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[Interview] General: Raph Koster on MMOs, Their Future, and Crowfalls Place in the Mix
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Raphael "Raph" Koster is an award-winning game designer and creative director best known for his work on Ultima Online (UO) for Origin Systems/EA and Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) for Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). A pioneer of massively multiplayer online games, Koster is regarded as one of the video game industry's foremost authorities on game design.
Read more of Morgan Ramsay's Raph Koster on MMOs, Their Future, and Crowfall’s Place in the Mix.
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Ralph Koster is a legend to me due to his design spec for Star Wars Galaxies. I think the original design is some of the most progressive and inventive, I have seen in a MMORPG.
His manifesto on "gamers who make their own content" is brilliant.
One thing that's fascinating about this is how heavily derided Koster was back in the SWG days for creating a "failed game." I don't think contemporary history really fairly judged him at that juncture -- people were just too angry about the combat revamp and holocron grind to look beyond these missteps to the bigger picture: that SWG was really the last time we got to play around in a fully-realized sandbox world where the focus was more on exploration and settlement establishment/defense than it was on chasing little yellow exclamation points.
And that isn't to say that I think WoW is bad (okay, maybe I do think WoW *is* now bad -- but it wasn't for the first 6 years or so), but, as this article has correctly pointed out:
"Then WoW comes around, streamlines the hell out of EverQuest, and captures 90% of the market very, very quickly in the space of days after launching. When you see something like that, the money starts to chase that, and that's what happened for the next ten years."
That's actually bang-on, and I don't mind saying that I could see the pattern emerging myself, and stated something to this extent in my discussions with fellow gamers right around the time Burning Crusade launched. By that point, it had become clear that the first of the "WoW killers" -- LOTRO online -- was, for all its polish, essentially a WoW clone (minus engaging PvP environs), and, as we squinted down the road ahead, it was looking more and more like this was where the genre had shifted.
And I think it was stupid. I've said all along that you don't eat the other guy's lunch by mimicking his motions -- you steal his breakfast by playing the game better than he does (or, maybe you don't try at all -- you aim low and carve out a niche all your own). This is why games like EVE continue to muddle along in this no-man's land of commercial success (at least how it is judged by WoW's placement within the market) -- because they elected to stick with their own design rather than attempt to ape WoW's. It's the SAME reason that dozens of competing titles (Tera, Rift, LOTRO, Wildstar, SW:TOR, etc.) have all either imploded or gone F2P -- because they couldn't "out WoW" WoW at being WoW.
The worry here is that the industry is drawing the wrong conclusions about the pending collapse of Warcraft. This is a self-inflicted wound -- in part due to the age of the platform and people's comfort with it (WoW is so easy and familiar now that content is consumed too fast for designers to keep up with), in part owed to downright hellacious management over the past 16 months or so, which has driven the "flagship of MMORPGs" up onto the rocks.
The problem with this isn't so much that WoW is in the midst of imploding, but that people (re: industry observers and bigwig producers) are deriving the wrong lessons from it -- that the genre can no longer sustain the subscription-based "big game." This is UTTERLY INCORRECT. Despite economic downswings, people are just as capable as ever of spending $15 a month on entertainment of this caliber... they just aren't willing to do it for a bad game. And WoW is becoming just that -- a greedy, putrid, hybrid P2P/item mall that reeks of corporate avarice, and which is farming its remaining playerbase for all its worth.
Yes, the genre never should have turned so decidedly against the sandbox. And yes, WoW's doom opens up a lot of opportunities. But it's important that the industry as a whole realizes that there are still great riches to be had if only they can locate their old creative roots -- buried as they are beneath a decade of copycat design. Don't try to slay the king; don't try to grasp the crown. The king is doing a fine enough job slaying himself. And in the wake of his demise, there will we a chance then for a great game -- even if it looks nothing like WoW -- to slip quietly into that mighty and now-vacant throne.
And I wanted to just add: I think SWG's town-building and base-defense design still stands as a watermark of advancement for the genre as a whole. The sheer intensity of having to log in and fight to protect something you spent hundreds of hours to build (let alone scouted out the location of, and recruited the players to populate) was quite possibly the most engaging PvP experience I've ever had on an MMORPG.
