Richard Garriot Argues Against Stagnant MMOG Design 175
The creator of Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa and well-known designer Richard Garriot spoke at the Develop Conference in Brighton, England on the subjects of stagnating MMOG design and the NCSoft deal with Sony. His commentary on Massive game design is fairly direct: "If you look at the vast majority of MMOs that has come out since Ultima Online and Everquest, you can look at the features and they are almost exactly the same. Even though the graphics have got better and the interface is much slicker, fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged. Worse yet, there are many things that have become standard that I look at and even though they are powerful enough to encourage the behavior of people obsessed with playing these games, I don't think they are the right way of building the future."
Re:Lord British (Score:3, Informative)
Truly a British icon
Actually, he did die once:
http://www.aschulze.net/ultima/stories9/beta.htm [aschulze.net]
Re:Victims of their own success (Score:4, Informative)
When I read "You throw the rock through the nearby window, which shatters into hundreds of razor sharp pieces. The shards fly into the store, catching the many shoppers by surprise. Panic breaks out amongst them.", In my mind I can picture all of that happening without very little effort. But for a game developer to create a scene like that in a game, they'd have to do an incredible amount of work if they wanted it to look good. Things like physics to have the glass shatter realistically. Some sort of AI(or at least scripting) to have the people react appropriately. Not to mention wrapping it all up in some pretty graphics with high-rez textures on detailed and well animated models.
All the computing power in the world isn't going to make designing photo-realistic gameplay anywhere near as easy as it is to do it text based (that's not to say that good text based games are a piece of cake though).
Re:Very perceptive Richard (Score:1, Informative)
I'm all for credit where it's due, but Garriott doesn't get it for MMOGs.
Re:Very perceptive Richard (Score:5, Informative)
Also, he left Origin in 2000 and ostensibly started conceptualizing Tabula Rasa shortly thereafter.
That's a 3D Realms-style dry spell, punctuated with his occassional 'massmogs are niche/stagnant/whatever' articles.
Granted, TR will almost certainly hit shelves before DNF, but 3DRealms already had a Vaporware Lifetime Achievement award after 7 years. Surely he's due some 'pipe down until you ship' sentiment.
The other sticking point is that anyone who's followed the genre for more than a couple years knows the popular games are stagnating to a degree. And anyone who has any appreciable knowledge of the genre knows they've been stuck for more than 10 years -- all the most popular games are still pretty much derivatives of Diku, itself not a very big step away from D&D. One would more accurately say that massmogs have been largely stagnant since the first bastard child of Gygax and Bartle.
And yet the subtle change between EQ's level grind and WoW's level grind had a much larger practical impact on Diku play than the 'moral choices' seen thus far in Tabula Rasa. Granted, TR's still beta, but the system itself looks like a more slight update to faction mechanics than WoW's update to quest mechanics. So calling everyone onto the carpet while your own contribution is still minor compared to theirs, is ill-advised.
However, I do grant Garriott any and all respect for whatever role he had in UO releasing as a Koster-land. Even if he merely hired the guy who actually had good ideas, that's worth some points. Unfortunately, TR's less ambitious design does make it look like he only green-lit such a bold design because he didn't know any different.
Also, the bonus points one gets for 'leaving a comfy job' are significantly diminished when you're already fabulously wealthy.
I think the rule is: first personal castle takes half and extraplanetary property takes the other half.
Any subsequent castles or russian rovers make him a valid target of scorn if he ever doesn't have his own company.
Re:More elements of simulation needed (Score:5, Informative)
As for being player directed...sure. But its player directed the way the real world is. A few are at the top calling the shots, and the VAST majority work for them, or work for someone who works for them, or are otherwise relatively irrelevant pawns in the game, who have about as much impact on the direction the game takes as they have on the direction the real world takes.
Now don't get me wrong, its entirely -possible- to control a trade empire. Its just utterly unlikely of ever becoming a reality. If 250,000 people log in each day dreaming of controlling a galaxy spanning empire... well, 249,500 of them will never reach their goal. The nature of the power consolidation that is represented by an empire is such that it is controlled by a small number of people. And to be one of the lucky few you have to essentially out-compete nearly everyone else who wants that same empire.
I guess if all you really want is to be a cog in someone elses wheel you'll likely reach that goal in Eve.
And, that, is eve at its hypothetical best... Eve, in my opinion, has been tainted by the devs/gm's who also PLAY. Even when they aren't outright cheating to give their corporations an edge, its pretty much a given that they'll have an information advantage. (Is it merely a coincidence that a corporation/alliance the devs are known to be involved with has been a dominant force in the game?) I don't mind devs playing a pve mmog, but when the game developers are also a competing to win against their own subscribers it sets the stage for scandals... which Eve has seen plenty of.