[Consumption vs Naturalism in Animal Crossing]

via Gamasutra

"Animal Crossing deploys a procedural rhetoric about the repetition of mundane work as a consequence of contemporary material property ideals. When my (then) five-year-old began playing the game seriously, he quickly recognized the dilemma he faced. On the one hand, he wanted to spend the money he had earned from collecting fruit and bugs on new furniture, carpets, and shirts. On the other hand, he wanted to pay off his house so he could get a bigger one like mine. Then, once he did amass enough savings to pay off his mortgage, the local shopkeeper and real estate tycoon Tom Nook offered to expand his house. While it is possible to refrain from upgrading, Nook, an unassuming raccoon, continues to offer renovations as frequently as the player visits his store. My son began to realize the trap he was in: the more material possessions he took on, the more space he needed, and the more debt he had to take on to provide that space. And the additional space just fueled more material acquisitions, continuing the cycle."

  One thing that I have never seen anyone else notice or remark on about Animal Crossing, is the fact that all the housing items in the game are represented by a leaf icon whenever dropped  on the ground outside a building. The significance of that may be lost on most Westerners who aren't familiar with the Japanese mythology that surrounds the animal that Tom Nook is -- which is to say he's actually a tanuki, and not a raccoon.

  Tanuki are known for casting enchantments on things like leaves to make them look like treasure, and tricking stupid humans with it. When the tanuki magic wears off, the objects are revealed to actually be worthless. In other words, signs may be pointing to Tom Nook's entire business being more of a scam than Crazy Redd's black market. =P

  The fact that this tanuki trickery seems to be alluded to in Animal Crossing is very interesting, and even more so in the context of the above article, in my opinion.

[Are There Just Fewer Stories to Tell?]

  I've been musing over the recent wave of posts from some of the more established MMO bloggers decrying the death of the 'MMO blog', but after reading various bloggers' takes on the issue and watching this (rather brilliant) presentation on the culture of narrative and player/content dialogue in games, I think I understand a large part of the issue (and it's the culmination of something I started feeling dissatisfied about years ago back when the only MMORPG I had ever played was WoW).

  It's not that the MMORPG genre in particular is dying per se (the term 'MMO' has expanded to include so many variations of games precisely because it's grown so much). I think part of it is that nowadays there are fewer stories you can tell within it. Why blog about your experience doing heavily scripted/cut scene'd content that will be experienced in the exact same way by everyone else who's ever done it (or watched a Let's Play)? That doesn't lead to interesting or compelling player stories. Aside from navel-gazing and pontificating on one's personal taste in gameplay or following the latest dev studio drama, perhaps the recent field of MMORPGs just doesn't lend itself to much in the way of compelling personal material of the sort that inspires people to want to write much about it.

  This is not an issue unique to MMORPGs. Modern games have been struggling with this issue of how to engage players and bring more meaningful experiences for years now. So far, the idea has been to 'AAA' up the game and make it as cinematic as possible (apeing movies) and completely overlooking that the procedural aspect of 'worldy' MMORPGs is what makes them so compelling to people in the first place. The result is a heavily homogenized experience that may be fun enough for the individual, but without those unique, unpredictable flashes that make recounting the experience to others interesting.

  It's only natural that as most games have moved toward a painstakingly streamlined, heavily-guided game experience, that bloggers would find less incentive to talk about it. Generic gameplay info and reviews are better presented via YouTube videos and fan forums. Individual dialogues on a specific game or essays about one's adventures in it are harder to present in a unique or interesting way. The fact seems to be that there are now thousands of perfectly adequate MMOGs out there lately, but few that are worth regularly blogging about.

Related Reading:  
The Blogs Reflect the Genre
Retro Servers and the Light at the End of the Tunnel
I Don't Care What You're Doing In Your MMO

[The Corruption of AAA and What it Means for 'Games as Art']

A harsh excoriation on the decadence of the videogame industry (and why it means 'games as an artform' and respect for the medium is actually undermined by it), via Medium Difficulty. 

