SonOfMethuselah said:
Because the last time he tried an MMO, it went extremely well. I know this is more his style than Tabula Rasa was, but you would think the man would try to reestablish his name with a smash-hit single-player title before jumping on the MMO bandwagon again, familiar territory or not. I for one have to see that he's still able to craft anything worth playing before I'll agree to sink time and money into an MMO he's designing, much less support one through Kickstarter.
I've had to put some things on hold due to putting some $$ in a few Kickstarters this month when I probably shouldn't have. This was one of them.
I'd personally like to see a return to single player RPGs myself, but I can see why Richard Garriot is going with an MMO. As I remember from way back in the day, he was always interested in the idea of virtual worlds, and trying to push the envelope of what technology could do forward, even if the results were mixed. Things like "Pagan" and "Ascension" being attempts to create a more gradually realistic enviroment in terms of movement and interaction, with the idea of a character being able to say play Hopscotch (Acension Movement Tutorial) being kind of the point, even if I, and others were not please with the results. I seem to remember Richard at one point mentioning how he planned for his games to go into VR early on, and as a result I can sort of see how he'd be interested in the idea of shared worlds like MMOs above and beyond wanting to make single player fare.
I'm sort of a Lord British fan, and absolutly worshipped the single player Ultima games for a long time (even if the last two were lacking IMO). He's got what support, and very limited funds I can contribute. To me the question is less whether he can create, and more on whether he's going to go off in wierd semi-experimental tangents that while interesting on a certain level don't lead to a very fun gameplay experience. For example I felt "Tabula Rasa" was pants as an MMO, and really not all that fun (it died, so apparently I'm not alone) but the big selling point, the idea of enemies attacking bases, taking them over, and then changing the enviroment all on their own, was very interesting, but at the end of the day I increasingly felt like I had little control over what was going on other than to maybe show up in the right place and generally kill things for a while and hope the invisible counter maybe allowed us to "win" not that it really mattered in the big picture. Truthfully I suspect this basic concept heavily inspired a lot of what you see going on in RIFT and even with WoW's experiments in "phasing" (Wrath Gate, etc...).
I think the problem won't be creativity, so much as Richard needing to realize that first and foremost he has to make things fun for the average user, and make it so they keep wanting to play, and then work his experimental mechanics and ideas around that. I mean as cool as it was to see what he did with "Ascension" to begin with was also (for it's time), it like Tabula Rasa wound up being not a lot of fun in the long term.
I'll also say that I think Richard needs to be a little less naive when it comes to human behavior. As nice as it is to envision a "Dreampark" type enviroment where everyone co-exists in, and contributes to the fantasy together, and even the bad guys are kind of fun to deal with when people play them, he needs to get that a lot of people are jerks and are going to derive enjoyment from messing with other players, and in a practical sense, a game without any real permanant penelties means that those harassing players will always have an advantage since everyone dropping what they are doing to try and stop them (if it's even possible) isn't condusive to the enviroment, since even in the best cases it simply becomes a game for the troublemakers to make everyone spend all their time reacting to them, rather than playing the game and doing whatever it is they want to do. UO wound up becoming a hellhole early on for this reason, and we're not just talking the PKers, but people doing crap like making characters called "Sir Lagsalot" running around dropping nested bags and backpacks full of trivial items on the ground specifically to create as much painful lag as they could for the rest of the players.... and so much paranoia everyone ran around spamming a hotkey for "guards" 24/7.
I guess the point of my rambling amounts to me hoping he's not only learned, but also puts together a good team, that happens to be more grounded in reality, that he's actually going to listen to.
