Richard Garriott: "Theme Park" MMOs are Dead
- Thread starter StewShearerOld
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You know, I think his opinion might hold a bit more water if he wasn't using it to flog his own game...
Seriously, this is the guy who tried to revolutionize the MMO(with Tabula Rasa) and failed hard. he talked a lot of shit before that game came out too. I don't think he is a great designer. I contribute a lot of Ultima Online's success to Raph Koster and not Garriott. Ultima before UO was pretty bland.
I dunno. I call that "putting your money where your mouth is". There's nothing cynical or hypocritical about what he's doing. He's got some ideas, he's trying to make them real and convince everyone they're great ideas.Reed Spacer said:
On the other hand... It all seems very ivory tower to me. He's making what he wants, but is that what lots of other people want? Recent history suggests that it probably isn't, and worse, that he's overlooked things that ARE very important to players, and will drive away people who might otherwise be interested in his vision.
Well, I think he's saying that because right now sandbox design appears to solve some of the juxtaposition players encounter between their actions and the game world at large. A common example would be "Everyone is the Hero", where the player introduction to the game world is via some scripted event in a linear tutorial where they get told they are some kind of chosen one, and then get tossed into the world at large with tons of other players.
On the other hand, sandbox MMOs likely will have their own bag of problems. What happens if the game employs destructible terrain and some high level player decides to go GTA on an entire city? It would be pretty entertaining, but likely disruptive to at least some portion of the player population. Especially if the antics result in a building collapsing and killing a valuable merchant.
Then again, maybe we do need a dose of anarchy in our MMO space.
On the other hand, sandbox MMOs likely will have their own bag of problems. What happens if the game employs destructible terrain and some high level player decides to go GTA on an entire city? It would be pretty entertaining, but likely disruptive to at least some portion of the player population. Especially if the antics result in a building collapsing and killing a valuable merchant.
Then again, maybe we do need a dose of anarchy in our MMO space.
I think that the new generation of MMOs will be more in line with what Sony have planned for Everquest next, that is to say more sandboxy and less scripted along a set path. They seem to have learned their lessons from their previous MMOs like SWG and Everquests.
I dunno. I'm getting into Guild Wars 2 right now, and as theme parks go, it is a pretty great one. Sure, the heyday of WoW and its imitators is gone, but big deal. There are still plenty of MMO's with their own little niches, and now even Guild Wars and WoW are two well-aged, mature franchises with plenty to sink your teeth into.
Basically, this is a really dumb prediction. Show us what you've got first, Garriot, because especially given the shameless hyping of this particular industry, anything else is just hot air. I'll stick with what's here right now, and what's fun.
Basically, this is a really dumb prediction. Show us what you've got first, Garriot, because especially given the shameless hyping of this particular industry, anything else is just hot air. I'll stick with what's here right now, and what's fun.
You basically just described Everquest:Nextjoeman098 said:
OT: I do not think that Theme Park MMO's are dead, not at all. Pop culture doesn't die, it gets replaced. Sure, Games like WoW are certainly getting stale and stagnating but they're not dead yet. Not until the next big thing comes along.
WoW has 7.6 Million paying subs, sure sounds dead to me. Look, I like Garriot, but when someone thinks they have the foresight to claim something "dead" all the while being responsible for one of the most dull and broken MMO's in recent history, Bullshit drama magnet alarms sound.
I declare that Richard Garriot is dead.
No, seriously. Has he made any meaningful contributions to the gaming arena in the last 15 years?
No, seriously. Has he made any meaningful contributions to the gaming arena in the last 15 years?
Odd. From what I can see they're not dead enough.
Not nearly enough to make that claim, at least.
Not nearly enough to make that claim, at least.
and ... this will be that last any one hears of it, till it gets shut down cause no one plays it.
That's Peter Molyneux (OBE)delroland said:
Then again old DIck can shut up, nothing is ever dead in gaming, like fashion trends from 30 years ago and the music of the 80's everything comes back around... whether you want it to or not!
Story driven MMOs have a problem - theres only so many times you can see the same story till it gets boring.
not to mention
hi
trade
sell 50 halberds
yes
bye
was so ingrained into me i could do it blindfolded in the middle of the night.
Speaking to NPCs is awesome and im very sad they no longer do that. this was one of the features they RUINED in modern games.
ALso you can already do that in Eve to soem extent. player owned structures can be destroyed and items in it blow up and looted. variuso factions raid each other and destroy their POS all the time. There, of course, is a space regulated by NPC police who got OP guns though, that one is safer. And you cant blow up stations sadly. The post thing is good thing for me, since i actually build them and thus they give me moneys for replacements.
