Meanwhile, Microsoft and McQuaid Announce Vanguard

Schumpeter said that capitalism is creative destruction. The creative counterpoint to the demise of E&B and Mythica: Vanguard, a new MMORPG from Sigil Games, the new company of veteran designer McQuaid, now backed by Microsoft. From Slashdot Games.

Comments

[David Maduram]

1.

Does anyone know a tentative release date for Vanguard?

Perhaps early-mid 2005?

[Edward Castronova]

2.

I don't know, but 2006 is going to be a much better year for a launch than 2004. By then, the market will have been cleared of all these flavor-of-the-month designs.

[DivineShadow]

3.

Yesterday when I bumped into the site my first thought was... Here we go with the Trademark issues again and Microsoft. The title is: Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Which reminded me of "City of Heroes" scheduled for launch later this year. Are all the good names taken?

[Cory Ondrejka]

4.

So we have a creator of EverQuest, a fatansy themed RPG that attempted to take the great features of MUDs and put them into a graphical environment, creating . . .wait for it . . . wait for it . . a fantasy themed RPG that attempts to take the great features of MUDs and put them into a graphical environment. From the Gamespy interview:

McQuaid: Yes and no. The vision for EverQuest really came from playing and studying all the great text MUDs that have been around for a decade or two. The vision for Vanguard goes back to those same roots (MUDs) and thinking about how we can even better translate what made those games so compelling and fun as well as taking all that we've learned and thought about over the years.

And we wonder why the market isn't growing very quickly.

[Richard Bartle]

5.

From the Sigil FAQ:

"Richard Bartle, author of 'Designing Virtual Worlds,' says that most players are not good designers. If designers can't be players in the same way the "rest of us" are, what does that say about game design?

With all due respect to Bartle, I very much disagree.

In fact, I think one sign of a great game is when one or more of the game's creators can sit down and play and enjoy it. If anything's magic, that is."

He designs the games he wants to play. Why is anyone surprised that Vanguard looks like EQ?

Richard

[Jeff Freeman]

6.

Is it just me or does that web page make you scroll sideways?

Hm. Just noticed that this one does, too.

:)

[weasel]

7.

Richard: He designs the games he wants to play. Why is anyone surprised that Vanguard looks like EQ?

If given funding to publish my vision more than once, I know that I'd keep redoing essentially the same design until I got it right. Maybe it's just me. And McQuaid. And Koster.

Cory: And we wonder why the market isn't growing very quickly.

It's fair to say that, with EQ, McQuaid missed certain aspects from Diku MUDs that made them good, clean, albeit more mindless, fun. Yet the market has rewarded his design above all others.

And again, one could frame that same critique against Koster as well.

Vanguard and World of Warcraft do seem poised to show whether the market actually wants to branch out in design philosophy (as we here generally agree) - or simply clean up the design that's worked thus far.

Ed: By then, the market will have been cleared of all these flavor-of-the-month designs.

I'm not entirely sure whether you're being serious or not. Taking a shot at the lack of core innovation in '2G' designs? Or the feasibility of the gimmicks being used to differentiate one 10% diversion from status-quo, from everyone elses 10% diversion?

[Sourtone]

8.

Richard> "He designs the games he wants to play. Why is anyone surprised that Vanguard looks like EQ?"

I'd be surprised if it didn't as Brad seems to have a very narrow view of how an MMORPG should be. There may have been deeper motivations for him to leave Verant, but from the outsiders view he left because there were some fundamental design changes to EQ that he didn't agree with. Now he's making a game the way he wanted EQ to be and thinks he's going to have full control over the design... with MS as a partner that's not really very likely.

I can't totally knock Brad... after all HE has a published game and I do not (though that may be more a matter of being in the right place at the right time) but the changes that were made to his original design were made due to the cries of the player base. What would EQ be today if those cries had been ignored?

We may find out in 2007.

[BridgetAG]

9.

It cannot possibly be coincidence that this announcement was make on the 5th anniversary of the launch of Everquest.

[Sourtone]

10.

