Nokia N-Gage: Clunky

A long while back I was asked on my thoughts around gaming on the mobile phone. At the time I replied that there was no simple answer, that there were a number of scenarios that made being able to design strategies and methods for achieving success in these markets very difficult. Problems ranging from device compatibility through to user experience all contributed to make the platform unappealing. Compared to the familiar and well-used processes used to support traditional video games, the mobile phone was treated as a niche platform. A couple of attempts were made to crack the mechanism – Nokia’s N-Gage phones were one such example – but ultimately they failed to gain a foothold in the marketplace due to only offering a limited range of games. So what’s changed since then? In a word, everything.

Apple's App Store

Back in July 2008, Apple launched their App Store, offering 500 applications that customers could download direct to their iPhone. In the weekend since it was launched over 10 million applications were downloaded, with those chosen being a mix of free and paid content. Since then, estimates have put the amount of revenue the App Store at $1 billion with Apple keeping 30% and passing the rest on to developers. Fast forward to late January and Apple are now saying that there’s been 500 million downloads from a catalogue that’s expanded to 15,000 applications. By far the largest category of applications on the App Store is games, although it’s impossible to quantify how many of those are ‘limited feature’ free versions in order to tempt players into forking out for the full blown version. Suffice it to say, games have been a huge success on the iPhone. It’s no wonder that traditional games developers are taking a keen interest in the platform for future titles. Not only that, but Microsoft, Palm, RIM’s Blackberry, Google’s Android, Samsung and Nokia are all working on having their own app store catering for paid applications shortly. It’s unclear if any of these other stores Will be as successful, as Apple already has a billing relationship with their customers via iTunes and used their close relationship with the existing OS X developer community to ensure a selection of applications was available at launch.

That’s not to say that the Cupertino crew have had things all their own way – commentators feel that being reliably able to search for games or get auto-recommended a list of titles to try would be a huge welcome, as would being able to look for top rated games in particular genres.  The shop storefronts also feel a little static, with little scope for uploading a youtube video of the app running or audio commentary from the developer. That said, there’s also the question of what the App Store as a concept will introduce for desktop software. For desktop videogames at least, an online shop has been kicking around for some time, either in the form of Steam or Direct2Drive. With all of this laid out in front of them, surely it must represent some kind of Golden Age for developers and publishers to connect smoothly with customers? Well, not quite.

The trouble with developing videogames is that they cost money. In the case of PC and console videogames it can be a as much as $30 million, while customers are increasingly concerned about the value they get from the games they buy. Conventional industry wisdom states that for a game with top flight production values, a publisher will need to shift about 1 to 2 million units in order to break even, due to the complexity of the latest consoles and the relative cost of developing for them. Compare that with the iPhone, where a nine year-old can write code that will run on the platform. But a shallower platform, where users are becoming accustomed to a low price-point in games brings it’s own problems, and although indie developers can crank out a game relatively easily, they find they have to keep producing rapidly in order to sustain that income. There are already development tools that can make the process a little more streamlined, but largely speaking it’s still a new area. Even then, there’s always the complication about developing a game for all of the emerging app stores – which ones you pick, how you spread development, what maximum technology level you develop for. It’s always a risk that you’ll start developing for a platform that falls out of favour, leaving you with a game but no market to sell it to.

Aurora Feint: Asynchronous

So, is there an alternative? Well, it just so happens that there might be. One relatively unexplored area of videogame development on the mobile platform is the MMO. Currently, there are some tentative steps into this area through titles such as Aurora Feint, but these tend to be asynchronous experiences where the player can chat with others using an IRC style interface and use ghosting (competing against another player’s saved session) in order to provide the multiplayer experience. Parallel Kingdom allows players to play alongside each other using GPS, but relies on a solid data connection to maintain gameplay continuity. In a realm where data connections aren’t always present, it’s important to either allow action to take place at a slower place so that every player gets a chance to take part in the action, or allow portions of the game to be carried out offline. Luckily, the concept of turn-based games has been around for a fair while, with their ‘tick’ based variants such as OGame being particularly suited for massively multiplayer gaming. From there, it’s a matter of developing a sequence of game mechanics and content, as well as the clients that run on the various mobile devices that are available. The wonderful thing about developing the infrastructure in the first place is that it can be recycled – the same mechanisms could be used to facilitate a football team management game as much as one revolving around tribal warfare.