No, player driven MMOs wont fail. Giving players no steering wheel and expecting them to steer - will. If you want player driven sandbox games to work - give players the ability to actually run the sandbox. Take a look at Eve-Online for example. players drive the market, heck, players own 2/3 of the systems in the game, maknig their own security patrols, industries. becuase players are given the tools to do it. On the other hand you got MMOs where players cant do anything and still expect players to do everything.Therumancer said:
actually that made some games amazing, when you could find hidden phrases to make NPCs say interesting things.Pyrian said:
not to mention
hi
trade
sell 50 halberds
yes
bye
was so ingrained into me i could do it blindfolded in the middle of the night.
Speaking to NPCs is awesome and im very sad they no longer do that. this was one of the features they RUINED in modern games.
That would be quite... awesome. and then we would see NPCs reconstructing the city slowly, with ability to pay them mroe to do it faster.Colt47 said:
ALso you can already do that in Eve to soem extent. player owned structures can be destroyed and items in it blow up and looted. variuso factions raid each other and destroy their POS all the time. There, of course, is a space regulated by NPC police who got OP guns though, that one is safer. And you cant blow up stations sadly. The post thing is good thing for me, since i actually build them and thus they give me moneys for replacements.
Actually yeah, EVE is a good example. It's worked to an extent, but has never been one of the top MMOs or one that has been widely imitated for a reason... that is to say that the entire game is pretty much a pyramid scheme based on griefing. The basic truth of EVE is that it's a very simple game that has become largely an exercise in a bunch of people trying to harass and scam each other almost 24/7. It's also one where it's more or less impossible for a new player to get into the game seriously without a lot of help, and frequently the people offering to help are more or less out to screw them (if they even believe it's a genuine new player, as opposed to someone running a scam). The real time element to raising skills means that someone who has been playing years will ALWAYS have an advantage over someone that just got started. What's more 2/3rds of the game being owned and controlled by players (where there is little else there) sounds "cool" conceptually, until you realize that this means that's 2/3rds of the galaxy any player who isn't part of a huge corp isn't likely to be able to visit since for all intents and purposes the guys controlling that space pretty much want to murder other players who enter there.Strazdas said:
What's more, beyond a certain point you have to ask "what do you do with all of this power?" the answer is of course to make anyone with less power miserable. The guys who are say manufacturing ships and have trillions of ISK to put into clones and such decide to put their power to useful purposes... like suicide ganking in JITA to annoy other people.
Looking at another Sandbox, UO, you see the same basic problem. What did you do with your high level powers except mess with other players when and where you could? Early in UO the game pretty much involved groups like The Mercs, Trinsic Warriors, Pirates Of Dark Water (named off of the old Cartoon) and Inner Circle doing whatever they could to pretty much harass anyone that wasn't as powerful or coordinated as they were. Trinsic Borrowers used to do things like literally sit outside of Trinsic city lines (the alleged "City Of Honor") and gank anyone as soon as they left protection. For a while they set up a guild stone where they were pretty much charging people to join a guild, the tag of which would not be attacked, letting people leave the city of Trinsic (or enter it) without being ganked. The idea being that someone who wanted to play in that section of the map had to pay protection money....
As I said "hell is other people", and really the point is that a sandbox is great up until the point that you need something constructive for people who put in that work to do other than to terrorize less powerful players and see what kind of chaos they can spread. Hence the need for some kind of strong theme park/PVE elements, and a strong endgame, even in otherwise sandbox gameplay.
This is of course before you even consider Richard's basic play to become a virtual landlord, and how his idea is to charge a premium to build structures in addition to in game resources. Something that means that your real world wealth is going to enter into the equasion as much as other elements of the sandbox. Someone who can afford to drop several hundred dollars of real money for a land plot and structure is going to wind up being able to lord over someone who just logs in to play the game and can't afford to spend that much money on it. Sort of like if CCP charged EVE corporations real money based on the amount of game real estate they controlled each month. This as much as anything is part of my problem with the concepts behind "Shroud Of The Avatar" if I understand it all correctly (and I think I do).
He doesn't come off great, but he's still half right. The next wave of MMOs will be heavily sandboxy with a primary focus on player-generated content. It just makes too much sense financially. WoW makes a bunch of money, but they have to continually funnel their profits into generating new static content to keep people interested. If you shed that responsibilities onto your players, they will basically do your job for you. Hard to beat that sort of overhead savings; once they get the tools in place, such games should be highly profitable without requiring millions of subscribers. Hell, they can even eject most of the community management in the name of "player-generated solutions".
