What Next Blizzard?

With the announcement of Diablo 3 as Blizzards next major game release, and with a distinct lack of MMOness in the feature list for Diablo 3, there’s a whole new world of speculation ready to erupt.

My recent guess that Blizzard was going to use the Diablo IP as the basis for their next MMORPG missed the mark. It’s highly unlikely that a Diablo MMORPG will be developed concurrently with Diablo 3, especially since Diablo 3 is still probably a year to eighteen months away — I did read some speculation that the release would be Halloween 2009.

The same applies to the Starcraft IP. I believe Starcraft 2, while it hasn’t been given a release date, isn’t all that far off. I expect it to be out sometime before the end of the year. Given that Blizzard would want to make all the mileage it can on Starcraft 2, and that the original Starcraft is still very popular in some regions, it’s unlikely Blizzard will be working concurrently on a Starcraft MMORPG.

So where does that leave us?

Aside from the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises, Blizzard has produced several other IPs. (source: Wikipedia)

• RPM Racing — 1991
• Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess — 1991
• The Lost Vikings I & II — 1992 & 1995
• Rock n’ Roll Racing — 1993
• Shanghai II: Dragons Eye — 1994
• Blackthorne — 1994
• The Death and Return of Superman — 1994
• Justice League Task Force — 1995

Since 1995 — Warcraft was released in 1994 — the only titles that Blizzard has produced have been from their big three properties.

I honestly don’t see Blizzard returning to any of their old titles for inspiration for their new MMORPG. Well… maybe Rock n’ Roll Racing Online could be a goer, but then again…

I figure there are two possibilities.

The first is that Blizzard invents a totally new property. I can see this happening. After so many years working on the same three themes, the creative minds at Blizzard must be itching to work on a new concept.

The second possibility is that Blizzard will join forces with a group that owns an existing popular IP. There are plenty of options in this group ranging from comic books owners to movie franchises. Who knows, Blizzard might even be looking at the Star Trek license.

However, I’d put my money on Blizzard coming up with their own intellectual property. It’s a lot easier to make changes for gameplay reasons when you don’t have to run it past a bunch of IP lawyers, just look at the changes Blizzard has made to the Warcraft lore to suit the game. Blizzard is known for putting gameplay first and cutting features that don’t work. I can’t imagine them giving up control by licensing a heavily restricted property.

In any case I don’t expect to hear anything about Blizzards new MMORPG until a few months after the release of Wrath of the Lich King. And it’s very possible we won’t hear anything until after the releases of Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3.

One thing about the Blizzard organization — it’s really good at protecting its secrets.

Update: From the Internode Games Network — It looks like my expectation that Starcraft 2 will be out by the end of the year is also off target. Rob Pardo has stated at the Worldwide Invitational that the game is only a third done and won’t be out this year, though they’ll have something to show by end of year. So that’s the bad news. The good news, for Apple fans, is that there will be a simultaneous release on both Windows and Mac when it is finally released. A third done now, does that mean sometime in 2010?

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Behind the Blizzard Curtain

The walls have come down, and the curtain lifted. Blizzard have finally let us of the hook and revealed the big announcement they have been working towards for a few days now. And the announcement is:

Diablo 3.

The link to the page didn’t work when I checked it out, so I can’t see what features the game will have, but I guess that will be up in due course.

Updates when I find out more.

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Brussels Sprouts, Presidents, Bartle and Tobold

You know how important someone is to a particular industry by the fuss they cause.

A few years ago a certain president who was the daddy of another certain president — do you like how I’m not being political here? — made the statement that he hated Brussels Sprouts. All of a sudden there was an outcry. A thunder was heard in the Heartland. The combined Brussels Sprout farmers of the USA rose up and delivered quite a lot of the ‘orrible little veggies to the White House. A big fuss over what was quite an innocent statement of culinary preference.

Now if I make the statement on this blog that I consider Brussels Sprouts to be hideous lumps of green putty that grow in Satan’s nether regions — which I do — it is unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow morning with several tons of the nasty things on my front doorstep. Nor will I likely be vilified by the Brussels Sprouts farmers of Australia and issued nasty threats. That might just be because I am considered somewhat less important of a commentator than president G.H.W. Bush.

