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General: AGC Panel: Running Your Own MMO
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Jon Wood sat in on a panel about "Runing Your Own MMORPG" with several independent developers. Here is what was said:
| Independent companies making MMORPGs. Its one of those things that we all talk about and we all want to see happen. For one, its always nice to feel like gamers are giving our money to a small company and not some giant faceless corporation, people also like the level of interaction you get from small-studio devs that you cant always get from the big guys. The panel discussion I attended today focused on just that niche, small independent studios who make MMORPGs.
The aptly named The Joy of Running Your Very Own MMO panel consisted of moderator Bill Money of Iron Will Games (Ashen Empires), and panelists David Reese who is also a part of Iron Will, Brian Green of Near Death Studios (Meridian 59) and Adam Ghetti of Rapid Reality (The Chronicle, Africa). In the case of Near Death and Iron Will, very small teams run and maintain their respective games with small subscriberships, while Rapid Reality, with a development team of 45 was by far the largest although neither of their in-development games has hit store shelves. |
Jon's report is here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Yes - who hasn't thought they could do a better job than WoW, or as in my case, City of Heroes. I was one of the early forum loyalists who stuck with CoH during 3 years of development, adding and refining ideas of what we comic heroes wanted in our perfect game. In combination, we probably spent orders of magnitude more time thinking through our perfect game than Cryptic did, at least judging by how rich our vision was when compared to the game that they ended up with. (Sorry guys.)
Which leads me to ask - why no open source MMORPGs? There are a lot of open source tools out their for game AI, rich 3d graphic systems, etc. I think all that's missing is a publisher to create all the content development tools, get them out there, filter and edit the results, and host the game(s). It's gotta happen eventually - why not Ashen or Near Death?
Jon Wood reports "All in all, it was interesting to hear the different .."
Gosh wow. It's great that you managed to hear interesting things, but could we have more reporting on what those interesting things were rather than reports that you heard them.