Good catch there Bridget, hadn't even thought of that ;-)

[Cory Ondrejka]

11.

weasel> And again, one could frame that same critique against Koster as well

They might not see it as a critique. As Raph posted in his response to the GameSpy story about SW:G: "I definitely to admit to failure in the area where SWG feels like UO in space. It was supposed to be UO + EQ, all the best bits of both."

[magicback]

12.

On the business side, I think the Majors has modelled sufficient the $ value of each new MMORPG design and this valuation get updated regularly. At any point in time that the $ value of a particular design under development is less than the next one, "reallocation of resources" are made.

Perhaps Vanguard's design on paper is much better than Mythica on paper and perhaps even E&B live.

Frank

[Raph Koster]

13.

With that comment, what I was getting at was that I hoped that SWG would serve as sort of a "summary game" recapitulating all that was good in that generation of MMOGs. Take everything that worked well, integrate it, add some extra stuff that was incremental above and beyond the patterns established in those games. But we didn't really manage it.

Brad definitely believes in being more incremental. He's very concerned that games that are too experimental and yet high profile will damage the viability of the medium--TSO as an example. It's a cautious approach, but one I don't really agree with. My sense is that the audience wants change, and they want it two years ago.

WoW looks very likely to do well. It's likely to essentially be a summary game for the hack n slash style, at any rate. EQ2 is pushing in some slightly different directions. If, as some claim, MMOG design branched off between "online games" and "virtual worlds", aka EQ and UO style games, then certainly the online games are way ahead on market share.

The questions to pose are, to my mind,

- why seem them as branching? From talking to Brad, we actually have very similar longterm goals...
- why online games over virtual worlds? Is Cory working on the wrong project? :)
- which branch can win? Which branch SHOULD win? Which branch can encompass the other?
- if these are so different, why does the general public consider them to be basically the same?

Hurm, unsure how to keep going without being impolitic to some degree. Stopping now. :)

[Richard Bartle]

14.

Weasel>If given funding to publish my vision more than once, I know that I'd keep redoing essentially the same design until I got it right.

So your later virtual worlds would also look/feel like your earlier virtual worlds.

I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, just that it's not entirely unexpected.

Dwarf ninja, right?

Richard

[weasel]

15.

Cory: They might not see it as a critique
I wouldn't call it a negative association at all; I presonally prefer UO's design to EQ's. My point was that 'his new game sounds just like his last', in itself doesn't negate the opportunity for growth. Witness Carmack, Spector, and Molyneux on the single-player side.

Richard: So your later virtual worlds would also look/feel like your earlier virtual worlds.

Until I got it right, sure. Of course, I'd have to be forced out to 'start over', rather than just fixing the first attempt itself.

I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, just that it's not entirely unexpected.
Dwarf ninja, right?

Well, yeah. :)

[Richard Bartle]

16.

Weasel>Until I got it right, sure. Of course, I'd have to be forced out to 'start over', rather than just fixing the first attempt itself.

So if you were writing a book and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies but you weren't really satisfied with it, you'd write another book in the same genre that used the same plot but with different details? And you'd repeat this until you got the formula right?

Hmm, this looks like the makings of an art versus craft dichotomy to me.

Richard

[wease]

17.

Richard:

Hmm, this looks like the makings of an art versus craft dichotomy to me.

perhaps more appropriately: a Dwarf vs Elf dichotomy. :)

So if you were writing a book ... but you weren't really satisfied with it, you'd write another book in the same genre that used the same plot but with different details? And you'd repeat this until you got the formula right?

I was speaking more from a slightly higher level of abstraction regarding the mechanics that I'd 'redo'. If forced out from the design-side of my hypothetical fantasy world, Yes, I'd likely try to apply very similar design concepts to my next world -- though the in-game fiction, tone, art style, genre, etc might vary wildly.

In the book analogy I think it would be more appropriate to trying to write a different story with the same underlying concepts. If that makes any sense.

Suppose my first hypothetical novel was written as a post-apoc study to contrast human nature under pressure, with the perceptions we have about civilized behavior. The 'plot' might involve a seperated family of characters trying to get back together and survive this situation.

