Its a Group Thing

Been spending a bit more time in post-cataclysm Norrath of late.  Sony Online Entertainments “Legends of Norrath” promotion got Mrs. P and me sucked back in in large part due to Gaff’s urging.  So far, I can’t say I have any regrets.

As I mentioned before, I had bailed out before when EQ2 was the 3d game for me.  3d game means that’s the one I don’t play.

I like to explore and I like to play with a few select friends.  And, from time to time, I enjoy crafting.  All of these takes a fair amount of time.  Exploration is its own reward.

Group play is its own challenge– time wise its no where near as “efficient” as well-studied solo play or  some kind of Machiavellian minmax group play but its infinitely more rewarding.  Of course with current game design, sharing content and experiences with others requires an almost herculean effort.

In games like EQ2 and City of Heroes/Villains, there are mechanism that allow players of different levels to play together, but lets face it, the higher level player is mostly playing with the lowbie as a charitable act.  Chances are they have already experienced the shared content.

Mrs. P and I have been exploring the evil side of Norrath and generally having a good time.  Gaff has about 87 characters on no less than 34 accounts of all races, genders, classes and levels, and is quite adept at multiboxing so I think he’s hoping we stick with things long enough to plug into one of his multi box groups.  We’re actually looking forward to replicating on a much smaller scale some of our WoW group experiences.

As no doubt Wilhelm will report this week, we had a challenging weekend foray with our WoW group.  As Mrs. P and I retired in the wee hours Saturday/Sunday, I prattled on in my usual Monday morning quarterback fashion about the night’s efforts.

While we were not altogether successful in our primary goals, I was reminded of the extremely rarefied space our little band of adventurers occupies.  Three of us have been playing as a regular group since WoW’s release in December 2004.  Four of us have been playing together since about April or May 2005.   The latest incarnation of our group has been playing together since September 2006.

In a few short months our current group will have been at it nearly two extremely casual years.  In WoW terms, we are finally nearing the current level cap (70).  Until last week when we lifted the self-imposed soft level cap, we had managed to stay within about 1/3 of a level of each other after nearly two years of play with wildly divergent play budgets.  Not too bad I’d say.

As Mrs. P and I were doing the post-instance night post-mortem, it occurred yet again to me what an amazing accomplishment we’ve achieved irrespective of the night’s outcome.  One of us had a baby, four of us moved, one about 800 miles in the same time zone, one about 3000 miles two time zones away, one of us a few dozen miles and one of us twice in that period of time.  One of us lived out of a suitcase for more than a year and still managed to make our Saturday night runs and when they moved to their new permanent abode not miss the Saturday night event after the move.

No thanks to any game mechanic, through heroic efforts of self restraint and self auto regulation, we have shared collectively extraordinary experiences.  Indeed the chronicles of the group that Wilhelm has recorded has created that singular heroic fantastical narrative of shared experience that MMOs should strive to provide for their subscribers.

When I look back on it, we have a single shared narrative which should be the essence of the MMO experience IMHO.  If you read Wil’s amusing and insightful reportage of our collective adventures, you are in fact largely seeing all the data points of the collective narrative.  Except for perhaps crafting, there is no other narrative.  What you see is pretty much our five individual and collective stories in the game universe.

As we’re getting a bit more immersed into the EQ2 scene and frankly a bit bored with everything else currently out there, I’m struck by fundamentally different character of the experience we’ve been having in WoW and Tipa and the Nostalgia the Guild folks have been having back in EQ.  I’m hoping we might replicate at least a shred of the same thing in EQ2.

Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I’m not seeing any of the current crop of games make this kind of gameplay easier.  The “all solo” MMO is a function of the reality that we all have different play budgets and asynchronous progression is the new norm.  I can’t help but think that we’ve lost something by turning the dial completely to solo and not to provide mechanisms whereby different folks with different play budgets can still play together and create the shared experiences that are the most rarified that MMOs have to offer.

I’m not sure there’s a eureka moment buried here as its late, but I gotta think the devs might have a few better ideas than mine to facilitate this kind of gameplay.  Capping XP generation would be a start, but many more aspects would also need to be managed in order to accommodate different play styles and still support the unique squad-based objective.  Thats different from a guild, that’s different from “i have friends who also play the game”.

