by Wolfshead on March 5, 2014
I had the opportunity to have participated in two Elder Scrolls Online beta weekends. During the previous beta weekend I was able to devote some significant time to playing two characters where I got a good feel for the first 5 levels of the MMO.
The second beta weekend apparently just ended abruptly at 9 PM Pacific time — 3 hours ago as I am writing this. At least the previous weekend allowed players to play in the early hours of Monday morning but not this weekend. Throughout this beta weekend the ESO servers were plagued with problems that made playing the MMO pretty impossible. You would think that given all of the server problems that players experienced this weekend, Zenimax would have the good sense to extend the beta weekend like they did the previous time. Not this time.
Since I didn’t have much time to play the most recent beta which has put me in a foul mood, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts instead.
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by Wolfshead on February 12, 2014
In the classic film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is forced to relive February 2nd over and over. Eventually he learns from his mistakes, perfects his strategy and wins the heart of the heroine played by Angie McDowell and the curse is broken.
For years, MMORPGs have been subject to a similar curse. I call it the Groundhog Day syndrome.
In this design paradigm players are forced to deal with a virtual world of static spawning enemy NPCs with predetermined attributes and abilities. When killed, these mobs spawn again within a few minutes or if within an instance they re-spawn when you repeat the instance.
In the real world people would quickly tire of being trapped like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog day. With so many interesting possibilities available to a dynamic virtual world, why would anyone want to go back to a predictable scripted theme park MMO?
Do we really need another Groundhog Day MMO?
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by Wolfshead on February 3, 2014
Brad McQuaid is back. Almost 15 years after the release of EverQuest and 7 years after the release of his Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the prodigal son of the MMO world has returned seeking redemption. This time Brad is pitching a new MMO on Kickstarter called Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.
Brad has a checkered career in the collective memory of video game industry. Deemed by some to be the brains behind the revolutionary EverQuest — regarded by many as the finest MMORPG ever created — he is also considered an incompetent villain by others who believe him largely responsible for the failure of Vanguard which is estimated by many to be one of the biggest disasters in MMO history.
Before the debacle of Vanguard, I was a big admirer of Brad McQuaid. After all, he was the face of EverQuest and was christened as a “game god” by the media back then and many of us believed the hype. I also think that he received the lion’s share of the credit for EverQuest when in truth it was a team effort. That said, I still have a great respect for him and despite his failings he has dared to come back on the scene to challenge the complacency in the current MMO market.
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by Wolfshead on December 28, 2013
For World of Warcraft devotees the almost annual BlizzCon love fest is like an American State of the Union address combined with the euphoria of an Amway convention. There is no dissent to speak of as the lucky few fans who managed to purchase tickets sit in rapt attention awaiting revelation of new features and story narratives that will shape their game play experiences in months ahead.
Blizzard is preaching to their loyal choir. So it’s no surprise that BlizzCon 2013 was predictable and scripted spectacle. In grand tradition, I too follow with my predictable BlizzCon article.
Before each BlizzCon there is always a feeling in me that maybe this time Blizzard will get it right with World of Warcraft and change course. After all, how can a video game company continue to adopt a stay the course philosophy after losing millions of subscribers? Surely something has to give…
After watching BlizzCon 2013 in DirecTV’s virtual ticket pay per view my hopes were again dashed. The massive and aging ship USS: WoW lurches toward the iceberg of its obsolescent doom in a sea of ice cold reality.
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by Wolfshead on November 7, 2013
While viewing the schedule for the upcoming BlizzCon 2013, I noticed a familiar name in the lineup of panelists: Alex Afrasiabi. It seems that Alex, missing from the public eye for the past 3 years and rumored to have been working on the delayed top secret Titan MMO has indeed returned to World of Warcraft team as the Creative Director. This is certainly a promotion from his previous job title of Lead world designer.
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by Wolfshead on September 22, 2013
One of the highest objectives a fantasy MMORPG should strive for is the creation of a vibrant and passionate community. For the player, the benefits of a robust community are felt both within the game as the quality of the community itself gradually becomes the draw and outside the game as players congregate around websites, forums and even meeting in real life. For the developer, virtual worlds with healthy communities act as a magnet for new players and have the added bonus of higher player retention.
A MMORPG that fails to value and nurture community is selling itself short and may as well just call itself a single-player video game.
Developing a community in and around your virtual world is more than about involving the community in decision, hiring convivial community managers and leveraging social media — it has to be a philosophy that permeates every facet of your virtual world.