   Really sums up how I've been feeling lately (particularly on the issue of lack of accountability). Between the above article and John Teti's takedown of the PS4 reveal, there's not much else I can add to the generally-unimpressed feelings I've been getting from a lot of industry news lately. Though it was reassuring reading these pieces with feelings so similar to mine and realizing that it's not just me becoming an insufferable gaming hipster (though that could be part of it too, I suppose). =P

  Regardless, the problems of budget bloat, overhype, creative stagnation, technology-fetishism and fear of straying too far out of the box are all things that have plagued most post-WoW MMORPGs as well, so I feel this topic is worth bringing up in a context beyond just console games.


Related Reading:
What's Wrong With the AAA MMO Industry?
The Folly of David Cage
Dev warns Against Economically Unviable Next Gen

[Stop With the Pointless CGI Trailers, Already]

I am seriously tired of cinematic MMORPG trailers. Sick of them. The recent trailer for The Elder Scrolls Online just summed up all my annoyances with these things:

  Sure, they look really cool, and can thrill the imagination. But they have ZERO bearing on the actual game, and they show nothing of significance about the gameplay (you know, the bit that actually matters?). The more slick and impressive one is the more I think "How much money was wasted on making this rather than being invested in something useful for the game?" Rather than getting me interested, these things are starting to actually turn me off. They seem to be more of an advertisement of how much a game studio's priorities are in the wrong place; how they want flashy imagery to excite people's interest rather than the merits of the game speaking for itself.

  And in the case of TESO, especially, when so little of what we've heard about it is anything significantly concrete about the actual game. When your potential playerbase is already skeptical and more interested in finding out whether or not your game is yet another amalgam of tired MMO cliches in a new skin, showing off a fancy 6 minute cutscene trailer illustrating cool stuff that nobody ingame can actually do, most likely, is not a good idea in my opinion. What does this stuff have to do with what people will actually be able to experience? This looks like it'd be a cool movie but tells me jack about whether its an interesting game.

  Overall, though, MMO studios need to stop with the gimmicky PR garbage and focus on the quality of their product, not the volume of their hype. Because as excitable as many MMO players can be, I think we've reached a critical level of jaded low tolerance for the same old crap in a different box. No amount of fanciful CGI shenanigans is going to save your game if it can't actually deliver. I swear the priorities of AAA MMO studios nowadays are really backwards.

[The Folly of CRPGs in the West and Japan]

  Via the Insomnia blog: an interesting article dissecting the chronic design failures of the CRPG genre, and why the result is that people have a hard time pinning down just what exactly a 'RPG' even is anymore.

  As someone whose first experiences with 'RPG's were of the Japanese variety (on the SNES) their criticisms of the genre are hard to hear but I have to admit they make a lot of sense (particularly in explaining why as a genre JRPGs have have been in decline for years now).


Related Reading:
R.I.P J-RPG

[Do MMOs Really Need to Be Saved?]

via Tadhg Kelly at What Games Are; a rebuttal to the idea that modern games need to be 'saved':

"It's a rite-of-passage thing. Also an age thing. You're probably around 25, have jumped, slaughtered and strategised your way through at least 1000 games, and found them amazing and entertaining. Then something happens.

  You start to get bothered by the sameness. You start to notice that games recycle the same ideas on a generational timeline, that every 5-7 years or so game developers repackage the same concepts for new platforms. And also keep making the same mistakes. Over time, you start to think that games need to be saved.

  Your attention span shortens. You struggle to remember the last time you had a gaming all-nighter and you look on Skyrim not as a challenge, but rather as a task. A drudge, even. You wonder just how long games can get away with that sort of thing. You also start to be much less tolerant of the first hour of a game: if it doesn't absorb you then you dump it."