So it’s interesting to read all the comments about Richard Bartle that have surfaced over his comments regarding the current state of MMO games, World of Warcraft, and Warhammer Online. A recent comment about Warhammer, "I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft" while not really particularly helpful, or accurate, has garnered quite a bit of animosity around the traps.

Of course Richard Bartle was (one of?) the designers of the original Multi User Dungeon (MUD), the text based role playing adventures that are the grand-daddies of the modern MMO game. Since that time, Dr Bartle has spent a great deal of his academic career studying and commentating on the virtual world phenomenon. This of course makes him an authority, and subject to scrutiny.

And he’s received a lot of that recently with his ongoing commentaries on World of Warcraft. Much of it highly critical. Of course criticism is to be expected when you have a go at a phenomena like WoW, Warhammer, or Whatever in which a lot of people are emotionally invested.

When anonymous readers criticize they fall into one of three categories.

1. The Rationalist,
2. the Zealot, and
3. the Troll.

The Rationalist usually writes well thought out responses to a post, and to other commenters on the thread. Sometimes these don’t appear to be well thought out, passion and bias for a subject can make an argument look odd, but at least they are trying. They don’t tend to start off by name calling.

The Zealot, aka the Fanboi, will tend to take the blogger to task for what they have written. The better ones will often have a good argument, but will tend to be one eyed ignoring the bloggers arguments all together. Often though the Zealot will attack the blogger personally, resort to name calling, and present straw-man arguments. The worst of these will attack quite viscously.

The Troll often comes across as a Zealot, but the motivation is different. They don’t tend to care about the topic, the only motive is to start a fuss. They can often come in on the side of the blogger, but will resort to the methods of the worst zealots in order to stir up trouble.

Tobold, and most of the other bloggers I read, fall into the first category, the Rationalist. But they are also passionate about their subject. You don’t end up with a blog career of more than a couple of months if you aren’t passionate about your subject and Tobold has been writing about the MMO subject for quite a few years now. That can lead to passionate words being used when posting, and if the issue is controversial the conversation will be inflamed. But a lot of that depends on how popular and authoritative the blogger is.

Tobold too is now finding out — maybe he knew already — his place in the MMO culture. In some of his recent posts, Public Figures and Public Figures - Part 2 he writes about the recent abuse that he has received from some of his readers, ironically in response to some of the comments he made about Bartle.

So now I’m a bit at a loss what to do. I could pull a "reverse Lum" and turn into "Tobold the Mad", with an angry rant blog, and not care about all the comments with foul language that would undoubtedly attract. But that isn’t really my style. I could write much less, or shut down the blog for a long period unless I’m out of the public eye and thus regain the ability to say what I think. Or I could shut down the blog completely and open a new one as "Dlobot", without telling anyone, and escape scrutiny that way. But I think the most rational is a mix in which I use the current summer MMORPG slump and holiday period to write less, try being myself without self-censorship, and wield a heavy banstick if that causes the language in the comments to deviate from my Terms of Service.

Honestly, I hope Tobold doesn’t let the negative comments affect him and keeps posting with the same frequency and quality that he has been. I enjoy reading his ongoing commentary, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything he writes, I respect that it’s written with thought and introspection. And frankly, I also like that Tobold’s blog is a good source of ideas for my blog when I’m having trouble coming up with my own.

Tobold, Richard Bartle, Scott Jennings (Lum), Raph Koster, and others have become an important commentators in the MMO world. You can tell that by the controversies over their words. What everyone, including the Zealots — forget the Trolls, they’re not interested anyway — need to realize is that commentators are as important in this field as they are in every other. They are representative of the culture in which they interact, and in no small way shape that culture with their conversation.

And the more voices in a conversation, the healthier it is.

Those voices don’t have to agree all the time. In fact, it’s better that they don’t. Strong cultures are made up of diverse viewpoints. Cultures where everyone is of the same opinion stagnate and fall away. The world of MMO games only benefits from the diversity of ideas and viewpoints that come from the individuals engaged in conversation.

