I was reading a rant linked by Jeff Freeman and written by Dan Rubenfield (who apparently has a long experience in the mmorpg industry and recently left SOE in search of something different). I liked it quite a bit. I agree on most of those premises.

Dream games. All developers and designers have them. In fact, everyone has them.

But we never make them. We all want to but don’t have the time or the resources.

So all designers have dream games. We bandy them around but tend not to talk to them while employed as there’s always a fear of “losing your idea” to your parent company.

Well, I’m not sure that I understand this. I would love to “lose my ideas” to make them possible, myself. In fact I expose them often when I write. So I see that trend described as really counterproductive. Why you should hide your ideas when employed? And what’s the work about then?

See ideas becoming real should be the most rewarding experience ever. The “parent company” is supposed to valorize the people who work within and let them express at their very best. Put them in the condition to do so. If instead the devs shy away it means that something is going really wrong.

Making a mmorpg is about harmonious teamwork. You dedicate yourself to the game and everyone contributes with what he does best. Competition inside the same team is a bad thing. But this is a digression.

Currently nobody’s making anything new for MMO development. There’s a smattering of small developers pushing the envelope but the majority of the big publishers out there (Except Blizzard) isn’t doing shit.

There’s a palpable sense of fear and terror amongst mmo developers right now. They’re scared shitless of WOW. They see it, believe it’s insurmountable, tuck their tails and go the opposite direction.

What does that mean?

It means you’re going to have company after company fucking around with smalltime, smallscale free products. Myspace Killers, Habbo Killers, Runescape Killers, you name it.

It’s going to be reactive, marketing driven, and for the most part, failure after failure.

It’s going to be company after company saying things like “We’d like to focus on the Casual market instead of the hardcore”.

Dan considers the “casual market” as a “null” one, since it is made by non-gamers who will never really cross the line to become gamers and true supporters of this industry:

(about casual gamers)
We should figure out how to craft and sell games to the people who legitimize us before dorking around with people who don’t buy or enjoy our products.

Continuing on the same rant:

Everyone looks at MMO development as “Competing” with WOW. And nobody wants to do it. They’d rather scrabble for the detritus that falls from their pockets. They’d rather go for spillover and for some fucked up reason, focus on the Non-Gaming market.

And once again, I ask “What The Fuck?”. We haven’t figured out how to reliably create and sell games to the people who buy games and we’re fucking around trying to sell games to people who don’t even play games?

We’re once again not using the strength of the medium, once again not asking the questions that need to be asked. The people who hold the purse strings aren’t interested. They’ve retreated into their developmental shells in an attempt to go for the “untapped potential” market.

The thing is, we’ve seen this happen over and over historically. If you single track your product lines like this you’re going to end up fucked. You’re might see some short term success but long term you’re going to end up in very bad financial shape.

We’re not in a static environment of game players, game developers, game sales, game platforms. There’s an ever evolving sense of tastes and ever shifting marketplace. Our marketing efforts and development dollars tend to use history as the basis for choices. Unfortunately this is only part of the equation.

We should be looking historically as well as looking forward for future trends and desires.

Like I do, he hopes for games that expand their sighting, new approaches, different paradigms. The current rules in the market are just consolidated and conventional, but not absolute.

So the market is incredibly malleable. It can be shaped. This is the correct perspective to see it. Hystorical rules are just consequences of what is being made. Different things being made would lead to a different types of market and completely different influences for future products.

It is important to understand the market, but not react to it passively.

The part where I don’t agree with Dan is where he is over with the analysis and proposes an alternative:

Everyone’s piling into that rowboat because we’ve convinced ourselves that WOW is insurmountable.

And to a degree we’re right. WOW is not something you can ever compete with. So DON’T.

I will bold this yet again.

STOP TRYING TO MAKE THAT SAME FUCKING GAME.

Raph made a comment a few years back that WOW was going to set our industry back 10 years. It wasn’t meant as a derogatory statement about WOW but instead about the reactive, bullshit nature of us.

And you know what? He was right about that too.

From there he starts to pitch his own game idea that I want comment (but it’s good enough).

I don’t agree with him even if I agree with all the other premises because I see things from a different perspective.