  Sound familiar to anyone? =P

  I think the fact that many of the current MMO bloggers fit squarely into this description explains a lot about the tone many have towards the games today. For example the whole '3-monther' label being used by many as proof of the genre's failings rather than a hint that something has changed in the player.  I also agree with Tadhg that perhaps we 'old timers' may be able to get games more in line with our desires by focusing on indies rather than the mainstream gaming industry, since the mainstream studios don't really seem to be serving our demographic.


Related Reading:
The Dark Side of Happy Memories

[We Can't Have It Both Ways]

 via Real Talk: Videogames:

"The gaming community, or let’s say the ones with voices -popular developers, media, and maybe celebrities if we have those- have a cake eating problem. We want to be taken seriously as an artform but don’t often value critical analysis. Game criticism and academia are held in disdain and shoved in corners, dubbed inapplicable. Recycling the same themes, mechanics, and ideologies of game design passes through reviews and feature articles without scrutiny."

   On the one hand, we gamers want our games to be respected as 'art'. On the other hand, the minute any sort of critical lens is placed on themes or mechanics of a game, the cry from many corners is "It's just a game, why are you taking it so seriously? Get a life!"

  But you can't have it both ways. The more that games develop in complexity and scope of their content, the more they will be measured for cultural relevance and judged for their themes. And we'll have to accept that such a development means we gamers need to start seriously examining what and why we play and be prepared to offer better in reply to serious analysis of them other than "It's just a game."

[How Predatory is F2P?]

Another quote from the F2P Ethics panel at GDC:

"We like to think that the ones spending vast sums on these games are sons of Dubai oligarchs, but we have the data to prove that they're not, and that they probably can't afford to spend what they're spending. We're saying our market is suckers - we're going to cast a net that catches as many mentally ill people as we can!" ~Nik Davidson

  Are some cash shops predatory? Yes. Are many sub games skinner-box grinds designed to milk monthly fees? Yes. Are there some people who should probably stay away from any game (sub or F2P), because they can't control themselves (either time or moneywise)? Yes, but whose job is it to police those people, the game company's?

  Should games (or laws) put limits on how much money a player can spend in a F2P per month? What kind of mechanics can drive 'too much' spending (are they the same mechanics that, in a sub game, encourage 'too much playing'?), and how does worrying about people spending large amounts of money conflict with the 'A few big spenders pay for everyone' structure F2P games are built around?

  And what even IS the monetary definition of a 'big spender' in a F2P game? 20$? 1000$? I've heard that only 5-10% on average in any F2P game spend money, and the definition of 'the average big spender' is a lot less than you'd think. But there is still very little public data about this (at least in English) that I could find.

  There's also this fact to consider -- F2P originally arose in Asia because of the extremely high software piracy rate there (in other words, selling a box would be financial suicide), so from the start there has never been a 'baked-in' requirement for a cash shop-model game to be exploitative or a cheaply-designed money pit rather than a quality game. A F2P game can be both a good game and have a fair cash shop.

  There is a real need for legitimate debate about what 'fair' monetization models for F2P/Freemium games are. I think that it's hard to pin down exactly, because no two games (or cash shops) are the same. I think the Western MMO market is still trying to figure this one out.


Related Reading:
F2P is Not Exploitative
Free vs Pay Games [DICE 2011]
$100k Whales: Intro to Chinese Browser Game Design

[F2P Is Not the Problem, and it's Also Not the Solution]

Karen Bryan at Massively posted on 'The Ethics of Gaming', questioning if the fad for F2P over subs that companies are rushing to embrace might be a Bad Idea. As someone who made peace with F2P games years ago, I actually agree with her, but for different reasons:

"In order to succeed, MMOs need players, but over the years there's been much more of an emphasis on how to monetize games and generate even more revenue. Back when the western MMO market was largely subscription-based, the key was to get players signing up and sticking around. It didn't necessarily matter how much you played, just that you kept coming back. And players did come back because they were compelled to, not because they were swayed by marketing."

