trek Online, it’s the exact same design choice all over again.  You’re thrown smack into a pitched battle that rages across view screens against the most dangerous foes the series ever presented!  And you have to take control and save the day! 

There are a myriad of problems with this philosophy though.  The first, and foremost of which is – MMO’s are really big games.  No seriously.  Even if you’ve played them all your life, there are a lot of systems there.  And if you’ve never played one, or if you’re playing one that is significantly different from ones you’ve played before, there will be a lot of stuff to learn.  So as a designer, you don’t want to dump all the systems on top of the player at one time.  Your goal should really be to ease the player into the game, introduce the systems a little at a time, by allowing the player to achieve success using the systems you introduce, and then introduce new systems.  But this goal of easing a player into the game by allowing them to perform tasks that introduce each system one at a time flies directly in the face of a goal of throwing the players into the middle of a huge action sequence.  And this contradiction pervades every aspect of the new player experience.  Because on one hand, you’re being told in every way possible that the world is about to end and you need to get to saving it, but on the other hand, you’re being given tasks that are trivial in nature (or have enemies that have been greatly watered down — I’m looking at you “erratic borg”) because they’re intended to teach you game systems.

The situation is made even worse when you rely on text to explain the game’s systems.  Don’t get me wrong.  Text is a perfectly fine way of explaining many of the game’s systems – especially those that don’t lend themselves to demonstration by action.  How do skill points work?  What happens when I die?  What items should I sell and what should I keep?  Players will want to know these kinds of things, and you should put the answers directly in front of them, not make them dig through categories and subcategories of topics in an esoteric help system off of a menu they’ll never find.  But if you want player’s to learn those systems, to read that text, then you should provide an environment in which they feel comfortable taking the time to read that text.  And does anyone really think an environment with warning klaxons blaring, explosions going off all around you, and angry bug creatures or borg running up to you and attacking you is really the best environment to learn about how skill points work?  And if you do take the time to read all that text, and it’s okay, then you’re immediately struck with the contradiction again.  Because as a new player, if the game is telling me in every way possible that there’s imminent danger, but the game is also telling me it’s okay to take the time to read this wall of text about skill system, then I know the game is lying to me.  And suspension of belief is immediately destroyed. 

I think the best MMO’s are the ones that recognize this, and account for it.  In WoW, no matter which race you start off as, you start in a small, relatively peaceful village that is facing some relatively small perils, and you’re asked to pitch in and help the village while you learn the game and it’s systems.  In Guild Wars, you start in either a monastery, or a fishing village, or a farming community.  Again you’re asked to fight off some relatively minor threats to get the feel of combat and to give you a feeling of success.  In DDO, you start on a beach, and soon join a band of seasoned veteran NPC’s, whom teach you the game’s mechanics as you help them fight their way through a small cave complex, with the NPC’s going the really hard stuff.   In all these cases, the player is given fun things to do, but at the same time given them in an environment where they feel invited to take the time to read up on the game’s systems or to learn them as they go.  They aren’t killing rabbits with sticks.  But they aren’t being asked to save the world in the very first moments of a game in which you don’t know which end.

Thoughts?  Comments?  What do you think of Cryptic’s method of introducing you to the game.  Love it?  Hate it?  Post it up!

Now, MMO whore that I am, you might expect me to talk about what I think is going to happen with our favorite MMO’s in 2010, and our most anticipated ones to come.  However, several other bloggers have already made those predictions, and by far and large I find them to be in agreement with my own.  If you would like to know the future of your favorite MMO, I suggest you start with Petter’s excellent prediction post at Don’t Fear the Mutant.  Not only is he making his own predictions, but he in turn links several of the other more notable ones.  Nicely done Petter!  As for me, I will save you the trouble of reading yet another post that says Cataclysm will launch and it will be a huge success.

But I spend a lot of time looking at the industry as a whole, and in 2009, I spent a lot of time watching and paying attention to the melding of two industries – social media and virtual worlds.   So instead of talking just about MMO’s, I’m going to go out on a limb and talk about some industry shifts that I think will come to pass in 2010.  And of course, as I often am in these sorts of things, will most likely be completely wrong.  Nevertheless, let’s press on!

