Bad News for Bioware fans

I've got a few friends who are really looking forward to the Knights of "The Old Republic" MMO from Bioware. I warned them not to get their hopes up too high since EA is now in charge.

Sure enough, EA has put Paul Bennett in charge of Creative Director for Bioware-Mythic. Yes, coming over from the greatly successful MMO studios of EA (what MMO didn't they sink?) and coming on board for the slowly sinking ship that is WAR (recently laying off massively in their QA and customer service departments as per my prior blog entry) is now in charge of Creative development. Because when you're a big egotistical manager for a hugely egotistical corporation like EA or SOE you always take your failed managers and promote them on to your new great endeavors.

Head for the link to read more of this creative vision that he is bringing or enforcing on Bioware.

Paul Bennett: The concept of there being MMOs is probably dead. There are just games. There's online games, and very soon there will just be games. They will all be online anyway. I don't think there's an MMO any more. I think there's online games and there's online revenue, and they're sort of going to combine.

Tip of the Hat to Broken Toys

Update note: I guess the working title of the new MMO is simply "The Old Republic" and the 'Knights of' is not part of it.

Ramblings on Game Industry

Time for another intermission from the terrain fest.

Brad McQuaid has another new blog entry on how Sigil failed with its Vanguard MMO launch. I'm glad he has noticed that the MMO industry is WAY too caught up in its developer's egos. I think it is standard in most U.S. corporations for the managers and execs to have super bloated egos but in the MMO industry it seems to filter right on down to the Janitor as well. I won't name names but having worked at 3 different .com websites that covered the MMO industry... I interviewed and and met a number of developers who just couldn't get over themselves. As a QA professional I've ground into many people many times that "The customer isn't always right, but you give them what they want anyways because they pay for your sorry ass to to have a job". Like having a paycheck? Make sure your customer is happy.

Of course I believe it would help if the MMO industry and a lot of other game companies put a lot more resources into Quality Assurance. A lot of failures (including WotC's Dreamblade which I was a contractor for) just didn't test their stuff enough before throwing it out to customers.

Another BIG problem with game developers is that not enough of them play their own game. A lot of the already mentioned egotistical MMO developers were horrible for it. They had this great theoretical expertise about game development... but they didn't play their game and didn't see problems which would be obvious to someone who did for a couple minutes. If you can't enjoy the game you're making, then you're working on the wrong project or maybe in the wrong industry.

Though maybe I shouldn't talk too much. I'm still unemployed and looking for work. At least my housing issues are settled for now with the landlord deciding he didn't want to go to court and settling for letting us stay in our place. Which is why I can enjoy my unemployment a little less stressfully and put out some new articles soon on terrain making.

MMO Post-Mortem

Speaking of MMOs I quit, here is one I never started because the launch was so awful: Vanguard

Brad McQuaid the designer of Vanguard and chief guy at Sigil Games now has a blog and is starting a series where he analyzes the mistakes they made.

Why I quit MMOs

Getting a good number of company contacts but few interviews and no job offers so far. Hopefully something gives soon, and likely it will be a game company as they are the main companies hiring right now that I'm applying for.

I've kind of quit beta testing the MMO I've been playing. Not because the game is bad, but because some combat changes made it not fun to really test my main character and totally invalidated and made pointless my main alt. It is both good and bad for the game when it releases, but I just don't have the heart to put the work in to try and make the changes work in their current form.

But I did think I'd talk about why I quit prior MMOs I've played:

• Anarchy Online - quit this game due to a dying roleplay community, being harassed by one of their volunteers, and the tediousness of trying to advance my main character at all.
• Neocron - Develops decided to punish all their customers because a few exploited things they didn't like. Some of the exploiters were aided and abetted by GMs (wittingly or unwittingly) and it just made PvP not any fun to be beaten by exploits repeatedly.
• Saga of Ryzom - Despite a lot of warnings they went ahead with patches that destroyed a lot of people's characters and made the game unplayable. They didn't roll back the disaster either and I was among the people leaving in droves.
• World of Warcraft - Left because of drama with the immature community, being stuck raiding for character advancement, then having that raid gear completely redesigned at Blizzard's whim after working hard for it.
  
• Horizons - Bad company took over and killed it for me. The community died and there isn't enough storyline or interesting things to do for me to jump back into their second Tier character advancement. Plus frankly, it is hard going back to those graphics, glitches and sound effects after playing LotRO.
  