  It's a fallacy to say the only reasons why people stay with F2P games (though 'F2P games' are far from all the same so they shouldn't be lumped together as if they are) is just because of marketing rather than content quality. This might shock some 'sub zealots', but tons of F2P games are succeeding because PEOPLE LIKE TO PLAY THEM, not because cash shops hold some kind of mind-control power over the 'stupid casuals' (which, let's face it, tends to be the stereotype in many anti-F2P players minds of the sort of person who would play a F2P MMO).

  My worry is that instead of learning the lesson as to WHY so many sub MMOs have failed in the wake of WoW's success, these companies will only come away with 'Subs are no longer popular for some reason, we just need to change our monetization scheme!' rather than the core issue which is PEOPLE DIDN'T FEEL YOUR GAME'S CONTENT IS WORTH BOX+15$ A MONTH. That is the true core of the problem here -- if people aren't willing to stick with a MMO with a monthly fee, it's because they don't feel like it's worth that investment of their time or money, and that is a serious issue that being F2P will not magically solve, and neither will 'slick marketing'.

  Why is Rift (which is far from 'revolutionary') still alive after so many other sub fee games failed all around it? Could it be that the frequency of content updates and quality the service it offers its players is considered by them to be 'valuable' enough to be worth paying a monthly fee for? Is this why WoW succeeds where other games who tried to ape it's 'popular gameplay style' failed -- because it provides CONTENT of sufficient concentration that players feel it's worth 15$? Is the reason why people left SWTOR in droves because they felt that what the game offered at level cap was not worth 15$ a month to be allowed continued access to? What is it about a F2P that makes people WANT to buy stuff in the cash shop? What is it about ANY MMO that makes it compelling to players longterm?

  Simply grabbing onto F2P as the savior (or doom) of MMORPGs is a fallacy. Companies are missing the lessons that the market has tried to teach them, if 'trying a new monetization scheme' is their best idea for how to survive in the current MMO environment.

  Players are not seeing these games as having enough gameplay & content value to justify a sub fee. The reason why many sub MMOs are doing poorly is not simply because those games were using an 'obsolete payment model'. If the latter is what all these 'AAA' studios have come away with as their lesson after seeing years of post-WoW MMO failures, then maybe the genre is in peril after all.


Related Reading:
SWTOR's Failure Was Not 'Random Chance'
Should AAA Game Studios Die?

[Every Game is a '3-Monther' for Somebody]

A great post from Chris over at 'Game By Night':

"Where do you find a game that’s not a 3-monther? The game with lasting power is the one where you can find a place to fit in with other players and continuously work at something. In WoW and RIFT, that’s raiding or PvP. In Guild Wars 2, it’s WvW. Maybe it’s RP for LotRO. It really doesn’t matter because the game with legs for me might be totally different for you.

No game is going to hand you the past. If you’re willing to work for it and find your niche, and can be flexible in getting there, you might just find that a game being a game is okay… and care a whole lot less when other people nitpick."

 Very true!


Related Reading:
The Cure for the 3-Month MMO Lies With Us 
Of Three-Monthers

[MMOldtimers: Adapt or Move On]

  From Inventory Full:

"If MMOs were invented today, does anyone really think they'd set out their stall by asking for a hefty payment up front before you could even see the product, then demand another $15 a month just to keep using the thing you'd payed for? How did that ever work?

Well, it worked for a while because, as Wilhelm says, there was an Implied Social Contract, and, crucially, because the producers and consumers all came from the same culture. That lasted as long as it took for the word to get out that there was serious money to be made. Until WoW, in other words. Which, of course, charges a subscription. Because it can.

That brought in people whose dream was making money, not making worlds. They all tried to ape it and most of them ended up looking like monkeys. What works for WoW hasn't worked for anyone else because no-one really knows why it works for WoW. It shouldn't. It just does.

So here we are, we old-timers, leaning on our fences looking out at the tarmac being laid across the prairie all around us and wondering where the wonder went."

