The downside imo is that some of the community are similar to wow's community relative to eq. They want things extremely easy and they want to progress consistently with minimal effort. Obviously they won't admit to this because most people don't want to consider themselves that kind of gamer, but that's the reality of it. A lot of people complain about grinds and such from games like wow, but the grind in wow is minimal compared to the 1st generation mmorpgs, they are just accustomed to wanting things even easier and easier as more and more time goes on. Being that gw2 is in fact gw2 there will be a lot of gw1 players playing it, and gw1 was basically about as hard as diablo, so they have a very low standard for what they consider challenging content as opposed to content that is "too hard". Anet seems to be catering to this crowd, much like blizzard caters to their casual crowd.
How do you know this? Saying the content 'extremely easy' is an exaggeration. In other videos, they said it will not be very easy. They also mentioned that dungeons will be alot harder. They also realize that it is not fun at all when things are too easy ie. scaling the difficulty of monsters (not just bosses) up the more players participate, so that players don't feel that all of a sudden it becomes easy and fun is taken away because of that
It's a relative statement and a subjective idea of what content should be to the player in an mmo. It's basically a personal opinion or even game philosophy that people that like the difficulties of grind and camping and farming and high-level raid content etc etc are not being catered to in GW2. I'd have to agree, but disagree that is generally a bad thing, for most people.
Most people, I'd think, don't play a game to "beat the system", but play for a dose of fun. Challenge matched to skill can produce that fun, and hopefully GW2 will deliver this successfully in the right dose for most but not all people.
Arenanet is trying to cater to a wider audience beyond casual. For those who love grinding, there will be a form of grinding in GW2 and that comes in the form of (farming) Titles and Achievements, if it resembles anything like GW1 (alot longer and sometimes harder to attain in comparison to leveling. Many of them have tiers.). They aren't a must have for everyone since they don't make you powerful but if it helps you feel your character is unique and have achieved something most haven't then it would serve that purpose, and that is still a powerful incentive as shown by the many players going after them in GW1 and there are a wide variety of titles. These title and achievements (if it's like GW1), would be mostly for cosmetic purposes only, unlike leveling. And you'll be able to show them off. They also said there would be 'farming areas'. Those kinds of implements would typically cater to grinders.
Playing now: Cities: Skyline / Ori and the Blind Forest / Banished
There is no downside to guild wars 2. It has no monthly fee.
That is the downside.
Developers of other mmo's have an incentive to create games with a lasting appeal for obvious reasons. Take away the subscription model and you're left with an incentive to create a shallow game with a shiny surface and a lot of hype.
Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset. The best thing that can happen is that they play intensely for a few weeks, convince all their friends to buy a copy as well and then quit.
Then after a few years, and another suspiciously short development cycle they can release guildwars 3, and convince everyone that this time it is all different, even though the business model happens to be exactly the same.
That being said I will still buy a copy of the game at release, because despite of what I said it is still the most interesting mmo on the horizon, now how sad is that?
I really liked the vidoes i saw from this forum. But one thing is bothering me.
Anmation feels like arcade machines from 80's, no grace and no power moves, just insert coin and play.
Just like Tasmania Beast on speed. That Warrior whirlwind from video was just afwul. Can you explain to me as a wow player, am I missing something here or animation is really that bad?
There is no downside to guild wars 2. It has no monthly fee.
That is the downside.
Developers of other mmo's have an incentive to create games with a lasting appeal for obvious reasons. Take away the subscription model and you're left with an incentive to create a shallow game with a shiny surface and a lot of hype.
Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset. The best thing that can happen is that they play intensely for a few weeks, convince all their friends to buy a copy as well and then quit.
Then after a few years, and another suspiciously short development cycle they can release guildwars 3, and convince everyone that this time it is all different, even though the business model happens to be exactly the same.
That being said I will still buy a copy of the game at release, because despite of what I said it is still the most interesting mmo on the horizon, now how sad is that?
By far one of the better arguments against Free to Play. Lets keep our eyes on this one
There is no downside to guild wars 2. It has no monthly fee.
That is the downside.
Developers of other mmo's have an incentive to create games with a lasting appeal for obvious reasons. Take away the subscription model and you're left with an incentive to create a shallow game with a shiny surface and a lot of hype.
Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset. The best thing that can happen is that they play intensely for a few weeks, convince all their friends to buy a copy as well and then quit.
Then after a few years, and another suspiciously short development cycle they can release guildwars 3, and convince everyone that this time it is all different, even though the business model happens to be exactly the same.
That being said I will still buy a copy of the game at release, because despite of what I said it is still the most interesting mmo on the horizon, now how sad is that?
I completely disagree. Just because a customer is not being charged a subscription fee does not make them a "liability." It is still definitely in ArenaNet's interest to please their consumers.
Pleased customers:
1. Generate positive word of mouth that translates to additional sales when they tell their friends about the product.
2. Are more likely to buy other products (expansions) released by the company.
More importantly, unhappy customers generate negative word of mouth that can turn people off to and even kill an online game. Just look at how much damage negative word of mouth did to AoC. The game had decent critical reviews, but displeased customers bad-mouthing it more or less destroyed it.
In any kind of marketing, you NEVER want unhappy customers. They are seriously bad news for your product.
Also, the fact that GW2 will be F2P enables it to appeal to an entirely different market segment. There are several customers that just will not pay a subscription fee to play an MMO. They will however, happily put down $60 for a one time purchase.
The only downside for me is it's take on the reviving system.
Staying alive won't have the same importance as in most games, it kind of creates the ultimate "easy-mode". Since most people will likely just play blind without the need to be thinking about consequences of rushing into battle, group play could just turn into total res spamming fests and all you'll hear is constant "res me!".
Just speculation, but I have a pretty strong feeling i'm going to spend a lot of my time constantly reviving impatient people who continually rush into things without thinking.
I really liked the vidoes i saw from this forum. But one thing is bothering me.
Anmation feels like arcade machines from 80's, no grace and no power moves, just insert coin and play.
Just like Tasmania Beast on speed. That Warrior whirlwind from video was just afwul. Can you explain to me as a wow player, am I missing something here or animation is really that bad?
I thought it was awesome, but I guess it's just a matter of opinion.
They'll probably have to save money on various little fields and try to make money on other ones.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy into the "arenanet aren't money hogs, unlike other P2P's" or even that their server structure would be so much more advanced.
They are under publisher NCsoft, those guys are interested in money, lots of it; as are the shareholders; and there are more than enough great minds out there for other MMO's who would've come up with a similar advanced server structure by now.
I expect to see little customer support for instance, luckily not something most people are confronted with and not something NCsoft is very much involved with anyhow.
I can see regular expansions happening and some MT in the same style as GW1 did.
And maybe they'll save money in some other areas I don't know of. ... maybe pens in their offices ?
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
There is no downside to guild wars 2. It has no monthly fee.
That is the downside.
Developers of other mmo's have an incentive to create games with a lasting appeal for obvious reasons. Take away the subscription model and you're left with an incentive to create a shallow game with a shiny surface and a lot of hype.
Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset. The best thing that can happen is that they play intensely for a few weeks, convince all their friends to buy a copy as well and then quit.
Then after a few years, and another suspiciously short development cycle they can release guildwars 3, and convince everyone that this time it is all different, even though the business model happens to be exactly the same.
That being said I will still buy a copy of the game at release, because despite of what I said it is still the most interesting mmo on the horizon, now how sad is that?
That's not entirely true. When you subscribe to an MMO, you are buying into the promise that there will be free content updates between expansion packs. Arenanet isn't obligated to do that, even though they have given out free content update in GW1. The size of content in GW2 will dwarf GW1 and I think it's fair to say that it would more comparable to the big MMOs in the market today in terms of content at launch. There are plans for Micro transactions in GW2.
Jeff Strain made a speech in regards to 'How to Make a Successful MMO' in front of an audience of many influential developers at Games Convention.
A quote from Jeff Strain himself. Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money.
And a snippet from his very long presentation talks about subcriptions....
Don't count on subscriptions
In the early years of the MMO industry, from roughly 1997 to 2001, there were a few big MMOs that had active player populations. By the time we started ArenaNet in the summer of 2000, we knew of at least eighty MMOs that were in development. Based on the success of UO and EQ, publishers were reviewing their portfolios and planning to migrate their existing game franchises to the online world, where they believed they could adopt a subscription model and "make bank". Clearly, it did not work out that way. As more MMOs came into the market, two things changed. First, players now had a choice about which game they would play, and as a result their expectations for polish, content quantity, and service increased substantially. Second, and perhaps more telling for the future of the industry, it became clear that the subscription model forced players to choose a single game, rather than playing many different games.
Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money. This is the legacy of games like Guild Wars, Maple Story, and Silkroad Online, all of which introduced new business models into the MMO genre and were quite successful. The subscription model is still perfectly viable, but the pain threshold is very low now. It's no secret that gamers don't want to pay a subscription fee. If you can convince them that your game offers enough value to justify it, more power to you! But be prepared to defend your decision, often and loudly, and back it up over the lifetime of your game.
Be very aware of the choice you are asking players to make, and the frequency of that choice. In a subscription model you are asking players to make a choice every month, and it is a fairly drastic choice: Stay married, or get divorced? It is certainly the case that if every player decides to stay married every month, you can make more money from each player in the subscription model. But that will rarely be the case, and not something that you should count on. Every month, some percentage of your player base will decide on divorce, and as with marriage in the real word, once you are divorced you rarely get married to the same person again. If you go the subscription route, you'll need to have the confidence that your marriage rate will exceed your divorce rate.
With Guild Wars we ask players to make a choice only one time, and that choice is whether to buy the game, or not to buy the game. While we don't enjoy a recurring revenue stream each month, we do benefit from the fact that most Guild Wars players come back to the game when we release new content, so we are less concerned about players putting the game down for a few months. Players don't have to decide whether to stay married or get divorced, they just have to decide whether they want to play today or not. Beyond the benefit of a lower pain threshold to get into the game, this is the core strength of the Guild Wars business model, and one of the reasons it continues to thrive when many other subscription-based MMOs are struggling.
Innovate with your game play, and innovate with your business model! The two go hand in hand, and are mutually dependent on each other. Decide on your business model first, and then build your game around it. Guild Wars can be successful with its business model because we decided that we would not charge a subscription fee before we wrote the first line of code, and every design and technology decision we made served that purpose. We could never turn Guild Wars into a subscription-based game, just as Turbine could not suddenly decide to eliminate the subscription model for Lord of the Rings Online. If you decide to require players to subscribe to your game, be prepared to build a game that thoroughly justifies it.
Hello everyone. My name is Jeff Strain, one of the co-founders of ArenaNet, the studio behind Guild Wars. It was an honor to be asked to speak about the MMO industry today at the GC Developer's Conference, which is among the most influential developer conferences in the world. It's an equal honor to be able to represent the talented team at ArenaNet and be able to convey some of the development philosophies of the world-class designers, artists, and programmers who built Guild Wars. And of course I am honored that those of you sitting here actually took the time to come hear what I have to say. Thank you.
When I initially accepted the invitation to speak today, I provided a generic topic – "The Future of the MMO industry" – because I had not written anything yet, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room to explore different topics. To those of you who chose to come today believing that I would make far-reaching predictions about the games we'll be creating ten years from now, I apologize. The truth is, I hope that I am completely ignorant about what kind of games we'll be making in ten years, because I hope some hotshot kid comes out of nowhere and changes everything out from under us before then. If that doesn't happen, we've all failed to embrace and protect the culture of innovation that made it possible for us to be here in the first place.
I ultimately decided to address something much more relevant to those of us in this room today, and that is what it takes to create a successful MMO in today's crowded and brutal market. The formula is not as simple as it was a few years ago, as the very visible failure of many recent high-profile MMOs makes clear. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I can share some of the beliefs that I and many of my peers at ArenaNet hold based on our experience with Guild Wars. These beliefs are guiding us in the development of Guild Wars 2, so I sure as hell hope we're right!
Most MMOs fail
Don't be fooled by the much-hyped success of the top MMOs on the market. The game industry is littered with the carnage of MMOs that have failed over the past few years. Due largely to the social nature of MMOs, gamers rarely commit to more than one or two MMOs at a time. This is in contrast to the traditional game market, in which there is room for many games to be successful, even within the same genre. You may play ten different action games this year, but you are very unlikely to play more than one or two MMOs. This means that it is not enough to make a great game – instead you must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community and bring that community to your game. In today's market, that is a tall order.
Regardless of the business model, the primary factor that determines whether an MMO lives or dies is the size of its active player base. There appears to be a tipping point at around 150,000 players. MMOs that reach this critical mass within a few months of release tend to continue to grow and thrive, and those that do not tend to shrink and ultimately die. The majority of MMOs that are released into the market never reach this threshold.
This is a tough industry, and only the most committed studios and publishers with solid long-term financial backing should be undertaking MMO development. I can assure you that releasing an MMO into the market before the development team is proud of it will result in writing off every penny invested in its development. The best publishers are willing to give development teams time for polish and balance. In the MMO market, there is simply no other option, and many publishers are not willing to make this commitment.