There are, of course, some sticking points. How do you get people to pay for the thing? Traditionally web or browser-based MMOs have relied upon advertising for funding, while client-server variants have used either a subscription based mechanism or a microtransaction system where in-game items are sold for real currency. Either are possible with a mobile-based MMO, with transactions being possible in real-time via Premium SMS, or by charging an in-game allowance using facilities such as PayPal. There’s enough flexibility to even employ different charging approaches for different games released.

But what about that niggling doubt about developing mobile clients for all those different devices? Well, recently I had the luck of catching up with Paul Golding, who is somewhat of an expert in the field of mobile web technologies. It may be that one option is to open up the infrastructure and allow users, fans and so on to develop their own clients. Provide a standard interface for players to get a feel for the game and perhaps a client or two for a couple of major platforms, but otherwise keep it open and allow others to generate their own frontends to the game.  After all, players are already tweaking their games to create custom interfaces, so why not go the whole hog and allow them to create the client? It mimics the approach of Twitter, a fully web-based app that took off once others started developing clients and offshoot services to integrate with it. By allowing others to hook into the game’s exposed services, you increase the potential to promote it purely by word of mouth as well as avoiding funding development for a multitude of clients. And as long as you keep getting subscriptions, transactions or advertising eyeballs, you only stand to make more from your original concept.

So, while mobile gaming has come a long way already, we’re still only at the first step. By intertwining the data connection and payment relationship already in most mobile phones with compelling games that hook into a player’s other social services, it’s possible to really move forward. This amalgam of old and new ideas might just do the trick.

Aion: JRPG influences

One concept that pretty much every videogamer has become aware of, even if it’s only at some subconscious level, is the idea of a Japanese role-playing game or JRPG. This unique variant originated from Western tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons being imported into Japan and translated, with homegrown variants springing up shortly afterwards.  These then translated into videogame products, which is where series like Final Fantasy come in. It’s difficult to say if later Korean MMOs such as Lineage are a direct result of the JRPG videogames, but there are some heavy influences that come through in areas such as art direction (smooth, anime-style characters) and gameplay choices (long, drawn out and repetitive grinding sessions). Players seem to love them, with Lineage notching up 3 million players at it’s peak, while the Final Fantasy series has enjoyed continued international acclaim. It comes as no surprise then to see NCsoft try and explore this market again with a high-fantasy MMO that has a distinctly different taste to the orcs, goblins and kobolds that typically inhabit more Western fare.

Atreia: a world of two halves

The setting of the game lends it to a range of environments, with one half of the world of Atreia being continually bathed in light while the other languishes in darkness.  These two halves occupy the inside of two hemispheres, with the rubble and rock between them described as ‘The Abyss’. The background to the story involves the central tower being shattered halfway, with the inhabitants of each hemisphere blaming the other. Thus, the stage is set for conflict between the radiant Eloys and the shadowy Asmodians, providing PVP fanatics with all the reason they need to gank with impunity. Mindful of the upset that can be caused if one faction starts to dominate, a quirky design trick is to introduce an AI controlled faction called the Balaur in order to maintain some sort of balance. Depending on the amount of control each faction exhibits, the Baular can switch sides from fighting alongside to against them. It’s a clever solution to a problem that can cause heavy issues in PVP specific realms where one faction heavily outnumbers another.  NCsoft are trying to christen this type of realm design ‘PvPvE’, but it does feel to be more of a case of PvE with a special PvP zone between the two PvE areas.

