Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.Paraphrasing a discussion of Second Life and other online fun:
A> So virtual sex is twisted and strange, but virtual killing is good clean fun? This country is messed up.
B> Virtual killing is great because no one really dies. Virtual sex is stupid because no one really gets laid. See the difference?
: Zubon
After I read about Kotick’s comments here and then commented on the insanity here
I was still pretty stunned for a few days, as were a lot of other people I know in the game industry.
At another conference, this time the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Kotick has made more eyebrow raising comments. My skype went nuts over the last day or so as everyone has been sending me the links hah. Gamesindustry.biz reports a few of his comments, but I wonder if Kotick isn’t doing a technology and investing roadshow, hitting all of the influencers…with the same speech. So far, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Think about that for a minute.
Anyway, he has already declared that you need to spend $500M-$1B to effectively compete with World of Warcraft (total bullsh**) or at least be commercially successful. Now, he is saying that conversations with Blizzard has Activision thinking about a Call of Duty MMO (bad idea! bad!) which will probably cost…how much? My psychic mind powers give me a strong sense that the budget will be something insane, and will directly impact Activision shareholders (or Actiblizzion, whatever they call the merged venture). Even more mind boggling, is that he implies that Blizzard’s “take away” from the brainstorming conversations was (and this is a direct quote):
“about how Starcraft – as a short session experience – can actually be the model for in-game advertising and sponsorship and tournament play and ladder play for the future.”
Uhm, wow. I’m beginning to see where all this is going. I wonder how long before Blizzard/Vivendi starts feeling some serious buyer’s remorse. I don’t have an opinion of the staff at Activision, but my impression of Kotick is rapidly going down the toilet and based on his comments (granted, I didn’t hear them first hand and I don’t have the full transcript of his talk), I think we are beginning to see early red flags for the future of the company.
Sure, Blizzard is the king of the hill now, and World of Warcraft is great, but can they really follow through with people like Kotick being thrown into the mix? How many of the original designers and developers that worked on WoW are even around any more (remember the exodus with all the new MMO studios being founded by ex-blizzard WoW employees that all had critical contributions to the game?).
Look at NCSoft…they used to be the king of the hill too, but it only takes a few missteps for the whole house of cards to tumble.
My advice to Blizzard: Caveat emptor.
I am one of 35 people in the world who liked the original ending of Evangelion. I think it takes the internal perspective on the external events shown in the (first hour of the) re-done version. One notable bit in those episodes is that Shinji is given infinite potential, a blank slate. And he rejects it. He needs a line, ground to walk upon, something to give him bearings. Alone in the void, he has nothing meaningful to do.
Many people reject Second Life because there is nothing to do. Wait, that can’t be right, you can do whatever you want, from swordfighting to interior design. There is just no reason to unless you already want to. Second Life does not have quests or monsters or levels to push you in some direction. You make of your universe what you will, in interaction with others doing the same. That is a lot of responsibility to bear, especially if you are looking for simple fun. (Also, the interface kind of sucks.)
A recent book I read was on the problem of evil. A partial answer I recall from a college text was the need for an “Irenaean environment”: without danger, we would not grow. One similar atheistic perspective holds that a being with no threats to itself has no reason to do anything. If there is no goal to potentially fail in your sandbox game, how long until people get bored and wander off?
So we start with a line. You are level one, and you have an experience point bar. Fill that bar and you reach two. You have a direction, and a goal at the end. We even have some new lines for you to follow at the end of that one. Small risks of failure along the way hide the fact that you cannot lose at World of Warcraft. There are things that want to eat you, and people with exclamation points asking if you would kindly do things. Far from a blank slate of imagination, you now have a clear, channeled path.
But I guess you can win now.
: Zubon
Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American writer and game designer, best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson, and co-founding the company Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye in 1974. Gygax is generally acknowledged as the father of the role-playing game.
On March 4th, the Associated Press confirmed reports of Gygax’s passing that originally were made by Troll Lord Games, a small role playing game company Gygax had been working with. He had been in poor health, suffering multiple strokes and a near-heart attack.
– Ethic
Quest Online is proud to announce its redesigned web site for its upcoming (2009) MMO. If you want to see what the game looks like two years into development, the link shall guide you. If you check “Races & Classes” under “Game Design,” the source of the above image, you can read about two of the races. They hope to have some class information up this year. Our friend below comes from the more-filled-out World History section. 
: Zubon
Creatrix Games is making Lila Dreams, a side-scrolling 2D MMO with a flash interface, to be published on Kongregate. No levels, free to play with ads and microtransactions. The setting is inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl.
The Lila Dreams link is to the development blog. I have not read everything there yet, but I must say this is a different approach to MMOs. Let’s celebrate trying new things and see where it leads later this year.