Then again, maybe I’m over thinking it.  Maybe all it takes is a group of people committed to coloring within the lines and being selfless enough to recognize that a greater good comes out of self restraint and “staying with the group” as they adventure through a virtual world.  I sure wish a few devs would bend their brains to make it a bit easier for us though…

Everything Old is New Again

Summer MMO-ennui what it is, you can tell by my recent posts (or lack thereof), I haven’t got much to say of late. Part of that is a result of an RL conspiracy to keep me busy outside of normal work hours with so-called “business development events”.

Not that they aren’t interesting or valuable, but they do take a bite out of the old game time. As the bloom is coming off of Conan and all else grows long in the tooth, there has been a slow steady drumbeat of some folks to “Return to X.”

Tipa’s adventures with her Nostalgia guild has almost got me to go back to EQ. Now I hear Wilhelm, the Ancient Gaming Noob, has succumbed. I’m not sure I really remember how to play, but I could see it happening now.

Likewise, Wilhelm and Gaff have been haranguing me and Mrs. P to return to EQ2 where Gaff apparently has sixty or seventy alts of every class level and faction with which he can triple or quad or quintuple box or somesuch. The spin is this time lets be naughty (evil).

I really didn’t see me coming back to EQ2 yet. I got to chatting with Gaff and he was asking whether Mrs. P might be interested. I hadn’t asked, but I assumed based on prior experience that she wouldn’t be that interested. Uncanny valley, learning curve, not quite cute enough, etc. But, much to my surprise, when I mentioned the conversation, I got a very positive “That’s a good idea. It might be fun to continue to explore EQ2.”

See, last time, I succumbed to Wil’s thinly veiled shilling for the Play the Fae campaign and started to get sucked in when I got into the LotRO closed beta. I’ve said before, at best, I’m a two MMO guy. I was digging the LotRO beta and our WoW group was rolling so EQ2 got the can.

SO, after a satisfying weekend of home improvement projects, Gaff caught me again with the hard sell and I caved. I dug out the disks (I had uninstalled. OH NOES!) and started what I thought would be the patching process to end all patching processes. Surprise, a clean install (the version that shipped as a bundle with the Echoes of Faydwer) and it was patched and running in only a brief few hours while I grabbed dinner.

Even quicker for Mrs. P who hadn’t uninstalled. Though she fell asleep before she could weigh in.

Not quite sure what happened with my old toons, but they weren’t terribly high level, so I rolled a new Arasai Coercer with the idea that if I was tagging along with better players like the multi-boxing Gaff or the better experienced Wil, then I should be able to contribute something useful like crowd control. I was expecting a bit of a slog as a not-entirely-offense-oriented caster. Still, one of my favorite classes from the original EQ was the Enchanter with its crowd control skills.  I was pleasantly surprised.  I seemed to be having a decent time making progress.

So, I give you Nardendul, Arasai Coercer:

I managed to get to about Level 7 among bouts of laundry which I consider to be decent progress considering I started very late in the evening, and yes, I wanted to read the quests.

For the Arasai starting area, it didn’t seem to have gotten as much attention as the Fae starting area, but it was still smooth, logical and relatively easy to figure out even for me when I had forgotten so much of the basic EQ2 stuff.

Now, if I can get Mrs. P to roll on the evil side, we may have quite a little casual group…

Patch-Fu

Right on up there with The Ancient Gaming Noob’s idea with analyzing MMO fishing mechanics is my next ranty-goofy idea:  review all MMO patchers.  What, you may ask, inspired this weak kneed rant?

Tuesday night was patch night in WoW.  The big 2.3 Azerothian world nerf patch and a wee bit of a hefty one at that at 265 MB (anyone remember when a game demo dl over 10MB was outrageous?).  So at somepoint in the last x years, Blizzard tweaked its patcher so that it could, at your election, download the latest upcoming patch in advance of patch day.  You can have it do it while you play WoW or begin after you logout of WoW. 