Eloy: Bunch of posers

Aion: The Tower of Eternity has all the feel of a Japanese or Korean videogame. The visuals are stunning to look at, with clever texture and model work benefiting from the Crytek CryEngine used in Far Cry. Atmospheric lighting and glow effects are all there, with sunny Elysium, gloomy Asmodae and the Abyss all providing a range of environments to work with. Although influences from other fantasy settings are evident, the styling and art direction provide enough distinction to make this feel a game in it’s own right rather than just a collage of borrowed ideas. For a start, nothing looks ugly – not the creatures, not the landscapes, not the non-player characters – nothing. Whether it’s due to it’s unique heritage or just a by-product of game lore, but there is a definite aura of beauty about it. The characters themselves look like they’ve come out of a top anime movie, complete with Dragonball-Z hairstyles, plated armour and humorously over-sized weapons. The character choices themselves though are fairly straightforward – you can either choose an Asmodean or an Eloy, but there are no other racial choices available. Customisation is in a similar ball-park to Age of Conan, with sliders for almost every option conceivable. While having a limited number of choices is likely to upset players who want to play Mr Ugly, it does mean that all those issues such as racial abilities and balancing them are removed.

Classes: Simple choices

Character development is also straightforward. Four classes are initially available: Scout, Warrior, Mage and Priest. From there, players can later specialise into one of two subclasses, depending on what their personal preference is. For a warrior, this means specialising as either a tanking Templar or a general combat Gladiator. Unlike other games where switching between these two types is easy, in Aion the change becomes permanent. Although this can be a limiting choice, characters can also pick up ’stigma stones’ from the corpses of defeated monsters and use them to gain the abilities of other classes. This can mean that a mage would be able to wear heavy armour, or a warrior could gain some healing abilities.  Characters are restricted with how many stigma stones they can use and when they can swap them, and some stones will be harder to find and become bound to the character when used. It does mean though that some of the characters designed mainly for group roles such as healers and tanks will have a little more versatility during solo play. It also means that character skills can be bought and sold, providing something new for player economies to haggle over. Characters also gain the ability to fly at their tenth level, although it’s fairly tightly controlled. At first, a character can only fly for a minute, although this can be increased through the use of items, potions and general character development. Flight will also be useful in combat, with a number of flight-only abilities such as dive-bombing being possible.

Combat: Button-mashing optional

Adventuring in Aion is available in three ways, with either solo-play, 6-man parties or 9-party raids available. Most of the content is open-world, including the dungeons, with only limited content being instanced. As far as combat goes, it’s a fairly standard hack-and-slash or spellcasting affair, with a combo ability mechanism bolted on to provide even more spectacular visuals. Combo trees are also talked about, allowing a player to customise an attack to add a particular effect. Now, while I’m not averse to having combo-mechanisms to pull off spectacular attacks instead of blindly mashing buttons, I do get a little nervous when they start talking about combo trees. If the options are nice and simple I can’t see a problem with it, but if you end up with about ten different combo tree options for each ability it rapidly becomes unwieldy. There’s also what happens if a combo fails – do you deal some damage, or do you have to complete it exactly in order to do anything at all? It’s these subtle choices that can take a cool design idea and either make it something that adds a little uniqueness or something that makes it inherently frustrating. Then there’s the death penalty – not only does your character suffer debilitating effects for a short time and restart at a fixed location, but there’s also an experience point penalty. I thought we’d moved beyond these penalties, as it means that if you’re having a bad day questing or just continually getting ganked in PVP you can actually lose levels and start moving backwards. Yes, death should be harsh and unrewarding, but XP penalties are one of those design choices that should have been discarded long ago.

Crafting: can be a gamble

Crafting also seems to be one of those areas where game design choices seem to reward with one hand and punish with the other. Although the usual rollout of professions are there, the way they are implemented is cause for concern. As well as having a regular crafting success or a critical success to make an item with increased stats, a character can also fail to craft anything at all. This places increased risk on crafting economies – just imagine collecting the resources to craft a difficult to make set of armour and finding a blacksmith willing to make it, only to have your materials wasted by a failed crafting. As a consolation, players will be able to transmute resources from one type to another (such as wood into iron), but it means that you’re more likely to sell materials and buy completed items instead of finding a crafter and paying a small fee to get an item made.

