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Live Forum Q&A with Raph Koster, 10/16
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These are both excellent questions.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
No offense taken. I'll never be ashamed of appreciating (and promoting) and holding onto something truly special. And, imho, SWG and Ultima (and Phantasy Star and Elder Scrolls) represent something truly special. A cut above, imo. Something more...sophisticated. More challenging. More...immersive.
And frankly, if someone like You was indeed developing another MMO in one of those aforementioned 'worlds' (especially Star Wars or Ultima) , then perhaps someone like me wouldn't clamor for "the past" so much.
But rather be more inclined to 'invest' in the future.
BioWare had a chance, initially, with SWTOR. But imo they failed and disappointed me & many others.
ESO might have potential...maybe. But it's not Star Wars lol.
Anyways, i guess the point is: Mr. Koster...If You build it, they will come. Will they not?
Well, step one is get rid of the casual sexism and racism baked into the actual games. I've often said that the core narrative of MMOs is in many ways colonialist. See this article I wrote ages ago: http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/30/the-evil-we-pretend-to-do/
Step two is likely reduce the emphasis on violence. Right now, it's 90% of the games.
MMOs are more diverse than people think. Roblox is one of the biggest in the world right now. Lots of young girls play on Minecraft servers, which are basically being run as personal MMO worlds. Club Penguin has a very diverse set of kids playing it. There have been a TON of very successful MMOs or MMO-like things for the younger audience with huge female populations. Gaia, Meez, WeeWorld, etc. The fact is that the folks here are a minority -- most people today play MMOs as kids and graduate from ever playing them again. I am pretty sure there are more people playing on the kids' worlds than all the adult MMOs combined.
The next barrier is timesink. A lot of the qualities that MMOs offer can now be had in a very lightweight way through other forms of entertainment. A housewife can play an entire session of Candy Crush Saga, including chatting with friends, in less time than it takes to get through a single loading screen for a big MMO. So what does an MMO offer that is unique enough to overcome that obstacle? Everywhere offers the social connection. There's games you can play together all over the place now.
The subject matter needs to get a lot broader. Make MMOs about the kind of worlds that marginalized communities want to see, and they will play. Where's the MMO inspired by African culture? Latin American culture? And I don't mean as simple acts of cultural appropriation to make a zone seem "exotic," but really and truly inspired?
Are you sure about this? Have you taken a look at say, Nexus Mods?
SRPGs like Oblivion and Skyrim have had a massive amount of very very large creations made for them. heck, each of those games had the entire 3rd ES game, Marrowind, recreated in a mod. I will even dare to mention the F2P MMO Neverwinter, with its foundry, has more than a few massive sized creations being played by 100s of thousands and there hasn't been an end to the creations coming to the game.
I don't believe its that the community isn't willing, I think its more due to the lack of tools given alongside the game itself. If the game is lacking in drawing the player into the world, the players have no reason to create for it. This is 100% up to the designers. It isn't enough to just make a sandbox, throw sand in it with some tools and tell us to make the world. Give us a world WORTH creating in.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
The highlighted is sad to hear on many levels. Permanently revoking pvp for a pk? As a person who has loved pve and loves pvp, I think that was a terrible idea. Further you seem to have no faith and or vision for making a working pvp system. Have you looked at Age of Wushu and what has been done there? How a risk/reward, crime and punishment system can create a civil FFA world?
You, and our other western developers can do so much more than tentative, "We don't want anyone upset" approach we've been seeing the last few years. Heck WoW is starting to look hardcore compared to what's been released recently.
When creating a virtual world, do you ever toy with the idea of non-heteronormative social structures? There is a queer gaming convention at berkley this month. As a feminist, I find video games cling to gender norms and discourse like their life depended on it. While simultaneously attempting to take us to another place. It always feels a little counter productive.
Penny for your thoughts on this?
Nice!
Well, even if such a game would come out it does not necessarily mean i would play it bcs that would depend on if my friends play it too and that is a Major Problem of any MMOrpg that comes out these days.
Social Bonds pull you back into the same old crap all the time after the "Honeymoon" is over...
In the end you have only time to play on MMOrpg at the time!
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
1) Yes, of course you can make it so that everything can be earned even though it is sold. The question is whether you will make enough money. I think the answer is going to depend on cost structure, etc. Fundamentally, only two things work as virtual goods: short-circuiting time, and getting something impossible to get any other way. So eliminating all grind and all exclusivity means that most likely, no one will pay for anything you sell. Is there a sweet spot? Probably...