  Several years ago I struggled with being dissatisfied with where MMORPGs were going -- World of Warcraft was my first MMORPG, but I had embraced the ideal and concept of a 'virtual world' and wanted to see that ideal grown and built on, rather than the slew of WoW-clones released in its wake. I played several older games during this period (Horizons and Ryzom) just in time to see both go bankrupt and be largely abandoned to 'life support' status. This made me very discouraged. Games that seemed to want to be worlds were losing, while 'game-y' WoW clones kept coming (and WoW itself chipped away at it's 'World' as well).

  Toward the end of WotLK, I found I was mostly unhappy both with where WoW and most other 'real' (sub-based) MMORPGs were. I took a long break from blogging and became a tourist of F2P games, which I once scorned. And I found many fun, creative games in places I would never have given the slightest chance to before because of their lack of 'worldiness' and small scope. Along the way, I think my expectations normalized and I realized that those dreamy days of the past where people imagined a massive living, breathing, fantasy world as the future of MMORPGs were gone. That was not the future of the genre -- the future was going to be something else, something more 'game-y', and if I wanted to keep playing MMOs I'd have to accept that fact and learn to love them firstly as games, and not worlds.

  For some MMO oldtimers (many of whom's MMORPG histories are far older than mine), the future will be bleak. The new games will not offer anything they want, and if their older 'home' games die so will their desire to play MMOs. But I also think many of us will end up adapting our expectations, and learning to love the games we have instead of always wishing they were something else.


Related Reading:
Every Game is a 3-Monther

[Should 'AAA' Game Studios Die?]

Robert Florence at EuroGamer wrote a piece recently about game piracy and why it happens, which also touched on what he sees as a plague on gaming and contribution to the problem: the 'AAA Game Studio':

"The publishers who make these bloated AAA BLOCKBUSTER games that get booted down our throats at every fake awards show argue that they need to charge a premium price to keep delivering a premium product. But who says we need a "premium product", whatever that is? Did we even ask for that? Is that what we want from games? Massive marketing spend and homogenisation?

'But these giant companies would have to close down. People will lose their jobs!' And yes, that's horrible. No one ever wants to see people lose their jobs. But if these companies can only stay in existence by charging their customers extortionate prices for bland, safe product, should they even be there in the first place?"

  I found the article very thought-provoking, especially in the light of recent financial flops in the MMOsphere and the current feeling by many questioning whether the 'AAA model' may be harming the genre more than it contributes. The issue of budget-bloat demanding 'safe' derivative gameplay over depth and innovation and hype being peddled over substance is not something restricted to MMOs-only, and is a worrying trend in games as a whole.


Related Reading:
Three Things at E3 That Need to Stop, Part 1
What's Wrong With the AAA MMO Industry

[The MMO Messiah]

...Could it really be Guild Wars 2?

Wait, hear me out! =P

  It's a fact that 2012 has been a disappointing year for 'AAA' MMORPGs. The highly publicized implosion of 38 Studios and the stumbling performance of SWTOR has led some gaming pundits to question if the entire genre has been put in peril. I've already addressed why I disagree that those games' failures were because 'the market is over-saturated with MMOs', but there IS something to be said about the chilling effect such high budget crash-and-burns can have on twitchy investors who may not know enough about MMOs to understand why all the money put into those studios failed to provide the desired returns.

 

  The hard fact is, making games is a business. It is generally required by AAA development studios to convince people who may not be gamers or even particularly interested in gaming to fork over considerable amounts of money to fund their projects. These sorts of investors are the types who read statements like 'the market for MMOs is obviously saturated because not even 200 million dollars can make a game MMO players want to play', and decide it's not a good idea to invest in MMO projects for the forseeable future. Thus, even though the true reasons why certain big-budget games did poorly is more complex than that, every MMO project going forward gets stigmatized as a 'low chance of being profitable' before it even gets out of the gate. If reality gets framed as being MMORPGs as a whole that are not profitable rather than just over-derivative WoW clones, then yes, the genre as a whole will suffer. And there is a real risk that the latter will be the message taken away from this year by the investors of tomorrow.