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by Wolfshead on August 8, 2013
By now most EverQuest devotees have watched the video presentations and read all of the coverage on various gaming websites about SOE’s reveal of EverQuest Next in Las Vegas over the weekend. We’ve seen and heard all of the hype regarding the new features of EQ Next. By now everyone knows what a voxel is and we’ve seen a lot of demos of things blowing up.
After ample reflection and analysis, I think it’s safe to say that SOE will not be bringing back many of the elements that made the original EverQuest such a magical experience. EQ Next is a brand new type of highly accessible superhero low fantasy MMO aimed at an entirely new audience of gamers that are more at home with a software toy like Minecraft then they are with a serious virtual world like EverQuest.
SOE has decided to entirely reboot and re-imagine the world of Norrath with the end goal of creating an intellectual property that will be the flagship offering for a vast franchise of products and services.
As well as attending SOE Live, I have poured over all of the videos multiple times to really digest what SOE has presented to give the best analysis possible. My assessment of EQ Next is based on what we currently know. I’m certain that many of my questions and gaps in knowledge will be answered in the coming weeks and months ahead.
Let me preface this article by saying there are a lot of things I like about EQ Next (and its companion offering EQ Landmark) and many things that I do not like which I will discuss in this article: the good, the bad and the ugly.
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by Wolfshead on July 31, 2013
After becoming interested in the upcoming EverQuest Next being revealed at SOE Live on August 1, 2013 in Las Vegas at Planet Hollywood, I’ve done a lot of soul searching on the impact of the entire EverQuest franchise. As a result I began re-reading my some of my old articles.
SOE bestowed the MMORPG community with a revolutionary experience with EQ and so I thought it might be useful to list my previous articles complete with thoughts, observations and speculations. Most of my articles do reference EverQuest but these are the ones that deal with it directly. As time has made the past cleared, my opinions have changed and matured. It’s been a long, strange trip but one I don’t regret.
-Wolfshead
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by Zanakus on July 30, 2013
In advance of Friday’s big reveal of Everquest Next (rumored to be released in a playable form – presumably Beta – by the end of the year), many fans have been expressing excitement in discussions around the internet that its gameplay experience might be akin to that of the original Everquest. This is rooted in the fact that many players of the first and second-generation MMOs (roughly, Ultima Online and perhaps its immediate predecessors through to the era of early 2000s games like Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online and Asheron’s Call 2) have been vocally expressing dismay for years that the dominant MMORPG design philosophy changed profoundly with the release and runaway success of World of Warcraft in 2004, with nearly every major big-budget MMO since modeling itself after that title.
Newer MMO fans can be forgiven for any puzzlement concerning this viewpoint, having missed the period of time wherein Everquest’s own very distinctive design philosophy set the paradigm for the MMO genre, with immediate successors like the aforementioned early 2000′s games modeling themselves, to varying degrees, on Everquest as a foundation or starting template.
I thought it might be useful and timely to clarify exactly what made Everquest Everquest, or what gave rise to that game’s nearly mythical level of ‘immersiveness’. What exactly constitutes the MMORPG ‘vision’ famously referred to by Everquest lead designer Brad McQuaid?
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by Wolfshead on July 27, 2013
It’s been a frustrating couple of years for the MMORPG genre and its devotees. The once mighty Blizzard Entertainment has had to suffer the embarrassment of years of declining subscriptions to their once bloated cash cow World of Warcraft. Even one of their former developers rightly blamed them for the demise of the genre. Perhaps the release of the first WoW children’s book will turn things around for them.
To add to the embarrassment, their upcoming MMO Project Titan — allegedly staffed with A-list talent – has been delayed until 2016; if it’s ever released it will be a MMO 8 long years in the making. Suddenly the smartest guys in the MMO room don’t seem that smart anymore. Perhaps they never really were that smart since they essentially just copied EverQuest, removed 50% of the mechanics and added in $60 million dollars worth of polish.
Then factor in those unfortunate companies that blindly imitated the WoW amusement park MMO formula: such as the tragic debacle of Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios Copernicus MMO and the ignominy of EA Bioware’s Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic disaster and you have a decline of epic proportions for the MMORPG industry. Even the ambitious and politically correct Guild Wars 2 was not the savior of the genre that they boldly proclaimed themselves to be.
After 9 years of being bludgeoned by the Blizzard formula of creating theme park style MMO’s, the online gaming public has finally had enough. After years of writing about MMO’s and feeling helpless and continually betrayed, I too had enough and stopped writing a once beloved genre.
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