Today I’m in for a Dave Rickey dance. This guy still speaks in a way I like. At least I can feel some passion that is nowhere to be found in the whole mmorpg panorama.

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When I was Lead Desiger on Wish, there were certain things I thought absolutely had to happen, and other goals I thought absolutely we should abandon. Obviously my boss (the sole investor) disagreed with me.

Unfortunately, I get no satisfaction from any evidence I was right to be found here. I’ve got some good friends who are now out of work, and unfortunately I am not at a stage on my new project to pick up most of them. They’re good guys, highly competent and hard-working, and none of the blame for this should be placed on their shoulders.

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Yes, I have a new project, no, I can’t say much about it right now. It’s vaguely fantasy, but not Tolkienesque or D&D inspired at all.

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My first choice was to do a Sci-Fi project, that’s what I spent the first half of last year trying to find investors for. Not only does Sci-Fi interest me more personally, but Sci-Fi has so much more potential. There’s a lot of completely different themes in Sci-Fi, and it crosses over into the mainstream much more easily than Fantasy for other media.

But when pitching such a project, you have to answer the question: “What has been the market response to Sci-Fi?” And the answer is: Not nearly as strong as fantasy. You’ve got exactly *one* clearly successful title, SWG, and a bunch of marginal successes (Eve, Anarchy Online) and clear failures. Without a major liscense, the investors don’t want to talk to you about a Sci-Fi project right now.

On the flip side, the “overcrowded” fantasy market has produced 5 major successes, overall each being bigger than the last. The *market* analysis says that Fantasy isn’t overcrowded, in fact it is underserved. Two titles came out within a short window and both vaulted past the 250K mark like it was nothing.

So, I’m doing another fantasy project because that’s what people are buying, and therefore that is what investors are willing to put money into. On the other hand, the fact that the EQ formula has been so repeatedly cloned, and polished to a high gloss by EQ2 and WoW, makes it a lot easier to convince people that it’s time to take some chances and break the mold. With the price tag for an EQ-clone rising towards the $50M mark, a $10M bet on something new looks more reasonable. At least this time I hold some equity.

(and no f–king elves this time. Or dwarves, hobbits, or any of the rest of that deformed human menagerie)

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Soulflame:
Why should someone move from their old MMOG, with years of work on stability, content, and characters they’ve had for all this time, to a new hotness? EQ2 and WoW did it by having a lot of content in the game at release. Can a small indie MMOG do the same thing? I’m skeptical, to say the least.

Gameplay. Purpose. All the current fantasy offerings offer variants on the EQ formula of “Fight little monster and get stronger, so you can fight small monster and get stronger, so you can fight medium sized monster and get stronger, so you can fight large monster and get stronger, so you and 40 or 50 of your friends can fight the really freaking huge monster and one or two of you can get stronger.” It’s repetitive, it’s pointless, it’s ultimately an excercise in frustration because even inside of the context of the game, defeating these things makes no damned difference at all. After you and your friends save the world, you all get chivvied out the door and the ride resets for the next group of kiddies.

The whole concept has reached a blind alley, witness that the hot new idea, the plan for making it all better, shinier, SPECIAL NEW AND IMPROVED, is to take the first M out of MMOG and try to make a subscription version of Diablo. So not only is it pointless and transient, but the very place that it is happening is hermetically sealed away from everything and everyone else.

This is not what makes the MMO experience tick. This is not what got us excited in the early days of UO and EQ. The fire and passion that created BattleVortex, Dr. Twister, Lum the Mad, and for that matter got me to quit a job as a web server programmer at the height of the dot-com craze and take a job at a third of the money and twice the hours for Verant. Call it “Vision”, call it stubborness, call it just plain self-delusion, but I refuse to look at what we’ve got, and what the majority of the industry plans on making, and accept that *this* steaming pile of highly polished stairclimber-to-nowhere turds is all we can expect, the best we can do.

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HRose:
But then you’d need very, very good artists to shape a fascinating world that isn’t already a well known archetype.

I think that without a wonderful visual impact you have no hopes at creating a fantasy setting out of the line.

There are fantastic settings of near-universal recognition that have not yet been explored. But yes, execution is important. Fundamentals are important. Not just the fundamentals of gameplay, but the deep down plumbing of server architectures and network protocols. At almost every level these games, although sometimes shiny and well polished on the surface, hide deep flaws of infrastructure that was no better than it absolutely had to be. This leads to a sort of drag on the creative process, things that aren’t done, aren’t even conceived, because the fundamental system architecture cannot support them.