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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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 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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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
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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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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The recent drama and subsequent bankruptcy of Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios has haunted me these past few weeks. Although I was just a bystander, I was living somewhat vicariously through Curt and his dreams to create a revolutionary fantasy virtual world. With his celebrity status, myriad of connections and considerable wealth, I figured if someone could make my perfect MMO it would most likely be Curt.
When it all came crashing down, the not only did the dreams of Curt and his employees end, it had the side effect of forcing me to confront my own dreams of creating a MMO. Most game designer have a secret video game project that they guard in their heart of hearts; designing a MMO was mine. It is these dreams that are the inspirational fuel that keeps us going when we are involved in video game projects we don’t particularly like.
What happened to 38 Studios was a jolting reality check for all aspiring MMO developers because it forced us all to ask a crucial question:
If a multi-millionaire celebrity with all of his resources and hired talent can’t even finish a MMO after spending over $150 million dollars, realistically, what hope is there for the rest of us who share similar dreams?
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No one can deny that this past week has been a catastrophe of near biblical proportions for Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and their proposed “Copernicus” MMO.
By now most avid MMO watchers are familiar with the story of how on May 1, of 2012, 38 Studios defaulted on a $1.1 loan payment to the Rhode Island Economic Development Council. Once that transpired, a series of meetings between the Rhode Island government officials and 38 Studio how to resolve the default. A comprehensive financial timeline of this matter has been studiously complied by Atropos over at AmalurFoundry.com
Eventually 38 Studios came up with the $1.1 million in funds to cover the default but they failed to meet their payroll and the company is teetering on the edge of insolvency. The latest news is that Curt has returned to talk to his team and the layoffs have begun with fired workers attending a Turbine job fair nearby.
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Guitarist Kevin Eubanks is primarily known for his 15 year tenure as the leader of The Tonight Show Band. When I watched Jay Leno on late night TV show, it was always interesting to see the back and forth repartee between Jay and Kevin. Given Kevin’s stature and likable personality we figured it was a safe bet seeing him live at the venerable Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley here in Seattle.
I admit we were not familiar with any of Kevin’s music before hand. To remedy this omission I fired up Spotify and listened to his latest album [amazon_link id="B0043SS250" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Zen Food[/amazon_link]. This 2010 release by Kevin was standard modern jazz faire and quite listenable. In the past 10 years we’ve been to many Jazz Alley concerts and seen a wide range of acts from Chris Botti to Pat Metheny. Only on a few occasions have we been truly disappointed with the shows.
Recently I became exposed to an interesting idea called the Gartner Hype Cycle. It’s implications might be useful to those of us still interested in the future viability of virtual worlds and MMOs.
The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphic that depicts public expectations of new and emerging (often not so new) technologies in the form of a graph. It is updated annually and produced by a research and advisory company called Gartner, Inc.
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