Guild Wars launched successfully in April 2005, and has done quite well over the past two years. Initially this was largely attributable to its business model, which did away with the customary subscription requirement and made it very easy for new players to give the game a try. Over time, we were able to keep the player population growing by releasing new content and substantial game updates on a regular basis. However, the market today is very different than the market in 2005, and many of the points I will be discussing in this presentation are based on lessons we have learned – often the hard way – with Guild Wars, and that the ArenaNet development team feels are crucial to the success of any new MMO product entering the market today.
An MMO cookbook
I spoke with several game designers while preparing this presentation, and asked them a single question: What does it take to make a successful MMO? I expected to gather a wide range of responses and perspectives, but I was surprised to find that their input largely overlapped. When you take a broad look at the industry, as both a player and a designer, and analyze what worked and what did not work in the MMOs that have entered the market for the last few years, a few essential lessons emerge that can help guide all of us in our MMO design efforts.
Before you start building the ultimate MMO, you should accept that "MMO" is a technology, not a game design. It still feels like many MMOs are trying to build on the fundamental designs established by UO and EQ in the late '90s. In the heyday of Doom and Quake we all eventually realized that "3D" was a technology, distinct from the "FPS," which was a game design. It's time we accepted that for MMOs as well. We are finding ways to overcome many of the limitations of the technology that dictated the early MMO design, such as Internet latency and limited global scalability. These improvements can enable a new class of online games that break out of the traditional MMO mold and explore new territory. It can be a daunting proposition to willfully walk away from what seems to be a "sure thing" in game design, but lack of differentiation is probably the number one reason that MMOs fail, so we all need to leave the comfort zone and start innovating, or risk creating yet another "me too" MMO.
According to James Phinney, lead designer of StarCraft and Guild Wars, every great game starts with one question: "What do I want to play next?". This may seem an obvious statement, but his point is that designers are often asked to make a game that is specifically designed to be "better" than a successful game from a competitor, rather than making a game that is exciting and new. How many designers have been asked to make a "GTA killer", or a "Guitar Hero killer", or a "WoWkiller"? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: "It's like WoW, but..." I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution ofWoW is... well, the WoW team. They've got their thing, and they're good at it. Let's all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you've lost.
When he hears me exhorting developers to innovate, Eric Flannum, the content design lead on Guild Wars and lead designer of Sacrifice, is quick to point out that it's not enough to be different – it also has to be better. His point is that change, just for the sake of change, is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes designs endure and genres emerge for good reason, and arbitrarily changing things that work just so you can label your game as innovative can lead to failure as quickly as producing a generic also-ran. His point is scary for me, because it's easy for me to look at something and criticize it for being nothing new, but I don't have the design talent to walk the fine line between innovation and alienation. Very few people do, and the ability to do so is the hallmark of a talented designer. While a game can be successful by refining and polishing an established design, most successful games are created with this principal of "structured innovation" and give players a sense of something new and exciting, while still being accessible and familiar.
James Phinney also believes that half of the appeal of an MMO isn't anything we as designers do – it's simply the fact that there are other players, so we should make a world that players want to live in. Scorched badlands can convey a sense of loss, stark alien landscapes are creepy and fascinating, and gloomy dungeons and caverns are the definitive locale for adventure. However, none of these environments will make your players feel a strong sense of place. Dystopia may be exciting, but it's not home. It is a truism that MMOs are all about community, and the success or failure of your MMO will largely be gated by how well the community coalesces and feels a strong sense of place in your world.
The importance of giving players a home was a lesson we learned with Guild Wars. Players start out in the Kingdom of Ascalon, an idyllic, beautiful land of vivid colors and gentle landscapes. Early in the game, Ascalon is destroyed in an event known as the Searing, and players find themselves playing through a blasted, dreary landscape of ruins and mud. While this certainly added a sense of drama and loss to the story, players were upset that they could not go back to Ascalon, because it had become their home in the game. In each new campaign, and even more so with the upcomingEye of the North expansion, we were careful to establish "home" very early and maintain it as a sanctuary for players.
Don't force your players to endure play mechanics they experienced ten years ago. The much-maligned FedEx quest is a classic example of an old-school mechanic that is still manifesting in modern games. Even if you have the best intentions at the beginning of the project to avoid FedEx quests, you will often be stymied by the fact that the FedEx quest is a manifestation of the traditional MMO RPG design, and you can't change the symptom if you are not willing to address the cause. The traditional MMO world is a steady-state machine, much like an episode of the classicStar Trek television series, in which characters, equipment, and the state of the universe had to be reset be the end of the episode. While this design certainly allows for content to be scalable – fetch 20 pig hides, fetch 40 pig hides, kill 10 rats, kill the rat queen – it doesn't allow players to be part of an epic quest, or feel like their actions have a material impact on the world around them. Ten years ago, players were willing to accept this in order to enjoy the benefits of the communal play, but today they expect more.
As a general rule, be nice to your players! With each generation of MMOs, players become less tolerant of being forced to spend time resting after battles to restore health, onerous consequences for dying, the length of time required to level up and reach the mid-game, and high failure rates for activities such as crafting. Early MMOs could be "meaner" because there were fewer choices, but today players have options, so be nice to them.
Don't design an MMO around the assumption that players are a "type" of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like.
Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. A few months before the release of Guild Wars we added computer-controlled henchmen to the game as a way to pad out your party when your friends weren't around. Later we enhanced this feature and introduced computer-controlled Heroes, which gave you control over their actions and more fully supported the notion of playing the game entirely on your own. While it may seem counterintuitive to add features that support the solo play experience into an MMO, we believe that Guild Warswould not have been as successful had we not added these features.
Two-player gaming, or as we call it "buddy gaming", is not a generic case of multi-player gaming, but is instead its own form of play that deserves special attention. Increasingly, MMOs are used as a setting for "real world" social interaction, including dating, spending time with your kids, or hanging out with your best friend or spouse. Just as the real social dynamics in a one-on-one setting greatly differ from the dynamics of a large group setting, the game experience when playing with one person differs from the experience of playing with a group. You can slow down, smell the flowers, discuss what you've seen and what you'd like to do, strategize and assist each other, and communicate on a more sincere level. In short, it's a more intimate form of community, and we should be supporting it explicitly.
Pay close attention to complexity creep. Don't assume that most of your players are reading your website and consuming information about your game. Most of your players will never read your website, never visit fansites, and never participate in forum discussions. We are often immersed in the community forums and rants and raves posted to game fansites, and it is easy to lose perspective about the knowledge level of most of our players. Players who participate in fansites and send six-page emails to your community team are experts at your game – they probably know more about it than you do – so it's important to realize that they do not represent the average player. The vast majority of your players are not digging into every detail of every spell or creating lists of animations so that they can react when they see the basilisk twitch its nose. They want to play, not study, so take care to create a game that allows them to do so.
Film, television, and book franchises are just not good candidates for MMOs. Even MMOs based on the "Big Two" franchises – you know the ones – have not lived up to the expectations of their developers. Today, and historically, the biggest MMOs are based on universes that were created for the purpose of supporting games. MMOs are all about exploration, personal glory, hanging out with friends, and meeting new people. You can't take a universe that was created to support a linear, non-interactive viewing experience that has its own six-volume set of rules and expect a development team to deliver something innovative and fresh within that universe that allows millions of players to be the hero. The best games, MMO or otherwise, are created first and foremost to be games, and the world, story, and setting are there to serve that end, not the other way around. It seems like I hear about a new MMO in development based on a sci-fi or fantasy license every week, and it worries me tremendously. MMOs are expensive, expectations are high, and huge failures will disenfranchise publishers and make life more difficult for new MMO developers. If you want to take a popular movie license and spin out a DS game to support its launch, then go for it – I think that's an appropriate form of media collaboration – but let developers design MMOs that are not constrained by the rules and restrictions of a licensing body.
Finally, you can make everyone happy, but you can't make everyone happy all the time. It is risky to try to make decisions that appeal to all players equally. Don't fall into the trap of making decisions based on what causes the least amount of pain, because this can lead to a game that is just kind of "okay" and doesn't really excite anybody. When you have a large, active, and passionate player base, every decision you make, every change to the game, no matter how convinced you are that it makes the game strictly better, will piss someone off, and they'll post about it, blog about it, rant to the press about it, loudly and publicly predict that this is the "beginning of the end" of your game, and send hate mail to your community and support teams. MMO developers have to have thick skins, but always remember that if one of your players is angry with you, it is because he really cares about the game, and that's much healthier for you than apathy. Go with your instincts and make the right decision for your game.
You can't develop an MMO in a traditional game-studio culture
Surprisingly, many of the more high-profile MMO failures were developed by the largest, most well established publishers in the industry. These projects had the benefit of solid financing, large teams, established IPs, and proven development methodologies that had been refined over decades of developing successful games in other genres. What happened? You can certainly make a list of everything that went wrong – the game industry is full of "armchair generals" who would love to do so for you – but ultimately the quality of a game is determined by the development culture that created it, and creating a successful MMO requires a radically different development culture than the culture optimized to produce traditional video games. While these large publishers have refined the process of creating traditional video games to an art, many of them have not yet realized that an MMO requires a completely different development process, and a studio culture to compliment that process.
The defining characteristic of top MMO development teams is their awareness that they are delivering a service, rather than creating a product, and that release day is the beginning of a long-term relationship with their customers, rather than the end of the project. Traditionally, release day is the time to go home, repair your relationship with your spouse or significant other, and sleep for a few days, but the weeks and months following the release of an MMO are the most critical point of your development cycle. It's the time to make it clear to your customers that you will stand by your game, and that their trust in you as the developer will be rewarded. Regardless of your business model, you are asking players to invest hundreds or thousands of hours playing your game, and you need to demonstrate that you are committed to protecting the economy, quickly fixing bugs and exploits, and adding live content. If the entire development team is recovering at the beach in those first critical weeks, you will be unable to demonstrate your willingness and ability to support your game, and your players will be hesitant to invest their time and money with you.
The message is clear: avoid the Big Crunch. I'm not saying that we should expect to work 8-hour days in the weeks leading up to release, but we certainly can't work 16-hour days for six months before release and then expect to sustain that pace over the several-year lifespan of a successful MMO. If you are planning for success, you have to build a sustainable work culture, and you need to establish that culture before release. The work load will not decrease after launch – if anything, it will increase, so build a sustainable work culture and stand by it. It's not just a morale issue – it will have a critical impact on the success or failure of your business.
An MMO must deliver content at three distinct stages: the early game, which is the first twenty hours, the mid game, which is the first few hundred hours, and the late game, which is at a thousand hours and beyond. Each of these stages represents a chance for your game to continue to grow, or to decline and ultimately fail. The traditional QA model is just not equipped to deal with this – there is simply no way to effectively test 1,000 hours of content in the final months of the project, particularly when you are not focused only on bugs, but instead on that hard-to-define feeling of satisfaction that a good MMO provides hour after hour. The only way to ship an MMO into the market and have confidence that it will survive at each of these thresholds is to ensure that your entire team is playing the game, every day, for at least two years before release. That sounds difficult, because you first have to ensure that everyone enjoys playing the game, then allocate time in the development schedule for them to play it, and finally ensure that you actually have something playable two years before release. Despite the difficulties of fully achieving this goal, at ArenaNet we believe that this philosophy was crucial to the success of Guild Wars.
It's crucial to get feedback from outside the development team at a very early stage. We started alpha testing over three years before Guild Wars was released. To say that the game was crude at that point is a bit of an understatement – I think we're still tracking down screenshots from that period and trying to get them burned. It was a very controversial decision at the time, and generated a lot of heated debate within the development team, because it flew in the face of the traditional wisdom that you should never show anyone outside the company what you are working on until it is perfect. I wish I could tell you that every tester we brought into the alpha test was honest, abided by the NDA, and gave the development team carefully-considered and high-quality feedback after each of the tri-weekly play sessions, but that would not be the truth. There were several times after we launched the program that we revisited the notion and discussed whether the good outweighed the bad. But we kept at it, and by the time Guild Wars shipped in April, 2005 it was clear that the game had benefited from the alpha test program, and today we consider it an essential component of the development process.
The primary value of the external alpha test program was that it gave the designers the opportunity to experiment with different ideas and get immediate feedback from the thousand or so external testers. During that time, and to this day, we published between ten and twenty builds a day, and our alpha testers had access to every build. If we introduced a new system or design change into the game, even in crude, first-iteration form, we got immediate feedback on it. This prevented us from spending weeks refining a design that was fundamentally flawed, which in turn freed the development team to be experimental and try new things. I've noticed a similar phenomenon at my son's skate park. The older kids who are too cool to wear helmets and protective pads skate carefully, while the younger kids whose mothers force them to wear protective gear go absolutely crazy hurling themselves down ramps, jumping on rails, and exceeding highway speed limits. Think of having a thousand external testers in the early stages of development as protective gear – it may make you look uncool, but it sure frees you to try some crazy stuff.