Twitter Misses its Heyday

I started using Twitter almost exactly one year ago.  And I think we can all say, without a doubt, that 2009 was the year that Twitter exploded onto the mass consumption scene.  I remember being amused as television shows such as E.T. reported on the celebrity goings ons of Ashton and Mrs. Kutcher, and showing videos I had seen 9 hours before because I followed them on Twitter.  From following live tweets from the inauguration, to listening to people that were on the ferries that loaded passengers up from the crashed plane in the Hudson, you cannot overstate the profound impact twitter has had on the way news is discovered, reported on, and disseminated.  But there is already mounting evidence of a decline in twitter use.  I fully expect this trend to continue, as twitter becomes more commercialized in its use.  As marketers start paying celebrities for their tweets, as news aggregator sites continue to flood the tweet streams with RSS feed blasts, as twitter increasingly becomes the domain of people paid to be there, the value to the common man grows less and less, until they (you and I) just stop using it.  I think twitter had the power to change the world, and in many ways it already has.  But in 2010 it will become solely the purview of paid advertisers and marketers, and thus will completely lose the value it had for the millions of us that used it to communicate with people we otherwise would never be able to communicate with.  That’s not to say it will go away, but it will become a completely different beast, and for many of us, one that isn’t nearly as useful.

Facebook Games Pop

Without a doubt, 2009 saw the explosion of casual gaming through Facebook, and a corresponding explosion of the virtual goods market. Now I don’t think Facebook gaming is going away in 2010, but I do see it evolving, and becoming something less than what it is now.  Right now, Facebook is already groaning under the weight of game generated spam.  And while there are millions of people playing, there are also millions that aren’t, and those people are tired of wading through that experience.  Facebook first tried to clean this up a bit by restructuring their interface to split your stream up between “News Feed’ and “Life feed”, to at least get the spam to a different page.  But Facebook continues to publish changes to it’s API, and while the press spin from developers on this is initially positive, these changes make the viral nature of these games, upon which they thrive on to succeed, even more difficult to accomplish.  Zynga has already launched Farmville.com, a standalone portal for their popular game Farmville.  I think companies like Zynga and Playdom would like nothing more than to take their 350 million players and put them under their own umbrella, while using the Facebook Connect API to continue to farm Facebook users for their own sites.  In the meantime, I’d be very surprised if Facebook didn’t kill the golden goose utterly by doing something like creating a virtual currency in which all games must participate in, making it even harder to monopolize virtual dollars, and losing a percentage to facebook.  Casual games and virtual goods are certainly here to stay, but if you plan on jumping on the Facebook gravy train for game development this year, think very carefully.  Next year games under Facebook will be significantly different, and the gravy train just might be drying up if you’re not already there.

“MMO” Becomes Even Harder to Define

One thing you will see in 2010, is the melding of social media and virtual worlds to an even greater extent.  In 2009 we saw a real blurring of the lines as people talked about Facebook apps as “MMOs”, while MMO pundits decried them as silly kiddy games that weren’t “really” MMO’s.  In the meantime, Susan Wu and Ohai are making *real* MMO’s playable under Facebook, so now where do you draw the line!  In 2010 your traditional 3D virtual world MMO’s will become much more social media like in their implementation (Facebook & iPhone apps to access the auction house, Fanbook pages for guilds, etc), and your social media games will become much more MMO’like in their delivery.  And RPG is finally dropped out of the nomenclature for good, as increasingly fewer and fewer massively multiplayer games have anything to do with role playing or character development, and just become about getting together and killing things. 

Every MMO Game You Play will Incorporate Virtual Goods in Some Way

Make no mistake.  Virtual goods and microtransaction are here to stay.  Some games will use them almost exclusively for their billing model, but most will combine a “velvet rope subscription model” backed up by virtual goods to provide the revenue for their endeavors.  Wizard 101 got it right coming out of the gate, and Free Realms saw the light halfway through the year by changing it’s billing model to one of “start playing for free, pay if you want to continue”.  But all of these games also offer a way to buy items in game for real money, and they aren’t just vanity items either.  Even your most beloved, hard core games will incorporate virtual goods in one way or another, and if you’re building what we used to call MMO’s in 2010, you’d best make sure you do too.

And there you go, already way over word budget, so I should stop here and start making my own plans for 2010.  There’s a few predictions for how things will go in 2010, and as the old saying goes – only time will tell.  In the meantime, feel free to post up and tell me just how crazy I am!