The MMORPG "WISH" was announced cancelled. As this occurs within a week into what seemed like a well-heeded beta, there is reason for a pause...
From (Stratics, Jan, 3):
...the Wish 2.0 Beta client is now #1 on Fileplanet's "What's Hot?" list for more than two weeks with over 45,000 downloads! Meanwhile, Beta 2.0 is in full progress, with a total of 68,000 players signed up, and 30,000 player accounts activated within the first three days.
This event would seem to underline how frontloaded the MMO business/PR/marketing process is - judgements are made early and are decisive, launch is almost too late.
Unfavorable early publicity (or the prospect of it) can unhinge even the best of plans. Perhaps this is inevitable to a hyper-competitive service industry whose customers are largely cannibalized and where so much of the future business is decided by small cadres of guild leaders and other highly networked players.
On the one hand, swift judgements in the business cycle are resource efficient. Often IT project management is much less about picking winners than about managing risk. The strategy is that as so many projects are likely to fail and their failure is unpredictable at the start (external/ unknown factors), good management is about best guesses and then identifying and tracking risk and pulling the plug on the losers and reallocating to the winners.
On the other hand, how can there be innovation and growth in world design without experimentation and a bit more forbearance up front?
I know sometimes projects can get cancelled when the task appears to be too difficult to accomplish.
What I don't understand is how someone can spend millions to develop such a game and then cancel it at the "last minute". If the game was really in such trouble as to not be ready for prime time, this should have been readily apparrent to people before its time for beta.
Now, I don't know how things were going at Mutable Realms, so maybe the developers new they weren't where they needed to be. But obviously management didn't know, or else they wouldn't have continued to spend millions if they were willing to cancel it. So was management simply asleep at the switch?
The only other thing I can think of offhand, is that since Wish was testing this new "Ultra" technology to allow 10,000 connections in the same world without a shard, was that the beta made it clear to them it wasn't going to work and the performance was too slow. Still, even in that case, you'd think it would be simple enough to change direction and implement a sharding system. Heck, there should be a design and business plan to allow for such a contigency.
Ahh well. Wish probably didn't have a bright future ahead anyway; the fantasy space is overcrowded and there are other games out there with bigger licenses and bigger budgets. But all of this was obvious at least a year ago if not 2, so why continue to undertake such a project?
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jan 09, 2005 at 23:36
Yeah, the fantasy space is really crowded (IMO, WoW has probably "won" this niche for the foreseeable future in the US and Europe at least). Still, even allowing for all sorts of behind-the-scenes things going on, I find myself taking a human perspective rather than an economic one: I feel for the dev team here. And for the players of course, but they'll move on to find another flavor of the month real quick. This is a strong indication of the degree of risk that needs managing as Bruce says, and of how much you can pour into a project and not see it come to fruition. Speaking from experience, it's going to take some of the dev team months (or if they've mortgaged their homes, years) to work through the aftermath process themselves.
OTOH, maybe there will be some talented people available for other up-and-coming projects...
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jan 10, 2005 at 00:21
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.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Jan 10, 2005 at 00:43
Bruce Woodcock wrote:
The only other thing I can think of offhand, is that since Wish was testing this new "Ultra" technology to allow 10,000 connections in the same world
So 'new' and 'Ultra' that Kingdom of the Winds did 12,000+ simultaneous connections, what, 6 years ago? Maybe it's only 5...
Nathan Combs wrote:
But on the other hand, how can there be innovation and growth in world design without experimentation and a bit more forbearance up front?
Dude (dude? Dude!). There's -plenty- of innovation and growth. I feel like what you're actually trying to ask is "How can there be innovation and growth in world design in products trying to directly compete with the most popular products on the market?" But that's like wondering why the interesting movies aren't coming from Jerry Bruckheimer. I should think the answer is obvious: The bigger the market, the less it wants anything radical. It wants what Blizzard does: small improvements in an established formula (with all due respect to the Blizzard guys, whom I have tremendous respect for).
Anyway, isn't this site pretty explicitly devoted to following the "Hollywood" games rather than the "Sundance" games? ;)
--matt
P.S. I'm not casting disdain on the 'Hollywood' games. WoW is a financial juggernaut, which I'd imagine is what it was intended to be. And sure, it's interesting in a "Man they're good at dressing up a treadmill" kind of way, but it's not very interesting from a broader world design perspective, imho.
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 10, 2005 at 01:14
Perspectives vary, as ever - I find WoW absolutely fascinating from a world design viewpoint precisely because it is so much a hodge-podge of existing elements, old and new, and yet has this sense of all hanging together. I've been poking at it a lot with my writer and developer hats on, and learning lessons I hope to apply to future projects in tabletop RPG design.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | Jan 10, 2005 at 03:02
Perspectives vary, as ever - I find WoW absolutely fascinating from a world design viewpoint precisely because it is so much a hodge-podge of existing elements, old and new, and yet has this sense of all hanging together. I've been poking at it a lot with my writer and developer hats on, and learning lessons I hope to apply to future projects in tabletop RPG design.
But yes, what Mike and Dave said above about the folks working on Wish: what a drag. :( Getting ganked at this stage hurts more, in my experience; best wishes to them all in recuperating.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | Jan 10, 2005 at 03:04
>So 'new' and 'Ultra' that Kingdom of the Winds
>did 12,000+ simultaneous connections, what, 6
>years ago? Maybe it's only 5...