• Lord of the Rings Online - Mines of Moria killed it for me by completely screwing up their combat mechanics, redefining the role my chosen class played and making the endgame content both easy and pointless. Don't get me started on how they drove me away from their version of PvP.

I think the main lesson to learn is don't screw up why your customers are there. Don't do the Neocron, always be nice to your customers. Have something challenging and meaningful for when your characters have maxed out casual character advancement. Don't massively overhaul game content once you've launched it if people are still using it, it can be very upsetting. Don't sell your company the moment it starts to make a profit, and don't buy it from someone if the game has just changed around unless you're willing to put A LOT into it.

When you're a developer thinking about how game changes will impact the customer, use the Golden Rule.

Don't let your ego get in the way of doing what is Smart.

The Political Game.

The first Presidential debate is now over so I can blog at last. I had my priorities this evening. Speaking of which if you follow this blog you should also be reading GamePolitics. Have you figured out who to vote for to preserve the right to play the games you like? Have you been playing The Political Machine to see who will win in November? It seems my games of Obama and McCain keep coming down to Ohia and Michigan, can't win without them.

I've been doing some more resurgent MMO playing lately. My wife has been playing LotRO again sporadically and I've been playing Saga of Ryzom now that it is free to play. Free is a very good price for this MMO. It had a lot of features that were very promising for roleplayers, but in the end it remains a hall of broken promises and missing content. The mechanics are neat, but grinding gets old and you can choose to do that in any game. Never the less if you like MMOs you should check it out because there are numerous features that many good MMOs should copy from it. They have a great way of avoiding the class sytem and an interesting take on skills. Their faction system has a nifty way of gaining loyalty with factions... they just need some real incentives for actually doing so. The difference between a faction that totally loves you and one that is neutral is ... nothing. None the less you can grind it for the sake of seeing numbers scroll on your computer screen. I'll continue playing it while its free but I wouldn't pay anything for it in its current state. Say "Hi" to the lonely Pilgrim guild leader Svayvti if you stop by, the last Pilgrim leader of Atys.

I had a good post-PAX match up of Anima: Tactics at my friendly local games store (FLGS). My Church force Vs. Church Inquisitors Vs. Dark side. You can see me and the dark side player going at it to the right here. However, now that I've got the Konosuke figure from PAX... I've changed my playing allegiance to Samael for the time being. People seem to be down on them but I've found they can really put the hurt on. I've had one 300 point game with them and won it handily while still learning to field a Samael force. Good things appear to be in store with this force so lets hope we can really stir up a lot of local interest in this game.

In VOR news I haven't gotten any good games in lately with Scott and to a lesser degree myself being fairly busy. There is however a new Golden Growler contest going on. My wife took second place at the last one and I'm glad in this one we won't be directly competing. She is doing a Diorama entry for the Diorama contest and I'm doing a special character entry for the special character contest. Can you guess which special character I'm going to bring to life? For a harder question guess what Kirara's diorama will be of... You can see a picture of the fantastic trophies that Merc created. Will there be more good Shard entries? Last time I was totally impressed with Balrog's Shard Axion and thought is should have won first place. I hope we get more Shard entries ths time.

On the subject of RPGs, I've got yet another new RPG to try out. This one is the Chronices of Ramlar "Revised edition". The setting is classic fantasy, but the system mechanics are very intriguing and completely oriented towards hardcore roleplaying that I like. Tomorrow they have a RPG day at my FLGS and I'll see if I can poach some roleplayers to try and get a group going. Expect to hear a good deal more about Ramlar in the future. Shadowrun 4th edition continues to disappoint and their 20th anniversary is focusing on the failed Earthdawn crossovers rather than anything truly good and original from 1st edition. Smith & Tinker, please, please don't let me down in my hopes for a good Shadowrun game. Just trust Mike Mulvihill and Jordan Weisman because they made 1st and 3rd editions rock.

I'm getting back into the swing of applying for regular employment. Some of the jobs I'm well qualified for just look too boring. Would I like to make good money working in a boring downtown job for a soda distributor or dare I hold out for something interesting but less lucrative like game testing or working for government environmental consultants? I've inquired into both and potentially may have something next week involving contract work for Microsoft. We'll see what happens. Any ways it goes, my twice a month blog schedule I have going probably won't be impacted.

Peace and Fragging Happiness to you.