At the end of the day, Aion is as much a game trying to interlock two gaming cultures together as it is about two factions opposing each other. In making concessions to western gameplay styles while still keeping eastern roots, it’s attempting to carve out a niche for itself that it hopes will make it appealing to a wide range of audiences. But while design choices seek to punish players for unlucky play sessions, reaching audiences in depth may be more of a challenge. Although it’s easy to attract a number of players keen on the more hardcore aspects of an MMO, pulling in the large numbers of casual gamers out there may prove more of a challenge.

Halo 3: $30 million in development cash

Developers and publishers have for many years sought the holy grail of gaming: a reliable, recurring revenue stream. Traditional game development can be a high-risk business, with top class titles such as Halo 3 estimated to cost around $30 million. This cost can be shared and managed between the developer and publisher, with the balance of cost on each depending on the commercial agreements in place. Trouble is, there’s a large amount of risk involved in this process – what happens when a game eats through a wadge of development cash only to fail to sell well once it hits the stores? Being as averse to losing money as the rest of us, publishers try to reduce the risk by financing titles that are likely to do well, either because the characters or concept involved is already well known (a sequel or franchise), or because the developers have prior history of creating similar successful games in the past. Once a developer released a title, they became almost dependant on it’s success to fuel an appetite for future products. This cycle can play havoc with cash flow, especially with the average title taking between 18 months and 3 years to develop.

The strategy of almost every developer is to try and smooth out the bumpy cash flow they face. Some larger studios aim to run two or three development cycles in tandem, with the conclusion of each offset from the others. Smaller studios may look to partner up with a large publisher then seek milestone or interim payments on the road to delivery. Both of these are more a case of commercial mechanics that are unlikely to have an impact on the overall delivery. Publishers may also seek to re-release popular games at a lower price point, under a “classic” or “platinum” banner if the game does well initially, potentially bringing in further revenue. In terms of getting further revenue from customers who buy an initial game, there’s only one further choice available: expansion packs. In a similar way to tabletop or role-playing games, a developer could re-use the existing technology and game mechanics and just provide a continued storyline with new creatures to defeat and areas to explore. An example of this is Beyond the Dark Portal, an expansion for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

Spore: Creepy concerns

Expansion packs aren’t without their downsides though. EA Games took expansion and content packs to an extreme level with The Sims 2. Over the course of four years,  eight expansion packs and ten “stuff” or content packs would be made available to buy from retail stores. Seeking to repeat the process, Spore was quickly followed up with the Creepy and Cute pack. Unfortunately, EA had lost a substantial amount of goodwill in relation to Spore due to the SecuRom debacle upon release. Users (and I have to count myself among them) experienced further problems in using this new content with existing saved games, further damaging the reputation of a game dogged with controversy. It’s when moving into areas like this that publishers have to be careful, particularly in the current climate. Players have to feel that they’re buying an entertainment product, not a chore. More importantly though, they have to feel that they’re buying something that represents to them value for money. With retail growth slowing during the crucial winter season, it’s more crucial than ever to reward customers for their purchases. Some publishers have started to move in this direction by lowering the prices of some of their newer releases, but if discounting becomes the norm it increases the risk that a game will not generate a profit.

Aion: Tower of Eternity: NCsoft's next MMO

The question is, can MMO studios fare any better? Although they release videogames to similar schedules and charge about the same for them, they generally take longer to develop and require additional infrastructure to support them. Likewise, while they can provide a regular revenue stream, players expect regular content updates to be included as part of the agreement. Plus a fair chunk of that recurring revenue has to be spent on operational costs such as maintenance, customer support and so on. And don’t forget, a developer has to splash out on getting all this up and running before a single copy of the game is bought – if the game doesn’t sell or if forecasts are wrong, they may end up with too few subscribers to sustain the online platform. The history of Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted (formerly Horizons: Empire of Istaria) serves well as an example in this regard, with the development and ongoing maintenance changing hands several times. Firms such as NCsoft, with a range of multiplayer games spanning multiple markets, and with a support and server infrastructure already in place, may fare better in the medium term.