Hey, I was just regurgitating their spin. :) Obviously such an architecture is not impossible, but doing it along with the amount of data Wish wanted to represent, well, that might have been impossible -- at least for 56K folks.
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jan 10, 2005 at 03:04
Bruce Baugh wrote:
Perspectives vary, as ever - I find WoW absolutely fascinating from a world design viewpoint
Why? I mean, what precisely is so interesting besides the fact that they've managed to convince so many people that it's actually some big leap forward in conceptual design as opposed to implementation?
Also, purely out of curiosity, what's your MMOG background? My impression is that people who never played text MMOs tend to see WoW as a lot more 'new' than those who had/do played/play text MMOs (and were thus generally exposed to a more diverse set of game designs). I think if an MMO IS fundamentally about monster bashing to you, then maybe WoW would seem a lot different. But if you pull back your view a bit and start comparing it to the rest of the MMO universe (not just the biggest games), it starts to look a LOT like most of the other big budget ones (barring Planetside, Shadowbane, and the social ones like TSO), just improved a bit here and there.
Please don't take this as some sort of "You suck if you haven't played small MMOS." It's just that...your worldview on MMOs is inherently going to be really narrow if all you play are the ones you can pick up in Walmart.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 10, 2005 at 04:41
I find myself taking a human perspective rather than an economic one: I feel for the dev team here
Same here, having been there twice I know it's a heart breaking experience.
I know sometimes projects can get cancelled when the task appears to be too difficult to accomplish.
In my experience publishers will put up with a lot of difficulty if they think there is money to be made eventually. I think the reason we've seen a lot of MMOs cancelled recently is that the money men have seen that MMOs aren't always a license to print money. It's not that the difficulty increased, but the rewards decreased.
What I don't understand is how someone can spend millions to develop such a game and then cancel it at the "last minute".
It's never "last minute". Even if the game is finished it's much cheaper to cancel it than launch it and see it fail. The cost of marketing and customer service normally dwarfs the development costs.
Posted by: Jim Purbrick | Jan 10, 2005 at 05:05
it's encouraging to see a company use the beta period to test the popularity of a game's features and interface. too often, beta testing is focused solely on code repairs and stress testing. even uru didn't seem to be paying much attention to the community during beta.
as a wish tester, i'm willing to bet that, after opening several thousand accounts, they saw very little traffic after the first couple of days.
Posted by: khamon | Jan 10, 2005 at 08:40
Khamon, unfortunately beta-testers are not representative of the casual market. A point-and-click interface will never go well with the hardcore FPS players.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jan 10, 2005 at 08:56
>> What I don't understand is how someone can
>> spend millions to develop such a game and then
>> cancel it at the "last minute".
> It's never "last minute". Even if the game is
> finished it's much cheaper to cancel it than
> launch it and see it fail. The cost of
> marketing and customer service normally dwarfs
> the development costs.
They don't exactly dwarf development costs, but they are large. Depending on how many simultaneous players you intend/need to support at launch - which determines how much hardware and bandwidth you need and how many CS, QA, NetOps and other support personnel - and where your support center is located, it can range from a million or two USD to well over five million USD. Bear in mind also that you have to plan for both the Launch day massive influx and for continued success, which means trying to have some extra capacity available on Launch Day.
Given the above, it sounds like Mutable analyzed the Beta results and didn't think they could make it financially in a crowded niche. While it is sad to see another development team on the streets, I can hardly blame Mutable for not tossing another couple million or so down a rat hole.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Jan 10, 2005 at 09:04
The fact that Mutable appears to have had a single investor (as Dave said above) makes this somewhat more understandable too: the Boyd decision loop was much tighter, resulting in a higher probability of fast surprising decisions.
Jessica, what you've said about the cost of CS, QA, and Ops people/hw/sw is absolutley true, and an area that seems to either scare MMOG developers silly or about which they seem casually naive. And yet there seems to be a wide variance of solution spaces here, from Mythic's (or I think Turbine, originally anyway) on the low end to Sony's rumored army-of-people approach on the high end. Which of those is appropriate depends a lot on corporate attitudes and early design decisions as much as anything else.
One other thing: you mentioned the launch day influx, which we've seen recently with WoW. Given their announced sell-through, registration, and server numbers I think they were hitting about 55-60% concurrent users in the first few days, which is astounding. And explains why they have so many servers open. The question is, what happens when that falls back to a more historical average of 15% or so, and all those servers seem like ghost towns? In an otherwise pretty clean launch, that may have been Blizzard's biggest misstep -- and one that won't have visible consequences until 2-3 months or so after launch.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jan 10, 2005 at 12:01
I think it's too early to say whether the low population issues that are already being felt on some of the WoW servers is really much of a problem in even the medium term. They've limited the release so there has not been a lot of influx of new players, which will tend towards the low pop servers when the floodgates are re-opened. Blizzard has also mentioned on their forums that they intend to have support some sort of population rebalancing mechanism (like character relocation from high pop servers to low pop ones).