All RPGs live or die based on the quality and quantity of their content, and this is even more true for MMOs, since players are expecting thousands, not hundreds, of hours of content. In a state-of-the art, first-person shooter designed to provide fifty hours of play, it makes sense to allocate the programming budget to focus on the latest graphics technologies. In an MMO, your programming budget should skew heavily toward development tools for artists and designers. Some of your content will always require dedicated content programmers with good design sensibilities – and they are a valuable and rare breed indeed – but ultimately your ability to put content generation directly into the hands of your designers and artists is crucial to your ability to generate the amount and quality of content that today's MMO players expect. It has been my experience that traditional development studios tend to assign tools development to their junior-level programmers, while the more seasoned programmers work on graphics or other "sexy" technologies, and I think this is a mistake. The quality of your tools determines the quality of your game, and it also directly impacts the morale of your development team, because nobody wants to spend the next two years building dungeons in a text editor! Invest heavily in your development tools – they will be your most valuable asset.
Don't count on subscriptions
In the early years of the MMO industry, from roughly 1997 to 2001, there were a few big MMOs that had active player populations. By the time we started ArenaNet in the summer of 2000, we knew of at least eighty MMOs that were in development. Based on the success of UO and EQ, publishers were reviewing their portfolios and planning to migrate their existing game franchises to the online world, where they believed they could adopt a subscription model and "make bank". Clearly, it did not work out that way. As more MMOs came into the market, two things changed. First, players now had a choice about which game they would play, and as a result their expectations for polish, content quantity, and service increased substantially. Second, and perhaps more telling for the future of the industry, it became clear that the subscription model forced players to choose a single game, rather than playing many different games.
Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money. This is the legacy of games like Guild Wars, Maple Story, and Silkroad Online, all of which introduced new business models into the MMO genre and were quite successful. The subscription model is still perfectly viable, but the pain threshold is very low now. It's no secret that gamers don't want to pay a subscription fee. If you can convince them that your game offers enough value to justify it, more power to you! But be prepared to defend your decision, often and loudly, and back it up over the lifetime of your game.
Be very aware of the choice you are asking players to make, and the frequency of that choice. In a subscription model you are asking players to make a choice every month, and it is a fairly drastic choice: Stay married, or get divorced? It is certainly the case that if every player decides to stay married every month, you can make more money from each player in the subscription model. But that will rarely be the case, and not something that you should count on. Every month, some percentage of your player base will decide on divorce, and as with marriage in the real word, once you are divorced you rarely get married to the same person again. If you go the subscription route, you'll need to have the confidence that your marriage rate will exceed your divorce rate.
With Guild Wars we ask players to make a choice only one time, and that choice is whether to buy the game, or not to buy the game. While we don't enjoy a recurring revenue stream each month, we do benefit from the fact that most Guild Wars players come back to the game when we release new content, so we are less concerned about players putting the game down for a few months. Players don't have to decide whether to stay married or get divorced, they just have to decide whether they want to play today or not. Beyond the benefit of a lower pain threshold to get into the game, this is the core strength of the Guild Wars business model, and one of the reasons it continues to thrive when many other subscription-based MMOs are struggling.
Innovate with your game play, and innovate with your business model! The two go hand in hand, and are mutually dependent on each other. Decide on your business model first, and then build your game around it. Guild Wars can be successful with its business model because we decided that we would not charge a subscription fee before we wrote the first line of code, and every design and technology decision we made served that purpose. We could never turn Guild Wars into a subscription-based game, just as Turbine could not suddenly decide to eliminate the subscription model for Lord of the Rings Online. If you decide to require players to subscribe to your game, be prepared to build a game that thoroughly justifies it.
Hello everyone. My name is Jeff Strain, one of the co-founders of ArenaNet, the studio behind Guild Wars. It was an honor to be asked to speak about the MMO industry today at the GC Developer's Conference, which is among the most influential developer conferences in the world. It's an equal honor to be able to represent the talented team at ArenaNet and be able to convey some of the development philosophies of the world-class designers, artists, and programmers who built Guild Wars. And of course I am honored that those of you sitting here actually took the time to come hear what I have to say. Thank you.
When I initially accepted the invitation to speak today, I provided a generic topic – "The Future of the MMO industry" – because I had not written anything yet, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room to explore different topics. To those of you who chose to come today believing that I would make far-reaching predictions about the games we'll be creating ten years from now, I apologize. The truth is, I hope that I am completely ignorant about what kind of games we'll be making in ten years, because I hope some hotshot kid comes out of nowhere and changes everything out from under us before then. If that doesn't happen, we've all failed to embrace and protect the culture of innovation that made it possible for us to be here in the first place.
I ultimately decided to address something much more relevant to those of us in this room today, and that is what it takes to create a successful MMO in today's crowded and brutal market. The formula is not as simple as it was a few years ago, as the very visible failure of many recent high-profile MMOs makes clear. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I can share some of the beliefs that I and many of my peers at ArenaNet hold based on our experience with Guild Wars. These beliefs are guiding us in the development of Guild Wars 2, so I sure as hell hope we're right!
Most MMOs fail
Don't be fooled by the much-hyped success of the top MMOs on the market. The game industry is littered with the carnage of MMOs that have failed over the past few years. Due largely to the social nature of MMOs, gamers rarely commit to more than one or two MMOs at a time. This is in contrast to the traditional game market, in which there is room for many games to be successful, even within the same genre. You may play ten different action games this year, but you are very unlikely to play more than one or two MMOs. This means that it is not enough to make a great game – instead you must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community and bring that community to your game. In today's market, that is a tall order.
Regardless of the business model, the primary factor that determines whether an MMO lives or dies is the size of its active player base. There appears to be a tipping point at around 150,000 players. MMOs that reach this critical mass within a few months of release tend to continue to grow and thrive, and those that do not tend to shrink and ultimately die. The majority of MMOs that are released into the market never reach this threshold.
This is a tough industry, and only the most committed studios and publishers with solid long-term financial backing should be undertaking MMO development. I can assure you that releasing an MMO into the market before the development team is proud of it will result in writing off every penny invested in its development. The best publishers are willing to give development teams time for polish and balance. In the MMO market, there is simply no other option, and many publishers are not willing to make this commitment.
Guild Wars launched successfully in April 2005, and has done quite well over the past two years. Initially this was largely attributable to its business model, which did away with the customary subscription requirement and made it very easy for new players to give the game a try. Over time, we were able to keep the player population growing by releasing new content and substantial game updates on a regular basis. However, the market today is very different than the market in 2005, and many of the points I will be discussing in this presentation are based on lessons we have learned – often the hard way – with Guild Wars, and that the ArenaNet development team feels are crucial to the success of any new MMO product entering the market today.
An MMO cookbook
I spoke with several game designers while preparing this presentation, and asked them a single question: What does it take to make a successful MMO? I expected to gather a wide range of responses and perspectives, but I was surprised to find that their input largely overlapped. When you take a broad look at the industry, as both a player and a designer, and analyze what worked and what did not work in the MMOs that have entered the market for the last few years, a few essential lessons emerge that can help guide all of us in our MMO design efforts.
Before you start building the ultimate MMO, you should accept that "MMO" is a technology, not a game design. It still feels like many MMOs are trying to build on the fundamental designs established by UO and EQ in the late '90s. In the heyday of Doom and Quake we all eventually realized that "3D" was a technology, distinct from the "FPS," which was a game design. It's time we accepted that for MMOs as well. We are finding ways to overcome many of the limitations of the technology that dictated the early MMO design, such as Internet latency and limited global scalability. These improvements can enable a new class of online games that break out of the traditional MMO mold and explore new territory. It can be a daunting proposition to willfully walk away from what seems to be a "sure thing" in game design, but lack of differentiation is probably the number one reason that MMOs fail, so we all need to leave the comfort zone and start innovating, or risk creating yet another "me too" MMO.
According to James Phinney, lead designer of StarCraft and Guild Wars, every great game starts with one question: "What do I want to play next?". This may seem an obvious statement, but his point is that designers are often asked to make a game that is specifically designed to be "better" than a successful game from a competitor, rather than making a game that is exciting and new. How many designers have been asked to make a "GTA killer", or a "Guitar Hero killer", or a "WoWkiller"? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: "It's like WoW, but..." I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution ofWoW is... well, the WoW team. They've got their thing, and they're good at it. Let's all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you've lost.
When he hears me exhorting developers to innovate, Eric Flannum, the content design lead on Guild Wars and lead designer of Sacrifice, is quick to point out that it's not enough to be different – it also has to be better. His point is that change, just for the sake of change, is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes designs endure and genres emerge for good reason, and arbitrarily changing things that work just so you can label your game as innovative can lead to failure as quickly as producing a generic also-ran. His point is scary for me, because it's easy for me to look at something and criticize it for being nothing new, but I don't have the design talent to walk the fine line between innovation and alienation. Very few people do, and the ability to do so is the hallmark of a talented designer. While a game can be successful by refining and polishing an established design, most successful games are created with this principal of "structured innovation" and give players a sense of something new and exciting, while still being accessible and familiar.
James Phinney also believes that half of the appeal of an MMO isn't anything we as designers do – it's simply the fact that there are other players, so we should make a world that players want to live in. Scorched badlands can convey a sense of loss, stark alien landscapes are creepy and fascinating, and gloomy dungeons and caverns are the definitive locale for adventure. However, none of these environments will make your players feel a strong sense of place. Dystopia may be exciting, but it's not home. It is a truism that MMOs are all about community, and the success or failure of your MMO will largely be gated by how well the community coalesces and feels a strong sense of place in your world.
The importance of giving players a home was a lesson we learned with Guild Wars. Players start out in the Kingdom of Ascalon, an idyllic, beautiful land of vivid colors and gentle landscapes. Early in the game, Ascalon is destroyed in an event known as the Searing, and players find themselves playing through a blasted, dreary landscape of ruins and mud. While this certainly added a sense of drama and loss to the story, players were upset that they could not go back to Ascalon, because it had become their home in the game. In each new campaign, and even more so with the upcomingEye of the North expansion, we were careful to establish "home" very early and maintain it as a sanctuary for players.
Don't force your players to endure play mechanics they experienced ten years ago. The much-maligned FedEx quest is a classic example of an old-school mechanic that is still manifesting in modern games. Even if you have the best intentions at the beginning of the project to avoid FedEx quests, you will often be stymied by the fact that the FedEx quest is a manifestation of the traditional MMO RPG design, and you can't change the symptom if you are not willing to address the cause. The traditional MMO world is a steady-state machine, much like an episode of the classicStar Trek television series, in which characters, equipment, and the state of the universe had to be reset be the end of the episode. While this design certainly allows for content to be scalable – fetch 20 pig hides, fetch 40 pig hides, kill 10 rats, kill the rat queen – it doesn't allow players to be part of an epic quest, or feel like their actions have a material impact on the world around them. Ten years ago, players were willing to accept this in order to enjoy the benefits of the communal play, but today they expect more.
As a general rule, be nice to your players! With each generation of MMOs, players become less tolerant of being forced to spend time resting after battles to restore health, onerous consequences for dying, the length of time required to level up and reach the mid-game, and high failure rates for activities such as crafting. Early MMOs could be "meaner" because there were fewer choices, but today players have options, so be nice to them.
Don't design an MMO around the assumption that players are a "type" of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like.
Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. A few months before the release of Guild Wars we added computer-controlled henchmen to the game as a way to pad out your party when your friends weren't around. Later we enhanced this feature and introduced computer-controlled Heroes, which gave you control over their actions and more fully supported the notion of playing the game entirely on your own. While it may seem counterintuitive to add features that support the solo play experience into an MMO, we believe that Guild Warswould not have been as successful had we not added these features.
Two-player gaming, or as we call it "buddy gaming", is not a generic case of multi-player gaming, but is instead its own form of play that deserves special attention. Increasingly, MMOs are used as a setting for "real world" social interaction, including dating, spending time with your kids, or hanging out with your best friend or spouse. Just as the real social dynamics in a one-on-one setting greatly differ from the dynamics of a large group setting, the game experience when playing with one person differs from the experience of playing with a group. You can slow down, smell the flowers, discuss what you've seen and what you'd like to do, strategize and assist each other, and communicate on a more sincere level. In short, it's a more intimate form of community, and we should be supporting it explicitly.
Pay close attention to complexity creep. Don't assume that most of your players are reading your website and consuming information about your game. Most of your players will never read your website, never visit fansites, and never participate in forum discussions. We are often immersed in the community forums and rants and raves posted to game fansites, and it is easy to lose perspective about the knowledge level of most of our players. Players who participate in fansites and send six-page emails to your community team are experts at your game – they probably know more about it than you do – so it's important to realize that they do not represent the average player. The vast majority of your players are not digging into every detail of every spell or creating lists of animations so that they can react when they see the basilisk twitch its nose. They want to play, not study, so take care to create a game that allows them to do so.