What I strongly believe is quite simple: it is possible to make new and different games IN the “fantasy genre”.

From a side Dan proposes to start from a different game concept, from the other to push a different pricing model that relies heavily on RMT.

I heartily *hate* the second part for reasons I won’t explain again (in short: real money should stay OUT of the game, it doesn’t belong there), while I see the first as not the obligatory solution.

I’m between those who really dreams and wants completely new and different games. Focusing on the immersion, with a true ongoing, dedicated, passionate development to shape and nourish a *world*, and not bouncing devs and resources between a bunch of mediocre projects or sequels that won’t leave any sign and will be obsolete and forgotten after a few months or years. Ambitions and myths. Not consumer society.

But I also believe that the “fantasy genre” is far from being just WoW. Or pinpointed by it. Different games are possible. And not only possible: successful. And the same for different genres. I would love to design a Space Opera mmorpg, or a steampunk based world (think to Myazaki’s Nausicaa), but you aren’t forced to abandon a genre because you blindly believe that nothing else is possible within it.

I just refuse to believe that WoW has now the monopoly of the fantasy genre. And I refuse to accept that you are now forced to make games into different genres if you want to survive.

Hell, even the same Warcraft could be made into completely different games.

Gathering some comments I wrote about Mythic being sold to EA.

—
It means that EA will now set too high expectations. And when Warhammer won’t reach them (and it won’t), EA will take over completely and put Mythic to rest forever.

The only difference is that this time they’ll let it release.

Really. The only REAL change after this acquisition is that the 120-130k subs DAoC currently has aren’t REMOTELY enough for Mythic to exist. And that Warhammer must do 5x better only to be granted continued existence.

You think throwing money at it is enough. I don’t. Before this Mythic could survive with modest-sized games and still slowly building very good ones. I seriously think that they threw away a lot of potential because they had the possibility to slowly increase their market share, instead of slowly losing it.

Under EA they don’t have anymore the luxury to go on with modest-sized mmorpgs. It’s quite obvious that EA will now bet heavily on this. It’s quite obvious that they will throw a bunch of money at Mythic. And it’s quite obvious that things at Mythic will change SIGNIFICANTLY because of this.

—

Athryn: Who knows, maybe they will infuse some life back into DAoC?

DAoC was already the sacrificial lamb for Warhammer. They are too similar to let them compete for the same audience and it already happened that they used DAoC shortcomings to publicize Warhammer (instead of fixing them).

This already before EA’s acquisition, so nothing will change. Maybe DAoC will even have a few more leftovers devs that will give the illusion of more support when instead they will complete the disruption of the original DAoC team (as SWG demonstrated the simplest, quickest way to kill a mmorpg is to have an high churn rate with the devs).

The true impact of EA’s acquisition is that now Mythic is something *completely new*. Maybe not in those who work there, they won’t even relocate. But in *expectations*. Before Mythic could survive and prosper with medium-sized mmorpgs finding their own space. 100-200k subs were absolutely viable and they still had a lot of resources to increase their market share with the time if they wanted to (instead of losing it).

After this, the rules are changing. EA is going to throw a lot of money at Warhammer. This is good? Not from my point of view because it’s quite obvious that you don’t hand out money at will if you don’t expect something BACK. The “old” Mythic dies here (if it didn’t before). Expectations change, plans change. And you can be sure that when Warhammer won’t reach those insane expectations, EA *will* take over completely. Or start the cleansing.

Till now Mythic has been DAoC. Warhammer doesn’t exist. Well, for EA DAoC is nothing less than a grain of sand. You really believe that it’s enough to grant Mythic a continuity similar to the one they have now? Hell NO. You really believe that Mark Jacobs told EA that the target market for Warhammer is 200-300k subs? HELL NO.

EVERYTHING changes with this. The scale changes. The company’s objectives change. The production process will change, testing will change. The ambition and overall strategy change.

No matter what Mythic reps are saying while trying to reassure themselves.

Jason Booth commented on Lum’s blog:

As for Mythics future games, I wish them luck, but so far, no studio has managed to hit it out of the ballpark more than once.