Of course, this does depend on subscriber loyalty. As we dip further into an economic downturn, are players more likely to give up buying new games to continue paying for subscriptions to their current ones? How high is a gaming subscription on a player’s list of financial priorities – is it something they’ll hang on to as long as possible, or something they’ll only cancel if almost forced to? How much of an improvement does a new MMO have to provide before players switch from one game to another? It’s difficult to say for sure, but I have a feeling that players are likely to consider giving many other things up before closing out on a game they’ve enjoyed playing for some time.

DooM: Multiple difficuly options available

Going back through history, the earliest videogames traditionally took a static approach to difficulty. Although games demonstrated a difficulty curve, there wasn’t any way to alter it. If you couldn’t complete the game, it was either a case of getting a friend to complete it for you, or finding a way to cheat so that you could overcome an obstacle. Cheat codes were passed around school playgrounds like sacred lore, offering young gamers a sure-fire way to finish certain games if only to see how the story ends.  Although cheat codes offered developers a back-out clause of allowing a player a way of making the game easier, it wasn’t until difficulty menus started emerging that players could really choose how difficult they wanted a game to be. This was arguably popularised through the id software classic DooM with it’s now legendary “Nightmare” difficulty setting being the hardest of five different ones available. The legacy left behind by this still crops up in more modern videogames, typically first-person shooters. As time has progressed, techniques such as dynamic difficulty adjustment have been developed in order to tune a game experience even more closely to the person playing it. The difficulty of individual components that may make up an encounter or level are also studied in much more detail now, in order to control elements such as pacing in much the same way that a director or editor would seek to control the pacing of a scene in a film.

All this, in a rather roundabout way, brings us to the central theme of this post: defining the difficulty level of MMO content. Problem is, in an MMO, you don’t really have the option of letting the player choose a difficulty level to play at. Pretty much all of the content is designed in such a way that the majority of players will get to experience it, if they want to. The problems emerge when you have a clash between two parts of a player’s MMO experience – levelling their character, and “endgame” content.

Burning Crusade: Lots of content, flow restricted

As a player levels up, there’s usually a lot for them to do: there’s quests to complete, zones to explore, dungeons to investigate and so on. As they progress, their character develops by gaining new gear, becoming tougher and gaining new skills and abilities. Once a player hits maximum level, their options become more limited: they can take part in maximum level dungeons, invest time in PvP, or look at joining a raid group. As a result, your choices as a developer become limited – you want to maximise the value of the content already available at endgame, but you also wan to be able to provide new content in a timely fashion for players to experience. This is where the difficulty curve comes into play – by varying the difficulty of challenges sufficiently at endgame, you force players into a situation where they have to complete the easier content before they can move on to the more difficult stuff. You can even put artificial barriers in to play in order to slow down the progression between one grade of content and another. Get it wrong, and the players will have rapidly completed the hardest content you have available, putting increased pressure on your development teams to churn out more content, and increasing the risk that the new content will be rushed. To give an example of this, I’ll use two popular examples from the same game: The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, both expansions for World of Warcraft.

Burning Crusade: Gates galore

On release, The Burning Crusade introduced two new concepts for endgame players. For 5-man dungeons, players would have the option of tackling them at either their standard difficulty setting or a new “heroic” one, specifically tuned for endgame players with a minimum level of equipment on their characters. In addition, unlocking the heroic mode for a dungeon usually required completing it in normal mode a number of times. Beyond that, being able to access raid content relied on players completing a number of tasks in 5-man dungeons, while accessing higher tier raiding required players to complete lower tier raid locales first. This enforced gating process meant that upon release, Blizzard would have a reasonable idea how long it would take for groups to progress through the content. It also meant that the complexity or challenge of each instance was less of a risk – it didn’t matter if the difficulty curve was poorly implemented if the flow of players into the higher content was restricted through the use of gates. Over time the gates and restrictions were removed in order to open up content to more players, but by then Blizzard had managed to release further content updates in order to keep players with something to do. More than that though, having far off goals provided players with an aspiration to work towards, even if they would never ultimately reach that goal.