Film, television, and book franchises are just not good candidates for MMOs. Even MMOs based on the "Big Two" franchises – you know the ones – have not lived up to the expectations of their developers. Today, and historically, the biggest MMOs are based on universes that were created for the purpose of supporting games. MMOs are all about exploration, personal glory, hanging out with friends, and meeting new people. You can't take a universe that was created to support a linear, non-interactive viewing experience that has its own six-volume set of rules and expect a development team to deliver something innovative and fresh within that universe that allows millions of players to be the hero. The best games, MMO or otherwise, are created first and foremost to be games, and the world, story, and setting are there to serve that end, not the other way around. It seems like I hear about a new MMO in development based on a sci-fi or fantasy license every week, and it worries me tremendously. MMOs are expensive, expectations are high, and huge failures will disenfranchise publishers and make life more difficult for new MMO developers. If you want to take a popular movie license and spin out a DS game to support its launch, then go for it – I think that's an appropriate form of media collaboration – but let developers design MMOs that are not constrained by the rules and restrictions of a licensing body.
Finally, you can make everyone happy, but you can't make everyone happy all the time. It is risky to try to make decisions that appeal to all players equally. Don't fall into the trap of making decisions based on what causes the least amount of pain, because this can lead to a game that is just kind of "okay" and doesn't really excite anybody. When you have a large, active, and passionate player base, every decision you make, every change to the game, no matter how convinced you are that it makes the game strictly better, will piss someone off, and they'll post about it, blog about it, rant to the press about it, loudly and publicly predict that this is the "beginning of the end" of your game, and send hate mail to your community and support teams. MMO developers have to have thick skins, but always remember that if one of your players is angry with you, it is because he really cares about the game, and that's much healthier for you than apathy. Go with your instincts and make the right decision for your game.
You can't develop an MMO in a traditional game-studio culture
Surprisingly, many of the more high-profile MMO failures were developed by the largest, most well established publishers in the industry. These projects had the benefit of solid financing, large teams, established IPs, and proven development methodologies that had been refined over decades of developing successful games in other genres. What happened? You can certainly make a list of everything that went wrong – the game industry is full of "armchair generals" who would love to do so for you – but ultimately the quality of a game is determined by the development culture that created it, and creating a successful MMO requires a radically different development culture than the culture optimized to produce traditional video games. While these large publishers have refined the process of creating traditional video games to an art, many of them have not yet realized that an MMO requires a completely different development process, and a studio culture to compliment that process.
The defining characteristic of top MMO development teams is their awareness that they are delivering a service, rather than creating a product, and that release day is the beginning of a long-term relationship with their customers, rather than the end of the project. Traditionally, release day is the time to go home, repair your relationship with your spouse or significant other, and sleep for a few days, but the weeks and months following the release of an MMO are the most critical point of your development cycle. It's the time to make it clear to your customers that you will stand by your game, and that their trust in you as the developer will be rewarded. Regardless of your business model, you are asking players to invest hundreds or thousands of hours playing your game, and you need to demonstrate that you are committed to protecting the economy, quickly fixing bugs and exploits, and adding live content. If the entire development team is recovering at the beach in those first critical weeks, you will be unable to demonstrate your willingness and ability to support your game, and your players will be hesitant to invest their time and money with you.
The message is clear: avoid the Big Crunch. I'm not saying that we should expect to work 8-hour days in the weeks leading up to release, but we certainly can't work 16-hour days for six months before release and then expect to sustain that pace over the several-year lifespan of a successful MMO. If you are planning for success, you have to build a sustainable work culture, and you need to establish that culture before release. The work load will not decrease after launch – if anything, it will increase, so build a sustainable work culture and stand by it. It's not just a morale issue – it will have a critical impact on the success or failure of your business.
An MMO must deliver content at three distinct stages: the early game, which is the first twenty hours, the mid game, which is the first few hundred hours, and the late game, which is at a thousand hours and beyond. Each of these stages represents a chance for your game to continue to grow, or to decline and ultimately fail. The traditional QA model is just not equipped to deal with this – there is simply no way to effectively test 1,000 hours of content in the final months of the project, particularly when you are not focused only on bugs, but instead on that hard-to-define feeling of satisfaction that a good MMO provides hour after hour. The only way to ship an MMO into the market and have confidence that it will survive at each of these thresholds is to ensure that your entire team is playing the game, every day, for at least two years before release. That sounds difficult, because you first have to ensure that everyone enjoys playing the game, then allocate time in the development schedule for them to play it, and finally ensure that you actually have something playable two years before release. Despite the difficulties of fully achievin
Playing now: Cities: Skyline / Ori and the Blind Forest / Banished
As for the lack of money !!!! Are you joking, every few months there will be an expansion, its the way they make there money, in the end its almost equal to sub , that or you keep playing for free with the same old content.
But in the end trust me they make money , or they wouldnt be in this business.
This is the Answer from OP question!,
The game it will be fun to play as Gdesigners told, but to keep interest and daily/weekly patchs and nice servers they need money and they will get it with new payed content (expansions) such as guild wars 1, no surprise about that.
OFC it will be 1000's of WoWfans players talking xit about this game but they are being robbed since years and years, and they even need to pay every expansion (Blizzard knows how to please people and get their pockets full of money..)
That's a very nice quote you have there. And is one of the reasons why I still support Anet. I think they have a very good and honest perspective of the MMO genre, and are willing to do what it takes to make games that work w/ that perspective.
The snippet that Dookz posted is dead on, in my opinon. Gamers are requiring more polish from developers in order to keep their subscriptions. Look at the mmo fiasco of 2009.
AoC, WAR and Aion all released and not one met with a huge success. Aion in Asia being the exception, but it still wasn't nearly as successful in the west. All three games failed to deliver for different reasons, but the bottom line was that each game did not fulfill the promise that is implied when you pay for a subscription.
Who's to say that those games wouldn't have been more successful with a buy 2 play model. Gamers might have been more forgiving of the flaws of each game, and while they might have stepped away from the game, the chances that they would have tried it again months down the road would have probably been greater.
While the non-subscription model doesn't have as great of an earning potential as a subscription model does, the potential to retain or reattain customers is probably higher as the gamer gets more bang for their buck.
Look at how many games the average gamer might purchase throughout the year. Games like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Modern Warfare 2, StarCraft 2, Halo series, Final Fantasy series, all of those mentioned have found much success in box sales. No doubt that a single gamer will own 2 or more of these titles. While there is more of a time investment into a mmorpg, if more mmorpgs were pay once and play forever, you might see the overall population of mmos spread out more with migration from one game to the next based upon content updates.
WoW is an exception, not a rule. Many investors don't really see that simple fact. We may never see another success story like WoW for many, many years...if ever.
Honestly I don't really see a downside. I'm not saying it will be perfect, but I've been impressed with everything I've read and watched about it so far. I still play Guild Wars 1 off and on. It's been one of my favorite MMOs to date and after everything I've seen going on with GW2 I think I will be far from disappointed.
I disagree with the fact that there is no subscription fee being the downside. It's far from it. It's not like any f2p game where you create an account and later on figure out you are most likely going to have to depend on the item mall for access to more content, or items that will allow you to be a good contender in pvp. If you take a look at the store for Guild Wars1 it's things like character slots, costumes, and the ability to buy a digital version of Guild Wars 1, and all of the expansions. You can also at times upgrade your game to a game of the year edition. See the difference?
Just about every negative thing I've heard seems to be from people that probably have not even bothered to read up on it or even watch a few videos. I've heard things like,
"Oh it's just a WoW clone."
to,
"It's nothing but graphics the gameplay is just like any other f2p grinder that's out right now."
Guild Wars 2 is a step in the right direction for MMOs in my opinion. Some of the things they are doing are pretty ground breaking. I know there are probably other game developers that claim or have claimed to have a lot of the features Guild Wars 2 will have, but were they done well? I'm willing to bet not.
"Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset."
The players are assest in the stock market where you can convince the investors that you can make good games and promise a reasonable return. The money aren't just coming from sales, which most of the people analyzing ArenaNet assumes.
Two downsides for me (and im definitely in the minority here) are the instant travel to known waypoints and the ability use the auction house outside the game. To me, that hurts immersion and the ingame community. Both of which are important (again, to me) elements in a mmorpg.
edit:make that 3 downsides. Just read that player housing is instanced. Thats a downer
Two downsides for me (and im definitely in the minority here) are the instant travel to known waypoints and the ability use the auction house outside the game. To me, that hurts immersion and the ingame community. Both of which are important (again, to me) elements in a mmorpg.
edit:make that 3 downsides. Just read that player housing is instanced. Thats a downer
The travel thing sounded like a downer for me too when I got the original GW but you'll get use to it fast and it has some advantages. Besides, there are no mounts in the game so running everywhere would be a bother.
Using the action house ofline sucks to me too but I guess it is for the dweebs who want to check out things on their Iphone every 5 minutes.
Instanced player housing is bad but I still havn't seen a good way to handle non instanced housing. Well, maybe SWG were close to good but to get that into a game like GW2 would be almost impossible. I like to see it myself but I don't think it is worth all the job, there are other more important things. I am happy enough to get my own house.
Okay reading through all these posts and gathering info I still feel like the DE system sounded better before we saw video and started learning more about it.
Now from what i gather Even though they are supposed to be dynamic and make the world change it sounds like they still just reset once you do one.
So to me the bad is going to be yeah you get all these DE's but once you done them it is going to be the same old thing in that same spot as before. Where reading the blog on GW2. com made it sound like if you kill off the bandits attacking that was it they wouldn't come back knowing that they will come back just destroy's my hype for this game by a ton.
Now if it did work where you defeat the bandits burning the hay stack and then that opened up another even where you can now raid there base of operations and completely wipe them out and that is the end of those bandits. That was the impression i got from reading the on the site if they will just come back another day and have the same event over again That don't seem very dynamic to me.
Now on another note i still plan on buying the game but i'm just saying My Hype has gone way way down with the thought that these events keep happening over and over again. To me dynamic means always different. Not random outcomes but the same thing is going to be happening in this spot again in a couple days. Same bandits coming back to burn the hay again. That defy's there living world if they keep happening over and over.
Two downsides for me (and im definitely in the minority here) are the instant travel to known waypoints and the ability use the auction house outside the game. To me, that hurts immersion and the ingame community. Both of which are important (again, to me) elements in a mmorpg.
edit:make that 3 downsides. Just read that player housing is instanced. Thats a downer
The travel thing sounded like a downer for me too when I got the original GW but you'll get use to it fast and it has some advantages. Besides, there are no mounts in the game so running everywhere would be a bother.
Using the action house ofline sucks to me too but I guess it is for the dweebs who want to check out things on their Iphone every 5 minutes.
Instanced player housing is bad but I still havn't seen a good way to handle non instanced housing. Well, maybe SWG were close to good but to get that into a game like GW2 would be almost impossible. I like to see it myself but I don't think it is worth all the job, there are other more important things. I am happy enough to get my own house.
Yeah on the hosing note talking about SWG it was a good system but what happened is every one complained the worlds were huge and empty. But imagine if that game would have had wow like subs and all that empty space on the planets was filled with player owned cities. That is why the planets were so open and barren so they would get filled up with player cities but alas it didn't get those numbers so everyone thought the planets were huge and boring and empty and the devs were lazy by not filling the planets up with stuff.
They were supposed to get filled with player cities that you could than raid in open pvp. Was a great system just implemented poorly by SoE.
Okay reading through all these posts and gathering info I still feel like the DE system sounded better before we saw video and started learning more about it.
Now from what i gather Even though they are supposed to be dynamic and make the world change it sounds like they still just reset once you do one.
So to me the bad is going to be yeah you get all these DE's but once you done them it is going to be the same old thing in that same spot as before. Where reading the blog on GW2. com made it sound like if you kill off the bandits attacking that was it they wouldn't come back knowing that they will come back just destroy's my hype for this game by a ton.
Now if it did work where you defeat the bandits burning the hay stack and then that opened up another even where you can now raid there base of operations and completely wipe them out and that is the end of those bandits. That was the impression i got from reading the on the site if they will just come back another day and have the same event over again That don't seem very dynamic to me.
Now on another note i still plan on buying the game but i'm just saying My Hype has gone way way down with the thought that these events keep happening over and over again. To me dynamic means always different. Not random outcomes but the same thing is going to be happening in this spot again in a couple days. Same bandits coming back to burn the hay again. That defy's there living world if they keep happening over and over.
the problem with that, is then we would run out of things to do as a whole. new gamers would be dumbfounded by the fact that there is no dynamic events at all. so makeing us able to wipe out anything makes it bad for the playerbade in general. so from what i gather they have found the perfect system that causes loops rather then resets.
Okay reading through all these posts and gathering info I still feel like the DE system sounded better before we saw video and started learning more about it.
Now from what i gather Even though they are supposed to be dynamic and make the world change it sounds like they still just reset once you do one.