None of this means the theme park MMO is dead. At worst, it might become the new minority.
Sidebar: my biggest problem with the modern day theme park MMO is the loss of scale and space in the name of player convenience. No one wanted to walk anywhere or wait for anything, so you just queue every conceivable activity directly from a drop-down menu - or (worst case scenario) grab a nearby portal to almost exactly where you want to go. Remember travel in early EQ1? It was dangerous. It was time-consuming. It was engaging. And it felt more like an actual quest than any version of "kill six guys and come back for something" ever has.
None of this means the theme park MMO is dead. At worst, it might become the new minority.
Sidebar: my biggest problem with the modern day theme park MMO is the loss of scale and space in the name of player convenience. No one wanted to walk anywhere or wait for anything, so you just queue every conceivable activity directly from a drop-down menu - or (worst case scenario) grab a nearby portal to almost exactly where you want to go. Remember travel in early EQ1? It was dangerous. It was time-consuming. It was engaging. And it felt more like an actual quest than any version of "kill six guys and come back for something" ever has.
Therumancer said:
Ah, as usual, misconceptions, misconceptions everywhere. Yeah, lets ignore the fact that Eve is the ONLY MMO with open market, has won numerous awards, including best gaming community in a MMO, two years in a row.
Eve numbers have been risign steadily over whole 10 years (except incarna disaster). It is a nicnhe game (space MMO) therefore the userbase will also be niche. They never expecter or wanted 10 million subscribers. They rather have 1 mil of good players tham 9 mil bots. Not to mention the players council where you can get elected and actually argue your own features in with CCP, in real life meetings. (though granted most of ccandidates that win are placed by large powerhouses that already have thousands of votes to throw around).
Yes, there are scammers and there are non-scammers. just because you saw some scammers in Jita does not mean the whole game is like that. you know an easy way to protect yourself against ALL scammers in eve? Using your brain. Yes, this MMO wants you to think instead of just grind. HOw terrible.
New players problems. When i was new to the game, 8 days old and on trial account, a bunch of cool people took me under their wing. The corporation was so good that here 4 years later i still hold their banner.
Heck, there is even a corporation called Eve University that is made specifically for the purpose of teaching new players the ins and outs of the game and then send them off to the "big corps". ANd its been doing this for years - grief free. There are PVP schools, plety of stuff. Just because eve doesnt hold its players by the hand in narrow linear path does not mean its bad.
Real time skill rising means that skill grinding is non-existant and players can focus on more fun parts. Money is the key in this game and that is all that matters. SKills are secondary. As far as skills go, im sure you noticed they only go up to 5 right? A person flying a frigate who is 10 years old and 1 month old can both have completely equal skills. Ships like titans takes time, sure, but that is good. Besides, as far as flying ships in PVP goes, your personal skills matter so much more than ingame skills. All you need is basic skills to be able to fit everything you need. That 2% faster cap regen wont win you the battle if you have no skill. ANd dont make mistake many people do - just because its controlled by mouse clicks does not mean it takes no skill to fight with it. It does.
Plenty of people enter the rest 2/3 of galaxy, from WH explorers to 0sec scouts. The reason the owners are so trigger happy is because every potential visitor is potential thief. since you know, you can actually steal from other players now. not to mention the fact that big corps rent the space to small corps as well. and yes, if you are a loner you wont last for long there - your not supposed to. Your not supposed to go alone into fringe of galaxy and fight of hordes of enemies, this is not disney princess adventures in space. All players are equal, not all use their abilities equally.
I have 20 trillion ISK. i have never ganked anyone in my life. There are plenty of other ways to put your money into useful purposes. Like, for example, fighting the people who gank others? And you cant jut go and gank people. After 2 people your security status will fall so low you will have to leave highsec space for good (or grind your way back up. and trust me, you dont want to grind level 1 missions) Not to mention that the whole "denial of Ice" and "hulkagedon" events have been amazing in a sense that players are able to organize such a thing and make it succeed (and they make a lot of ISK in the process, mind you). There is no other game where player events can have such impact to whole games market and even playstyle. Eve is perfect example of how given tghe right tools players CAN make the game much better than any content creator could.