I think the really crucial piece that's missing from player versus player "mini games" in titles like WoW is PLAYER INVESTMENT. IE, you aren't just zoning into Alterac Valley to battle over a meaningless stretch of identical turf that you've fought a thousand times to capture; you're zoning into a town that YOU BUILT and fighting to defend it against its IMMINENT DESTRUCTION. There's a tangibility there; a potent, palpable mixture of adrenaline, desperation and dread, that are unlike anything we see inside WoW's merry-go-round of Arenas and BGs. It's the difference between meeting the wolves on the footstep of your homestead, and inviting them to slip on boxing gloves before you tap each other in a sterilized, protected environment.
Koster's wolves had teeth and fangs, and they were coming for your family. WoW's wolves read the Wall Street Journal, spend their weekends on the links, and occasionally nudge you with their muzzle because they're hungry for the low-end dry dog food you nourish them with.
Pretty much. People expect every brand new game to have the features and content that others built up to over a decade or more. Not even AAA MMOs can live up to those standards, so how on Earth are Indies going to pull it off with a fragment of that budget (not counting SC which has an AAA budget, but it's the only "Indie" with that kind of funding).
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
Here's the problem with your vision of gaming Utopia. It does not appeal to the masses. So the type of sandbox game ala "SWG" which you seem so enamored with, will merely be niche. It will never be as successful as WoW was.
Most people who enjoy games do it for relaxation. They don't want to have to worry about "Wolves" attemepting to destroy their homes and take their belongings. Which is why the majority flocked to WoW and EvE muddles along as you said.
Secondly, gamers are different today. Less social or at least more reluctant to be social. Also less likely to stick with any one game since they have so many choices.
Frankly I don't see any game having a WoW level of popularity again. It would have to appeal to a broad spectrum of gamers, and I don't see how any game can accomplish that now. Gamers to me seem more polarized than ever. And the two spectrums seem incapable of co-existing.
As much as I would like to see a game that would bring us all together the way WoW did, I don't think a sandbox game with Wolves out to eat your young, is going to be the one to do it.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
It really depends. I believe the future of the genre lies somewhere between the two stools -- the "sandpark" (or themebox). IE, there is developer involvement in providing necessary tools, adding classes, designing major raid content, etc., but the players largely populate the world with cities, kingdoms, mines, ports, lumber mills, and even in the designing of small-scale dungeons.
Such a game would almost require an RvR focus, where all players supported the PvP, even if they never directly participated in it (this is where WoW has always fallen flat -- attempting to bifurcate effort between PvP and PvE when the two camps should have instead been driving towards the same goal, albeit from different directions). IE, you gather a bunch of friends to run a dungeon, are rewarded with personal loot, and at the end your faction gains, say, +35 diamonds, or +50 sapphires, or some form of currency that goes into supporting the overall war effort. Does player X never, ever, EVER want to PvP? That's perfectly fine -- he can craft, PvE, etc., still constitute an extremely important element of the global war, but never actually draw his sword against an enemy player.
Crowfall, interesting as it looks, really lacks any kind of PvE emphasis, other than random monster slaying. I still think it looks like a very interesting small-market game... but I don't for a second believe that it's some kind of WoW killer (and it never could be with that total lack of PvE). But I don't think the death of WoW means that there can never be another God-King of the genre -- it just means that we're going to plunge back into the tumult of the "warring states era," essentially analogous to ~2003.
It's a setting that's ripe for innovation and experimentation (and crowd-funding, 'tired' as many of you claim to be, will play a role in this -- have you seen how much raw capital that ridiculous game Star Citizen has raised? It was something on the order of $50 million the last time I checked. And many people are convinced it's an enormous scam!). And I do think that, eventually, someone is going to stumble onto the alchemical formula to turn swill into gold again -- it's inevitable.
And why is it inevitable? For no other reason than this: the average human being is a follower first, and followers love the cozy warmth of being part something bigger than them. WoW didn't just become the crown prince simply because it was good (it was, but that's almost beside the point) -- it stepped onto that center stage because word of mouth carried it along in the electronic equivalent of a wave election. People liked what they saw; those people told friends; and those friends brought along newcomers who had never dipped so much as a toe into MMORPGs before.
A lot of those same newcomers, I believe, have similarly left the building as WoW's intensity dimmed -- their commitment to the concept of MMORPGs was only as deep as their loyalty to friends and social structures established within that specific game. Right now, MMORPGs are largely battling over about 10-15 (ish) million committed genre warriors -- people who, if they aren't playing game X, will be playing game Y.