Richard Bartle has done us all a favor with his comment comparing World of Warcraft with Warhammer. While it’s certainly controversial, and where I don’t really agree with it, it has stimulated a conversation. It’s made us think. And that’s important.

Tobolds response to Bartle has continued that conversation. For those of us who are rational, and for those of us who are zealots we have also been forced to think and perhaps even to have considered where we stand. And that’s also important. As long as we do it without resorting to abuse.

If a voice is silenced through an onslaught of vicious criticism, we have all lost.

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The End

Have you ever noticed how important the end of something is?

• A great movie with a crappy ending leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths.
• A novel which sets up a great sequence of events, memorable characters and an epic story line, but pulls a rabbit out of the hat to tie up the plotlines, leaves the reader wholly unsatisfied.
• A First Person Shooter where the player is facing ever more difficult scenarios, but where the final boss is a complete wimp makes many a hardcore gamer cry.
• A night out at an expensive restaurant where the main meal consists of a portion less than half a budgie and is gone in a single nibble, leaves the diner still hungry.
• A MMORPG where the end game is nowhere near complete…

You’d think that by now MMORPG designers would realize that there will be a considerable portion of their subscribers who will, in the first month of release, reach the level cap. These players will do that because they either like playing the game and never leave their computer, or because they want to get to the end game, or both reasons. There’s only one game I know where this doesn’t happen, and that’s Eve Online, and that’s only because it takes a certain amount of real time to level up the skills (a single skill might take a couple of weeks or more to get to max level.)

So I gotta ask, why are game developers still neglecting the end game?

A month after release Age of Conan has had two sieges. Sieges were touted by Funcom as the big thing for PvPers. They were supposed to offer PvP battles of up to 300 players per side and the use of siege weapons and mounts to breach walls. These epic battles were supposed to be the pinnacle of Age of Conan PvP.

Problem is. They just don’t work.

The first siege was a disaster. Players were experiencing frame rates of less than 3 frames per second. Walls were either exploitable, or when breached, didn’t allow access as intended. Siege weapons didn’t work. The siege was no where near 300 players. The second siege wasn’t much better. Funcom managed to improve performance. Players are now getting 15 FPS. It’s an improvement I guess, but not much of one.

The thing is. The whole siege mechanic just wasn’t tested during beta. From what I’ve learned since release, the only part of the game that was thoroughly tested in beta was Tortage. Yep, that’s right. The one to twenty area. The beginners game.

Of course Funcom isn’t the only culprit here. Recently, both Lord of the Rings Online and Tabula Rasa were also released without a lot of end game content. You might remember that LotRO really got hammered for that in the months after launch. And these games weren’t the only ones. Even World of Warcraft was end game incomplete at launch.

You’ve got to give Funcom a lot of credit for the Tortage area. It’s one of the most polished and complete newbie experiences in a MMORPG that I have played, even with its downsides. It’s a great hook to catch new players and get them passed the first free month. But it’s not enough.

It doesn’t really matter if the content in the middle game thins out a bit. Sure, players will complain, and it is important in the sense of keeping players involved, but it’s the end game that will really advertise a game.

You see, the players who rush through to the level cap two weeks after release are also going to be the ones who make the most noise if the end game is not there. They’ll roll another alt, and then they’ll post on the official forums about how the end game sucks. And they’ll keep posting. Sooner rather than later, this will get out of the official forums onto the forums of game sites, the main pages of game sites, blogs…

In no time at all, the game will be thought of as shallow. What started out as a rush of sales at release, dries up. After the free month, subscriptions start to drop off as those players who rushed to the top and now have two or three alts at the level cap don’t have anything to do and don’t wish to start another and go through the same content again. Without some solid intervention by the developer team, server populations drop, severs are merged, the game gets sold to SOE…

Even if the devs recover and add a whole bunch of new and end game content within a few months of release, the damage is done. Players have left and have left a preconception of an incomplete game in the minds of the public.