I have not played UO, but i have played Tibia, a game few months older than UO and a lot of overlapping userbase. It was perma-death at the beginning. Some high levels decided they wanted to kill others. You know how it ended? Players united and drove them away to such extent that we had people patrolling cities and main roads against player killers. And that game wasnt even good at the user freedom part.
Though as good players moved on to other games there was a "pay protection if you want to be high level" which later went into "pay BOH (boots of haste) or dead", but at that point the game itself was so downhill i dont even know why i played it (mostly the developers fault)
No, you were wrong to say hell is other people. at least partly. Life is other people. And life can be a hell or a bliss, it all depends on the players themselves. The endgame are the players in every game anyway. PVP will always be more attractive than PVE, the key is to make sure that PVP happens where it should - at the endgame and coulantarily. In eve you have 3 huge conglomerates (alliances of alliances) fighting eachother in 0 sec. Result? a lot of shows blown up, creating demand and healthy market, leaving other space relatively safe for people who dont want to get involved into this and creating stories no other game could. When was the last time you saw somone loose 100+ titans (translated to real life money if you were to use it to buy it instead of makngi them ingame - ~40.000 Euros) because of a bad fleet commander call in another game. Never thats when. When did you saw people loosign a war and throwing suicidal attacks in order to distract enemy long enough so they can haul the expensive stuff out of the dangerous space? When did you saw players organize a protest agaisnt developer that was so loud it crashed their server and made healdlines in non-gaming media? When did you saw players organize events that double item prices because they decided there were too many mining bots? When did you saw disputes between factions so large that they would resott in creating secret spying agency to infiltrate enemy team and play as part of their team for multiple years to get into directors position and then suddenly the corporations assets are all gone?
No, you dont see this in other games. Why? Because they dont give players the tools to be a sandbox.
I am not sure what you mean with charging real money about real estate, so i cant comment about that, but Corporations pay real estate taxes with INGAME money, not real life money in eve. In fact there was a famous event this year when 100+ systems dropped to no ownership becuase one alliance forgot to pay their taxes, leaving to a rush to capture these systems from other players.
Charging real money for plots and buildings is part of Shroud Of The Avatar. I get videos from Richard Garriot explaining the game development, and one of the big things I get sent are offers to pre-buy houses and stuff that I can put on a plot if I decide to buy one. Those who pay hundreds or thousands of dollars though can apparently get a permanent plot to put structures on as opposed to having to buy one from Richard and then risk it reverting to the bank if you don't keep paying in-game taxes on it.Strazdas said:
As far as EVE goes, bots and the same people juggling multiple accounts are the reason why the player base has appeared to be growing, that and a few spikes of activity when they have done promotional events and such. There has been a lot of analysis on EVE and how many people actually play it, and the bottom line is that even CCP has no idea how big their actual player base is. That said, as you pointed out yourself it's a niche game, it's not supposed to have a huge player base. However your wrong that it being a space MMO is what makes it a niche game, it's all of the stuff your saying is so great about it. You also mention, but otherwise gloss over things like "Hulkageddon" (massive griefing event against miners) and similar. I mean I get that you REALLY like EVE, a lot of people do, but I think that leads you to misrepresent what the game is like, or the problems with it. I also admit that I have some doubts as to whether you've actually played EVE due to your comments about skills "capping at 5" and how that means that newer players are equal to older ones. Strictly speaking there are a whole crapton of skills that augement each other, and getting just one of them up to level 5 can take a month all on it's own. What's more there really isn't "a frigate" beyond the very beginning of the game, as later play involves getting specialty ships bombers, faction ships, etc... where even small ones can take months upon months to use. In a practical sense, a new player is not going to be able to catch or equal an older one, and if skill is equal, seniority is going to be the deciding factor since some guy who played years could very well have a couple dozen relevant skills all working together in combat as far as maneuvering, gunnery, and firing missiles are concerned. In most MMOs once you hit top level the basic skills intristic to a character type are equal, which means that on a fundamental level new players don't wind up getting victimized by simple seniority.
I'm not disagreeing that sandbox elements are a good thing, they are, however I do not think a total sandbox will ever be more than a niche game at this point, you need those strong PVE aspects, and gameplay devoid of having to compete or interact with players unless you REALLY want to, as well, if you want to the game to survive and become any kind of massive success. In short the future for MMOs is going to be a combination of both "Theme Part" and "Sandbox" elements working together as opposed to games that are entirely one thing or the other. I think to some extent Richard Garriot is trying to do this, but as I said I think he's largely leaning towards the sandbox side of things because he sees potential to get people to pay real money for structures and virtual real estate to put them on.