The next WoW doesn't need to bring all these people under the same tent -- it would be impossible to do so, since they are, as you pointed out, such a fractious bunch. Rather, the next WoW merely needs to generate enough speculation, hype, and strong word-of-mouth that it begins to lure in that newbie element, and it is those millions of box-buyers and subscribers (even if only intermittent or temporary) who make the difference in crowning a king (keep in mind that WoW claims to hold approximately 100 MILLION total accounts worldwide, even if there are only ~5 million subscribers). THOSE are the people who will give rise to the successor -- not the people like you and me who post on MMORPG.com. The kingmakers? They don't even follow this site.
I agree but on the same spectrum I won't say that pvp mmos are a bad thing until someone comes out with a pvp mmo with a AAA budget. I personally find it a damn shame that a game like ArcheAge can have like a 40 million dollar budget and have better pvp than an ESO.
And ArcheAge's gameplay has nothing to do with it being p2w and nothing to do with the terrible hacktards that infest it. Sorry but western devs are just robbing their own banks in development and coming out with piss poor sorry ass excuses why their game is not worth it.
I'm looking at you Zenimax Online.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Without crowd funding a lots of games are simply going to stop being made, because publishers are not interest in spending their money into something they consider risk and their analysts are basically telling them that anything that isn't a MOBA or a mobile game is risk these days.
I've come to expect that Raph will never again make a Sandbox game. He's dug deep into the psychology and become the antithesis of "Sandbox"...."gamey".
Oh, sure, he still has many sandbox ideals, but what this leaves him with is exactly what many gamers think they want, this muddled mix of sandbox-in-themepark that's still leaving gamers wondering that old question: "is there nothing more?"
And the answer still seems to be: "nope".
Once upon a time....
They say there's a sucker born every minute.
And I'm not by any means trying to imply that everyone who participates in crowd funding is some kind of an ignorant shill. But, clearly, there are a LOT of people out there who are willing to toss around modest sums of cash when they think there's a decent idea in the offing. Hell, there are a lot of people out there who are willing to toss around modest sums even when there's no idea at all! -- why do you think there are a half dozen willing recipients of that stream of capital standing, open palms extended, at every busy intersection in the sun belt? Panhandling's very existence is dependent on fools parting with their money.
Some people have a lot of free capital. I don't -- I'm as impoverished and downtrodden an 'artiste' as they come. But there is a substantial bloc of young people who can essentially sling dollar bills around whenever and wherever they darn well please -- and these same folks have few (if any) reservations about dropping an Andrew Jackson or a Ulysses S. Grant on something that tickles their fancy.
Crowdfunding isn't going anywhere -- it's going to remain an integral part of small-market (and even large-scale) game production for the foreseeable future.
I think thats part of the problem. Some of these games should not be made and they are getting funded. As we have seen many so far, because of this they have folded, closed their doors and said their swan song of a post. This is eating gamers up! The games later that should get funded, wont, because of this problem. Miss managed funds and people who have no clue how to run business are getting money that should not and the average person kickstarting has no clue and no way to check into that.
Yeah. The problem with Crowfall is that the city-building all seems to be done in an instanced setting. I understand that developers want to avoid the choking, constricting "cheesing" of the game world with rampant, empty housing (which you saw everywhere in SWG -- within a few months of the game's release, urban sprawl had started to consume all but the wildest corners of every planet on every server). But building walls around the most creative aspect of the game isn't the answer, either.
Sandboxes should designate buildable areas, while keeping others pristine... or, in the least, develop a system where only certain structures can be placed in certain locations (IE, you can only build a squat, wooden watch tower on the top of this mountain; sorry, this coastline is only suitable for the smallest fishing hut). Pair a system like this with a radius limit (each building comes with a built-in, 'you cannot build another of this type within a given 'halo' protection zone), aggressive structure decay, and, boom, you have your anti-sprawl system in place.
Trying to hide all that inside an instance, however, just cheapens the experience totally. The root driver of the sandbox is the feeling of impacting the world. If you're only impacting a locked-away portion of the environment, it's little (if any) better than WoW's Garrisons, albeit on a slightly larger scale.
Well at least he did admit that going all pvp was to eliminate cost of creating PVE content.
right away that spells of half a game.IMO it is a huge flip over,pvp takes almost no effort and i would think having seen Warhammer completely fail doing rvr ,WHY would anyone want to copy that design?
Perhaps this is why we see a lot of FORMER names and games being bantered around as a sort of SELL JOB.I honestly don't think ANYTHING from those old past games warrants any mention in today's gaming,we expect a lot more now days.