Look at Lord of the Rings Online, Tabula Rasa, and Vanguard. Vanguard in particular has made leaps and strides in quality and content of the last year, or so I’ve heard — it might be time to have another look — but people still think of it as the train wreck it was at release. Turbine was lucky with LotRO. It was a good, bug free launch, and managed to get a loyal following. Lord of the Rings Online’s player base has even grown since launch, but how much better would it have done if it had a decent amount of end game content at launch?

There are three things the developers should do before launching a game:

1. Make sure the game is stable and works as intended. That’s a no brainer, surely?
2. Have a great newbie area. Lot’s of content and quests for at least twenty levels.
3. Make sure there is at least some end game content, and make sure it works — test it before release please.

Okay. So there should also be a decent amount of middle level content. The game should also have a certain amount of polish, and a good portion of the promised features should be included. If the devs have promised ten major features, at least seven of them should be included with a promise to finish the others as soon as possible. If a feature has to be cut, do it well before launch, and tell everyone about it loudly.

Don’t ignore your power levelers. They get a bum rap most of the time. Other players think they’re idiots for rushing through the content, and wonder why they expect the end game content to be there anyway. Developers probably see them as an anomaly. A blip in the subscriber data, so it doesn’t matter if they don’t resubscribe. But, they should be thought of as the trail blazers. They’re going to find the bugs first. They’re going to find the crappy content before everyone else. And if you treat them badly, they’ll tell everyone how much your game sucks.

Unfortunately, there seems to be an attitude that publishers and developers have where they believe that no matter what state they release their game in, players will buy it and they can add content and fix bugs later. I had hoped that Vanguard had shown how wrong that attitude was.

It seems that Funcom didn’t get the point.

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Happy Birthday Sweetflag

DM Osbon has been blogging for a few years now. Starting with a World of Warcraft blog, he launched the Sweetflag blog one year ago. In the last year he’s written about a bunch of topics that he enjoys, but has decided to refocus the blog back onto games.

Now the usual thing about birthdays is that it’s the birthday boy who gets the prezzies. But DM has turned the tables on this one.

He’s going to be giving away some presents to UK & European residents. He has two copies each of UEFA Euro 2008 for the PS3 and Boom Blox for the Wii.

So duck on over to Sweetflag, wish DM a happy blog birthday, and join the competition.

Happy first birthday Sweetflag!

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Being a Bum

It’s a pity that my favorite games don’t have a Lazy Bum class. Or maybe that’s a good thing or I might have spent the whole week playing it.

I’ve spent a goodly part of the week recovering from my recent trip sitting in front of the television, doing a bit of reading, and of course, playing games. It’s a good thing I’ve got this time off. I usually finish my vacation holidays moments before I go back to work and spent the next two weeks at work recovering.

The big thing about this week is that it’s been the calm before the storm.

Age of Conan has been released in the US. (I know. You’re sick of hearing about AoC.) And it appears that Funcom has not vanguarded the game. There have been a few teething problems, especially with the early access program, and there have been a few oddly timed server downtimes, but all up it appears the release has gone well.

I mentioned that I was called when I was on holiday by the game store with the news that my preorder card has come in. I picked that up a couple of days ago.

At the time I was given an update on the date the box would be arriving in the store. Apparently it was supposed to come in today (Thursday 22nd) for sale tomorrow. The shop was going to phone me when it came in.

Well, it hasn’t arrived. Apparently the local EB Games were inundated with calls asking when it was coming in, so they preempted my call and phoned me telling me the game wasn’t in.

I feel strangely calm.

I’m not worried.

I have an interview for a new contract tomorrow (Friday) afternoon, and it’s my Mums birthday tomorrow too, so there’s a birthday dinner planned for tomorrow night. And there are plans afoot to see the new Indiana Jones on Saturday evening with a visit to the obligatory Indian restaurant before hand. Oh, and I’m scheduled for Lasik surgery on Monday so my eyes will be out of action for a couple of days after that.

As you can see, there’s a lot happening. And I feel strangely calm about Age of Conan. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Don’t get me wrong I want to play it. I’m excited about playing it, especially with all the positive news. I’m also a bit nervous. I really want it to live up to all the hype and expectations of the last year. I don’t want to get a month into it and get bored.

