Saving a wonderful comment from Matt Mihaly (creator of the superb Achaea) on TerraNova. The discussion is about somewhat innovative middleware that should allow everyone to create a personal, graphical sandbox and deliver “dream mmorpgs”.

Of course the idea interests me but I’m still sceptical about this going somewhere interesting (for me). For my own “dream mmorpg” I’d need just a simple 2D client (I define it “iconic”) like the early Ultima (I’m the only one who drooled at the old screens way more than those “remade” in the video?) but it’s the programming behind it that would be staggering to support the ideas that I have on my mind. And, really, without specific programming a game can only be a recombination of the same boxes. It won’t be all that appealing if you cannot go deeper. And if you can go deeper, once again, you don’t even really need “one-size-fits-all” middleware.

The comment from Matt, instead, is interesting for other reasons and I particularly love the last pharagraph that confirms that idea of “systemic” (living) worlds that I sticked here. And that is also at the base of my “ecological” approach.

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I think a LOT of caution is warranted. This whole thread could have taken place in 1990 as this happened in MMOs before, around 1990 when the text codebases like DIKU started coming out. Did it let lots of people make text MMOs? Sure. There are about 1500 MMOs running on a primarily text interface. 98% of them have about 5 players and are nearly identical to each other.

To run worlds of the size that the average hobbyist will attract, you don’t need anything more than Neverwinter Nights really. I can’t say I see how academics, for instance, will particularly benefit from Multiverse. If you just want a cheap way to create a virtual world to study, text has been available for a decade and a half. Yes you won’t get many users, but then, you’re not going to get many users with a nearly budget-less graphical MMO, and you’ll have far less content and far less depth due to the cost of producing the models/textures/animations. Far less ability to actually produce something interesting to study.

Mike Sherman wrote:

I think the downside is the lack of “names” associated with it. Where are the big Mud-Dev names working on this suite? Are we suppose to assume they got it right?

I unsubscribed to mud-dev awhile ago, but if I recall, Blizzard didn’t participate at all and managed to produce a product that kicked the living sh*t out of every game made by the “Mud-dev” crowd put together.

I guess my biggest reasons for not being excited about this boil down to two points:
1. On the scale we’re talking about (ie, presumably, small indies or hobbyists), the technology side of things is not particularly complicated or difficult. They can’t afford to create the content to back up a high-end game, so there’s no need for all the flash.
2. The difficult parts – polish, content creation, and unique selling points – cannot be effectively middle-wared, so the majority of the challenge is still there.

Have ideas for a set of guild management utilities that takes that part of the game to new levels, but not a whole system? Find someone willing to use it. Have a political-modeling system you wanted to try? Put it up there. Your own twist on ingame economies? Ditto.

Well, if enduring a flood of low-quality graphical MUDs with nearly identical feature-sets is appealing…..

Good game design is not on a “black box” system. You can’t just swap an economic system out for one that was developed for another game with different baseline expectations. Particularly in a virtual world, integration of the various systems is key, in my opinion at least.

–matt