And that’s the point. Before Mythic could sit in the back and remain prefectly active and healthy in that ballpark. They were deciding for themselves. Set THEIR OWN goals and ambitions. They should have tried to slowly improve and increase their market share in small step as CCP is doing with Eve-Online.

After this acquisition the objectives skyrocket. EA didn’t buy Mythic for *what it is*. But for what they hope it will become. Not for their identity, but for their potential. Not for their current worth, but for growth possibilities.

They bought it as a raw material to transform. Hence the reason why Mythic is now FORCED to “hit it out of the ballpark” or die in the process.

Putting their hand on EA’s wallet means accepting their conditions and expectations. It’s not about getting a disinterested donation. It’s betting with the devil.

They aren’t anymore their own measure. They are EA measure.

Mark Jacobs decided that continuing to do small steps wasn’t anymore satisfactory and, quoting:

We chose to do this deal because of what it meant to Mythic today and to our company going forward. It was a grand slam home run.

They chose to make this big jump at the price of their identity. You know, a sellout.

And you are silly if you believe that “things will remain the same”. Nothing will. For the worse or the better.

You really believe that EA will let Mythic survive with similar subscription numbers to DAoC? And you really believe that throwing money at them is enough to make great games?

Rumors were correct.

EA is now officially going to acquire Mythic:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 20, 2006–Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS – News) today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Virginia-based Mythic Entertainment®. Upon completion of the acquisition, Mythic Entertainment will become EA Mythic, a wholly-owned studio dedicated to developing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs).

Upon completion of the acquisition, Mark Jacobs, the President, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Mythic, will become Vice President, General Manager of EA Mythic. Rob Denton, the Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Mythic will assume the role of Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of EA Mythic. Mythic’s 175-person development team will remain in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Mythic has always been a leading independent developer in the online space,” says Mark Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of Mythic Entertainment. “EA’s commitment to the online market as well as its focus on creating games of unsurpassed quality, scope and scale gives us opportunities and resources we could only dream about in the past.”

“The addition of Mythic to the EA family reflects our deep commitment to the online gaming market worldwide. Mythic will bring one of the industry’s most talented MMORPG teams to EA. Together, we will create games that will introduce MMO players to a whole new level of game play and excitement,” said Paul Lee, President, EA Studios.

The only good part of the news is that I underlined. Now I’ll wait before picking some fun on Mark Jacobs. The post where he denied the rumors (sort of) can be found here. This is what he wrote today:

Mark Jacobs: As you can imagine, it’s been a rather interesting few weeks at Mythic. I promise to post a much longer letter here but the rest of the day is filled with interviews and questions and then I fly out for a few days with the folks at EA. I’ll try to find time to post here during that time but if I can’t, I will do so upon my return.

As always, there is nothing wrong with being skeptical, worried or cynical (traits that are near and dear to my heart) but we will prove over the next 15 months why we deserved your trust and faith from the beginning.

WAR is still coming and nothing will change, except for the better and nothing will stop that.

I’ll leave you will one final bit, we didn’t need to do this deal, we chose to do this deal because of what it meant to Mythic today and to our company going forward. It was a grand slam home run.

Expect LOTS of spinning. LOTS. Mark Jacobs will do his very best.

Sanya also commented:

– EA came to us. Not the other way around. And our deal with GOA (to work as partners on CS and simultaneous patches, etc) still stands.

– We have not been absorbed. Mark’s title is the highest/best/most powerful one he can have. In other words, he remains the studio head.

– I don’t blame MMO players for being nervous, but think about it – we KNOW the history of all previous deals. Only a complete monkey wouldn’t have taken that history into account while the contracts were being written.

– Wait and see if a chunk of sky hits you in the head before you say the sky is falling, okay?

NO ONE is being laid off, moved, rearranged, or changed. Mythic is working with Games Workshop and that isn’t changing in any way. I believe, and I will leave it to Mark to confirm, but I believe that keeping the relationship between us and GW exactly the same was kind of key here.

You don’t have to believe it, but I had to try

Yes, we knew all this. Money hat for Mark. The true impact of this will be only visible in the long term. And it won’t be pretty.

SELLOUT!!1! (this beats Brad bringing Vanguard back to SOE)

When you see these kinds of news the first question is: “What’s the source?”