So to me the bad is going to be yeah you get all these DE's but once you done them it is going to be the same old thing in that same spot as before. Where reading the blog on GW2. com made it sound like if you kill off the bandits attacking that was it they wouldn't come back knowing that they will come back just destroy's my hype for this game by a ton.
Now if it did work where you defeat the bandits burning the hay stack and then that opened up another even where you can now raid there base of operations and completely wipe them out and that is the end of those bandits. That was the impression i got from reading the on the site if they will just come back another day and have the same event over again That don't seem very dynamic to me.
Now on another note i still plan on buying the game but i'm just saying My Hype has gone way way down with the thought that these events keep happening over and over again. To me dynamic means always different. Not random outcomes but the same thing is going to be happening in this spot again in a couple days. Same bandits coming back to burn the hay again. That defy's there living world if they keep happening over and over.
the problem with that, is then we would run out of things to do as a whole. new gamers would be dumbfounded by the fact that there is no dynamic events at all. so makeing us able to wipe out anything makes it bad for the playerbade in general. so from what i gather they have found the perfect system that causes loops rather then resets.
I see the problem with it working like that but that in itself kinda takes the Dynamic out of it. I do believe this is still better than the norm. But the events them self are still pretty static if you think about it. Sure it progress along but in the end that same event will be taking place in the exact same place again soon.
Some asked what the downfall is or the bad part and in my eyes this is it. Like I said I still think it will be better than the normal mmo concepts but if you really think about it. The events are kinda static.
Okay reading through all these posts and gathering info I still feel like the DE system sounded better before we saw video and started learning more about it.
Now from what i gather Even though they are supposed to be dynamic and make the world change it sounds like they still just reset once you do one.
So to me the bad is going to be yeah you get all these DE's but once you done them it is going to be the same old thing in that same spot as before. Where reading the blog on GW2. com made it sound like if you kill off the bandits attacking that was it they wouldn't come back knowing that they will come back just destroy's my hype for this game by a ton.
Now if it did work where you defeat the bandits burning the hay stack and then that opened up another even where you can now raid there base of operations and completely wipe them out and that is the end of those bandits. That was the impression i got from reading the on the site if they will just come back another day and have the same event over again That don't seem very dynamic to me.
Now on another note i still plan on buying the game but i'm just saying My Hype has gone way way down with the thought that these events keep happening over and over again. To me dynamic means always different. Not random outcomes but the same thing is going to be happening in this spot again in a couple days. Same bandits coming back to burn the hay again. That defy's there living world if they keep happening over and over.
the problem with that, is then we would run out of things to do as a whole. new gamers would be dumbfounded by the fact that there is no dynamic events at all. so makeing us able to wipe out anything makes it bad for the playerbade in general. so from what i gather they have found the perfect system that causes loops rather then resets.
I see the problem with it working like that but that in itself kinda takes the Dynamic out of it. I do believe this is still better than the norm. But the events them self are still pretty static if you think about it. Sure it progress along but in the end that same event will be taking place in the exact same place again soon.
Some asked what the downfall is or the bad part and in my eyes this is it. Like I said I still think it will be better than the normal mmo concepts but if you really think about it. The events are kinda static.
well i know i would play though those "static" events a million times and still have fun
Okay reading through all these posts and gathering info I still feel like the DE system sounded better before we saw video and started learning more about it.
Now from what i gather Even though they are supposed to be dynamic and make the world change it sounds like they still just reset once you do one.
So to me the bad is going to be yeah you get all these DE's but once you done them it is going to be the same old thing in that same spot as before. Where reading the blog on GW2. com made it sound like if you kill off the bandits attacking that was it they wouldn't come back knowing that they will come back just destroy's my hype for this game by a ton.
Now if it did work where you defeat the bandits burning the hay stack and then that opened up another even where you can now raid there base of operations and completely wipe them out and that is the end of those bandits. That was the impression i got from reading the on the site if they will just come back another day and have the same event over again That don't seem very dynamic to me.
Now on another note i still plan on buying the game but i'm just saying My Hype has gone way way down with the thought that these events keep happening over and over again. To me dynamic means always different. Not random outcomes but the same thing is going to be happening in this spot again in a couple days. Same bandits coming back to burn the hay again. That defy's there living world if they keep happening over and over.
the problem with that, is then we would run out of things to do as a whole. new gamers would be dumbfounded by the fact that there is no dynamic events at all. so makeing us able to wipe out anything makes it bad for the playerbade in general. so from what i gather they have found the perfect system that causes loops rather then resets.
It seems to me that the DE system is sort of a revolving door system. Defeat the centuars in a village, now you have quests that involve unearthing a piece of dark history in the village, that leads to some events that have you kill spies, the spies lead to backlash from another group, that group is allied with centaurs, centuars raid the village and the cycle repeats. each section of the event hovers there until someone comes along and bumps it to the next part of the cycle. that sounds more realistic as far as DE system to me.
Comments
Arenanet is trying to cater to a wider audience beyond casual. For those who love grinding, there will be a form of grinding in GW2 and that comes in the form of (farming) Titles and Achievements, if it resembles anything like GW1 (alot longer and sometimes harder to attain in comparison to leveling. Many of them have tiers.). They aren't a must have for everyone since they don't make you powerful but if it helps you feel your character is unique and have achieved something most haven't then it would serve that purpose, and that is still a powerful incentive as shown by the many players going after them in GW1 and there are a wide variety of titles. These title and achievements (if it's like GW1), would be mostly for cosmetic purposes only, unlike leveling. And you'll be able to show them off. They also said there would be 'farming areas'. Those kinds of implements would typically cater to grinders.
Playing now: Cities: Skyline / Ori and the Blind Forest / Banished
That is the downside.
Developers of other mmo's have an incentive to create games with a lasting appeal for obvious reasons. Take away the subscription model and you're left with an incentive to create a shallow game with a shiny surface and a lot of hype.
Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset. The best thing that can happen is that they play intensely for a few weeks, convince all their friends to buy a copy as well and then quit.
Then after a few years, and another suspiciously short development cycle they can release guildwars 3, and convince everyone that this time it is all different, even though the business model happens to be exactly the same.
That being said I will still buy a copy of the game at release, because despite of what I said it is still the most interesting mmo on the horizon, now how sad is that?
I really liked the vidoes i saw from this forum. But one thing is bothering me.
Anmation feels like arcade machines from 80's, no grace and no power moves, just insert coin and play.
Just like Tasmania Beast on speed. That Warrior whirlwind from video was just afwul. Can you explain to me as a wow player, am I missing something here or animation is really that bad?
By far one of the better arguments against Free to Play. Lets keep our eyes on this one
I completely disagree. Just because a customer is not being charged a subscription fee does not make them a "liability." It is still definitely in ArenaNet's interest to please their consumers.
Pleased customers:
1. Generate positive word of mouth that translates to additional sales when they tell their friends about the product.
2. Are more likely to buy other products (expansions) released by the company.
More importantly, unhappy customers generate negative word of mouth that can turn people off to and even kill an online game. Just look at how much damage negative word of mouth did to AoC. The game had decent critical reviews, but displeased customers bad-mouthing it more or less destroyed it.
In any kind of marketing, you NEVER want unhappy customers. They are seriously bad news for your product.
Also, the fact that GW2 will be F2P enables it to appeal to an entirely different market segment. There are several customers that just will not pay a subscription fee to play an MMO. They will however, happily put down $60 for a one time purchase.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
The only downside for me is it's take on the reviving system.
Staying alive won't have the same importance as in most games, it kind of creates the ultimate "easy-mode". Since most people will likely just play blind without the need to be thinking about consequences of rushing into battle, group play could just turn into total res spamming fests and all you'll hear is constant "res me!".
Just speculation, but I have a pretty strong feeling i'm going to spend a lot of my time constantly reviving impatient people who continually rush into things without thinking.
I thought it was awesome, but I guess it's just a matter of opinion.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
They'll probably have to save money on various little fields and try to make money on other ones.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy into the "arenanet aren't money hogs, unlike other P2P's" or even that their server structure would be so much more advanced.
They are under publisher NCsoft, those guys are interested in money, lots of it; as are the shareholders; and there are more than enough great minds out there for other MMO's who would've come up with a similar advanced server structure by now.
I expect to see little customer support for instance, luckily not something most people are confronted with and not something NCsoft is very much involved with anyhow.
I can see regular expansions happening and some MT in the same style as GW1 did.
And maybe they'll save money in some other areas I don't know of. ... maybe pens in their offices ?
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
That's not entirely true. When you subscribe to an MMO, you are buying into the promise that there will be free content updates between expansion packs. Arenanet isn't obligated to do that, even though they have given out free content update in GW1. The size of content in GW2 will dwarf GW1 and I think it's fair to say that it would more comparable to the big MMOs in the market today in terms of content at launch. There are plans for Micro transactions in GW2.
Jeff Strain made a speech in regards to 'How to Make a Successful MMO' in front of an audience of many influential developers at Games Convention.
A quote from Jeff Strain himself. Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money.
And a snippet from his very long presentation talks about subcriptions....
Don't count on subscriptions
In the early years of the MMO industry, from roughly 1997 to 2001, there were a few big MMOs that had active player populations. By the time we started ArenaNet in the summer of 2000, we knew of at least eighty MMOs that were in development. Based on the success of UO and EQ, publishers were reviewing their portfolios and planning to migrate their existing game franchises to the online world, where they believed they could adopt a subscription model and "make bank". Clearly, it did not work out that way. As more MMOs came into the market, two things changed. First, players now had a choice about which game they would play, and as a result their expectations for polish, content quantity, and service increased substantially. Second, and perhaps more telling for the future of the industry, it became clear that the subscription model forced players to choose a single game, rather than playing many different games.
Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money. This is the legacy of games like Guild Wars, Maple Story, and Silkroad Online, all of which introduced new business models into the MMO genre and were quite successful. The subscription model is still perfectly viable, but the pain threshold is very low now. It's no secret that gamers don't want to pay a subscription fee. If you can convince them that your game offers enough value to justify it, more power to you! But be prepared to defend your decision, often and loudly, and back it up over the lifetime of your game.
Be very aware of the choice you are asking players to make, and the frequency of that choice. In a subscription model you are asking players to make a choice every month, and it is a fairly drastic choice: Stay married, or get divorced? It is certainly the case that if every player decides to stay married every month, you can make more money from each player in the subscription model. But that will rarely be the case, and not something that you should count on. Every month, some percentage of your player base will decide on divorce, and as with marriage in the real word, once you are divorced you rarely get married to the same person again. If you go the subscription route, you'll need to have the confidence that your marriage rate will exceed your divorce rate.
With Guild Wars we ask players to make a choice only one time, and that choice is whether to buy the game, or not to buy the game. While we don't enjoy a recurring revenue stream each month, we do benefit from the fact that most Guild Wars players come back to the game when we release new content, so we are less concerned about players putting the game down for a few months. Players don't have to decide whether to stay married or get divorced, they just have to decide whether they want to play today or not. Beyond the benefit of a lower pain threshold to get into the game, this is the core strength of the Guild Wars business model, and one of the reasons it continues to thrive when many other subscription-based MMOs are struggling.
Innovate with your game play, and innovate with your business model! The two go hand in hand, and are mutually dependent on each other. Decide on your business model first, and then build your game around it. Guild Wars can be successful with its business model because we decided that we would not charge a subscription fee before we wrote the first line of code, and every design and technology decision we made served that purpose. We could never turn Guild Wars into a subscription-based game, just as Turbine could not suddenly decide to eliminate the subscription model for Lord of the Rings Online. If you decide to require players to subscribe to your game, be prepared to build a game that thoroughly justifies it.
Home > Events > Trade And Fan Shows > Games Convention 2007
How to Create a Successful MMO
Hello everyone. My name is Jeff Strain, one of the co-founders of ArenaNet, the studio behind Guild Wars. It was an honor to be asked to speak about the MMO industry today at the GC Developer's Conference, which is among the most influential developer conferences in the world. It's an equal honor to be able to represent the talented team at ArenaNet and be able to convey some of the development philosophies of the world-class designers, artists, and programmers who built Guild Wars. And of course I am honored that those of you sitting here actually took the time to come hear what I have to say. Thank you.
When I initially accepted the invitation to speak today, I provided a generic topic – "The Future of the MMO industry" – because I had not written anything yet, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room to explore different topics. To those of you who chose to come today believing that I would make far-reaching predictions about the games we'll be creating ten years from now, I apologize. The truth is, I hope that I am completely ignorant about what kind of games we'll be making in ten years, because I hope some hotshot kid comes out of nowhere and changes everything out from under us before then. If that doesn't happen, we've all failed to embrace and protect the culture of innovation that made it possible for us to be here in the first place.
I ultimately decided to address something much more relevant to those of us in this room today, and that is what it takes to create a successful MMO in today's crowded and brutal market. The formula is not as simple as it was a few years ago, as the very visible failure of many recent high-profile MMOs makes clear. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I can share some of the beliefs that I and many of my peers at ArenaNet hold based on our experience with Guild Wars. These beliefs are guiding us in the development of Guild Wars 2, so I sure as hell hope we're right!