  Now, ArenaNet has not disclosed how much money has gone into Guild Wars 2 yet, but I'm going to assume it's at least $100 million. I could be totally wrong of course but when devs have made various comments that basically admit cost was not their major consideration and outright state they're betting the company on this game, it makes me suspicious that the final number is going to be pretty big.

  And not only has ArenaNet been coy about publicizing how much they've spent on Guild Wars 2, but also have been setting some pretty confident goals for themselves, such as being the best service provider in the entire industry. They are setting the bar for themselves high, with very public statements of confidence, and investors and other such influential people in the industry are definitely watching them closely to see if they can deliver.

  If Guild Wars 2 faceplants, it will be the second epic-budget AAA MMO released in 2012 to do poorly and the third bad end to a very expensive MMO project this year, and that will definitely have severe consequences for the AAA MMORPG as a genre. Because of that grim possibility, even people who are not interested in the game should be hoping it has a great launch and a positive market performance because Guild Wars 2 may actually be a 'MMO Messiah' if it can achieve it's lofty ambitions, albeit a savior in a different way than most gamers define the term.

[Brad McQuaid: Cult of Personality or Friends in High Places?]

So Brad McQuaid has been accepted back into the MMO Industry fold.

Why, exactly, given the complete fiasco of his last project?

  How many other people, after doing such a terrible job running a development team and company, would get a second chance like this? Is it because he's 'One of the Guys Who Designed EQ' and knows the right people and has a cool personality? When Vanguard got bought up and put on life support by SOE  (which was an oddly nice gesture of them), I had initially gotten the impression it was because someone high up there was being sentimental, and this latest development just reinforces my suspicion.

  Either way, in the light of the recent examples of high-profile MMO projects being brought low by gross incompetence, and the importance of developers today to be professionals aware of current market realities and not arrogant posers blinded by their personal 'Vision', I don't understand why this guy, who showed himself as being a terrible leader and an out-of-touch designer, is the one who gets chosen to be given another chance in the gaming business. It just baffles me.


Related Reading:
Great MMO Company Collapses of Our Time: Sigil
A Vanguard Retrospective
Brad McQuaid Returns to EverQuest

[Screenwriters Fail at Game Writing]

A great post from TJ Fixman's blog on writing stories for games:

"[G]ame development almost never starts with story. Every time I go to a convention, I meet fledgling writers who tell me they have an amazing game idea they’d love to pitch me. But the truth is, games aren’t pitched like movies or TV. What gets a game green lit is invariably tech or gameplay driven. A studio discovers they can do incredible realtime zero-g simulation with their engine? We’re doing a space adventure! Did the design team discover some super fun time-based game mechanic? Let’s do a time travel game! Games are built around two simple questions: 'Where does our tech shine?' and 'What is fun to play?'"

Read the rest here.


Related Reading:
Should games even bother trying to tell a meaningful story?

[SWTOR's Failure Was Not 'Random Chance']

  Let me be clear first off -- I mean 'failure' as in the game clearly did not meet the expectations of success it was aiming for, not that the game is without any merit whatsoever. With that said:

  The disappointing performance of Star Wars: The Old Republic was not the result of a bad 'roll of the dice' or because the market is saturated with MMOs. It was because of a clear lack of knowledge and competency on BioWare's part to design a strong MMORPG, despite getting around $200 million thrown at them.

  Firstly, any claims that SWTOR's failure to explode into a massive hit will harm the industry are not counting the number of MMORPGs that have been simultaneously available for the past 5+ years. Count the F2Ps, because they outnumber P2Ps by a large margin, though most may be virtually unknown by the majority of sub-model-only players (and regardless, the F2P MMORPG playerbase is plenty robust with new games coming out regularly, obviously because people are still interested in playing these types of games). By that metric, the MMORPG market is saturated with games at pretty much every point in time and has been for several years now, albeit with games of varying quality. Before WoW was released, nobody could imagine that the market for every MMO combined could possibly number in the millions of players, let alone the playerbase of one game. So apparently the situation here is more along the lines of 'if you build [a game people want to play], they will come'.