The source isn’t available but it should be still reliable. It comes from a presentation given by Vivendi to Wall Street, so something intended for the financial analysts. Source is F13 who had someone there, I think. I quote:

“All Blizzard franchises will become MMOGs.”

They claim they have a model now to develop an MMOG in 3 years for $50 million. WoW cost 50 million euros and took 4 1/2 years.

It is not an official announce since it’s more like in the form of “hype” to feed that type of audience with speculations. But I still consider this a reliable plan they have and that they WILL pursue now. Here Blizzard doesn’t exist anymore. My guess is that Vivendi is taking over. It’s not Blizzard deciding what to do next or even organizing the workflow. This is Vivendi seeing an insane stream of money coming in and going all “OMG, MONEY HATS FOR ALL!”. Then they rush in Blizzard’s offices with a grin, “SEE WHAT WE DID? NOW WE ARE MMOGs.”

Vivendi is not only taking over at the level of decision making. They are really stepping in Blizzard’s offices and taking over at every level. Before Blizzard was just an anomaly. This studio is so strong, as I pointed out in the past, because they ARRIVED to the success after a LONG process and hard work. It’s something handcrafted, done by people passionate about their work and slowly improving. “Vivendi taking over” is instead part of that other process who made so many important devs FLEE from Blizzard. Because they saw what was going on and that Blizzard was losing its role and slowly becoming just a “puppet”. The premises that made all that possible were changing. Those who saw that, left. With WoW’s HUGE success this process was accelerated considerably and I consider this presentation as the ultimate consequence: Blizzard’s autonomy is being killed.

Before WoW Vivendi didn’t have a particular attention for Blizzard, like every other division they have under them. Blizzard was successful, but only one cog in a huge machine. After WoW everything completely changed. While Blizzard probably had still a certain amount of autonomy, after the huge success of the game they weren’t anymore “invisible” to the Vivendi guys at the high levels. And this accelerated the process. You see, when you work for someone and do a good work, it’s all ok, you receive some praises and everything continues along the same lines. But when you start to do something absolutely *amazing* then you can be sure that they won’t leave you alone. They’ll come into your office, start asking questions, and yes, starting telling you what to do next so that TOGETHER you’ll conquer the world. Because they made you. And you are their property and merit.

People don’t leave you alone doing your work if they see that everything you touch becomes gold. Blizzard is the new “King Mida”. They make money hats. And now they totally have the attention of Vivendi. And they won’t leave them alone anymore, they won’t let them do their work. Instead they WILL take over, they WILL pretend to control and pilot them.

So this is what I see: it will need a few years before this process is complete. But Vivendi is going to take over, and this sort of “invasion” will have the consequence of ruining completely and slowly erasing all the “worth” that Blizzard slowly built along the years and with their hard work. They are guilty of having drawn too much attention on them, and now they are being swept away. It happens when you overdo, when you shine too much to continue doing what you do without things changing around you.

Diablo and Starcraft MMOs weren’t announced by Blizzard. They were announced by Vivendi. Blizzard is no more.

Those games will be made. Whether Blizzard wants or not. They aren’t no long masters in their own house. And in the next few years we’ll see a bleeding fracture between Blizzard and Vivendi management, trying to preserve control.

Right now Blizzard has barely the resources to support WoW. They don’t even have two separate teams to work on the live servers and the expansion.

Whatever will happen, things won’t be anymore the same.

From Blizzard’s rep:

I believe this was a misquote. We haven’t announced any specific development plans beyond the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, and we don’t have any intentions to focus on only one genre or platform with our future games.

We’ll see if it “was a misquote”, or if it’s just that Blizzard hasn’t anymore the freedom to decide what to do next.

Let’s see who makes the biggest voice.

It speaks by itself:

Vice president and general manager of Codemasters Online Gaming (COG), David Solari, has revealed a target of over a million players for the division’s upcoming Lord of the Ring Online (LOTRO) title and admitted intentions to compete directly with Blizzard’s genre-leading World of Warcraft.

“I think the goal [for LOTRO] would be over a million subscribers in the west,” said Solari, speaking at the COG LiVE event in Warwick, UK, yesterday. “World of Warcraft is such a benchmark now, but if something’s going to do it it’s going to be a Lord of the Rings brand that lets people play in that environment and experience that content. It’s got to have probably the best chance of competing with it.”