Of course, when I’m playing, I usually have skype going, I’m encoding a few mpegs, streaming audio, doing my taxes and uploading my uncompressed video of my junior high class project one man performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (in real time) so I tend not to want to take the performance hit.

Of coure, I usually shut down my machine when I’m done with WoW, so there’s not too much of a window for the patcher to try to download the patch.  That said, somehow, WoW’s patcher was apparently able to download the patch before Tuesday night.  Or so it seemed.

Tuesday night, I log on and WoW launches the patcher.  I’m thrilled as I watch the patcher find the previously downloaded patch and the progress bar zips across the screen 10%, 20%, 50%, 75%, 90%, 97%…97%…97%. Huh?  It seems I was 3% light, so I thought, “well, it managed to get 97% downloaded, how long can it take for the last 3% even on patch night?”

I stepped away to get my wife’s machine going.  Unfortunately, she hadn’t gotten any of it downloaded, so I started WoW’s patcher and watched it do nothing.  I checked back on my machine.  Still at 97%.

Ok, plan B.  I went to Gamer’s Hell and started to download the entire patch on my wife’s machine.  We’ll see who wins.  Not to be out done, I went back to my machine and did the same thing.  10 minutes later, both machines had downloaded the patch (prime time U.S. West Coast time) and the Blizzard downloaders had yet to move a single byte.

Why does this process have to be so cludgey?  Admittedly, Blizzard’s launcher/patcher is 1000 times better than SoE’s, but still.  If the game can get through your firewall and they can serve 9 million gamers worldwide, you’d think they could do as well as any of the gaming website which offer up the patches…

I’m still slack jawed at SoE’s patcher having seen it at work on EQ2, Vanguard and SWG.  I’m still not sure why it takes 5 minutes to go from launch to play when there is no patch…  So when do we see the Next Gen patcher?  Why isn’t this better?  Anyone?  Anyone? Beuhler?

The Measure of Success

Wilhelm’s provocative My New Scorecard post and comments got me thinking. What does it really mean to be a successful MMO financially? I’m mainly referring to professionally developed games with “real” funding.

In the wake of WoW’s success, many many studios have put projects in development. Nothing breeds interest in success like success, and a success like WoW’s can sure flush out the dumb money looking for a sure thing. So there is probably more opportunity to get a project off the ground then there was in 1997, but with those opportunities probably come more serious expectations that can dramatically affect a project’s development (e.g., Vanguard, Ryzom or Gods & Heroes).

From what I’ve read, it seems most “real” MMOs are taking anywhere from three to five years to develop. PotBS and Age of Conan have been in development for about 5 years, LotRO (with its sordid past) even longer than that (though admittedly not with the same “owners” if you will). Note these were in the works before WoW launched, let alone became the success it is.

Building these games takes time. Post-EQ2/WoW/Vanguard, they will take even more time since the market is expecting a much more polished and complete product on launch.

To make these games, investors must be patient and risk tolerant. Not exactly abundant commodities in the technolog community. At least if you’re making a movie and have shot the film, you can recut it into something at the end of the day, even if its complete crap to get to revenue (can you say straight to video?).

Not exactly the same case with a software product. Mostly it works or it doesn’t and you can’t really ship if it doesn’t. Couple that with the fact that if you can’t keep the servers running, there’s really no point in launching an MMO (e.g., Auto Assault, Ryzom).

So what’s it take to develop a new MMO? A few wild guesses, but as something between a software company and a services company, I’d be surprised if a real MMO could be developed these days for less than $20 million. With the complexity of the project and the polish required, I’d expect new games to have development budgets (eventually) more along the lines of movies– $100 million+.

If you think $20 million is a lot of money, do the math over a project’s development and see what you think. Its not. That’s only an average $4 million burn each year for each pre-revenue year. Much less at the front end, probably much more at the back end as pre-launch activities ramp up. The near-launch hype machine I’m told, can be millions in its own right.

So assume you’re selling the box for $50 and tagging subscribers for $15 per month. If you sold 250k boxes and held those subscribers for a full year, you’d return a little over $16 million, with the hope of about $3.8 million in recurring revenue for each following year that you could hold 250k subscribers. So if you’re lucky, on a $20 million budget with 250k subscribers for two years, your investors may break even after seven years.

