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LEGO Universe: Former Lead Developer Says Never Again
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Former lead developer for LEGO Universe, Ryan Seabury, has penned an open letter outlining three reasons he will never develop another MMO again. Seabury cites the necessity of "social features" as a drawback as well as too-long development timelines and creative exhaustion as instrumental in his decision to avoid MMO development in the future.
I simply realized there actually hadn't been an "MMO game" to get out of for at least two, three years. It's no longer a meaningful label. Point at any significant entertainment experience trending today, you won't be able to find one without some kind of social feature layers and persistent aspects. No one cares if something is "single player" or "multi player" or "massively multiplayer" anymore. We have come to a point where the game concept trumps such insignificant bullet points, and global social connectivity is a given.
Read more at Kotaku.
Comments
I hope he eats his own words. Likening "social feature layers" and "persistent aspects" to what is meant when you say "Massively Multiplayer". This is a industry trend which has diluted the meaning of massively multiplayer.
Battlefield 3 is coming out later this year and is advertising 32v32 multiplayer maps. Guess what? 64 people in a single location with common goals beats out most "Massively Multiplayer" games nowadays like WoW which limits raid sizes to 25-players and the largest PvP instance is 40v40. So if "Massively Multiplayer" is now 80 people tops, and "Regular Multiplayer" is 64 people tops, so 25% more players constitutes massive?
I think quite the complete opposite from Ryan Seabury. The problem isn't that single player games are closing the gap with their social features and persistent aspects. It's that Massively Multiplayer games have started turning back into single player games.
What I would agree to, is that if you are making a game which is centered around groups of people no larger than say 32, then don't even bother marketing it as a MMO, cause single player games already got you beat. So the large development times, subscription model and huge money sink isn't paying off cause DUH you just developed a single player game under the flag of a massively multiplayer game and are expecting MMO subs and MMO players... shame on you.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Hmm..Overall It sounds like mr Lego Creator has a grudge that hes LEGO Vision failed big time..
Well..To bad !!
But the game Isn't that great, he could have found that out by playing it I guess
Can't say he's wrong. Working on an MMO will suck you dry. I'll be out of college soon and will take any job I can get, but I'd honestly prefer it not be an MMO. I get to hear way too many horror stories from professors who work while teach, and it doesn't sound pretty.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Sounds like burn out syndrom.
Isn't this a good thing? Aren't we glad to be "past the newness of mmos" and into content? Shoud a flying car sell more than a '95 lincoln if the flying car can't steer well, brake at all, and sometimes explodes?
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Hear hear good sir/madam!
Sounds like he's burned out from doing an mmo, even when people play solo in mmo's there not playing the game as a single player because the interating with banks/auctions seeing other players running round knowing their not just NCP's, so when people who group together looking down at people who solo and asking why play alone, their not actually playing alone. Have you ever gone for a walk around your local town or village? Do you see others walking around which makes you feel that your not alone? Now think about the same scenario, but everyone around you is a dummy and static, you would then get the feeling your alone....So even playing solo in any mmo, you know there is lots of real humans behind those characters, that's the difference in playing mmo's to single player games or on servers where it's 32v32, with mmo's it's on a grander scale and alot more fun. Even if you don't group, you know your around alot of other people on those servers.
I sympathize with him. Listening to the tales of woe from developers, and hearing the lamentation of their women, I can only imagine working on an MMO project would be a living nightmare.
That said, some of it is the fault of the game development industry as a whole. Compared to normal business programming, the project management in game development is largely attrocious. That's why you hear about year long crunches, and the like. 99% of which could be avoided.
Sounds to me like he's burnt out because they've put out three MMOGs that have been looked at as failures by their producer, and he really just doesn't get it... He's probably better off then.
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Member Since March 2004
He also feels it's a good thing, that was his point. He's trying to say that gamers in general no longer look for specific genres of games such as mmo's /arena etc we now judge games on their content.
Personally I'm not so sure and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Imo it's not that mmo fans are blind to the restrictions of the genre or that we moan for the sake of it, there is simply a difference about playing in a living world (true these are becoming a more and more rare occurance but that's largely due to investors and devs reading of the marketplace, hence this artical's existance), it's not about having 4000+ players on the screen at any given time it's about sharing a changing gamespace with those 4000+ players. And having 64 players concurrently running essentially the same scenarios again and again, no matter how well that's done there is still only 64 players and little to no eveolution of the game itself.
As it stands I'm no more certain than anyone else whether this is a case of a self fulfilling profecy or simply the truth. If good/well funded/experienced devs only make a certain kind of game then of course eventually as the marketplace becomes more and more dominated with these types of new mmo's then more and more people are playing these types of games. New gamers to the market arn't about to start off with 6-10 year old games, they start with the existing new games that's obvious, but at the same time I think it's pretty telling that those 6-10+ year old games still pull a profit.