It is an interesting, if somewhat reductionist, way of trying to work around scalability issues. Since they don't have really much in the way of design tools for flash crowds (like instances), and don't appear to have a technology infrastructure that lets them throw more hardware at a given server to compensate for population issues, they are addressing it with massive server counts.
Anyways, in regards to Wish, it seems like they were solving a problem which kind of didn't have a lot of demand for being solved. People are comfortable with server based partitioning, however annoying, and there are some fundamental design issues with a "one united world" design that I never was really convinced were solved (though I never played their beta).
I never got the sense, through my particular corner of the fan community, that Wish had a lot of momentum. I wonder if that's due to their lack of a big name publishing partner? I couldn't find any info on publisher from their website...
Posted by: Rob "Xemu" Fermier | Jan 10, 2005 at 12:43
Just a question that may be better answered by the people here: why are you seeming to "dismiss" the single world idea?
Ever since starting Eve-online, i have loved the single world idea, and eve is reaching 10k simultaneous users in a single world (no shards). It's also a point and click interface (much like wish) but eve is going nicely, and has growing subscriptions and more content coming in, and devoted devs/community
addmittedly, there is a significant difference in Wish (i beta'd, it's a seamless world and probably more strain than the constant "star system loads" of eve)
The biggest plus i saw in Wish was the strong emphasis on RP - a good thing when its a mmoRPg.
Admitedly, it would have probably been a niche game... the graphics are okish - reminded me of a jazzed up morrowind - but it was very much a crafting centric game and the lack of levels/defined classes probably left a lot of people feeling directionless... (peraonally loved it - and the lack of xp/levels etc was a very very good thing to me).
To me it seemed that the idea of Wish was a little to much for Mutable Realms to cope with - brilliant idea, but it needed a little more flashyness to compete with the current crop of MMOGs.
Posted by: Cenn | Jan 10, 2005 at 14:17
some big leap forward in conceptual design as opposed to implementation?
What makes you think conceptual design is more important than implementation?
your worldview on MMOs is inherently going to be really narrow if all you play are the ones you can pick up in Walmart.
I'm not even going to touch this.
Posted by: Lukas | Jan 10, 2005 at 14:23
Lukas wrote:
What makes you think conceptual design is more important than implementation?
I can't recall claiming it was. Since Nathan, who started this thread, bemoaned the "lack of innovation and growth in world design" though, I thought I'd comment on that rather than the details of implementation.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 10, 2005 at 14:30
Matt>
There's -plenty- of innovation and growth. I feel like what you're actually trying to ask is "How can there be innovation and growth in world design in products trying to directly compete with the most popular products on the market?" But that's like wondering why the interesting movies aren't coming from Jerry Bruckheimer. I should think the answer is obvious: The bigger the market, the less it wants anything radical. It wants what Blizzard does: small improvements in an established formula (with all due respect to the Blizzard guys, whom I have tremendous respect for).
Seems like there is an assumption here doesn't feel quite right. Namely, that in the space of all possible conceptual world designs there are a few *sweet spots* that appeal to broad audiences, which are known, and covered, and derivative from previous works.
I'd like to believe, rather, that not all successful points in this space are known, and it is quite possible that someone could shift the frame a bit and conjure up something just as viable and quite different from previous experience.
However it may take a little time to get it just right, pull the plug too quickly and will never know... The old Sienfeld cliche: took a few seasons for that to work itself out.
Posted by: Nathan Combs | Jan 10, 2005 at 14:47
You MUST innovate or you will die. Your game MUST have a meme it can own. City of Heroes: the Superhero MMO. Shadowbane: the PvP MMO. Puzzle Pirates: the Puzzle MMO. If you just try to do what someone else has done, you will end up crushed by the guy that got there first.
The trick is discovering where to innovate. Yes, you need to find a 'sweet spot', but I think there's a lot of 'sweet spots' out there that haven't been exploited. Wish ultimately decided their sweet spot was having 10K users on a world at a time, which both wasn't very original (Eve got there first) nor terribly compelling.
Players make game decisions based upon the fun factor, so making a techy sales pitch is going to fall short. Saying that there will be 10K users attached to the same world isn't compelling. At the very least, they needed to find some way to bring this home in a tangible way that players could get - this means massive sieges! Ultra-complex politics! Without giving players those tangible design-y benefits to latch onto, players will only think of the problems that potentially come with the technology feature - spaces that are too crowded, a huge world that looks too generic, battle scenes with too many people on it to render - and your sales team will spend all of their time convincing the players that your game won't have those issues.
why are you seeming to "dismiss" the single world idea? Ever since starting Eve-online, i have loved the single world idea, and eve is reaching 10k simultaneous users in a single world (no shards).
I just don't think it's particularly compelling to most users. They might find it interesting, but it won't make-or-break a purchasing decision the way another core vision might. Note: EVE doesn't bill itself as the '10K simultaneous' game, but rather the 'space exploring/trading/etc' game. Players can more easily wrap their heads around the fun of that.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 10, 2005 at 15:51
Disclaimer: I am an unbearded, casual player.
The compelling hook for Wish, indeed one that kept me checking in on the game's progress from time to time, was the "live content" and the promise that player events would have in-world repercussions.