Most MMOs fail
Don't be fooled by the much-hyped success of the top MMOs on the market. The game industry is littered with the carnage of MMOs that have failed over the past few years. Due largely to the social nature of MMOs, gamers rarely commit to more than one or two MMOs at a time. This is in contrast to the traditional game market, in which there is room for many games to be successful, even within the same genre. You may play ten different action games this year, but you are very unlikely to play more than one or two MMOs. This means that it is not enough to make a great game – instead you must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community and bring that community to your game. In today's market, that is a tall order.
Regardless of the business model, the primary factor that determines whether an MMO lives or dies is the size of its active player base. There appears to be a tipping point at around 150,000 players. MMOs that reach this critical mass within a few months of release tend to continue to grow and thrive, and those that do not tend to shrink and ultimately die. The majority of MMOs that are released into the market never reach this threshold.
This is a tough industry, and only the most committed studios and publishers with solid long-term financial backing should be undertaking MMO development. I can assure you that releasing an MMO into the market before the development team is proud of it will result in writing off every penny invested in its development. The best publishers are willing to give development teams time for polish and balance. In the MMO market, there is simply no other option, and many publishers are not willing to make this commitment.
Guild Wars launched successfully in April 2005, and has done quite well over the past two years. Initially this was largely attributable to its business model, which did away with the customary subscription requirement and made it very easy for new players to give the game a try. Over time, we were able to keep the player population growing by releasing new content and substantial game updates on a regular basis. However, the market today is very different than the market in 2005, and many of the points I will be discussing in this presentation are based on lessons we have learned – often the hard way – with Guild Wars, and that the ArenaNet development team feels are crucial to the success of any new MMO product entering the market today.
An MMO cookbook
I spoke with several game designers while preparing this presentation, and asked them a single question: What does it take to make a successful MMO? I expected to gather a wide range of responses and perspectives, but I was surprised to find that their input largely overlapped. When you take a broad look at the industry, as both a player and a designer, and analyze what worked and what did not work in the MMOs that have entered the market for the last few years, a few essential lessons emerge that can help guide all of us in our MMO design efforts.
Before you start building the ultimate MMO, you should accept that "MMO" is a technology, not a game design. It still feels like many MMOs are trying to build on the fundamental designs established by UO and EQ in the late '90s. In the heyday of Doom and Quake we all eventually realized that "3D" was a technology, distinct from the "FPS," which was a game design. It's time we accepted that for MMOs as well. We are finding ways to overcome many of the limitations of the technology that dictated the early MMO design, such as Internet latency and limited global scalability. These improvements can enable a new class of online games that break out of the traditional MMO mold and explore new territory. It can be a daunting proposition to willfully walk away from what seems to be a "sure thing" in game design, but lack of differentiation is probably the number one reason that MMOs fail, so we all need to leave the comfort zone and start innovating, or risk creating yet another "me too" MMO.
According to James Phinney, lead designer of StarCraft and Guild Wars, every great game starts with one question: "What do I want to play next?". This may seem an obvious statement, but his point is that designers are often asked to make a game that is specifically designed to be "better" than a successful game from a competitor, rather than making a game that is exciting and new. How many designers have been asked to make a "GTA killer", or a "Guitar Hero killer", or a "WoWkiller"? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: "It's like WoW, but..." I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution ofWoW is... well, the WoW team. They've got their thing, and they're good at it. Let's all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you've lost.
When he hears me exhorting developers to innovate, Eric Flannum, the content design lead on Guild Wars and lead designer of Sacrifice, is quick to point out that it's not enough to be different – it also has to be better. His point is that change, just for the sake of change, is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes designs endure and genres emerge for good reason, and arbitrarily changing things that work just so you can label your game as innovative can lead to failure as quickly as producing a generic also-ran. His point is scary for me, because it's easy for me to look at something and criticize it for being nothing new, but I don't have the design talent to walk the fine line between innovation and alienation. Very few people do, and the ability to do so is the hallmark of a talented designer. While a game can be successful by refining and polishing an established design, most successful games are created with this principal of "structured innovation" and give players a sense of something new and exciting, while still being accessible and familiar.
James Phinney also believes that half of the appeal of an MMO isn't anything we as designers do – it's simply the fact that there are other players, so we should make a world that players want to live in. Scorched badlands can convey a sense of loss, stark alien landscapes are creepy and fascinating, and gloomy dungeons and caverns are the definitive locale for adventure. However, none of these environments will make your players feel a strong sense of place. Dystopia may be exciting, but it's not home. It is a truism that MMOs are all about community, and the success or failure of your MMO will largely be gated by how well the community coalesces and feels a strong sense of place in your world.
The importance of giving players a home was a lesson we learned with Guild Wars. Players start out in the Kingdom of Ascalon, an idyllic, beautiful land of vivid colors and gentle landscapes. Early in the game, Ascalon is destroyed in an event known as the Searing, and players find themselves playing through a blasted, dreary landscape of ruins and mud. While this certainly added a sense of drama and loss to the story, players were upset that they could not go back to Ascalon, because it had become their home in the game. In each new campaign, and even more so with the upcomingEye of the North expansion, we were careful to establish "home" very early and maintain it as a sanctuary for players.
Don't force your players to endure play mechanics they experienced ten years ago. The much-maligned FedEx quest is a classic example of an old-school mechanic that is still manifesting in modern games. Even if you have the best intentions at the beginning of the project to avoid FedEx quests, you will often be stymied by the fact that the FedEx quest is a manifestation of the traditional MMO RPG design, and you can't change the symptom if you are not willing to address the cause. The traditional MMO world is a steady-state machine, much like an episode of the classicStar Trek television series, in which characters, equipment, and the state of the universe had to be reset be the end of the episode. While this design certainly allows for content to be scalable – fetch 20 pig hides, fetch 40 pig hides, kill 10 rats, kill the rat queen – it doesn't allow players to be part of an epic quest, or feel like their actions have a material impact on the world around them. Ten years ago, players were willing to accept this in order to enjoy the benefits of the communal play, but today they expect more.
As a general rule, be nice to your players! With each generation of MMOs, players become less tolerant of being forced to spend time resting after battles to restore health, onerous consequences for dying, the length of time required to level up and reach the mid-game, and high failure rates for activities such as crafting. Early MMOs could be "meaner" because there were fewer choices, but today players have options, so be nice to them.
Don't design an MMO around the assumption that players are a "type" of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like.
Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. A few months before the release of Guild Wars we added computer-controlled henchmen to the game as a way to pad out your party when your friends weren't around. Later we enhanced this feature and introduced computer-controlled Heroes, which gave you control over their actions and more fully supported the notion of playing the game entirely on your own. While it may seem counterintuitive to add features that support the solo play experience into an MMO, we believe that Guild Warswould not have been as successful had we not added these features.
Two-player gaming, or as we call it "buddy gaming", is not a generic case of multi-player gaming, but is instead its own form of play that deserves special attention. Increasingly, MMOs are used as a setting for "real world" social interaction, including dating, spending time with your kids, or hanging out with your best friend or spouse. Just as the real social dynamics in a one-on-one setting greatly differ from the dynamics of a large group setting, the game experience when playing with one person differs from the experience of playing with a group. You can slow down, smell the flowers, discuss what you've seen and what you'd like to do, strategize and assist each other, and communicate on a more sincere level. In short, it's a more intimate form of community, and we should be supporting it explicitly.
Pay close attention to complexity creep. Don't assume that most of your players are reading your website and consuming information about your game. Most of your players will never read your website, never visit fansites, and never participate in forum discussions. We are often immersed in the community forums and rants and raves posted to game fansites, and it is easy to lose perspective about the knowledge level of most of our players. Players who participate in fansites and send six-page emails to your community team are experts at your game – they probably know more about it than you do – so it's important to realize that they do not represent the average player. The vast majority of your players are not digging into every detail of every spell or creating lists of animations so that they can react when they see the basilisk twitch its nose. They want to play, not study, so take care to create a game that allows them to do so.
Film, television, and book franchises are just not good candidates for MMOs. Even MMOs based on the "Big Two" franchises – you know the ones – have not lived up to the expectations of their developers. Today, and historically, the biggest MMOs are based on universes that were created for the purpose of supporting games. MMOs are all about exploration, personal glory, hanging out with friends, and meeting new people. You can't take a universe that was created to support a linear, non-interactive viewing experience that has its own six-volume set of rules and expect a development team to deliver something innovative and fresh within that universe that allows millions of players to be the hero. The best games, MMO or otherwise, are created first and foremost to be games, and the world, story, and setting are there to serve that end, not the other way around. It seems like I hear about a new MMO in development based on a sci-fi or fantasy license every week, and it worries me tremendously. MMOs are expensive, expectations are high, and huge failures will disenfranchise publishers and make life more difficult for new MMO developers. If you want to take a popular movie license and spin out a DS game to support its launch, then go for it – I think that's an appropriate form of media collaboration – but let developers design MMOs that are not constrained by the rules and restrictions of a licensing body.
Finally, you can make everyone happy, but you can't make everyone happy all the time. It is risky to try to make decisions that appeal to all players equally. Don't fall into the trap of making decisions based on what causes the least amount of pain, because this can lead to a game that is just kind of "okay" and doesn't really excite anybody. When you have a large, active, and passionate player base, every decision you make, every change to the game, no matter how convinced you are that it makes the game strictly better, will piss someone off, and they'll post about it, blog about it, rant to the press about it, loudly and publicly predict that this is the "beginning of the end" of your game, and send hate mail to your community and support teams. MMO developers have to have thick skins, but always remember that if one of your players is angry with you, it is because he really cares about the game, and that's much healthier for you than apathy. Go with your instincts and make the right decision for your game.
You can't develop an MMO in a traditional game-studio culture
Surprisingly, many of the more high-profile MMO failures were developed by the largest, most well established publishers in the industry. These projects had the benefit of solid financing, large teams, established IPs, and proven development methodologies that had been refined over decades of developing successful games in other genres. What happened? You can certainly make a list of everything that went wrong – the game industry is full of "armchair generals" who would love to do so for you – but ultimately the quality of a game is determined by the development culture that created it, and creating a successful MMO requires a radically different development culture than the culture optimized to produce traditional video games. While these large publishers have refined the process of creating traditional video games to an art, many of them have not yet realized that an MMO requires a completely different development process, and a studio culture to compliment that process.
The defining characteristic of top MMO development teams is their awareness that they are delivering a service, rather than creating a product, and that release day is the beginning of a long-term relationship with their customers, rather than the end of the project. Traditionally, release day is the time to go home, repair your relationship with your spouse or significant other, and sleep for a few days, but the weeks and months following the release of an MMO are the most critical point of your development cycle. It's the time to make it clear to your customers that you will stand by your game, and that their trust in you as the developer will be rewarded. Regardless of your business model, you are asking players to invest hundreds or thousands of hours playing your game, and you need to demonstrate that you are committed to protecting the economy, quickly fixing bugs and exploits, and adding live content. If the entire development team is recovering at the beach in those first critical weeks, you will be unable to demonstrate your willingness and ability to support your game, and your players will be hesitant to invest their time and money with you.
The message is clear: avoid the Big Crunch. I'm not saying that we should expect to work 8-hour days in the weeks leading up to release, but we certainly can't work 16-hour days for six months before release and then expect to sustain that pace over the several-year lifespan of a successful MMO. If you are planning for success, you have to build a sustainable work culture, and you need to establish that culture before release. The work load will not decrease after launch – if anything, it will increase, so build a sustainable work culture and stand by it. It's not just a morale issue – it will have a critical impact on the success or failure of your business.
An MMO must deliver content at three distinct stages: the early game, which is the first twenty hours, the mid game, which is the first few hundred hours, and the late game, which is at a thousand hours and beyond. Each of these stages represents a chance for your game to continue to grow, or to decline and ultimately fail. The traditional QA model is just not equipped to deal with this – there is simply no way to effectively test 1,000 hours of content in the final months of the project, particularly when you are not focused only on bugs, but instead on that hard-to-define feeling of satisfaction that a good MMO provides hour after hour. The only way to ship an MMO into the market and have confidence that it will survive at each of these thresholds is to ensure that your entire team is playing the game, every day, for at least two years before release. That sounds difficult, because you first have to ensure that everyone enjoys playing the game, then allocate time in the development schedule for them to play it, and finally ensure that you actually have something playable two years before release. Despite the difficulties of fully achieving this goal, at ArenaNet we believe that this philosophy was crucial to the success of Guild Wars.
It's crucial to get feedback from outside the development team at a very early stage. We started alpha testing over three years before Guild Wars was released. To say that the game was crude at that point is a bit of an understatement – I think we're still tracking down screenshots from that period and trying to get them burned. It was a very controversial decision at the time, and generated a lot of heated debate within the development team, because it flew in the face of the traditional wisdom that you should never show anyone outside the company what you are working on until it is perfect. I wish I could tell you that every tester we brought into the alpha test was honest, abided by the NDA, and gave the development team carefully-considered and high-quality feedback after each of the tri-weekly play sessions, but that would not be the truth. There were several times after we launched the program that we revisited the notion and discussed whether the good outweighed the bad. But we kept at it, and by the time Guild Wars shipped in April, 2005 it was clear that the game had benefited from the alpha test program, and today we consider it an essential component of the development process.
