There’s been a MMO currently in development that has been looming on the horizon for a few years now that has generated a tremendous amount of interest and speculation. The strange thing is that nobody knows much about it. All we really know is that it will be made by a company called 38 Studios headed by enigmatic baseball superstar Curt Schilling the Founder and Chairman of the company. Thanks to G4TV and Adam Sessler who interviewed Curt at the GDC 2009 in San Fransisco this week we’ve been given some insight into the man, his philosophy and his company.
After watching the interview I’m very hopeful that we may finally have a serious and polished alternative to World of Warcraft coming our way.
Warning: the following video is about 10 minutes long and much of the specific MMO content in the 2nd half. Also some people have had trouble viewing the embedded video. Be sure to refresh your browser once you are reading the full article.
Societal Observations about MMOs
In the interview Curt made some interesting societal observations about MMOs. He noted he can spend more time with his kids when he’s on the road by playing with them online. In an age where video games are scorned by some politicians as being destructive to families and many parents can’t or won’t spend time with their kids this is refreshing to hear. He also went on extol the virtues of MMOs in that they teach children and teens concepts like teamwork and cooperation — something that a World Series winning pitcher would know about. He also mentioned that MMO can help teach kids to communicate with keyboards by typing and reading.
With all of the negative things we’ve heard about video games in the media in the past few years it’s uplifting to finally see a public figure like Curt looking at them with a positive, glass half-full perspective.
Passion for MMOs
What comes across for me in this interview is Curt’s infectious passion for MMOs. Thankfully he’s using that same passion to make MMOs.
Curt Schilling: MMOs are very much a passion for me…I wanted to do something I really wanted to play. I’ve played so many games played by people that didn’t like the games they made and I’ve watched so many games made by people who did like the games they were making…
The takeaway for me is that he wants to make a better MMO and he realized that in order to do that you need to hire people that have the same passion as you.
Establishing His Credentials
I got the sense that Curt is really trying to convey that he and his team are hardcore MMO gamers. This reminds me of the hardcore raider resumes of World of Warcraft’s original dev team: Pardo, Kaplan (Tigole) and Afrasiabi (Furor). I think what he’s trying to do here is to send a clear message to the hardcore MMO community such as the Fires of Heaven crowd (where he routinely makes appearances) to take his MMO seriously. It’s also a good portent that there will be challenging group and raid content.
Sound Management is Key
I’ve been impressed by how Curt has cautiously and methodically put together his team over the last couple of years. Contrast this to the disaster that Sigil created with their mismanagement of their Vanguard MMO project. Sure they’ve culled people from various MMO’s but it’s no guarantee that they will be successful. Can they make the MMO that will finally dethrone WoW? If anyone can do it, it will probably be 38 Studios.
Curt Schilling: You’re never going to work for someone that cares more about you then I do…that cares more for your family than I do. Just be on time and bust your ass.
Curt’s commitment to his employees and their families is inspiring and refreshing considering the shabby way that most video game companies treat their employees. (As a game designer, I only wish I lived closer to the Boston area).
Regarding Fantasy, Story and Content
It looks as if the content in 38 Studios MMO will be story driven which will be released. Given the fantasy literary strength of R.A. Salvatore this is probably a wise move as they will be playing to one of their strengths.
Curt Schilling: Story is an integral, key piece of what we are doing. It’s episodically driven which we’ve made no mistake about it and it’s fantasy based.
I think the closest MMO I can think of that uses this content methodology is Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online based on the most popular fantasy book of all time. I just hope they don’t make the same mistakes as WoW and create an entirely quest driven MMO that discourages social interaction and grouping. I need to be honest though, my worst fear about 38 Studios is that they will produce a WoW clone.
Curt talked about the idea of intellectual property during the interview with regard to R.A. and Todd’s involvement. It’s been mentioned in the past that Salvatore will be writing a book that acts as a prequel and introduction to their MMO. When you consider all of the lore that Blizzard had already established previous to the release of WoW then it makes perfect sense that they are taking their time to ensure that solid lore/story foundations will be laid for their new fantasy world.
Learning the Lessons of the Past
It’s clear that Curt has really learned the lessons of the MMO industry in the past 10 years. From watching the interview and reading his views on MMOs over the years, here are a few that come to mind:
- be passionate about your work
- it’s not ready until it’s fun
- polish your MMO
- make it easy to learn and hard to master
- don’t create impossible expectations
- treat your employees with respect
We’ve seen many MMO companies disregard these truths and fall flat on their face.
Here’s more of what he said in the interview that makes me believe that 38 Studios has got the complex MMO formula all figured out:
Curt Schilling: We as gamers have these insanely ridiculously set of expectations that we put to any product that we hear long ahead of launch… First of all it’s not fair to the gamers, our customers and we care about. It’s not appropriate and right for the 38 Studios families.
These people need to be in an environment where they’re delivering a product that they believe is finished, polished and incredibly fun as it can be not because expectations have gotten to the point where we just needed to get it out of the door. We’ve watched those games come out time and time again and what’s happened to them.
A Great Spokesman for MMOs
From the outset you know that Curt cares about MMOs. He’s a hardcore MMO gamer. He’s also not your typical detached video game executive that rarely speaks publicly. If 38 Studios is successful then Curt will probably be the leading ambassador for MMOs and virtual worlds. He’s a firebrand with energy and drive to spare when he talks about MMOs. It’s been a while since we’ve seen someone with the eloquence and passion of Brad McQuaid leading a MMO company. The difference is now we have a MMO executive like Curt who has the team and management in place to backup the passion.