In the meantime, I spent much of this weeks gaming back in LotRO. One of my real life friends told me a few weeks ago that he subscribed to Lord of the Rings Online. It’s his first MMORPG so I created a Hobbit Hunter called Stroppo Swiftfoot on his server this week and started the leveling.

I reached 16 this afternoon and joined up with my friend when he logged in this evening. He has a 18 Guardian and handles it very well. We ended up running through the Strider quests together and, just the two of us, entered the Great Barrow. Needless to say, two isn’t enough for the end of the instance. We managed to get most of the way through, but the multiple elites got us. This instance really needs a Minstrel. Never mind. Next time.

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Is Diablo 3 Blizzards New MMORPG?

Over at MMOCrunch, Geoff is asking if Diablo 3 will be announced soon.

It’s a fair question given that Blizzard recently purchased the Diablo 3 domain name from the fan group was using it as a fan site pushing for Diablo 3. The purchase as I understand it was amicable, no lawyers involved, though I’m not sure what Blizzard paid for the domain. (BTW, even though I’ve linked to the domain, it’s currently not working for me; again my understanding is that there is a site there.)

I think an even better question is: will Diablo 3 be Blizzards new MMORPG?

Considering that:

• Blizzard is working on a new MMORPG. This was announced a few months ago, and a look at their job postings shows a number of Top Secret Next-Gen MMO opportunities.
• Starcraft 2 is close(?) to release. Close with Blizzard is a relative term, but I expect they’ll want to hit the Christmas season with Starcraft 2.
• Blizzard really only have three intellectual properties; Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.
• We haven’t heard a peep about Diablo 3 before now;

I believe that D3 is the likely candidate here.

With Starcraft 2 still being in development, it’s unlikely they’ll want to dilute sales with a MMO. Don’t forget that the original Starcraft is still a hot property in Korea some ten years after the game was released. A MMORPG released even a year or two after SC2 may hurt that game.

Diablo 2s online component was getting close to a MMORPG, perhaps without as much of the Massive that a real MMO has. It makes a lot of sense that the game mechanics of Diablo 2 could be extended into a full MMORPG without too much hassle. Of course, modern MMO mechanics would have to be added to make the game acceptable to modern MMOers.

Of course I could be wrong. Blizzard could be developing a completely new IP for their new MMORPG. Or, they could be working on World of Warcraft 2, but I really doubt that.

I think Diablo 3 Online is the likely scenario.

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GP Timing

What timing.

I’d just posted an article on game politics and what does Game Politics the blog do?

They report on a rant by Richard Bartle in the UK Newspaper, The Guardian.

Bartle, love him or hate him, is the co-creator of the MUD, the text based predecessor of our beloved MMORPG. He’s also a great voice out there for the gamer generation and he doesn’t pull any punches when he’s talking game politics.

Bartle directs his ire at the following:

I’m talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games:…

He has some word of prophecy for this generations politicians and media moguls.

15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will have grown up playing computer games… Gamers vote. Gamers buy newspapers. They won’t vote for you, or buy your newspapers, if you trash their entertainment with your ignorant ravings. Call them social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life, the most you’ll get from them is pity…

In the immortal words (paraphrased) of Monty Python: He’s a cruel man - but fair.

Like I said in my previous post about game politics, there are powerful groups with a vested interested in knobbling the gaming community. Richard Bartles perspective is that they have already lost, that there are now more gamers in the community than non gamers.

While I don’t agree completely — just because someone is born in the post-game generation doesn’t mean they are a gamer, or respect games — Bartle makes a great point. Games are here to stay. The longer this media exists, the more entrenched it becomes.

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Game Politics

One of the many (too many) blogs that I have in my RSS feedreader is Game Politics. It’s a fairly recent addition, even though I visit the site occassionally, and an important addition. It keeps a fairly up to date, though gamer biased, perspective on the social and political issues surrounding our favorite hobby.

If you’re a regular reader of Stropp’s World, you may have noticed that I occassionally get my rant on when it comes to the old media portrayal of computer games. The reason is that I believe that the old media companies have an awfully large amount of gold invested in their properties.

