Makin' A Game

Wow, one whole month without a post.

For a very long time I have had many, many ideas on games I would like to make. Well I am finally going to do it. The other night I had new revelations on how to deal with certain problems. For example the game I am going to be making is a MMO and the single biggest issue was how to prevent new players from being utterly crushed by existing ones without adding in arbitrary restrictions, such as anyone level 50 can only attack down to level 40.

I have half a dozen solid ideas which throw off normal MMO conventions. These ideas I have not seen anywhere in the market I am targeting. In fact the entire game premise is something I've not seen done yet.

Of course I won't be able to make this game on my own. Well I could, but it would take much too long. I am going to have to hire some people and form a real company. No idea what to call it yet.

The initial team is only going to consist of 3-5 people. Of course there is myself who will be doing a lot of the design and programming. I'll need to find a writer, server architect, and up to two other programmers. Later on I expect to bring on someone to do interface design, graphic design and customer relations. I'm not exactly sure how to go about finding these people yet. With the economy the way it is I'm sure there are tons out there who would be interested in doing something like this.

I'm sure over the coming weeks I'll have a lot more to post on this..........if I get to it.

Online Distribution

Blizzard may be patching every day but I am certainly not posting that quickly.

Recently there was an uproar in the UO community about how Stygian Abyss is going to be distributed online online. In other words, it will not be sold in retail stores. Some UO players feel this hurts the game due to a lack of shelf presence. What they do not realize is that the video game business is at a point now where having a box on the shelf no longer equals game success.

This has been further reinforced this week by Sony's and Microsoft's commitments to online publishing. Sony has gone so far as to have no physical media at all in their latest handheld, the PSP-GO. Until very recently Eve Online was online distributed via online sales. They were growing subscriptions the entire time, up to around 400,000 now I think.

The industry has evolved, just as nearly everything does. Anyone heard of a thing called newspapers? They are in big trouble because most people get their news through the internet. It is faster, cheaper and more convenient. Just as downloading a video game can be.

Whether the Stygian Abyss expansion is a success depends on the content. Unless they decide to release a Nintendo Wii version, which then a box on the shelf would make a difference.

Blizzard Publishing Every Day

I stumbled across a link to some WOW publish notes. It appears that Blizzard is now pushing out fixes virtually every day. And it isn't just one or two critical things needing fixing, it can be a dozen of fixes. They must feel very confident about their publishing process to be able to do it every day. Well with a game that has 12 million people playing, I guess you need to ramp up publishing to that speed.

On the subject of Blizzard, it appears they are over the "we have how many subscribers?" shock and are getting down to business. They were making so much profit per year but were not working on anything. Now they have Starcraft II, Diablo III and a secret MMO project all in the works. Plus with all that money coming in they have an unlimited amount of time to polish their games. These titles will probably be the most refined in the history of video games. Starcraft II likely would have been released up to a year or more ago from a publisher such as EA who likes to rush things out the door (Warhammer Online). As long as World of Warcraft keeps going, in four or five years Blizzard could be a one studio game producing powerhouse. Their no longer restricted in terms of time and money with a gravy train such as WOW under their belt. But who knows how long that will last.

Plus what is up with taking 18 months for an expansion? They should be able to knock that down to a yearly release. As time goes on players are going to get more and more bored. With no news on an expansion yet it doesn't sound like they'll have one ready. Who knows, maybe it will be a big surprise.

I need to post something

I am so bad at this. I need to try and post more often.

So what should I post about? I guess I should comment about Darkfall. The game is in an obvious downward spiral. The shop to purchase the game has finally been opened for several days, perhaps permanently. I don't play the game so I have no idea what the population situation is, but with the developers sticking with a one server implementation, it appears they have exhausted their backlog of players iching to play. That certainly does not bode well if the amount of people quitting is as estimated.

Darkfall promised a lot and has utterly failed in almost every field a MMO can possible fail in. Poor user interface, bad lag and disconnections, a multiple of hacks, unending amounts of exploits, substandard graphics, no community management, a website with the latest announcements about beta, no marketing, unfun PvM, sparse PvP, unbalanced mechanics favoring huge numbers and alliances, etc. It just goes on and on.