I think the world of CCGs has a lot of lessons on this front. They have managed to balance a microtransaction based model with an ever-expanding game and not piss everyone off.
2) Consider what cable TV does. You pay a sub fee, but once there, there are packages for different levels of value. There's also purchasing stuff on demand.
If a cable company worked like an f2p game, you'd get to watch some channels for free. You could pick up extra shows for one time fees. You would be able to pay $1000 to get all the seasons of Game of Thrones all the way to the end of the series delivered instantly On Demand.
If an f2p game worked like a cable system, you would ply mostly for free, and be able to unlock access to zones or classes or modes of play for an enhanced regular fee. And you'd be able to pay to get a specific epic instance adventure or storyline you wanted access to.
There's room for finding creative ways to mix these business models, for sure.
As far as DMs... you DID see that, kinda. We had stuff like that happen in both UO and SWG. It was expensive to do, though, took a lot of effort. You also had Neverwinter Nights, which did the same on a smaller scale. Used to happen on muds all the time. It's labor-intensive, is all. On SWG there was even eventually the Storyteller system, which started giving some powers to the players to do it themselves....
Maybe...
I actually think that Richard & the Portalarium guys stole a fair amount of potential thunder there. As we have seen in some threads here, it takes a knowledgeable fan to know what I brought to UO... and the Ultima brand is way more powerful than mine. So Lord British can drown me out and suck up all those potential pledgers.
More power to 'em, of course, I have lots of friends there too, including Richard and now Starr, of course.
Yeah, I think we're agreeing. That's what I am saying would probably work: Make a game that people love, then allow people to extend it. It is starting from nothing, no matter how big the ideals, that didn't work.
Saying it's a conservatism issue isn't a knock on you (the general you) at all. It was actually my mistake, with Metaplace. We started out planning to do exactly that, and ended up not doing it. A big error, IMHO.
I do believe in a crime/punishment system. But everything we tried did fall prey to new accounts and killers who just didn't care. If they have no emotional attachment to losing (e.g., don't give a shit) then there isn't any in-game punishment you can offer up. I don't know if you were around for it, but I tried for a LONG time to get that balance right in SWG. Bounty systems became high score tables. Rewards were claimed by dummy accounts. Most everything we tried became a tool for the bad guys. And the good guys literally had no way to win, because the bad guys could just come back the next day, over and over, and just wear your spirit down.
I should give a fuller description of Outcasting, though, because what i said only covers a fraction of the original idea.
The juries would have been players, and they would have been tied to territory. So players take a territory, then crimes within that territory would be reported to the local authorities IF the victim chose to. They would decide based on the logs whether to remove the "license to kill."
From there, we talked about two ways of doing that... remove it globally, but allow local territories to re-enable it; or remove it locally only.
One would be a safe world with wild areas where the local governments liked it to be wild. The other would a wild world, with safe areas where the local governments liked it to be safe. And of course, if you PKed someone who was playing along and enjoyed it, you wouldn't get reported in the first place.
Age of Wushu is a game from Asia. Audiences there are WAY more tolerant of PvP than here. Way way more. That is a business reality factor that has to be taken into account...
I actually think SWGs PvP system with TEFs worked pretty well. WoW's system is basically TEFs layered onto geographical RvR.
Oh yeah. I even had in my book (Theory of Fun) the proposal that virtual worlds should randomize sex at character creation, or allow only two slots, one of each, that sort of thing. And it wasn't a new idea even then, there had been discussion on MUD-Dev of other ways to force players to have a wider point of view.
Gender, of course, we don't code in -- the player can roleplay or express whatever they like, and there is a LONG tradition of that in muds. But as you say, the norming forces are VERY strong. Add in the casual use of homophobic slurs in the slang, and... ugh.
In many muds, we saw sexes beyond two, including asexual, hermaphroditic, third sex, ambiguous, etc. These were there in order to provide for a broader expression of gender. A lot of that has been completely lost in later virtual worlds, with of course stuff like Second Life or Furcadia to point at as supporting a diverse community.
I highly suggest tracking down the book MY TINY LIFE by Julian Dibbell for a glimpse into the crazy awesome stuff that was lost in the transition from muds to MMOs. I think you may even be able to get a free ebook download of it.
1. I would like to point out that your second point is not based on F2P it is based on Freemium which is not the same thing. A F2P game offers its entire game for free and makes its money off of cash shop fluff/buff and vanity items.