Conclusion
It’s not enough to make a pretty facsimile of WoW. Others have tried it and failed. 38 Studios is will have to push the envelope on all fronts if they plan on making something that will capture the imagination of the MMO and gaming public. That’s going to require taking risks and having the courage to embrace new ideas while still remaining faithful to those core fundamentals that all of us from Wizardry to WoW have understood about fantasy RPGs. The time for originality and innovation is now. It’s time for new trails to be blazed instead of walking down the safe and well established ones.
If anyone can do it it’s 38 Studios. With Curt they have a Founder and Chairman at the helm who is authentic and is not afraid to lead. He’s a real gamer like us. He’s passionate and knows what it takes to win. From what I can tell everything is in place for 38 Studios to make a massively popular MMO that will quite likely give Blizzard some serious competition. Curt and 38 Studios are definitely the MMO company to watch in the coming years.
-Wolfshead
As he did not really reveal anything about his MMO, I guess I will have to wait even longer than for Guild Wars 2. Curt Schilling is a reasonable and congenial guy with a plan, but I feel you are a bit too enthusiastic, given the little info he could reveal so far.
You know, Vin Diesel is dreaming of playing a carthaginian soldier in his very own MMORPG, called Barca B.C. (after Hamilcar Barca, father of Hannibal).
Salvatore is for sure a good AD&D writer, and this might hint that they plan to create a similar, rather “classic” universe, because Salvatore is not a good world builder / inventor. He created some universes of his own, but they were pretty much AD&D in a slightly different setting.
I have read most of his novels, and think he is to blame for dual-wielding to be the official unofficial cool style of swordfighting in fantasy.
I wonder how they are going to transport the story. Videogames are different to books or movies, and we all know that a bad book can make a great movie, but also that a great novel does not guarantee a mediocre or good movie. Guild Wars had a lot of storytelling issues early on, the story was there, but did not really make it into the game and into the mind of the gamers. More cutscenes plus NPC bubble dialogues got introduced later.
I was a bit worried that my article was a bit too positive as I’ve been burned badly before being a huge fan of another prospective MMO created Brad McQuaid and Sigil. We all know that happened there.
This time it’s different. Curt has all the ingredients to make a great MMO. The only question is do they have enough original ideas to make it stand out in a sea of WoW clones and can they execute those ideas? We shall see.
Too much story and the players will end up with a WoW MMO that is riding on rails, not enough story and you’ll end up with Second Life.
The important thing is for R.A. Salvatore not to let his ego as a writer get the better of him and I mean this with all due respect. The author’s story should not be the prime attraction, rather it should provide a contextual backdrop to the experiences of the players. Blizzard in my opinion went too far in pushing their lore and story with WoW.
Lore is important in an MMO, but only inasmuch as it sets the stage for the players to tell their own stories intertwined with the concepts therein. At least, that’s the draw of these virtual worlds in my mind. I can get gaming on rails offline.
I think the greatest asset of Curt Schilling is that he is a parent, knows some games and had/has a life – he has that kind of life experience that younger and highly motivated design teams often lack. This is very important for a MMORPG, if he wants to create a fascinating virtual world, and not so much an online single player experience.
Regarding “innovation” and the games industry… for some designers, WoW was their first and only MMORPG.
Makes me feel like an old man, but I guess they really lack something. Not necessarily “wisdom of age”, but simply experience. They experienced not that much besides WoW so far, and MMORPG is synonymous with WoW for them.
So let me link you this blog article:
http://ofcourseillplayit.com/?p=131
“Lessons from Titan – 2 Years on a cancelled MMO”
Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires e.g.) were basically working on a Halo MMO, supposed to be “WoW in Space”.
They wanted to create the perfect WoW killer by making a game like WoW, but better. You cannot overtake someone if you follow in his footsteps. The blogger/programmer (Dusty Monk) who worked on the project points at this fatal flaw frequently in his blog entry, but speaks a bit too much of innovation being copying innovative ideas from other MMOs.
The basic formula is always left untouched and undisputed.
I think I read that their project is codenamed “Copernicus”, and I hope that Schilling does NOT follow in WoW’s wake, because he is NOT a game designer, but a career changer.
Well said. Another good thing about Curt is that due to the fact that he’s not part of the industry he may be more open to *impossible* ideas that a jaded MMO dev would not think is possible. Although he’s hired established MMO people mainly from SOE with largely EQ2 experience and those people bring with them their own history and ideas which naturally would be a by product of working on EQ2.
It would be like hiring a first class chef to run a restaurant and you find out that his culinary vocabulary has been a steady died of BigMacs all his life.
Again I think much of the difference lies in the mission statement of what you are building. If a company decides to build a game, then it’s fine to have typical young”gamer devs” populating your dev team. However, if you are deciding on building a world then hiring exclusively hiring those young gamer devs would be a terrible mistake. I’m talking about hiring people that have a much wider palette of experiences such as understand social networking, human psychology, understanding how communities work, etc.
So making a game as opposed to making a virtual world is completely different and probably explains why WoW is so unsatisfying as a virtual world. Without the steady stream of NEW content, WoW would collapse. It just doesn’t have the social cohesion and stickiness to cut it as a serious virtual world.