I play two games, CoH and SWG. One is a "game" and the other is a "world," but for different reasons players/characters in both games have a negligible impact. I have several characters on the same server in CoH, and many are going through the same instanced storylines over and over. SWG allows an astonishing variety of playstyles and activities but nothing ever HAPPENS there. I enjoy both of these games qua games, but I rarely feel immersed in them, and there's little emotional connection. They're effective platforms for social gaming with a core group of friends.
The promise of Wish was in non-identical quests -- artificially generated but never precisely duplicated -- and a more hands-on live team. "Ultra-massive?" Shardless? Meaningles jargon. What Wish should have hung its hat on, IMHO, was a catchphrase like, "A single fantasy world...that YOU can CHANGE." Marketing hyperbole, of course -- single player games are much better at simulating the hero's impact on a story than any MMO, given that you have competing heroes. But I sure would have liked the chance to recreate the D&D around-the-table experience in a larger scale. I just don't get that in the games I play. Every day in SWG is just like the previous day, and I'm waiting for a snowstorm to develop -- developer controlled, of course -- in CoH while I run from instanced mission to instanced mission.
Posted by: That Chip Guy | Jan 10, 2005 at 16:31
Damion: good points.
I think thats one point - the politics/land control etc.
(sorry for using eve as example all the time, but its what i'm more familiar with atm) The politics here is what is the most interesting thing to me - the changing alliances and their control of areas of space... given that there isn't (until really recently) any way to legitimately control/own a region, they've done it the PvP way - destroy other enemy player in "their" turf... so the politics is down to a might makes right kind of thing... If someone could do this kind of thing in a fantasy based game - with the no-level no-xp learn anything kind of mentality that eve (and even more wish) had, it would be awesome.
massively multiplayer: lasting politics and a lasting effect on the world - a chance to be a hero/villan in a fictional world. If only the MMO delevopers would take a hint from such games as Morrowind/baldurs Gate it would be good.
City of Heroes: the Superhero MMO.
Shadowbane: the PvP MMO.
Puzzle Pirates: the Puzzle MMO
why cant we have
: the RPG MMO?
Posted by: Cenn | Jan 10, 2005 at 17:27
"The question is, what happens when that falls back to a more historical average of 15% or so, and all those servers seem like ghost towns? In an otherwise pretty clean launch, that may have been Blizzard's biggest misstep -- and one that won't have visible consequences until 2-3 months or so after launch."
It really depends on whether there are goods in one world that can't be brought across to a second world in a server character move, if Blizzard needs to consolidate servers.
Posted by: Jessica Mulligan | Jan 10, 2005 at 17:27
Cenn -- I actually talked about exactly that in my blog entry on the subject. Everquest and WoW pretty much own 'the RPG MMO' meme in the mass market's eyes, and if you don't believe that those are good RPGs, you may find that discouraging.
It's not. People who want to make a different kind of RPG have to find a way to communicate that vision to players succinctly, so that you can get it intuitively. UO was 'the virtual world', Shadowbane is the PvP MMO', and Dark Ages was 'the Realm vs Realm' game. Wish never found its one sentence sales pitch that resonated with its users, IMHO.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 10, 2005 at 18:17
Territorial control was what I wanted to try for, with some politics and economy thrown in because wars of conquest without political or economic features are simply a matter of who builds the first juggernaut war machine and rolls up everyone else. Even with *very* optimistic figures on productivity and efficiency of content creation, live GM content struck me as economically non-viable by more than an order of magnitude.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Jan 10, 2005 at 18:26
Following some of the comments above, the issue we seem to be talking about is the need for innovation that results in stickiness... what makes me want to spend my time playing these games or spending time in these worlds, given all the other demands on my time? And the more experienced we become with MMOs, the higher our expectations become, hence the transparency of a game like WoW to those of us who have played the games from which its elements are derived... the pay-off in terms of experience is simply not worth the investment of time. Because yes, I think our expectations have evolved… we now want to see the effect that we've had, either on our group(s), the environment, or the larger game universe.
The issue that I have come to have with a lot of MMOGs is that they play like the single-player games I played for years, with what seems like a bit of social stuff glued on as afterthought. What I want in an MMO is a platform where the benefit of being in a play universe with thousands of other people is central to the play experience. In CoH, grouping is relatively fundamental to gameplay and most everyone does it from fairly low levels (I think), even if it only means running from instanced mission to instanced mission. In SWG, even if I play solo, I need other people to buy that stuff I craft, or heal my battle fatigue when I've fought a bit too much. In Second Life, other residents are needed to appreciate one's creations and participate in the events one organises...
I don't know how the design process works, really… But it occurs to me that rather than starting with game mechanics, first understanding and engineering the social infrastructure may lead to greater innovation through the design of worlds where people need and enjoy each other... this social glue then translates into subscriber stickiness. A well-balanced game should start by designing player interdependency and the infrastructure to encourage group emergence (what Richard Bartle calls 'soft-wired groups') with systems and places that facilitate meeting, grouping, and forging/maintaining longer term relationships. Isn't this what we've seen work in MMOs that have long track records with very established social networks? But have the more sophisticated social functions been retrofits, rather than anticipated needs? Hasn't a lot of the social infrastructure been player-constructed or player-demanded, rather than designer-anticipated?
Maybe this social thing is just my bias... but if I wanted to solo, I'd play single-player games that don't involve subscription fees, lag and broadcast spammers. And it's also my bias as a researcher, but I think we need to spend more time figuring out what's working (or what has worked in the past, in MUDs, etc.), so we can all be better informed in the future.