LOTRO, developed by US developer Turbine, is scheduled for a Q4 release. Demoed in fully playable form at the event by executive producer Jeff Steefel, the initial release is to include the content from the first Lord of the Rings book, The Fellowship of the Ring, with the rest of the trilogy to be added as the game evolves.

This goes right into the group with Campion (Eve-Online clueless producer who luckily quit shortly after release) claiming that Eve would have 100k of players online at the same time (and the servers supporting that without troubles) and Marc Laukien (MutableRealms clueless president) claiming that Wish’s target was at least 100k subscribers.

Why people in the high positions never have even remotely a clue?

Adding my own guesswork:

1M of players is laughable, 500k is laughable. Anything below that depends solely on the quality of the game.

Imho the best scenario they have is 150k to 200.

(I think I’ve been excessively optimistic, this game may never see the light of the day)

Auto Assault should have launched recently and noone cares.

At least I don’t. I played Jumpgate for six months after launch. There was ZERO support. Nothing if not superficial massive “events” that were all about massive grinds (think to Ahn Quiraj). It was pretty obvious that NetDevil shipped the game and then forget about it.

When you do this, you deserve to go back into irrelevancy and stay there.

But of course people are stupid and the worst companies always get more founding. So now we have “Auto Assault”. It seems they worked on this for more than four years. With a team of 50. While Jumpgate was going on with a team of one.

Here’s the reason why this game and this company will never go anywhere:

NetDevil’s only other game was another massively multiplayer game called Jumpgate. NetDevil still maintains the game, which was launched in 2001, even though only about 1,000 people still play it.

And Brown said he plans to expand the company beyond its two current games.

“NetDevil is going to start another team and multiple games,” he said, adding that the company might also look at creating more traditional, non-MMO titles.

You cannot support ONE game and you already plan for multiple projects. What a fucking CLUELESS management.

For now, Brown and his crew will watch the gamers roll into Auto Assault and hope they stick around long enough to see what else they’ve been working on.

I hope they don’t.

This whole industry needs surgery to remove inflated egos.

P.S.
There’s a thread on Q23 if you want to read more specifically about EverQuest on wheels.

In Interstate 76, you had to deal with the physics of your car, and what armor was on what quadrant. You had to use your front rear and side weapons very intelligently. If your left armor was gone, you had to constantly manuever to keep that side out of the line of fire.

In Autoduel, it was even more strategic. You had to do many of the things mentioned above, as well as deal with subsystems of the car going out. Like tires, engines, weapons getting destroyed after the armor was gone (Granted, Auto Assault has this as well, but with one health bar car placement strategy means nothing. Once your health bar is gone you have no control over protecting your precious interior).

In Auto Assault, you have one health bar. Your main weapon is on a turret, so it doesn’t matter where the enemy is. You can always shoot it. Also, how you manuever your car and it’s position relative to the enemy means very little. There are front and rear mounted weapons, so you have to keep the enemy in this front arc that is drawn in front of your car to use the front mounted weapons.

The problem lies in the fact that skill plays almost no role. For the turret, if an enemy is in range, every shot may or may not hit them dependent on a die roll. Same with the front weapons. You basically just drive around in circles keeping the enemy in the front arc and hope that the die roll rolls a hit. It’s a piss poor merging of standard MMO combat mixed in with a pseudo-skill based system.

The reason this exists is to give you weapons firings stats that slowly increase over time, to keep you playing. Unfortunately, it makes the combat so ridiculously dull because it doesn’t reward skill. The only reward is eventually getting your weapons skills high enough to auto-hit enemies.

If it was for me I’d have put all the weapons on fixed positions so that you have to steer the car. More like an x-wing simulator done with cars, which should be easily doable even in a mmorpg since the car movement is easily predictable for the netcode.

Then it would be all about ramming other cars with blades or tailchasing them with a machine gun. It seems Auto Assault fails already on these extremely basic expectations.

Oh, and if I would make a game about “cars” it is quite obvious that it would all pivot on “modding” them. That’s what the car geeks expect. No “ding, level up” shit.