So by now, most everyone knows that Ensemble Studios was at one time working on an MMO.  The concept art was leaked out all over the net last year, and eventually we confirmed not only the MMO but all of our internal projects when we let the last guy from Gamasutra tour our offices.  While I wasn’t one of the original four that started the prototype, I was one of the earliest programmers brought on to help ramp the project up.  And for two years, from early 2005 to late 2007, I worked on that MMO, which was codenamed Titan.  Interesting tidbit — the project was originally codenamed Orion.  But news that we were working on an MMO called Orion was leaked to the internet.  To help dissuay the leak, we changed the project’s codename from Orion to Titan.  Though the project never saw the light of day, during the years we worked on it, we did an extraordinary amount of work.  And out of those efforts everyone involved took away some important lessons.  I plan to do a few of these types of posts, and share some of the things I learned while myself and a team of people worked to figure out how to build the perfect WoW killer. 

How about that World of Warcraft!

In 2005, pretty much all of Ensemble Studios was enthralled with World of Warcraft.  We all were playing it pretty much every night.  We were talking about it all day.  And we were, to a man, convinced we could build that game and more.  And therein lay the key.  We wanted to build that game.  I mean why wouldn’t you?  Titan was originally not even going to be a Halo MMO, but just a sci-fi MMO.  Internally we pitched it pretty much as WoW in space.  But as we all know, you have more of a chance of success for a multimillion dollar project if you can tie it to a multimillion dollar franchise, so the game very quickly became the Halo MMO.  It made sense on so many fronts.  We had a team passionate about MMO’s.. no scratch that — passionate about WoW (I’ll come back to that later), launching preproduction work on a sci-fi MMO, and Microsoft owned this IP that was rich in history, had a vibrant world, and oh yeah several million fans.  So you’d be stupid to not do the Halo MMO.  But there was a slight problem..

The team really still wanted to do WoW in space.  Above you see one of our earliest mockups.  It should be noted that one, this was a VERY early mockup, and two, that’s all it was — a mockup.  But you can see how much WoW’s influence bore on the initial design.  Everything from the layout of the interface to the interface elements themselves, to the art style of “Space Planet”, was influenced by WoW.  And it wasn’t even just the design elements.  From an artistic stand point, we really wanted to do our own highly stylized version of the Halo Universe.  And this just wasn’t from just a “let’s copy WoW” standpoint, but from the standpoint that we recognized, just as the blizzard designers did, and just as the SW:TOR designers have, a stylized art look ages much better than a realistic look.   So we were willing, and wanting, to take the Halo universe in a whole new direction, artistically speaking.

For me personally, this was probably one of the most conflicting parts of working on Titan.  Don’t get me wrong — I’d wanted to work on an MMO for as long as long as I’ve been in games, and this was the dream game of a lifetime.  But while there were a few of us that had played MMO’s before WoW, by far and large, as the team grew, most of the people on the team had never played a single MMO before WoW.  This led to a dilemma that the entire team struggled with throughout the lifetime of the project.  And it’s a dilemma I think every team out there that’s designing an MMO today has to struggle with,  and the actual point of this post, which I’m only just now actually getting around to:

How much do you copy the genre leader?

It’s teh WoW clone!!1!

I was recently reminded of just how prevalent this issue is by a recent twitter conversation regarding Runes of Magic.  They’re being somewhat blasted because of how much they apparently resemble WoW.  But those of us that play MMO’s don’t necessarily consider this a bad thing, and it was revealed to me that the developer’s readily acknowledge that they’re not only influenced by WoW, but many MMO’s. 

But how much is too much?  When does it go from “influenced by” to “plagiarized”.  And does it matter?  At the time of its launch, Dark Age of Camelot was considered by far and large to be the most successful MMO launched to date.  It was stable on launch day, and more importantly, the entire game play experience was familiar.  Familiar to anyone that had played the most successful MMO at the time, at least, which was Everquest.  DAoC owed its success largely to taking what was already out there, repeating it, polishing it, and improving up on it with it’s own take, which was an emphasis on PvP game play.  It was a formula the team would use again in 2008 for the launch of Warhammer Online.  Unfortunately, their results this time have been not quite as successful, at least judged by the standards of our time.  And interestingly enough, at least for me, a large part of the reason the game hasn’t been as successful is that it feels too derivative.  Art style, look, game play elements — through and through this game reminds me that everything here is very much exactly like what I did in WoW. 

Lord of the Rings Online is another great example.  When LOTRO release, my gawd it was so heavily derivative of WoW that I felt it differientated only in interface elements and art style (and I wasn’t that crazy about the character art!).  And if you only ever scratched the surface of Lotro, that would have been all you would have seen.  But after you play a bit, you realize there’s a ton of innovation in Lotro — from crafting to traits to monster play to achievements to fellowship abilities.  But the innovation is all wrapped nicely in the warm familiarity of WoW’s interface. 

For myself, between those two games, I’d say Lotro did a better job of embracing familiarity, while displaying innovation.  But it’s clear even those guys continue to struggle with this issue.  Next week Volume 7 Book 2 patch comes out, and enclosed within are a significant number of items brought directly over from WoW, or more importantly, from addons that have become a part of the standard gameplay in WoW. 

And copying WoW certainly doesn’t always work out.  In what is largely regarded as one of the worst decisions every made by a franchise, the producers at Star Wars Galaxies decided to complely overhaul their entire game’s design to make it more WoW-like.  The decision alienated the thousands of fans that were already playing the game and had become familiar with the game’s design, and the exodus from SWG is to this day unparalled in MMO history.

My point is that it’s easy to look at an MMO and say “OMG that is teh WoW clone”.  And you may in fact be right.  But where the ignorance comes in is if you don’t understand why it’s a WoW clone.  What you gain, in terms of not just familiarity, but satisfaction from your players if they can sit down to your game and WASD move’s them around, and right clicking on an object interacts with it, and hitting L brings up the quest log.  And that you have a quest log.  But as designers and developers, we also owe it to our players to give them something new.  A reason to play your game over that 500 lb gorilla beyond just that they’re tired of it.  And if you find yourself struggling with the question every day of how much do you do what has been done before, and how much do you make different — well know at least, you’re not alone.

Going back to Titan, eventually we found our vibe, and our level of innovation.  And we were innovating in some extremely interesting ways.   There are no screenshots that I know of floating around the net that show the game how it looked when it was canceled.  I can tell you it didn’t look anything at all like that early mockup. 

In my humble opinion, it looked a hundred times better.