Darkfall is in such bad shape that quite possibly it could end up shutting down by the end of the year. Aside from some current die-hard players, no one has any faith in the future of the game. People who cite potential are only fooling themselves. Everything has potential. UO has potential. Shadowbane had potential. Potential is only worth something if it can be utilized, which Aventurine has demonstrated an inability to access. They can't even update the main website for the game after 3 months of release. Darkfall is likely to go down as the worse MMO in history unless by some miracle the game can be salvaged.

Suspended from Darkfall's Forum

I've been meaning to write something about Darkfall for a while. Well today a review came out that gave the game a 2 out of 10. That is pretty bad. Anyway, I post on the Darkfall forum asking if this is the first review of Darkfall and get suspended for it. Here is what I recieved:

Dear JC the Builder,

You have received an infraction at Darkfall Forums.

Reason: THREE - You may not excessively communicate the same idea, phrase, or create spam within the community; you may not create any thread or post for the sole purpose of causing unrest in the community; you may not cause any sort of disturbance within a thread with the intent of ruining it; and you may not make one line posts such as IBTL, IBTB, BUMP, etc. Moderators are at their full discretion to enforce the spirit of this rule.
-------
Please refrain from trolling, thank you.
-------

This infraction is worth 10 point(s) and may result in restricted access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.

Original Post:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=3345212

Quote:

Can someone link to another review of Darkfall? I am having trouble finding any. Does this mean the first official review of Darkfall by a gaming website gave it a 2 out of 10? That is not good.

All the best,
Darkfall Forums

That was almost immediately after I posted it. Aventurine appears to be in full damage control mode. Their developer Tasos wrote a rebuttal almost as long as the review itself. He claims that the reviewer spent almost no time in the game. No play session lasted more then a few minutes. Eurogamer replied saying the reviewer spent around 9 hours. I'm sure more details will come out soon.

Someone replied to my post saying there is one on MMORPG.com. But there isn't, the closest is an opinion piece. No review with a score. After almost a full page of responses later, no one has replied to that person and stated this. The vast majority of replies are just remarks dispariging the reviewer and investigative posts of his MySpace or other reviews. I think this event shows the current Darkfall community in its true light. And that light isn't very bright at all.

More on a New UO Client

Continuing on with what I posted yesterday, I know there would be a couple issues trying to graft a 3d engine on the current UO world. A real one, not the one we saw with 3rd Dawn. Perhaps more than just a few problems too........

But I don't see anything that would outright prohibit it. The world might need a bit of changing so it isn't full of flat forests with trees laid out in unusually symmetric patterns. Perhaps the 1st person would only be available inside dungeons and buildings. I see this type of upgrade as the easier of two paths to restart the game. The other being a huge effort to bring 1997 isometric graphics to 2009, not 2001 which Kingdom Reborn tried to do. Even then, if that was the only upgrade performed the developers would need to combine it will a huge amount of game play enhancements in the all realms: PvM, PvP, sailing, housing, crafting, etc. Every single system would need a new and involved feature.

For UO to reverse its decline, you need something compelling to draw the attention of every MMO player out there. There needs to be something enticing them to at least give UO another 14 day trial. It all needs to go in simultaneously so when you login you see lots of other people playing with you.

The Stygian Abyss has the potential to do this. That is quite a big if there though, considering we have little idea of what is going on. At the moment it sounds like an average UO expansion. New dungeon(s), a couple new skills, a new system to revive crafting, etc. That is not going to cut it by a long shot. It might help maintain the status quo, but it is unlikely to turn subscriptions around.

As far as expansions go, the last two sucked. The most recent Mondain's Legacy was billed as a return to the game's "roots". Virtually everything about it failed. Recipes are nothing more than an one time annoyance, crafting quests in Heartwood are all "make x and have a 0.01% chance of getting a good drop", and the whole elf thing was just a marketing ploy to begin with. It didn't really "expand" the game at all. The same thing with Samurai Empire. New lands and two new skills which had a pitiful amount of abilities. It is no wonder players have lost interest in UO over the past 6 years. The game has gotten absolutely stagnate in terms of content additions.

If you go look back at the patch notes from 1999, 2000, and 2001 it appears they are doing stuff every single month. Not only that, but there was already so much stuff to do that you didn't hang off of every publish. It just added to your list or fixed stuff. In the past 2 years the majority of publishes have been to either fix/launch the Kingdom Reborn client or event related. The problem with events is they are short term.