(btw, I ranted about this topic just the other day...)
Posted by: Lisa Galarneau | Jan 10, 2005 at 18:31
Lisa: "A well-balanced game should start by designing player interdependency and the infrastructure to encourage group emergence (what Richard Bartle calls 'soft-wired groups') with systems and places that facilitate meeting, grouping, and forging/maintaining longer term relationships."
This is exactly one of my rants, too. :-)
It seems to me that a "massively multiplayer" world misses a valuable opportunity to create something unique if it's not designed to have features that highlight its massive multiplayerness. For interesting social effects to occur, you really need three things:
1. world code that supports grouped action
2. reasons to want to engage in grouped action
3. ways to find people to create groups
So why is it that many MMOGs seem to implement 1 and 2 together as "forced grouping" (thereby destroying the fun of grouping), and 3 -- if at all -- as an extremely limited search function added on as an afterthought?
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jan 10, 2005 at 19:44
Dave Rickey> live GM content struck me as economically non-viable by more than an order of magnitude.
Depends on how you utilize volunteers, doesn't it? With the right marketing, screening process and moderation it might work... (i.e. employees only approve.)
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jan 10, 2005 at 21:55
Ola wrote:
Dave Rickey> live GM content struck me as economically non-viable by more than an order of magnitude.
Depends on how you utilize volunteers, doesn't it? With the right marketing, screening process and moderation it might work... (i.e. employees only approve.)
Yes, it can definitely work and has been working for us for the past 8 years. I think, however, that I would not recommend trying to deploy the sort of intensive live GM content stuff we employ on the kind of scale that Everquest has, for instance, especially on a system with many shards. (In fact, the way we do things simply will not work on multiple shards as we're willing/able to change the world and the code itself in response to what players are doing. Hard to do if you have players doing different things in multiple shards.)
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 10, 2005 at 23:07
Jessica said of whether WoW has too many servers open due to early high concurrency, "it really depends on whether there are goods in one world that can't be brought across to a second world in a server character move, if Blizzard needs to consolidate servers."
Goods like, say, unique character names? Handling name collisions in consolidating servers could be pretty messy. Not impossible, just messy. And distressing to many players.
Lisa said, "The issue that I have come to have with a lot of MMOGs is that they play like the single-player games I played for years, with what seems like a bit of social stuff glued on as afterthought."
Yes, exactly. And IMO that is because they are still designed like single-player games, from a single-player POV. It's clearly a difficult viewpoint to break out of for both developer and player: as just one example, how many games have skills that are operable only by a group -- say, fighters working like (and gaining bonuses for) a Spartan phalanx? (For my rant and some design ideas on the subject of groups in MMOs, see my old article.)
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jan 11, 2005 at 00:13
If there was only one investor, then the decision does make a little more sense, but all of this still points at bad management to me. Yes, you need to have a certain number of subscribers in order to support your costs, but any business plan for a MMOG should be prepared to operate on 20K subs even if they're shooting for 200K. Yes, you'd have to do a massive workforce cut to handle that, but it should be doable. If management was planning on massive success -- well, again, it should have been obvious before beta they weren't going to get there.
So it seems perhaps instead that the investor told them they'd get $X to deliver on a certain date and management failed to deliver, thinking they could just get the investor to pony up more money. Again, poor management decision. Or perhaps the investor simply had a finacial setback and was unable to fund development any longer. Sometimes stuff just happens, and if Mutable Realms got caught in a financial pinch and couldn't find another investor to bail them out -- well, it happens.
Still, I can't help but think the problems were visible long before beta. Perhaps I'm just being a Monday Morning QB again. :)
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jan 11, 2005 at 01:31
The investor and the manager were the same person.
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Jan 11, 2005 at 01:37
Mike Sellers> Goods like, say, unique character names?
It still shocks and amazes me that MMORPGs seem to have gravitated to Unique Character Names.
There's no technical reason for unique character names. You need a unique handle per character, of course, but having more than one avatar named "Brask" should be no more troublesome in game than in real life.
- Brask
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Jan 11, 2005 at 02:08
I think, however, that I would not recommend trying to deploy the sort of intensive live GM content stuff we employ on the kind of scale that Everquest has, for instance, especially on a system with many shards.
The only solution that scales well is using volunteers. Unfortunately, the games that worry about scale on that size are also big enough to be sued by volunteers saying they were exploited without pay. =p
Goods like, say, unique character names? Handling name collisions in consolidating servers could be pretty messy. Not impossible, just messy. And distressing to many players.
This is actually pretty trivial, technically. For Shadowbane's server migration code, we simply prompt you to choose a new name if your old one is taken.
There's no technical reason for unique character names. You need a unique handle per character, of course, but having more than one avatar named "Brask" should be no more troublesome in game than in real life.