The points he brings up in the artical are extremely well thought out from someone with a top rate experience in the industry. There must be a better way to develop games than his experience as of late, he does sound largely burnt out and it will be interesting to see how his vision goes from there. I think a large part of it is pointing towards the social media games as it's seen by many as a massive largely untapped market so it makes sense but personally I'm not sure, he obviously knows better than me though.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
LOL. OMG. Everyday MMOs got some news and it has the buzz word "WoW". I'm getting sick of that too ><
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
Hmm if you have seen how confined the social aspects of the lego MMO are you can probably understand his frustration (they have to be extremely kiddie safe obviously) however tarring all MMO's with the brush he dipped in the lego MMO is hardly fair since the target audience and game design of lego universe deviates massively from most MMO's.
What a tool. Nobody cares what you have to say when youre quitting. Anything you say just makes you sound bitter and burnt.
Sadly you didn't even read the entire thing and whatever he wrote is true and relevant. Anywyas, you calling him a tool is very ironic.
I did read it, thanks for sharing.
Your post, while small and maybe easy for most to overlook. is on the whole so true that I wish I could sticky it to the login screen of this site. Everyone should read and re-read it until it sinks in, especially the observation that,
"The problem isn't that single player games are closing the gap with their social features and persistent aspects. It's that Massively Multiplayer games have started turning back into single player games."
I would add to your focus on the numbers involved that specifically it is the trend towards "The Hero" focus rather than the one-of-many weaklings struggling to fight in an undefeatible world that is also the issue with today's game. Both in storyline and in playstyle there is little reason to band together (other then for the sake expediency). Each individual can do it all. Each individual is the Hero -- not the team. Being a hero as an end-game is a possibly good concept. Being the storyline's "Hero" all the way through from beginning to end? That's boring. That's single player gaming. Stop it already DEVS! STOP IT!
Good response. I hope he sees it.
I think the comment that caught my eye was the one about releasing lots of Alpha builds and hoping some stick to the wall, rather than full development on one build that is then rejected by the customers.
If that's the answer for long development lead time, we are in for Atari E.T. - level sucktitude.
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Pro tip: ~Leave with grace and never burn bridges on your way out~
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
So developer from a studio that has largely struck out in every attempted endevour now says MMO's aren't worth making
Yeah, like I care.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Part of what he writes I can understand. How those long projects have the risk of burning the creativity out of you. I always wondered about that. For example how they keep developers at Arenanet so enthousiastic about the upcoming GW2. They have been busy with it day after day for 5 years already. Thats incredibly long for one game.
I also understand how it can be difficult to determine what the market wants in 5 years. You start a high fantasy MMO, but at the time it releases, there have been 10 other released in the years before you and players are temporarily bored with the genre or your game is not different enough so your title misses the moment.
On the other hand, other companies do succeed. Maybe the difference is that you have to keep an eye on market changes for your MMO to succeed. I wonder if there were succesfull developers that changed their game during development due to market reasons. Or left some things out (without letting fans know it was planned to be in of course) to be able to put it out on the market in time while still being polished.
Maybe its the connection with the fanbase that those new MMO developers cant cope with. It needs a new kind of information management I think from MMO developers.
I never got the whole "5 year development thing".
The newer games look all the same. They have similar interfaces and graphics and most of the concepts are the same.
Seems like the companies are spending most of their time designing rediculously spiky armor and uselessly detailed character generators that are made null and void by the fact that the only time you will ever see your character in such detail is on when you are creating it. And then they spend an enormous amount of time making "content"
The content in most cases consists of quests text that noone ever reads cause we see at a glance that we need to kill 10 rats or the interactables are highlighted for us. Then there is the raiding content that is over designed for what it does and goes stale on the second playthrough. By now its even stale on the first playthrough cause its all just a rehash of whats come out in the past 5 years.
Big companies have almost no capacity for original thought. And even less inclination to gamble on it.
Back to my point though.. It seems that developers are spending too much of those 5 years with a huge design staff that are there to make a tried and true formula with a little bit of innovation look good and look innovative, when its not. When they could have spent most of those 5 years with a tiny staff thinking up new concepts and ideas.
And if you start programming the final engine and graphics from day one you are gonna end up with something that looks 5 years old at launch.
He is tottaly right on most points.
Its a nightmare. You develop the game for 5 years. And than it dies in a month.
That is what happens to most of MMORPGs nowdays.
Whoever is developing one now must be either crazy , or they have game changing idea.
I can totaly believe that developers get burned out during the creation of an MMO. As a writer I view a 100,000 word book (aka 300 or so pages) to be similar to making a single player game. Now if you were to create a 1,000,000 word book that'd be like making an MMO. Its easy to see how those guys and gals get burned out. I also feel they earn their money when they make an MMO and it is always saddening to see MMOs fail becuase you know how much work went into them.
THIS is what's wrong with modern MMO developers today. They see the social aspect of the game as a burden to be tolerated rather than a vital and important component of any MMO.