Wrath of the Lich King: No gating

By contrast, Wrath of the Lich King has been completely open to players. There are no gates or hoops for players to jump through, and heroic modes are available to all players as soon as they reach endgame. Only, it hasn’t been as successful as one would have hoped. The normal modes of endgame dungeons have been largely discarded, as heroic ones are instantly available and in many cases are only marginally more difficult. This in a stroke halves the replay value of these dungeons – the trick was to use the gear your character would collect in the normal ones to enable you to complete the heroic ones, but if the gear from normal dungeons is worthless and heroic ones are easy to complete, why bother going through that step if you’re not forced to by some artificial gate? The situation gets worse with raiding – players can throw themselves into either a 10-man or 25-man version of every raid dungeon currently available and are likely to be able to complete it. There’s no tiering or gating mechanism in place, which means that once players have gorged their fill on existing content they start turning to Blizzard asking for more. Understandably, the responses have been less than firm . Although content patches are planned, there are no firm dates on when they’ll arrive or what’s in them.

Morton's Fork: both prongs are unappealing

For Blizzard, as much as any developer, it’s a difficult situation with no easy choices. Although it’s painfully obvious now that the difficulty level of much of the endgame Lick King content is not only low but closely packed together, it’s endemic of a Morton’s Fork when it comes to building an MMO difficulty curve. Do you build gates, quests, attunements and so on in order to restrict the flow of players through content, or do you rely on the intrinsic difficulty level of each piece of content to control the pace of progression for you? Neither are particularly appealing to the player base, as on one hand accusations of “holding players back” emerges, while on the other the risk of unbalanced content becomes much more pivotal in the player experience. For my own end, I prefer hard gating mechanisms, as they provide a checkpoint that the player has to work through as well as a mechanism that can be removed once further content is in place.

More than this though, I think there’s a more fundamental question to ask. Do players need a mixture of both goals (I’m going to finish this dungeon) and aspirations (One day I’ll have a full set of top-grade armour) in order to keep them motivated to play a game in the long term? More than that though, how dependant are they on those aspirations, even though they may never achieve them? And does providing a game with few challenges have the result of generating fewer aspirations in their playerbase? For me, a game without long-term goals to work towards leads me to wondering what all the short-term goals are in aid of, how they fit together and where they’re ultimately going to lead my character. And as soon as you get that seed of doubt about your short-term goals, your motivation to complete them evaporates like morning dew.

The original version of Everquest

So what’s made WoW so successful, straight from launch? Well, two of the three lead designers on the game (Rob “Furor” Pardo and Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan) were both heavy players of the EverQuest series of games, being part of the same guild. This meant that although you had a veteran game designer in the form of Tom Chilton, it’s reasonably safe to assume that the design team were focused strongly on what concepts would make the game more fun for the player and which would pull away from that. With this in place, concepts that had previously been traditional in MMOs (such as a heavy death penalty) were abandoned and new ones that rewarded players (such as granting players a bonus for taking regular breaks) became the norm. Before the game was even announced, the stage was set for World of Warcraft to become a mainstream MMO, designed from the core with the player in mind.

By the same token, development of a new MMO can be a high-cost, high-risk business. Blizzard managed to mitigate a large chunk of this risk by using the same root engine for both World of Warcraft and Warcraft III, the continuation of their real-time-strategy series, forking development part-way down the process so that they could be tailored for their eventual purpose. This meant that a lot of datafile formats and toolsets could be repurposed to go from one game to another, allowing you to share your development cost between three titles. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing was happening with their current in-development titles, Diablo III and Starcraft II. This afforded them additional luxuries not commonly known to game developers – additional development time. WoW was in production for about 5 years while various design choices were implemented, tested and so on.  One often used mantra by Blizzard designers is “iterate, iterate, iterate” or continually revisit concepts until you’re completely happy with how they work. By comparison, most other MMOs tend to go through a punishing two year development cycle where as much as possible is crammed in before launch, with further content promised as patch updates later.