UO shipped without unique character names. Trust me when I say the community lessons there were enough to say 'NEVER AGAIN' very loudly.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 11, 2005 at 02:30
Damion wrote:
The only solution that scales well is using volunteers. Unfortunately, the games that worry about scale on that size are also big enough to be sued by volunteers saying they were exploited without pay. =p
Well, I meant even with volunteers. The level of interaction we do with players is too high to replicate on that scale, I think. It requires that the GMs (or Gods in our case) have enormous power over the world in order to attain the flexibility we need, and I think you'd end up with a lot more corruption and screwing around on the EQ scale. Enough that it'd completely poison the whole system in the minds of the players. In our case, each game is small enough that the community of GMs/Gods feels some personal loyalty to the producer/producer(s) as individuals. We even take vacations together. =)
I just can't imagine being able to place that level of trust in 100x as many GMs/Gods (WoW being about 100x the size of Achaea).
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Jan 11, 2005 at 03:26
Damion Schubert> UO shipped without unique character names. Trust me when I say the community lessons there were enough to say 'NEVER AGAIN' very loudly.
That's what I was afraid of. IMHO, that's taking the wrong lesson from UO. The problem wasn't non-unique character names. It was the inability to authenticate fellow players. It is clear some social security like number needs to be available to the client to identify if the person you are talking to now is the same one you talked to yesterday. I do not think it is clear that the name should be this device.
But, as unique names become more de rigeuer, it will just further entrench the self-fulfilling prophecy that unique names are required to avoid identity problems. (As people become accustomed to unique names, they will assume in any new system that name identity implies account identity)
- Brask
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Jan 11, 2005 at 03:35
Mike Sellers wrote:
"The question is, what happens when that falls back to a more historical average of 15% or so, and all those servers seem like ghost towns? "
There are some good and bad examples: if you are lucky and you have a successful MMOG the higher deployment investment to support higher concurrent users at launch can be balanced with an increasing number of subscribers. You have decreasing concurrent users rate after launch but at the same time you have an increasing number of subscribers. In the long term it can work.
Or the bad example: you launch without an infrastructure able to support the initial number of subscribers, you rush to improve it with additional servers, support stuff etc. and in the long term you run in a marketing and pr catastrophe. You end with discouraged customers, blaming the company for the negative launch, a negative publicity for the rest of the product life of the MMOG. An example was Anarchy Online. At launch they did not have enough resources to support the high number of customers who bought the game (beside other problems like unstable software due to a rushed release). They tried to compensate buying additional servers, hiring new staff etc. But before they could bring the new infrastructure in, it was already too late. Subscribers number were sinking and what they had left was a shard with an average population, an under populated shard and a complete shard hardware of no use. In that case you cannot expect any ROI.
Posted by: Luca Girardo | Jan 11, 2005 at 04:22
Matt> I think, however, that I would not recommend trying to deploy the sort of intensive live GM content stuff we employ on the kind of scale that Everquest has, for instance, especially on a system with many shards.
Right, but the less ambitious goal of having many unique monsters, or even simple area designs, should be doable. Players can create new skins for models. Models can be composite (separate models for head, limbs, body etc). And volunteers can attach attributes and rewards to them. What you need pay staff for is to look over the monsters, and especially the rewards, before they are put in game. I guess you could have a set of rules that identify common problems, and verify world integrity, so you don't actually need to intervene manually in most cases. I think you could get this to work with at least 5 levels of moderation:
1. approval of skins by volunteer moderators
2. design of monsters by screened volunteers, who are responsible for a particular area
3. approval of monsters by rules
4. approval of monsters by volunteer moderators who are responsible for a particular area
5. final approval of monsters by paid moderators
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jan 11, 2005 at 08:44
That's what I was afraid of. IMHO, that's taking the wrong lesson from UO. The problem wasn't non-unique character names. It was the inability to authenticate fellow players. It is clear some social security like number needs to be available to the client to identify if the person you are talking to now is the same one you talked to yesterday. I do not think it is clear that the name should be this device.
Shadowbane actually does social security numbers as well as unique names - we did it because our Asian partners found that players from different Asian territories had problems communicating different Asian names to GMs. The social security numbers failed miserably, and En-Tranz ended up asking us how to make it so their entire Asian market would be forced to use English names (!).
Players don't want to turn on SSNs, since it adds to screen clutter and reinforces that you ARE a number, and NOT a free man. As such, when a problem player hit, most of the victims didn't have SSNs on and were too flustered to remember to flick the switch that did so.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 11, 2005 at 11:31
It seems like it is pretty late in development to be canning a project. It was, apparently, in the second phase of public beta when they decided to kill it. Do projects need to be assessed earlier in the development cycle for nuking? In my opinion, a game that isn't going to come out should never actually reach beta testing (meaning, research should be done prior to the fecal matter hitting the fan, and a decision should be made early on).
Any way you put it, this is one of those things that sucks for the industry and genre as a whole--all we need are a few more projects to waste millions of dollars and investors will shoot themselves in the face before pouring money into MMOG projects.
Posted by: Grouchy Gnome | Jan 11, 2005 at 14:24
Brask: "The problem [in UO] wasn't non-unique character names. It was the inability to authenticate fellow players."
I can see some people having a problem with anonymity... but I wonder if perhaps a more prevalent reason is the degree to which a player's identity is bound up in his avatar's name.
If the name you choose for your avatar is intended to communicate something about your identity, it can be upsetting to see someone else in the world with that name. This is particularly true if (in this age of individualism) your sense of self-worth is keyed to feeling "unique" and your nickname or handle is your primary means of asserting that uniqueness in an online world.