2. A very important question is brought up by this post of yours. Do you even look at the MMO industry as a whole or just on the western market? It appears that most if not all western designers and companies don't know about the market as a whole. Right here on this site a recent article is being spoken about where it states that the F2P market is going to top 2.5 billion in 2013. That is massive, its far larger than the P2P market is. The idea that a F2P game may not make enough money seems almost like an insane thought if its coming from someone with a grasp on the market.
Furthermore, the Asian F2P market is larger and generates more money, so the next question would be why doesn't the western market follow it with the same kind of micro-transactions?
Example. Game is released in both Asian and Western markets. Cash shop item A is sold for $2.99 in Asia...same item is sold for $9.99 in the west! The argument is that western nations are richer and can afford it yet the three Asian markets that make money for F2P are South Korea, China and Japan...three RICH NATIONS. Market history has proven over the course of many games that the micro-transactions that do this make far more money in Asia than in the west yet for some reason it seems that companies are not learning from this simple basic lesson.
10x the amount of people are more likely to buy a product for $2.99 than for $9.99. This is the reason why Companies like Nexon are making a TON of money on their F2P games in Asia and why Korean companies are taking over the market, buying out companies left and right. The market data is already there, why isn't anyone paying attention? Western games can be making far more money if they would stop being focused on the large $ charges.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
SWG had way shorter session lengths than EQ did at the time, and I counted that as a big success. It was because you could play aspects of the game while offline -- checking in on harvesters, etc. Basically, you could play SWG sort of like Farmville, in small sips rather than big gulps.
The shorter session thing is what unlocks more casual play, and opens up that audience and also the problem you describe. As long as playing an MMO means getting married, you're going to have trouble getting new stuff sampled and large groups moving over. It's another reason why you need a big budget, to force market awareness and make something "a must-play experience!" Otherwise, yeah, the lock-in factor means you will have trouble building audience.
Thanks for answering my questions especially the DM thing.
Another question I had goes into community hooks. We've seen the elimination of what made MMORPG's social experiences even for someone like myself who's not a heavy social gamer... downtime, interdependency, travel, challenging content, slower advancement, or just general inconveniences. Everquest was like a bit extreme but even SWG had battle fatigue to bring players back into town. Do you think these may return to a lesser degree or do you think we're stuck with games that are cater more convenience and instant gratification because majority of gamers were introduced that way vs. some of older vets who are bit more tolerant?
How difficult was it to build a crafting system with the depth of SWG?
Then you're stuck with the clones.
I think that you actually have BETTER odds, in this market, of aiming for a niche and deeply satisfying them in a way that makes them willing to pay, possibly more than they would elsewhere, in order to get the experience they want.
1) at least among developers, F2P and freemium mean the exact same thing. I have never heard the distinction you are making. Both mean "offer a large chunk for free, upsell additional stuff." Unless you mean the distinction between having a sub tier and not having one? That's really just an arbitrary convention. Lots of F2P models have "club membership" type things for periodic fees...
2) Hang on, I certainly didn't mean to imply that F2P doesn't make money. I said it is MORE effective at making money. And that is why it is dominates, and will continue to...
I've been following the F2P market since LONG before people in the West had ever heard of it.
I am very aware of what you say, and don't see anything I disagree with in what you said... so... what did I say above that sounded like I was disagreeing?
No no no no NOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo
Do NOT let yourself be fooled into thinking that a sandbox must be for a niche crowd. It doesn't have to be. Just for gods sake realize the mistakes made with SWG and don't repeat them, or come close to them.
Also, sandbox does not have to be 100% sandbox, it can have some themepark. These two ideas should not be mutually exclusive. One can have a roller-coaster without losing the freedom of a sandbox.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Hey Raph,
With crowd funding being a something newly available in the game development field, would you consider doing a crowd-funded MMO or other game?
And if so, how much would/does it take to do something "worth doing" and could it also be a factor in getting outside financing for a larger project (since people who crowd fund are neither stock/shareholders nor investors, and thus not "at the table" in terms of being an impediment to returns on outside investment)?
Thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions. I will check out that book you mentioned
Looking forward to playing your next game
1) I argued in favor of downtime here: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/socialization.shtml
And of interdependence here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/04/22/interdependent-systems/
And of inconveniences here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/
And of interaction here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/
Basically, you're stating a lot of stuff I have said for a LOOONG time.