Age of Conan: looks pretty, lacks content

Following on from this Blizzard had a couple of luxuries. The low polygon count strategy allowed the art and animation teams to create a large amount of assets – items, creatures, monsters, environments and so on – quickly and easily. This meant that they could ramp up the number of developers working on questing content such as building storylines, developing quest hubs and generally making sure that there was plenty of content to lead a player from one area of the game to another. By contrast, most MMOs of late (I’m thinking of Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan) have been really heavy on pushing the realism factor or advancing graphical capabilities in order to win some screenshot space in the videogaming press, or to have some flyover videos to impress the public with.  Eye candy might be great for the initial wow factor, but it’s content that keeps people hooked and playing for months on end.

Finally, Betas. Now, I’ve taken part in a few beta trials, and they’ve usually been of the kind that starts about 3 months before release, just in order to make sure that there are no glaring problems with the wide variety of hardware out there. This was particularly the case with Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London, where the beta was more of a pre-release demo than an external testing phase. Compare that with the 7 month beta window that WoW had before release and the sheer amount of changes and revamps that took place when developers found concepts that just weren’t working for players. Even post-lanch, Blizzard kept piling on the pressure by releasing new content on a regular basis. This allowed gamers to build confidence with Blizzard and the development teams, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be left with a game that suffers from a lack of post-release support.

So as you can see, Blizzard made several strategic choices that gave their movement into the MMO arena the best possible chance to succeed.

Hellgate: London eventually flagshipped

It’s only natural to assume that as a result, other publishers would consider learning from this and foster their own creative paths in order to support the mammoth amount of work that an MMO requires. Unfortunately, this hasn’t exactly been the case. In LOTRO the game was pretty but dull, with a huge amount of “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” and not enough “how do we make this fun to play?”.  In Age of Conan the game suffered from a lack of cohesion between the various different aspects – items had stats associated with them but it wasn’t obvious how each stat benefited your character, and crafting and player economies were severely neglected. In Hellgate: London, Flagship Studios tried to circumvent a large part of the development process by having different aspects of the world being randomly generated on the fly, but this only served to make areas feel repetitive and indistinct once the scenery had been encountered a handful of times. Not only that, but the nascent development company got heavily tarred with an internet meme that only grew as they became insolvent.

That hasn’t stopped studios from taking risks and developing MMOs. Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online, Jumpgate Evolution and Otherland to name but a few. Of these, I have fairly high hopes for SW:TOR as it’s being developed by Bioware, formerly of Neverwinter Nights and Mass Effect fame.  They’re used to developing role-playing games with a high level of content (particularly with NWN, which also featured a high level of online capability). I would also really like to see Jumpgate Evolution succeed, but it feels like Codemasters are going down the same roads they have before. They haven’t started a beta phase yet they’re proclaiming a release window of Spring 2009, which goes back to my point earlier about betas being used as a pre-release demo. I’d also really like to see Otherland succeed, but I’m concerned that RealU (the developers, based in Singapore) may have bitten off more than they can chew with an MMO being the first title they’ll release. I’d hate to see this turn into another Flagship.

Will games companies treat the MMO concept as something that requires a unique design path and strategy, respecting what players wants are in order to make a game with true mass-market appeal? Or will they cave to the demands of their publishers and stockholders to produce games that ship within a rigid release window, but ultimately fall flat? Is it possible for a developer to achieve both of these goals? Is an MMO the right thing for a newborn developer to focus on, or should they earn their stripes by pushing out some easier to develop but still hard to do well traditional role-playing games beforehand? It seems that as long as we have studios willing to venture into MMO territory, and as long as we have publishers to finance them, that we’ll see developers going over the same classic mistakes and fail to gain any meaningful market share. Blizzard has already demonstrated there’s a huge mass market out there waiting for the developer that gets it right. It’s just up to the developer to figure out what the right moves are.