Now, if I was not satisfied with the way my characterization of those core issues came off, my next book may well cover the same topics. However, subsequent attempts would surely be done with entirely different characters, setting, tone, plot, and relationships. Perhaps I'd use an alien invasion as the catalyst, or an old-fashioned zombie uprising the next time. Perhaps the plot would be more: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, alien invasion makes boy realize how important girl is, boy kills alien, boy saves girl. Perhaps the tone would be more action-y than dramatic, or even horror.

There are quite a bit of eaxmples of this craft-style approach to core concepts in traditionally-defined high art. Stephen King and Tom Clancy have quite a bit of sameness between their stories as did Shakespeare. Monet's haystack period is a bold example of toeing the line between craft and art in the realm of canvas.

As I approach game design philosophy, I'll readily admit I treat the core mechanics as 'craft'. The backstory, race/class/ability implementation, political affiliations, tone, graphical style, genre, etc - are where the 'art' comes in. I don't think it odd to reuse the mechanics, nor do I feel they necessarily constrain or make the game feel repetitive or derivative.

[weasel]

18.

hod did I botch the name on the above post?
*wease --l--

I swore I checked that 'Remember' box.

[Sourtone]

19.

Raph>> why seem them as branching? From talking to Brad, we actually have very similar longterm goals...
- why online games over virtual worlds? Is Cory working on the wrong project? :)
- which branch can win? Which branch SHOULD win? Which branch can encompass the other?
- if these are so different, why does the general public consider them to be basically the same?

These long term goals, I am hoping, are to provide quality entertainment to players by providing better and better online gaming experiences. That is, after all, what making video games is supposed to be about - entertaining the players. I think your looking at the MMO market as being a single genre and having a single direction... either we delve further into "online gaming" or we go more in the direction of "virtual worlds". Really though I think it's more of a sliding scale that any given game falls into... some games lean more towards virtual world (Second Life) while others lean more towards Online Game (World of Warcraft). neither is, however, "better" than the other or the "future" of gaming as they actually appeal to different groups of players. I personally could think of nothing more boring to play than Second Life (opinions of this author are his alone).. that doesn't mean it's not a valid game with a valid playerbase. It's just at a different end of the MMO specturm. So it's not a matter of either branch winning as they don't really share a playerbase.

Public perception is only is in depth as the information provided to them. We see the differences because we are immersed in the industry.. to many gamers any online world with persistent characters is an MMORPG (debated with one player for half an hour about why Planetside is an MMOFPS and not an MMORPG). To an even larger set of semi-gamers and non-gamers there's no difference between Counter-Strike and EQ (ie they're both online). To the public at large (Ma and Pa Horshradish watching Wheel in their trailer in Alabama) a video game is just a video game (if not also an instrument of the devil!).

So Cory and Brad's decision to make the games they are making really has less to do, I believe, with the direction they think all gamers want to go in and more to do with the kind of game they simply want to work on. Getting players is more about proper advertising and community building than anything else.

[Sourtone]

20.

To expand a little on how I see the MMO market:

All MMO's fall in a range from "game" to "world". On the game side are the more pure games (like Gunbound) while on the world side are the more pure VW's (like Second Life). In between these two extremes fall all other MMO's.

Each extreme also has it's own player base that meets somewhere in the middle - that small subset that likes both. The middle as well has it's own playerbase, the ones most MMORPG's shoot for. Graphically it should look something like:

http://home.ix.netcom.com/~sourtone/MMO_Spectrum.bmp

Circles aren't to scale of course without some hard marketing data.. but it should be roughly accurate.

So there should be room in the genre for both types of games.

[greglas]

21.

ST> Graphically it should look something like:

That's funny -- I made one of those too! I've got a second axis, though, for the degree of player control over the rules/content within the VW.

Not surprisingly, there's a line in the graph from one corner to another. The more you let players shape the rules/content, the less you have a game and the more you have a place.

[Sourtone]

22.

greg>> "I've got a second axis, though, for the degree of player control over the rules/content within the VW"

yea I was think you could apply a variety of other axis' there... that's definitely one.

(RPGers is, btw, just the first name I could come up with.. this group doesn't necessarily mean RPers and could also include MMOFPS and MMORTS players... though those types fall more to the "game" side.)