  I won't rehash all the ways SWTOR was designed from the core out as just a variant flavor of World of Warcraft's basic gameplay mechanics, because that has been done to death in many places already. The fact is, in an environment shaped by 7 years of the dominance of WoW and scattered with the corpses of games released since 2004 attempting to ape WoW's success by copying it's gameplay to varying degrees, the majority of MMO gamers are just plain tired of it. And because they've become very familiar with the tropes of WoW's formula, they've also become a whole heck of a lot pickier when it comes to judging any game that tries to make it's own spin on it. So far the only game that has done this and succeeded has been Rift. So the right question to ask is not 'Is the market over-saturated with MMOs' but 'Can the current market support WoW and 2 sub-based WoW variants at the same time?' And the answer might just be 'no'. In the words of ArenaNet's founder Jeff Strain in 2007:

"Don't be fooled by the much-hyped success of the top MMOs on the market. The game industry is littered with the carnage of MMOs that have failed over the past few years. Due largely to the social nature of MMOs, gamers rarely commit to more than one or two MMOs at a time. This is in contrast to the traditional game market, in which there is room for many games to be successful, even within the same genre. You may play ten different action games this year, but you are very unlikely to play more than one or two MMOs. This means that it is not enough to make a great game – instead you must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community and bring that community to your game."

 He may as well have written that today, for all it's remained relevant (the only thing I would add is that it goes double for any game attempting to run under the '$15 a month sub fee' model nowadays). For anyone to conclude that the failure of games like Project Copernicus and SWTOR's lack of popularity means the MMO industry itself is in peril seems to forget that game studios being run into the ground because of poor management is hardly new. If anything it's showed that the MMO industry is not immune to the reality that exists everywhere in business: that throwing tons of money at a game (or using a popular IP) doesn't automatically mean it will be a smash hit. Any problem for the industry here is a self-caused one: disinterest in the playerbase because gamers are getting tired of companies rehashing the same-old ideas with prettier skins and expecting people to keep paying $15 a month to play the same game they've already been playing for the last 10+ years.

   SWTOR bet the lion's share of their hundreds of millions of dollars on the premise that the way to outdo their competition would be to make individual class stories as interactive and cinematic as possible (since that is their studios' strength in singleplayer RPGs) and setting them as the core of the entire game, while simply copying 'what's worked before' for everything else. But they attempted to 'innovate' in the completely wrong direction because they lacked fundamental understanding of what makes a strong MMORPG -- the long-term replayability of a game's core mechanics, as well as underestimating just how tired many people are of those gameplay systems that 'worked so well for WoW'. So after their awesome single-player interactive movies were all finished, most SWTOR players looked around at the rest of the game, said 'meh' and unsubscribed.


Related Reading:
How to Create a Successful MMO [GDC 2007]
Behind the Scenes of Star Wars: The Old Republic
Story vs Persistent Game

[The Psychology of Griefing]

  On Massively's Soapbox column, Jef Reahard tries to analyze why people grief, and what indulging in a constant habit of asshatery in games reveal about their 'real' selves: there is no imaginary line between 'IRL' and 'the game' -- you are not magically a 'nice guy' in real life, because in 'real life' you are an asshole to random people on the internet for your own amusement. The very fact that doing that is your preferred means of online enjoyment makes your assholery completely real:

"I've met griefers who consider themselves well-adjusted folks in other parts of their lives, gamers who have fallen into the trap of separating game behavior from "real-world" behavior. The reality, though, is that if you're a bleep in an online game -- and it's a recurring thing -- you're a bleep, period. You're not a part-time bleep, or a bleep on the weekends, or a bleep after the wife and kids are safely bedded down. You're simply a bleep. Regardless of whether certain game mechanics enable your bleephead behavior, the choice to actively make another person unhappy is in fact a choice, and it's yours alone. You don't get to rationalize or compartmentalize it. It simply is what it is, and you are what you are."