I think I got a little off track in this post. I'll just end it here and try again another time.

UO Client Trailers

Here is a trailer for a new UO client I have thought up. If I had the patience, time and knowledge on how to do this, I think it would look really great. But I have none of those so you will just have to pull out your imagination and work with me.

So there is an ancient looking book which opens up to the first page. It shows a screenshot of a player sitting in a small house. There is a chair and a table. Maybe an empty bookcase. There is also a date, 1997, at the heading of the page. The page then turns to 1998. A few decorative items are added to the house. Perhaps some furniture introduced with The Second Age expansion. Do you see the theme?

As this is going on there is a narrator explaining what is going on. He is saying something like "For over a decade, Ultima Online has been growing and expanding....." I've not put a lot of thought into what the narrator says. So just know that it is there. Use your imagination and put words in his mouth. He won't mind.

So the pages keep turning. 1999, 2000. Maybe the leaves on the trees outside die showing that the changover to Trammel. As the years go on, two or three items are added to the house showing the growth of the game. When you arrive in 2008 it is filled with stuff. Then the announcer says something like "a lot has changed, but none more so than what is to come". The page turns once more to 2009.

You are greeted with a much larger image. It looks pretty much the same though. But something is different. The graphics are sharper and more clear. The page notes that the resolution is in 1280x720. The screen then zooms in on various parts to showcase the new high definition graphics. It looks exactly the same as the 2D client except much better. It is on par with what you see in Blizzard's Starcraft II and Diablo III screenshots. There is a fireplace going showcasing the new lightning effects.

The screen zooms back out to standard view. Now players would probably be very happy with this. It looks like an isometric game released in 2009. But then the narrator brings out the big twist! He rotates the camera angle. "For the first time you can now see all angles of the game world". You get to see the back of a house for the first time. There is full rotation, 360 degrees. This is it, the big new improvement for the client. The new hook to draw people in. You can zoom and rotate the camera. It looks spectacular. Everything UO players have been waiting for 10 years.

The screen begins to fade. But the narrator tells it to stop. He's not done yet. You have to see the best part. The screen snaps back to standard view. It starts to zoom in you think. But it is not the same this time. It goes over the shoulder of the avatar. Could it be? Yes it is! First person view. You are now staring at the desk, where you were writing. You look up at a painting on the wall. It is so big. It then switches to 3rd person over the shoulder view and whips around. You see a closeup of the avatar's face. It has an actual expression. Then the door opens behind into a bright light. The narrator says something like, "take your first step into the new world". End trailer.

First things first, I think up until the rotatable camera part could be applied to the upcoming Stygian Abyss client. A trailer similar to that would be absolutely killer as long as the client is solid.

As for the rest, you are probably wondering how that can all be done. It has been stated that camera rotation would be impossible for UO. It is as the client is being designed. For some reason the developers wanted to stick with sprites. Unfortunately that means you are limited to one field of view. I believe that switching to polygon models would have been possible. There may have been a tiny reduction in art quality, but what you would gain (camera rotation and 1st/3rd person perspectives) would make up for it. Plus all the graphics are being redone in high definition polygon models. So the walls of the house, the desk, the chair, the avatar, etc are all polygons. I would really like to see some comparisons of UO creatures done in polygons to see how much of a difference there would be.

The reason Kingdom Reborn was shunned was because it changed the look of the game. In my dreamt-up client you will be virtually unable to notice a difference in "classic" mode. You have the exact same perspective and all the art is the same, except in higher quality. You can take advantage of 1st person or rotating the camera if you wish. Or you could turn off those features and play UO the same way you did back in 1997.

If Mythic is serious about having UO have a place in the MMO marketplace they need to one of two things. Either bring the client up to Diablo III and Starcraft II art quality or add a 1st/3rd person perspective. Kingdom Reborn was a failure from the very start because it was no where near close to that.

One more trailer idea I had was for the new 1st person perspective. It opens with you traveling through an iconic UO dungeon such as the entrance of Deciet or maybe adventuring into the Wrong Troll room. The narrator is talking to you saying things like "Doesn't this place seem familiar? Have you been here before?" Chances are that person has if they played an MMO other than World of Warcraft. The trailer just ends with a shot of the UO symbol. Something like that would drive interest in UO to something unseen in a decade.