I've personally felt annoyance on the occasions when I've signed up on some game or forum and found that someone had already taken the name "Flatfingers." I was given that nickname 20 years ago by people who've remained good friends, and I (irrationally) resent its being appropriated. ("How could anyone else be nicknamed 'Flatfingers,' anyway?!")
But is the answer to require unique names so that whoever gets it first can be unique? Or would be it better to allow duplicate names so that those who've spent a lot of time coming up with a name they care about can always have it?
Or is the best solution to require additional qualifiers when a name clash is detected?
--Flatfingers (aka Bart Stewart, because while I enjoy my privacy I also stand behind what I write)
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jan 11, 2005 at 15:32
Ah, that's so true. I've used the nick "setarkos" since I was ridiculed on IRC for using my real first name back in 1991. Still, other people manage to pick the same name, somehow... Odd, that is.
Anyway, the problem can be solved by having first and last names. The first being a regular name and the last name being a description of your character's psyche/class:
Mary Bloodfingers, Peter Headshot...
> tell MaryBl hi!
The server should warn of ambiguities when using tells and favour those who are on your buddy list.
Can be done. Not too difficult. Another option would be to qualify by city, race, guild etc...
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jan 11, 2005 at 15:42
It seems like it is pretty late in development to be canning a project. It was, apparently, in the second phase of public beta when they decided to kill it. Do projects need to be assessed earlier in the development cycle for nuking? In my opinion, a game that isn't going to come out should never actually reach beta testing (meaning, research should be done prior to the fecal matter hitting the fan, and a decision should be made early on).
The problem is, if you've never made one of these games before, you don't know what you don't know until it's thrust in your face. The timing of the cancellation suggests to me some amount of sticker shock regarding problems exposed by their betas - i.e. they thought they were 90% done, and found out instead they had 90% to go. This isn't terribly unusual - almost every MMO suffers from contact with the enemy. However, if you're a small, independant company, you simply may not have the liquidity to keep it going.
Wolfpack put up it's public beta of Shadowbane more than a full year before it launched. If it hadn't had the support of a publisher for that year's time.... history would have been far different in this corner of the MMOverse.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 11, 2005 at 18:24
Damion Schubert> Players don't want to turn on SSNs, since it adds to screen clutter and reinforces that you ARE a number, and NOT a free man.
I agree having a number over everyones head is a bad idea. Ironically, this is why I'm against unique names! Forcing my name to be unique means I have to have a number over my head! As FlatFingers says, one cannot be Flatfingers, but must be Flatfingers53. (Or worse yet, give up on your handle entirely for the output of the autorolled name generator, which is little better than an SSN. (Indeed, by using the SSN as a seed, one could make an autogenerated name that corresponds uniquely with the SSN)
Damion Schubert> As such, when a problem player hit, most of the victims didn't have SSNs on and were too flustered to remember to flick the switch that did so.
Why aren't the SSN's available from the logs? The chat logs of a player shouldn't display the SSN (for reasons you mentinoed earlier), but should track the SSN so that the victim may go back and write it down later. (If the victim's attack wasn't in client logs, they are likely too flustered to remember the exact spelling of Anndsand which griefed them anyways...)
What I want as a user is the ability to rename other players. This renaming is done only client side, but allows the tagging of information. My client can then use the SSNs to lookup in my own list, so the particular Anndsand that griefed me will show up as Anndsand [KOS] when I look at him.
I guess I'm still naively idealistic here.
- Brask Mumei
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Jan 11, 2005 at 20:17
Lisa said, "The issue that I have come to have with a lot of MMOGs is that they play like the single-player games I played for years, with what seems like a bit of social stuff glued on as afterthought."
[Mike said] Yes, exactly. And IMO that is because they are still designed like single-player games, from a single-player POV. It's clearly a difficult viewpoint to break out of for both developer and player: as just one example, how many games have skills that are operable only by a group -- say, fighters working like (and gaining bonuses for) a Spartan phalanx? (For my rant and some design ideas on the subject of groups in MMOs, see my old article.)
My theory is that to go the next step, with current UI and comms, will likely be unpleasant for most players today. The next level requires a sophistication in interaction and coordination that would require (group) training - something most players likely wouldn't put up with.
I used to play online air sims - formation combat was horribly difficult, even with a committed bunch of guys... and guess what, its pretty darn hard in RL too. MMORPG group designs seem to have embraced Henry Ford's "interchangeable parts" and industrial design: want to be able to swap in and swap out players over a group session to keep it going.
Its always a heck of a lot more fun with a dedicated and synched up bunch of folk, but its real work to find and coordinate...
Posted by: Nathan Combs | Jan 11, 2005 at 21:11
As FlatFingers says, one cannot be Flatfingers, but must be Flatfingers53.
Not if we ban numbers in your name, as we and WoW both do.
Why aren't the SSN's available from the logs? The chat logs of a player shouldn't display the SSN (for reasons you mentinoed earlier), but should track the SSN so that the victim may go back and write it down later.
You're now asking the players to do work in order to get their CSR service support. Players flatly do not believe this responsibility resides with them.