What i see is the same thing i see in EVERY developer now,COST CUTTING and budget game designs.I seriously don't understand this design decision,the only thing i can think of is they really feel they can copy an Eve sort of pvp atmosphere and cash in on it,me personally i see it as a bad game design.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Crowfall is the only game that I want to see fail.
They spend WAY, WAY too much of their crowdfunding on putting out news and producing advertisements. Banners everywhere, paying people to talk about it on Reddit and other sites, paying MassivelyOP for articles about EVERY LITTLE TINY PATHETIC thing they do.
Plus, the two guys in most of the videos (THERE ARE MANY MANY MANY videos) are creepy as heck. The fat guy can't accept his age and looks like a total asshole. The other guy looks like the forever single type who preys on children. The whole entire game is just a bad vibe from start to finish. Screw Crowfall.
Crowfail. I guarantee it.
Never say never.
If I were to do a sandbox, the things that i would want to explore would be things like enabling some of those things that we turned off clear back in UO. So like, weather, chemical reactions (forest fires!), terrain modifiability, etc. And group activity and survival. So I would lean towards a colonization game of some sort. I'd be pretty interested in going back to simulated NPCs too.
That said, I WOULD want it to have rich and interesting lore...
Honestly, the degree of emphasis on PvP is one of the big questions I still wrestle with.
Dude... really? Get a life.
PvP takes enormous effort. The history of failed PvP implementations should show that prety clearly. It's hard to do right!
Crowfall is very much not a copy of Warhammer, as should be pretty evident if you read up on it.
Saying you aren't interested in anything from the older games is basically saying you just want WoW again, isn't it?
As far as why people are looking to cut costs -- because WoW and SWTOR outspent every other MMO project by a factor of 5 to 10. The only people with that kind of money are giant videogame publishers. Giant videogame publishers are only going to make very conservative games. They won't try anything new. To get new ideas, you have to lower the overall risk.
How would you propose to handle issues like the rampant outgrowth of player-owned structures? Honestly, I see this as the biggest, single difficulty for the true sandbox: housing spam spoiling the pristine environment. We saw it in UO and, to a somewhat lesser degree, we saw it in SWG.
'True' freedom might seem ideal, but it's actually not at all realistic, in that, in the real world, certain limiting factors (the distance a human could walk; the reasonable length of a horse-drawn cart ride; the presence of hostile peoples and/or animals) would essentially yoke human beings with restrictions as to how far out they could build civilizations prior to the advent of canals and railroads.
I like what you're doing with Crowfall -- really, I do. And I'm heavily considering dropping the $38 to fund this puppy. But I don't know if there are enough 'meta' activities to truly hold me. This is the same problem I have with EVE Online -- at the end of the day, a lot of EVE is just empty space. However, since EVE is persistent, I can at least wander into the neighbor's yard and suddenly be attacked by his angry dogs. Am I wrong in thinking that this 'unwelcome guest' scenario is impossible in CF?
BTW, Raph, it's nice to see that, after a full decade, you're still willing to engage the community directly. +1.
I agree with you, but I'd rather go with more "worldly" systems to control things. For "sprawl" I'd rather see a system where it's much more convenient and safe to build within a city, in "realistic" ways.
Once upon a time....
Yeah, PvP is a huge problem. You guys almost had it back in the UO days but fell short, then EA stepped in. But that was then, when such an answer would have worked. These days gamers aren't going to look at an open PvP game due to the history (not the masses anyways).
Damnit Raph, you make me start to dream again. UO expanded, NPCs advanced (including for player use), lore and mystery and discovery! Because I know you have it in you to make a truly great sandbox. But such dreams (with or without you) are like water in my hand, always slipping away.
Once upon a time....
I was actually unaware that Raph Koster was spearheading this particular project. Everyone involved in the original Ultima Online brought a very important piece to a puzzle that revoluntionized gaming... Koster was a *huge* part of that.
Crowfall has just made me sit up a little more straight.
Unfortunately, I feel the same. At this juncture, I don't believe the major Korean companies are ever going to produce the kind of sandbox MMO a lot of us are looking for -- I keep reaching for that pot, and every time I touch it, I pull back a burned thumb. Raph is probably, for this generation, the best hope for a solid, western-developed sandbox MMORPG. I really, really hope that his day is coming -- because I like to read what the guy says. If he believes half the things he claims to, that's our man for the job.