The primary value of the external alpha test program was that it gave the designers the opportunity to experiment with different ideas and get immediate feedback from the thousand or so external testers. During that time, and to this day, we published between ten and twenty builds a day, and our alpha testers had access to every build. If we introduced a new system or design change into the game, even in crude, first-iteration form, we got immediate feedback on it. This prevented us from spending weeks refining a design that was fundamentally flawed, which in turn freed the development team to be experimental and try new things. I've noticed a similar phenomenon at my son's skate park. The older kids who are too cool to wear helmets and protective pads skate carefully, while the younger kids whose mothers force them to wear protective gear go absolutely crazy hurling themselves down ramps, jumping on rails, and exceeding highway speed limits. Think of having a thousand external testers in the early stages of development as protective gear – it may make you look uncool, but it sure frees you to try some crazy stuff.
All RPGs live or die based on the quality and quantity of their content, and this is even more true for MMOs, since players are expecting thousands, not hundreds, of hours of content. In a state-of-the art, first-person shooter designed to provide fifty hours of play, it makes sense to allocate the programming budget to focus on the latest graphics technologies. In an MMO, your programming budget should skew heavily toward development tools for artists and designers. Some of your content will always require dedicated content programmers with good design sensibilities – and they are a valuable and rare breed indeed – but ultimately your ability to put content generation directly into the hands of your designers and artists is crucial to your ability to generate the amount and quality of content that today's MMO players expect. It has been my experience that traditional development studios tend to assign tools development to their junior-level programmers, while the more seasoned programmers work on graphics or other "sexy" technologies, and I think this is a mistake. The quality of your tools determines the quality of your game, and it also directly impacts the morale of your development team, because nobody wants to spend the next two years building dungeons in a text editor! Invest heavily in your development tools – they will be your most valuable asset.
Don't count on subscriptions
In the early years of the MMO industry, from roughly 1997 to 2001, there were a few big MMOs that had active player populations. By the time we started ArenaNet in the summer of 2000, we knew of at least eighty MMOs that were in development. Based on the success of UO and EQ, publishers were reviewing their portfolios and planning to migrate their existing game franchises to the online world, where they believed they could adopt a subscription model and "make bank". Clearly, it did not work out that way. As more MMOs came into the market, two things changed. First, players now had a choice about which game they would play, and as a result their expectations for polish, content quantity, and service increased substantially. Second, and perhaps more telling for the future of the industry, it became clear that the subscription model forced players to choose a single game, rather than playing many different games.
Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money. This is the legacy of games like Guild Wars, Maple Story, and Silkroad Online, all of which introduced new business models into the MMO genre and were quite successful. The subscription model is still perfectly viable, but the pain threshold is very low now. It's no secret that gamers don't want to pay a subscription fee. If you can convince them that your game offers enough value to justify it, more power to you! But be prepared to defend your decision, often and loudly, and back it up over the lifetime of your game.
Be very aware of the choice you are asking players to make, and the frequency of that choice. In a subscription model you are asking players to make a choice every month, and it is a fairly drastic choice: Stay married, or get divorced? It is certainly the case that if every player decides to stay married every month, you can make more money from each player in the subscription model. But that will rarely be the case, and not something that you should count on. Every month, some percentage of your player base will decide on divorce, and as with marriage in the real word, once you are divorced you rarely get married to the same person again. If you go the subscription route, you'll need to have the confidence that your marriage rate will exceed your divorce rate.
With Guild Wars we ask players to make a choice only one time, and that choice is whether to buy the game, or not to buy the game. While we don't enjoy a recurring revenue stream each month, we do benefit from the fact that most Guild Wars players come back to the game when we release new content, so we are less concerned about players putting the game down for a few months. Players don't have to decide whether to stay married or get divorced, they just have to decide whether they want to play today or not. Beyond the benefit of a lower pain threshold to get into the game, this is the core strength of the Guild Wars business model, and one of the reasons it continues to thrive when many other subscription-based MMOs are struggling.
Innovate with your game play, and innovate with your business model! The two go hand in hand, and are mutually dependent on each other. Decide on your business model first, and then build your game around it. Guild Wars can be successful with its business model because we decided that we would not charge a subscription fee before we wrote the first line of code, and every design and technology decision we made served that purpose. We could never turn Guild Wars into a subscription-based game, just as Turbine could not suddenly decide to eliminate the subscription model for Lord of the Rings Online. If you decide to require players to subscribe to your game, be prepared to build a game that thoroughly justifies it.
Home > Events > Trade And Fan Shows > Games Convention 2007
How to Create a Successful MMO
Hello everyone. My name is Jeff Strain, one of the co-founders of ArenaNet, the studio behind Guild Wars. It was an honor to be asked to speak about the MMO industry today at the GC Developer's Conference, which is among the most influential developer conferences in the world. It's an equal honor to be able to represent the talented team at ArenaNet and be able to convey some of the development philosophies of the world-class designers, artists, and programmers who built Guild Wars. And of course I am honored that those of you sitting here actually took the time to come hear what I have to say. Thank you.
When I initially accepted the invitation to speak today, I provided a generic topic – "The Future of the MMO industry" – because I had not written anything yet, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room to explore different topics. To those of you who chose to come today believing that I would make far-reaching predictions about the games we'll be creating ten years from now, I apologize. The truth is, I hope that I am completely ignorant about what kind of games we'll be making in ten years, because I hope some hotshot kid comes out of nowhere and changes everything out from under us before then. If that doesn't happen, we've all failed to embrace and protect the culture of innovation that made it possible for us to be here in the first place.
I ultimately decided to address something much more relevant to those of us in this room today, and that is what it takes to create a successful MMO in today's crowded and brutal market. The formula is not as simple as it was a few years ago, as the very visible failure of many recent high-profile MMOs makes clear. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I can share some of the beliefs that I and many of my peers at ArenaNet hold based on our experience with Guild Wars. These beliefs are guiding us in the development of Guild Wars 2, so I sure as hell hope we're right!
Most MMOs fail
Don't be fooled by the much-hyped success of the top MMOs on the market. The game industry is littered with the carnage of MMOs that have failed over the past few years. Due largely to the social nature of MMOs, gamers rarely commit to more than one or two MMOs at a time. This is in contrast to the traditional game market, in which there is room for many games to be successful, even within the same genre. You may play ten different action games this year, but you are very unlikely to play more than one or two MMOs. This means that it is not enough to make a great game – instead you must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community and bring that community to your game. In today's market, that is a tall order.
Regardless of the business model, the primary factor that determines whether an MMO lives or dies is the size of its active player base. There appears to be a tipping point at around 150,000 players. MMOs that reach this critical mass within a few months of release tend to continue to grow and thrive, and those that do not tend to shrink and ultimately die. The majority of MMOs that are released into the market never reach this threshold.
This is a tough industry, and only the most committed studios and publishers with solid long-term financial backing should be undertaking MMO development. I can assure you that releasing an MMO into the market before the development team is proud of it will result in writing off every penny invested in its development. The best publishers are willing to give development teams time for polish and balance. In the MMO market, there is simply no other option, and many publishers are not willing to make this commitment.
Guild Wars launched successfully in April 2005, and has done quite well over the past two years. Initially this was largely attributable to its business model, which did away with the customary subscription requirement and made it very easy for new players to give the game a try. Over time, we were able to keep the player population growing by releasing new content and substantial game updates on a regular basis. However, the market today is very different than the market in 2005, and many of the points I will be discussing in this presentation are based on lessons we have learned – often the hard way – with Guild Wars, and that the ArenaNet development team feels are crucial to the success of any new MMO product entering the market today.
An MMO cookbook
I spoke with several game designers while preparing this presentation, and asked them a single question: What does it take to make a successful MMO? I expected to gather a wide range of responses and perspectives, but I was surprised to find that their input largely overlapped. When you take a broad look at the industry, as both a player and a designer, and analyze what worked and what did not work in the MMOs that have entered the market for the last few years, a few essential lessons emerge that can help guide all of us in our MMO design efforts.
Before you start building the ultimate MMO, you should accept that "MMO" is a technology, not a game design. It still feels like many MMOs are trying to build on the fundamental designs established by UO and EQ in the late '90s. In the heyday of Doom and Quake we all eventually realized that "3D" was a technology, distinct from the "FPS," which was a game design. It's time we accepted that for MMOs as well. We are finding ways to overcome many of the limitations of the technology that dictated the early MMO design, such as Internet latency and limited global scalability. These improvements can enable a new class of online games that break out of the traditional MMO mold and explore new territory. It can be a daunting proposition to willfully walk away from what seems to be a "sure thing" in game design, but lack of differentiation is probably the number one reason that MMOs fail, so we all need to leave the comfort zone and start innovating, or risk creating yet another "me too" MMO.
According to James Phinney, lead designer of StarCraft and Guild Wars, every great game starts with one question: "What do I want to play next?". This may seem an obvious statement, but his point is that designers are often asked to make a game that is specifically designed to be "better" than a successful game from a competitor, rather than making a game that is exciting and new. How many designers have been asked to make a "GTA killer", or a "Guitar Hero killer", or a "WoWkiller"? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: "It's like WoW, but..." I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution ofWoW is... well, the WoW team. They've got their thing, and they're good at it. Let's all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you've lost.
When he hears me exhorting developers to innovate, Eric Flannum, the content design lead on Guild Wars and lead designer of Sacrifice, is quick to point out that it's not enough to be different – it also has to be better. His point is that change, just for the sake of change, is not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes designs endure and genres emerge for good reason, and arbitrarily changing things that work just so you can label your game as innovative can lead to failure as quickly as producing a generic also-ran. His point is scary for me, because it's easy for me to look at something and criticize it for being nothing new, but I don't have the design talent to walk the fine line between innovation and alienation. Very few people do, and the ability to do so is the hallmark of a talented designer. While a game can be successful by refining and polishing an established design, most successful games are created with this principal of "structured innovation" and give players a sense of something new and exciting, while still being accessible and familiar.
James Phinney also believes that half of the appeal of an MMO isn't anything we as designers do – it's simply the fact that there are other players, so we should make a world that players want to live in. Scorched badlands can convey a sense of loss, stark alien landscapes are creepy and fascinating, and gloomy dungeons and caverns are the definitive locale for adventure. However, none of these environments will make your players feel a strong sense of place. Dystopia may be exciting, but it's not home. It is a truism that MMOs are all about community, and the success or failure of your MMO will largely be gated by how well the community coalesces and feels a strong sense of place in your world.
The importance of giving players a home was a lesson we learned with Guild Wars. Players start out in the Kingdom of Ascalon, an idyllic, beautiful land of vivid colors and gentle landscapes. Early in the game, Ascalon is destroyed in an event known as the Searing, and players find themselves playing through a blasted, dreary landscape of ruins and mud. While this certainly added a sense of drama and loss to the story, players were upset that they could not go back to Ascalon, because it had become their home in the game. In each new campaign, and even more so with the upcomingEye of the North expansion, we were careful to establish "home" very early and maintain it as a sanctuary for players.
Don't force your players to endure play mechanics they experienced ten years ago. The much-maligned FedEx quest is a classic example of an old-school mechanic that is still manifesting in modern games. Even if you have the best intentions at the beginning of the project to avoid FedEx quests, you will often be stymied by the fact that the FedEx quest is a manifestation of the traditional MMO RPG design, and you can't change the symptom if you are not willing to address the cause. The traditional MMO world is a steady-state machine, much like an episode of the classicStar Trek television series, in which characters, equipment, and the state of the universe had to be reset be the end of the episode. While this design certainly allows for content to be scalable – fetch 20 pig hides, fetch 40 pig hides, kill 10 rats, kill the rat queen – it doesn't allow players to be part of an epic quest, or feel like their actions have a material impact on the world around them. Ten years ago, players were willing to accept this in order to enjoy the benefits of the communal play, but today they expect more.
As a general rule, be nice to your players! With each generation of MMOs, players become less tolerant of being forced to spend time resting after battles to restore health, onerous consequences for dying, the length of time required to level up and reach the mid-game, and high failure rates for activities such as crafting. Early MMOs could be "meaner" because there were fewer choices, but today players have options, so be nice to them.
Don't design an MMO around the assumption that players are a "type" of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like.
Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. A few months before the release of Guild Wars we added computer-controlled henchmen to the game as a way to pad out your party when your friends weren't around. Later we enhanced this feature and introduced computer-controlled Heroes, which gave you control over their actions and more fully supported the notion of playing the game entirely on your own. While it may seem counterintuitive to add features that support the solo play experience into an MMO, we believe that Guild Warswould not have been as successful had we not added these features.