Trust me when I say that the problem of you having to come up with a unique name from time to time is a much smaller one than the CSR issues that would arise if you try to go around it. Sometimes, the simple solutions are the best, and you have to accept the deficiencies of those solutions.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 11, 2005 at 21:26
> Damion Schubert wrote
>
> Cenn -- I actually talked about exactly that in my blog
> entry on the subject. Everquest and WoW pretty much own
> 'the RPG MMO' meme in the mass market's eyes
No, they own the Fantasy Monster Bashing MMO market.
There is absolutely no role playing in either one.
Just because the "RPG" term is typically used very sloppily does not mean we have to perpetuate its misuse.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 12, 2005 at 21:01
It does if you want to talk intelligently about the marketing, and the positioning of the games already there. Mentally, those games are 'RPGs' in the eyes of the game-buying public, and even if you feel that it isn't accurate, time will start flowing backwards before you convince them otherwise.
Is that to say that there aren't opportunities here. For example, you might market your own game as a 'True Role Playing Game', positioning yourself against what the RPG has become, but overall, the meme you want has been taken.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Jan 12, 2005 at 22:06
I don't think RPG has been taken whatsoever in the MMORPG market.
When people think EQ they don't think EQ. They think grinding and raiding.
Look at how people refer to the major games.
EQ: The grinding/raiding MMO.
DAoC: The RvR MMO
Shadowbane: The PvP MMO.
There is still an opportunity for someone to be the RPG MMO.
Posted by: Michael Hartman | Jan 13, 2005 at 13:19
I have the deepest respect for the game developers of WISH professionally, as I know the time and effort required to produce such a massive project.
However as an old tester of WISH even months back it was obvious that it wasn't going to offers the features and eye candy necessary to break into the MMORPG market with any significant presence. If this title had been released I think it would have hit the 20k-40k subscriber market initially. My opinion is the investor weighed the current state and feedback of the game, looked at the closest compariable product (Horizons) and the current competition in the fantasy genre (WoW, EQ2), and made the correct call based on the financials.
I hate to see any project that had so much creativity put into canned as much as anyone else, but to be competitive WISH still needed a major overhaul (6+ months) and even then the potential market would already have been squeezed by several other major players.
Posted by: Scott Shepherd | Jan 13, 2005 at 15:04
Scott Shepherd>My opinion is the investor weighed the current state and feedback of the game, looked at the closest compariable product (Horizons) and the current competition in the fantasy genre (WoW, EQ2), and made the correct call based on the financials.
This is what the people at Mutable Realms are saying, too. According to emails published at Stratics, "There has been a very loyal and dedicated community around Wish. But it is simply not large enough to support a group of over 32 full-time game developers, plus many others that worked as consultants."
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jan 18, 2005 at 03:14
Is it impossible to keep a game with 20K subscribers running, if you have the basic architecture set up and don't provide phone support?
Anyone know why they insisted on point-and-click in a 3D environment? Was it only a tech issue or was it a belief issue? It would've made more sense if they aimed for the casual market. Seems like their vision was set in stone prematurely.
The timing of the beta wasn't all that great either, if they wanted to measure market potential. And this is basically what I don't understand. Why would anyone even think of starting on a MMO from scratch if Wish had a technological architecture that was sound, and they still cancel? Why didn't Mutable Realms spend time identifying issues which made players leave and analyze what could be done with the overall design? Why not rework the issues and spend some time getting another investor involved? Why immediately destroy the goodwill associated with the label "Wish"?
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jan 18, 2005 at 05:25
The problem with every mmorpg using every convention with just little twists, is that someone will ultimately do it or are doing it better. It is high time for the evolution of mmo games. Sure wow was a success, but only because it simplifies all those conventions and makes it accesable to casual gamers who didn't like the thought of spending 3 years of killing bunnies to max out their characters. Good move on wow's part.
Now, take that formula, and add new approaches, and you will be amazed at the success. We have to ween ourselves away from the "rpg" of the mmo and into action,fps, or other types to satisfy those who like the use of skill not the use of electronic dice algorythms.
Some mmorpgs try this, such as planet side/neocron/endless ages ect. yet they still stick to the rpg sense in building stats and the like. We have to toss that out the window, and create the mmo with instant twitch action, whether it is manual kung-fu or manual weapons...without the rpg or other outrageous rulesets like in ww2o.
You can still have the l33t gear, you can still have economies and pvp and pve like everyone likes, but it will satisfy those gamers who are more savvy to the skill department.
Another thing mmo's must evolve is their content. Worlds must be more dynamic, with more exploration and strategy involved. Especially rpgs..the world must not be a static borign place filled with endless monsters.
As for mmorpgs, well, look at almost any single player or networked rpg and you will fidn many thigns missing from mmos. Liek breakign chests for loot. Small detail, but everyoen loves to smash chests, instead though, mmos don't have the little things that please people. And it favor of a false balance, they never give anyoen the sense of power, just the sense that they have exactly enough to survive their level brackets. uninspiring.
Whether Wish failed because of its own ambitions of having thousands of players on the same seamless world is actually besides the point, had it gone into official release it would have failed, or be another fringe mmorpg liek Horizons, endless ages ect ect. because it offered nothign new at all, even the thousands of players at once was not enough, because if you look at any mmorpg, you only run across a few hundred during any given day and that is plenty.
Posted by: wadewilson | Apr 21, 2005 at 16:39