: Zubon
HT: Terra Nova
Reaching into new parts of the Orange Box, I had my first taste of Half Life (2) ever this weekend. Yeah, I’m a bit behind the times, but is the gameplay supposed to be this dull? The game world is beautifully done, but I feel like I’m playing House of the Dead or something, except that I have more freedom to look around as I follow the one possible path. It looks like a big city, but it really is just a decorated alley that twists around a lot. It is twisty, but it is still a tube. Oh, and there are things shooting at me.
I found that silly in Portal’s escape section. It made sense for the levels to have one forced path: it is a puzzle game, and the Aperture enrichment course is a course. Go from A to B, you win! And then you get behind the scenes … and still have one forced path, still with convenient signs along the way. This only makes sense if that is still a part of the course, one that is designed to look like everything has gone wrong.
We hate MMOs with invisible walls, unclimbable hills, and impenetrable forests. They are the wallpaper that poorly hides the theme park nature of a world that pretends to be larger. And some of them have parts with the same problem: not only is there a single possible path, but the decoration is clutter that makes it really annoying to find the one possible path.
Maybe the series gets better. I hear that it has a great story, while others enjoy shooting masses of aliens. The gravity gun sounds fun. But if we are still at the point of making games that run from A to B with no meaningful choices, we might as well keep making them 2D games where we run left to right. The prettier they get, the clearer it is that we have all this great technology and nothing to do with it.
: Zubon
I have deliberately waited a month to see if not having one of these as a recent post reduces the amount of WoW porn searches reaching us. If so, February’s searches will have fewer tentacles. And if not, oh well. We’ll find out next time! But first, what dirty dirty things led you to Kill Ten Rats in the first month of the year?
Can Spore possibly meet expectations? With all that I hear, it should be Sim City, Civilization, Master of Orion, and whatever games the first two phases are. The fanboy backlash could be horrifying if it does not actually cause the Rapture.
: Zubon
I woke up this morning and was stunned to see an article on gamesindustry.biz where the CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick, is quoted as saying some pretty insane things at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium earlier this week.
“We don’t think that even if we made the USD 500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [to compete with WOW] that we would even be successful doing it,”
This is ludicrous on a massive scale and demonstrates that Kotick (and by association, Activision) literally has no clue when it comes to MMORPGs. Spending 500M to a billion dollars on a single MMORPG would have the same level of historic stupidity and waste as the Atari E.T. game (if you don’t know about that, look it up). Not only that, but for a company like Activision to spend that much, it would pretty much guarantee its sheer and absolute failure on an epic scale. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to create a MMORPG with a tenth of that amount and be competitive with WoW (and profitable).
“When we first started looking at it, it appeared to us like a game in an insurmountable product category… EA, Microsoft, Sony and scores of venture capital investments had been put to work unsuccessfully in trying to develop massively multiplayer games as a product opportunity,”
Why is that, do you think? The problem is the management of those companies, old misconceptions of what an MMORPG is or how to make one, and a lot of really, really bad design. Why is it that the companies that are most successful in the MMORPG space are the small or independent developers working with original IP? Why is it that the big publishers screw things up when they acquire these developers, or they throw massive amounts at a game that is just craptastic and then either cancel it or blame someone else on the failure?
“When you… Look at all the money that’s already gone to these businesses that have failed, there didn’t seem a likelihood that even a well-managed company like Activision would have the prospect for profit any time soon in this category.”
Oh, please. This was a pretty narcissistic and arrogant comment. “even a well-managed company like Activisionâ€, bah! Considering a half billion for an MMORPG is not well-managed at all. You might as well be smoking the money in the bathroom. My advice to Kotick…if you want to make money on an MMORPG, give your money to someone that knows what they are doing. It isn’t hard making a MMORPG profitable if the people making it are halfway intelligent and not monkey drones working in your generic game development factory.
Ok, so why am I so pissed about this? The audience that Kotick was talking to was the attendees of a technology investment symposium. If any of those people were looking at investing in game developers or funding new MMO ventures or even financing publisher expansion, Kotick just made it look like anything related to MMORPGs was a fat waste of time and not worth the risk. He single-handedly spit in everyone’s eye and effectively torpedoed someone’s chances at getting funding. This will have a subtle backlash effect on gamers too. If it is harder to find funding for new titles, you will see fewer games, less innovation (in a market where there is barely any to start with), and more games based on dumb Hollywood licenses (the argument being that a license lowers risk). Even worse, his comments have hit the press now and will probably hit mainstream market analysis and research reports.
Great job Kotick. Thanks a lot. I’ll be sure and dedicate my next MMORPG design project to you. I hope you don’t get punched in the face by an independent studio exec at the next game conference.
Speaking of which…this is an open request to everyone in the industry out there…if you have a funding pitch that gets nerfed because of Kotick’s asinine comments, please let me know.
Kotick, I think you owe us an apology and a retraction or at least a damn good (and detailed) explanation at why you think it would take $500-$1B to compete with WoW, and why you think MMORPGs are an “insurmountable product categoryâ€. Who has been feeding you your information?