Hardly the value proposition that most of the new crop of investors sniffing around the MMO world would sign up for. Why do that when you could throw $2 million at a web 2.0 widget company and get even 2x or 5x on your investment in 3 years?

No, I suspect that WoW may have really changed the game game. I think we’re beginning to see just how far the bar has been raised. 250k or even 500k users probably just doesn’t cut it as a target for a new game.

Yes, there will always be small games, but until there is really a technological change that can replace dozens of developers, coders and artists working thousands of hours to produce a top notch game, I wonder how many smaller or independent games will be able to grab the attention of the community accustomed to blockbuster releases.

Is this the beginning of the Hollywood-ification of the MMO space?

The Myth of Character Customization

With LotRO open beta rolling out and the official release later this month, more and more people are getting a chance to take a more serious look at the game.  The same occurred as Vanguard went open beta and into release.

In reading comments and forums posts, one thing I find interesting is the amount of weight people put on character customization.  Yes, everyone wants to be unique and above average, but let’s be serious, does this really matter in the grand cosmic scheme of things?  It certainly seems to.  When its bad, it really does seem to matter.  But when does “better” become the enemy of “good” by consuming resources better spent elsewhere? 

By “character customization” I do not mean item and clothing textures per se, but I do mean the ability to say, thin or thicken one’s eyebrows, or to select between slightly blue and slighly more blue eyes, or a bold chin or a slightly less bold chin.  Mea culpa, I certainly spend a fair amount of time on the character customization screen (even in WoW if you can believe it), so I’m not immune to this anthropomorphic narcissism.  I assume that game devs are simply responding to increasingly loud player demands.   Go them.

But does any of this really matter?  Consider that if you play in first person view (*shudder*), you never see your character at all.  Consider also that if you play in 3d person over the shoulder view, you will become intimately familiar with your character’s backside.  And that backside (your dorsal surface, not your derriere), from nearly the first moment you enter the game, will be covered by armor, a cloak (if you choose to show it) and a helm (likewise).  Even if you don’t show your cloak and helm, you are treated with the view of the back of your own head, so maybe hairstyle matters.

But doesn’t customization then at least make you appear unique to the rest of the game world?  I’m not so sure that faint scar I put above my left eyebrow is really going to help my guildies or friends pick me out of a crowd, nor the slightly-less-than-[blue][green][purple] eyes, etc.  Or the fact that my handlebar moustache with double braided beard is a particular shade of red.  You get the point.

Since I run in 3d person mode most of the time (and, as a healer, typically zoomed fairly far out for maximum situational awareness), I find I visually identify my friends and guildies mostly by what they are wearing or by the oh so convenience billboard hanging over their head with their name on it which I recognize…

So I ask the humble question, is all the time and effort spent by devs to create highly customizeable avatars really the best spend of limited development resources?  Doesn’t it really just turn into a performance hit at somepoint as the client needs to keep track of a thousand different bits of information for each character rather than say, a hundred or ten?  Would some of that dev time and money be better spend on better mob AI or animations or polishing the combat system?

Yes I recognize this is heresy, but the deeper question is what do we really need in an MMO to create a meaningful and unique character identity?  Is a floating player name enough?  Height and weight/build?  Hair/facial hair style?  Skin tone? Player customizeable clothing items (cloaks, shields, standards, tabards, etc.)?  Or am I completely missing the boat and do we, in fact, need infinite variability in all aspects (even more than mere sliders for variation of a trait)?  Is it an identity thing or a world-diversity thing?

One interesting tidbit for further thought.  I posted in the LotRO beta forum asking for an NPC eyeblink feature, something I thought that is subtle but goes a very long way to adding to the living feeling of a game world (much like the now standard character breathing and fidgeting animations).  The response I got was telling: such a task would be a collossal undertaking (I don’t disagree) and considering how much time and effort the team had recently been putting into further avatar customization efforts, it was unlikely that such a frill would be undertaken prior to launch.  A completely rational response.  Character customization 1, immersive world feeling 0.