Two-player gaming, or as we call it "buddy gaming", is not a generic case of multi-player gaming, but is instead its own form of play that deserves special attention. Increasingly, MMOs are used as a setting for "real world" social interaction, including dating, spending time with your kids, or hanging out with your best friend or spouse. Just as the real social dynamics in a one-on-one setting greatly differ from the dynamics of a large group setting, the game experience when playing with one person differs from the experience of playing with a group. You can slow down, smell the flowers, discuss what you've seen and what you'd like to do, strategize and assist each other, and communicate on a more sincere level. In short, it's a more intimate form of community, and we should be supporting it explicitly.
Pay close attention to complexity creep. Don't assume that most of your players are reading your website and consuming information about your game. Most of your players will never read your website, never visit fansites, and never participate in forum discussions. We are often immersed in the community forums and rants and raves posted to game fansites, and it is easy to lose perspective about the knowledge level of most of our players. Players who participate in fansites and send six-page emails to your community team are experts at your game – they probably know more about it than you do – so it's important to realize that they do not represent the average player. The vast majority of your players are not digging into every detail of every spell or creating lists of animations so that they can react when they see the basilisk twitch its nose. They want to play, not study, so take care to create a game that allows them to do so.
Film, television, and book franchises are just not good candidates for MMOs. Even MMOs based on the "Big Two" franchises – you know the ones – have not lived up to the expectations of their developers. Today, and historically, the biggest MMOs are based on universes that were created for the purpose of supporting games. MMOs are all about exploration, personal glory, hanging out with friends, and meeting new people. You can't take a universe that was created to support a linear, non-interactive viewing experience that has its own six-volume set of rules and expect a development team to deliver something innovative and fresh within that universe that allows millions of players to be the hero. The best games, MMO or otherwise, are created first and foremost to be games, and the world, story, and setting are there to serve that end, not the other way around. It seems like I hear about a new MMO in development based on a sci-fi or fantasy license every week, and it worries me tremendously. MMOs are expensive, expectations are high, and huge failures will disenfranchise publishers and make life more difficult for new MMO developers. If you want to take a popular movie license and spin out a DS game to support its launch, then go for it – I think that's an appropriate form of media collaboration – but let developers design MMOs that are not constrained by the rules and restrictions of a licensing body.
Finally, you can make everyone happy, but you can't make everyone happy all the time. It is risky to try to make decisions that appeal to all players equally. Don't fall into the trap of making decisions based on what causes the least amount of pain, because this can lead to a game that is just kind of "okay" and doesn't really excite anybody. When you have a large, active, and passionate player base, every decision you make, every change to the game, no matter how convinced you are that it makes the game strictly better, will piss someone off, and they'll post about it, blog about it, rant to the press about it, loudly and publicly predict that this is the "beginning of the end" of your game, and send hate mail to your community and support teams. MMO developers have to have thick skins, but always remember that if one of your players is angry with you, it is because he really cares about the game, and that's much healthier for you than apathy. Go with your instincts and make the right decision for your game.
You can't develop an MMO in a traditional game-studio culture
Surprisingly, many of the more high-profile MMO failures were developed by the largest, most well established publishers in the industry. These projects had the benefit of solid financing, large teams, established IPs, and proven development methodologies that had been refined over decades of developing successful games in other genres. What happened? You can certainly make a list of everything that went wrong – the game industry is full of "armchair generals" who would love to do so for you – but ultimately the quality of a game is determined by the development culture that created it, and creating a successful MMO requires a radically different development culture than the culture optimized to produce traditional video games. While these large publishers have refined the process of creating traditional video games to an art, many of them have not yet realized that an MMO requires a completely different development process, and a studio culture to compliment that process.
The defining characteristic of top MMO development teams is their awareness that they are delivering a service, rather than creating a product, and that release day is the beginning of a long-term relationship with their customers, rather than the end of the project. Traditionally, release day is the time to go home, repair your relationship with your spouse or significant other, and sleep for a few days, but the weeks and months following the release of an MMO are the most critical point of your development cycle. It's the time to make it clear to your customers that you will stand by your game, and that their trust in you as the developer will be rewarded. Regardless of your business model, you are asking players to invest hundreds or thousands of hours playing your game, and you need to demonstrate that you are committed to protecting the economy, quickly fixing bugs and exploits, and adding live content. If the entire development team is recovering at the beach in those first critical weeks, you will be unable to demonstrate your willingness and ability to support your game, and your players will be hesitant to invest their time and money with you.
The message is clear: avoid the Big Crunch. I'm not saying that we should expect to work 8-hour days in the weeks leading up to release, but we certainly can't work 16-hour days for six months before release and then expect to sustain that pace over the several-year lifespan of a successful MMO. If you are planning for success, you have to build a sustainable work culture, and you need to establish that culture before release. The work load will not decrease after launch – if anything, it will increase, so build a sustainable work culture and stand by it. It's not just a morale issue – it will have a critical impact on the success or failure of your business.
An MMO must deliver content at three distinct stages: the early game, which is the first twenty hours, the mid game, which is the first few hundred hours, and the late game, which is at a thousand hours and beyond. Each of these stages represents a chance for your game to continue to grow, or to decline and ultimately fail. The traditional QA model is just not equipped to deal with this – there is simply no way to effectively test 1,000 hours of content in the final months of the project, particularly when you are not focused only on bugs, but instead on that hard-to-define feeling of satisfaction that a good MMO provides hour after hour. The only way to ship an MMO into the market and have confidence that it will survive at each of these thresholds is to ensure that your entire team is playing the game, every day, for at least two years before release. That sounds difficult, because you first have to ensure that everyone enjoys playing the game, then allocate time in the development schedule for them to play it, and finally ensure that you actually have something playable two years before release. Despite the difficulties of fully achievin
Playing now: Cities: Skyline / Ori and the Blind Forest / Banished
The bussiness model was setup to be Buy To Play, all costs are discussed and prepared with NCsoft before production even starts.
People that believe that how the game is marketed, sold, paying methods and so on are decided when the game is released are very naive.
They built the game with this in mind and it will follow a structure.
His complete speech at http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.php
Playing now: Cities: Skyline / Ori and the Blind Forest / Banished
This is the Answer from OP question!,
The game it will be fun to play as Gdesigners told, but to keep interest and daily/weekly patchs and nice servers they need money and they will get it with new payed content (expansions) such as guild wars 1, no surprise about that.
OFC it will be 1000's of WoWfans players talking xit about this game but they are being robbed since years and years, and they even need to pay every expansion (Blizzard knows how to please people and get their pockets full of money..)
That's a very nice quote you have there. And is one of the reasons why I still support Anet. I think they have a very good and honest perspective of the MMO genre, and are willing to do what it takes to make games that work w/ that perspective.
The snippet that Dookz posted is dead on, in my opinon. Gamers are requiring more polish from developers in order to keep their subscriptions. Look at the mmo fiasco of 2009.
AoC, WAR and Aion all released and not one met with a huge success. Aion in Asia being the exception, but it still wasn't nearly as successful in the west. All three games failed to deliver for different reasons, but the bottom line was that each game did not fulfill the promise that is implied when you pay for a subscription.
Who's to say that those games wouldn't have been more successful with a buy 2 play model. Gamers might have been more forgiving of the flaws of each game, and while they might have stepped away from the game, the chances that they would have tried it again months down the road would have probably been greater.
While the non-subscription model doesn't have as great of an earning potential as a subscription model does, the potential to retain or reattain customers is probably higher as the gamer gets more bang for their buck.
Look at how many games the average gamer might purchase throughout the year. Games like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Modern Warfare 2, StarCraft 2, Halo series, Final Fantasy series, all of those mentioned have found much success in box sales. No doubt that a single gamer will own 2 or more of these titles. While there is more of a time investment into a mmorpg, if more mmorpgs were pay once and play forever, you might see the overall population of mmos spread out more with migration from one game to the next based upon content updates.
WoW is an exception, not a rule. Many investors don't really see that simple fact. We may never see another success story like WoW for many, many years...if ever.
Honestly I don't really see a downside. I'm not saying it will be perfect, but I've been impressed with everything I've read and watched about it so far. I still play Guild Wars 1 off and on. It's been one of my favorite MMOs to date and after everything I've seen going on with GW2 I think I will be far from disappointed.
I disagree with the fact that there is no subscription fee being the downside. It's far from it. It's not like any f2p game where you create an account and later on figure out you are most likely going to have to depend on the item mall for access to more content, or items that will allow you to be a good contender in pvp. If you take a look at the store for Guild Wars1 it's things like character slots, costumes, and the ability to buy a digital version of Guild Wars 1, and all of the expansions. You can also at times upgrade your game to a game of the year edition. See the difference?
Just about every negative thing I've heard seems to be from people that probably have not even bothered to read up on it or even watch a few videos. I've heard things like,
"Oh it's just a WoW clone."
to,
"It's nothing but graphics the gameplay is just like any other f2p grinder that's out right now."
Guild Wars 2 is a step in the right direction for MMOs in my opinion. Some of the things they are doing are pretty ground breaking. I know there are probably other game developers that claim or have claimed to have a lot of the features Guild Wars 2 will have, but were they done well? I'm willing to bet not.
Guild Wars 1, Jade Dynasty, King of Kings III
"Servers and bandwith are cheap, but not free, once someone has bought a copy of the game they are a liability, not an asset."
The players are assest in the stock market where you can convince the investors that you can make good games and promise a reasonable return. The money aren't just coming from sales, which most of the people analyzing ArenaNet assumes.
Ready for GW2!!!
Two downsides for me (and im definitely in the minority here) are the instant travel to known waypoints and the ability use the auction house outside the game. To me, that hurts immersion and the ingame community. Both of which are important (again, to me) elements in a mmorpg.
edit:make that 3 downsides. Just read that player housing is instanced. Thats a downer
downsides?
making room on my compy for both games =-)
its not out yet! =-)
not being able to spring for multiple copies for my friends! =-)
=-)
The travel thing sounded like a downer for me too when I got the original GW but you'll get use to it fast and it has some advantages. Besides, there are no mounts in the game so running everywhere would be a bother.
Using the action house ofline sucks to me too but I guess it is for the dweebs who want to check out things on their Iphone every 5 minutes.
Instanced player housing is bad but I still havn't seen a good way to handle non instanced housing. Well, maybe SWG were close to good but to get that into a game like GW2 would be almost impossible. I like to see it myself but I don't think it is worth all the job, there are other more important things. I am happy enough to get my own house.
Okay reading through all these posts and gathering info I still feel like the DE system sounded better before we saw video and started learning more about it.
Now from what i gather Even though they are supposed to be dynamic and make the world change it sounds like they still just reset once you do one.
So to me the bad is going to be yeah you get all these DE's but once you done them it is going to be the same old thing in that same spot as before. Where reading the blog on GW2. com made it sound like if you kill off the bandits attacking that was it they wouldn't come back knowing that they will come back just destroy's my hype for this game by a ton.
Now if it did work where you defeat the bandits burning the hay stack and then that opened up another even where you can now raid there base of operations and completely wipe them out and that is the end of those bandits. That was the impression i got from reading the on the site if they will just come back another day and have the same event over again That don't seem very dynamic to me.
Now on another note i still plan on buying the game but i'm just saying My Hype has gone way way down with the thought that these events keep happening over and over again. To me dynamic means always different. Not random outcomes but the same thing is going to be happening in this spot again in a couple days. Same bandits coming back to burn the hay again. That defy's there living world if they keep happening over and over.
Yeah on the hosing note talking about SWG it was a good system but what happened is every one complained the worlds were huge and empty. But imagine if that game would have had wow like subs and all that empty space on the planets was filled with player owned cities. That is why the planets were so open and barren so they would get filled up with player cities but alas it didn't get those numbers so everyone thought the planets were huge and boring and empty and the devs were lazy by not filling the planets up with stuff.
They were supposed to get filled with player cities that you could than raid in open pvp. Was a great system just implemented poorly by SoE.
the problem with that, is then we would run out of things to do as a whole. new gamers would be dumbfounded by the fact that there is no dynamic events at all. so makeing us able to wipe out anything makes it bad for the playerbade in general. so from what i gather they have found the perfect system that causes loops rather then resets.
I see the problem with it working like that but that in itself kinda takes the Dynamic out of it. I do believe this is still better than the norm. But the events them self are still pretty static if you think about it. Sure it progress along but in the end that same event will be taking place in the exact same place again soon.
Some asked what the downfall is or the bad part and in my eyes this is it. Like I said I still think it will be better than the normal mmo concepts but if you really think about it. The events are kinda static.
well i know i would play though those "static" events a million times and still have fun
It seems to me that the DE system is sort of a revolving door system. Defeat the centuars in a village, now you have quests that involve unearthing a piece of dark history in the village, that leads to some events that have you kill spies, the spies lead to backlash from another group, that group is allied with centaurs, centuars raid the village and the cycle repeats. each section of the event hovers there until someone comes along and bumps it to the next part of the cycle. that sounds more realistic as far as DE system to me.