Television and print media are the big losers when it comes to all things computer related. Newspapers have been losing out big time to the new online forms of publishing like this (and other) blogs. Television is also being hit big time. A couple of years ago I saw some statistics that revealed that the 18 to 34 male demographic was simply not watching TV at the levels it used to. You can probably thank computer games, the Internet, and alternative video sources like YouTube for that.

It’s not hard to come to the conclusion then, that the people with a lot to lose are not going to be saying nice things about the media that are threatening them. It’s probably not a stretch to believe that these same old media moguls are not above putting their large resources to work discrediting the new media forms and making life generally difficult.

Fox News for example is one of the more alarmist and extreme services around. (I hesitate to call them a news service.) We’ve seen examples of their behavior in the recent past with the whole Mass Effect scandal. While the academic at the center of that actually recanted and apologized, Fox News made no further comment. Does this mean they’re more interested in the scandal than the truth?

It was only a few days ago that a US based morality watchdog group referred to the US Constitution as a suicide pact. They were upset that the constitution allowed game developers and the producers of other violent media the same freedom of speech that they themselves enjoyed.

In other countries like Brazil, the judiciary are busy banning games, some of them over nine years old, saying that they undermine the public order and that players are subversives — that’s not all that far from saying that computer game players are terrorists. In recent days there have been reports of the new US installed government in Afghanistan banning, or discussing the banning, of computer games including consoles. So much for democracy.

Even here in my home state, there are politicians who don’t want to give computer games the same ratings that are available to movies. These politicians are actively against an R18 rating for games. Ironically, an R rating would help parents make better informed decisions on their game purchases. Blocking an R18 rating works against parents who want to do the right thing and buy appropriately rated games for their kids.

It seems the whole world is arrayed against computer games and the people who play them.

I know some of you guys could care less about what other people, especially politicians and watchdog groups, think about the games that you play. After all, you’ll go out and play GTA IV or Age of Conan regardless.

And if you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. Right?

Wrong.

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Reviving a Legend

Tobold has an interesting post up about the eventual decline of all MMO games. His argument is that with time players grow bored of the game, and as the game ages, the players depart for greener pastures. I touched on that idea a few days ago when I asked why game developers don’t upgrade their games.

However, I’m not going to post about that. I’m on a different track here. Tobold made the following comment:

EA certainly regrets earlier decisions to have canceled UO2 twice, because now the Ultima brand is dying.

I think Tobold is correct here. There would have to be at least some amount of regret in the EA camp about the cancellation of the sequel to Ultima Online simply because that game is now fading into obscurity.

I find it quite ironic really. The reason given for the cancellation of Ultima Online 2 was that EA believed UO2 would hurt UO by dividing its subscriber base. Instead, by not having a successor to Ultima Online, subscribers ended up drifting off to other companies products. Business rule numero uno — When you manage to get a customer, do everything you can to keep him.

So. Is it game over for Ultima Online?

Not yet. Ultima Online is still operating. It still has subscribers, a loyal bunch who won’t go quietly into that virtual night. But Ultima Online’s days are numbered. Eventually EA will consider the cost of running the game outweighs the benefits of keeping it going, and will switch off the servers. Then Ultima Online will exist only in our memories and on the countless unofficial servers running it.

The only hope of keeping the Ultima Online legend alive is for EA to, as soon as possible, revive the development of Ultima Online 2.

It’s important that a new version of UO isn’t WoWified. It also shouldn’t simply be a modernization of the original game. Here are a few ideas.

• Keep it as a skill based game. Don’t use classes for character development.
• Make it unique. Don’t try and emulate World of Warcraft or any other games. Perhaps try and develop a unique art style.
• Keep as many of the game systems of the original Ultima Online. There’s a reason the game has lasted this long.
• Implement modern game systems as makes sense to the UO style. Players like new MMO systems like quest icons, and instances.

Do you think that it’s even worth saving Ultima Online?

What sort of features do you think the successor should have?

I’d like to hear your opinions.  Leave a comment below, or continue the discussion in the forums.

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