These are important social architecture tools. In the name of making the games more accessible and more fun, we removed them, but in the process lose subtle social dynamics. It's a line to walk. We want shorter sessions, why not have teleporting? Because travel is a chance to converse or bond. Overcoming obstacles together is what drives that bonding, and yeah, some of those obstacles are tedium.
I do think it's hard for someone weaned on the quick gratification to get into a game that doesn't offer it. They probably bounce off. Which is why I said above, it might be better to target a niche.
Assuming that even the niche hasn't gotten spoiled by dessert before dinner, if you know what I mean.
As far as the difficulty of building a crafting system like that... the key challenge is learning to think in the right ways. If you start there, it's not that hard. I mean, a tough balancing problem, but not like an insane complex thing.
SWG crafting started with the idea that we should extend UO's resource concept. The first thing was, we should have turnover. Thenm let's have resource types in an inheritance system instead of simple types. Then let's add stats to them.
Once we had that set of concepts, it's really a matter of data. Lots of speccing out pieces, effects, etc. The idea of blueprints fell out of the concept of use-based XP. That ended up not being in the final game, but the idea of it is why we did blueprints. Plus it dovetailed with the notion of offline play.
So these pieces all fit together based on initial vision items, and then the rest arose naturally.
And when I say naturally, what I mean is MONTHS of painstaking speccing, balancing, and scripting work by Reece Thornton. We kept coming to him worried it had gotten too big and complicated... maybe he'd added too many stats? Too many components? It came in late, but it came in very nicely
He deserves full credit for how the system ended up working.
Hi Raph,
A friend of mine asks:
"What is the difference between a huge MMO and a smaller, boutique one? Budget can't be the only limiting factor to an MMO's success, and player count seems like a result more than an actual goal. Is it subject matter? Level of detail? I don't think those are the only criteria, obviously. Or is it more a function of specifically targeting a (relatively) small segment of the market and designing THE game for them? If that's the case, it sounds a lot like EVE is a wildly successful boutique game for people that like economically-driven PVP sandboxes, no?"
I actually think sandboxes are MORE mass market than Dikus. No question, and I have always said that.
BUT I also think the TRUE mass market found its satisfaction with much lighterweight games. Farmville is a highly simplified version of the same mechanic that was harvesting in SWG.
And I also think that the current MMO audience all expects stuff that plays like WoW, or at least has its production values.
So when I say odds of success, what I mean are, which way are you more likely to succeed? Trying to get a small amount of money, and making something that targets a known audience and doesn't have to tick every box? Or getting a huge pile of money and trying to make something that competes with those expectations, while still being innovative?
The latter is just way harder to pull off. EQNext is trying, so is ArcheAge, etc. But I bet that something like Realm of the Mad God breaks even faster, You know?
As far as sandbox not needing to be 100% sandbox, of course not. SWG was SUPPOSED to have a lot of types of static content. We never got most any of it. For example see http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/04/30/dynamic-pois/
Not on the attack here man ;-)
My post was based on your questioning if it can make money or not.
the term F2P is based off the original use, by Nexon back when you were making UO (I believe it was called Kingdom of the Winds), yes as you can see I have been following it for a long time as well. Freemium however is a recent invention by both Turbine and Sony when LoTRo and EQ2 ended their exclusive P2P model. In Asia, Freemium is near non-existent outside of Japan. You are either paying a sub, or the game is free with a cash shop. The market data has already shown that Freemium games make little compared to F2P.
Which makes sense. You have a game that is sub based, its losing players fast so the idea to save the game and get its popularity back is to cut the game into pieces offer parts of it for free and think you are going to somehow get people to want to sub again for the entire game...that was losing players because it wasn't good enough to pay for? never made sense to me. went on a tangent there.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
My main worry is that outside of Star Citizen, there hasn't been any crowdfunding effort anywhere near large enough to make an MMO with, especially not to today's graphics level. Shroud of the Avatar is doing some interesting endruns around that issue, I must say.
Successful crowdfunding does increase the ability to get cash from other sources, no question.
The other thing, for someone like me who is currently just me and not a team, is that crowdfunding pitches today have a lot sunk into them from the get-go. They are mostly for finishing things.
But sure, if the time was right, and it looked like it would succeed and enough money could be raised, I would totally do it. I HAVE thought about doing it.
As far as amount... Just the platform for Metaplace cost like $2.5m to make. The content for a full game... you need $10m maybe? Tooling has gotten cheaper, for sure. And there's ways to reduce it. But yeah, it's not cheap, you know?