  If your main pastime is being a sadistic jerk to people on the internet, how can you honestly believe you are not 'really' a sadistic jerk? Last I checked, 'real life' includes sitting in front of a computer an interacting with others. Interacting with people through games in this way IS what you're doing 'IRL'. There is no magical line that makes what you do to other people in a game less 'real' than anything else you happen to do in your life, and it defines who you are just as much as any face-to-face interaction.

[Ultimate PvP Potential or Recipe for Disaster?]

So there's an upcoming MMO, Salem, that's going to try tackling full loot free-for-all PvP, player-made building destruction, AND perma-death. Sounds like a winning combination!

"'When your character dies, he stays dead,' Johannessen said matter-of-factly. This is made even harsher by the fact that Salem will allow free-for-all PvP, which means that anyone can attack you without provocation. Player buildings can be razed and their corpses looted, but Johannessen hopes that the players will band together to protect each other and mete out justice."

I predict lots of fun times when that sucker gets released, of the 'wailing and gnashing of teeth' variety. That is, if anyone actually ends up playing it for reasons other than to indulge in sociopathic carnage.

I still say there are a lot of very confused FPS fans still trying to shoehorn their preferred gameplay style into a genre that was simply not made for it. Now, if the death system ends up being something like Mabinogi's Rebirth mechanic, where certain stats get carried over (and the game doesn't have levels or strong gear dependency) maybe it could be feasible. Otherwise, I'm sensing a pending crash and burn and a stark reality check for the devs of Salem.

[What Defines a 'Failed' MMO?]

 What do all these games have in common?

1. Horizons
2. Warhammer Online
3. Age of Conan
4. Aion
5. Allods Online

...they were all highly hyped before their release, and then loudly proclaimed 'failures' and 'dead' by large numbers of their (former) playerbase soon after (often via lengthy tirades on various message boards).

Yet, they're all still online. Which, I assume, means they're still making money and being played, sometimes years later. What does that say about the definition of 'failure' as it's often used by so many MMO gamers? Does it simply mean a game is a big disappointment? That it 'failed' to fulfill its ambitious concept promises? That there's only a few(!) hundred thousand people playing it instead of millions? Or because it's gone F2P?

I think many times, people toss around the accusation that a game is a 'failure' too easily, and often because they're feeling personally let down by the game. A lot of MMO gamers get very emotionally invested in their games (often years before they are even released!) so it's only expected that there can be a lot of bitterness when that investment ends up not paying off. Sometimes that bitterness becomes an active attempt to smear and tear down a game, hoping to drive people away (I've seen this with many former Allods players most recently).

In some ways I think the rise of WoW has skewed people's perceptions of what makes a game a failure population-wise. For example, nowadays MMOs are assumed to need a few million players in order to have a viable population (as a comparison, when WoW was first released Blizzard was expecting around 300,000!). The definition of success was different 5 years ago, that's for sure.

I think that the MMO community needs to be less eager to throw around the term 'failure'. I also think the biggest barrier to a  new game's success now is the box price+monthly fee model, which I hope is soon replaced by the free download/trial model (I still think it's baffling why most new MMOs treat trials as something that should only be offered later in a game's life rather than right at the start) or any of the various F2P+micropayment models. I honestly believe that could allow smaller games, niche games, to succeed in a way that is nearly impossible in the current MMORPG market. The more options for different game sizes, types, and payment models that there are, the more chances for success for a modern MMORPG.

[APB's Crash and Burn Explained]

I will admit, I'm always fascinated reading breakdowns of dysfunctional game development companies and how they eventually imploded. Vanguard and Horizons, for example, both had very drama-filled environments and amazingly arrogant/clueless people at the helm, and some of the stuff that went on in the backrooms of those games is frankly mind boggling.

At any rate, even though I never played APB, this series of posts from one of the devs is an interesting read: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3.

It's really shocking how unprofessional and inept some game companies are.