Psychochild

Thanks for the opportunity to do an interview, Justin! And, thank you for covering the older MMOs out there. As a game developer, I appreciate the need for us to know our history. This is an invaluable resource for developers and players who want to know more about MMO development.

Full disclosure: I'm a developer on Storybricks.

@Yarg2011 This is what innovation looks like. We have an idea, we show it to people, we get feedback, we demonstrate to investors that this idea addresses a demand, and then we make something cool that nobody has done before.

Going away in seclusion to create a game, just like a large company would do, means that we don't get feedback. The very thing we want to avoid is to create yet another overly complicated tool that seems simple for a developer to use, but that is too complex for a typical player.

Don't worry, we're working on something that incorporates this. But, there's no sense in wasting money if there's no interest. So, if you would like to see an actual product with Storybricks in it, give us your support and feedback. Go sign up to be a tester when it's time. Hopefully we'll astound you soon enough.

A very insightful post. (As a note, I consider psychochild.org to be a professional blog, not a personal one. Even if I do occasionally post about my personal life as it affects or is affected by my career.)

Although I complained about your corporate masters in my linked blog post, I've always had a lot of respect for the writers at Massively. I think your three points are 100% on target. Kudos for writing the piece, and hopefully others will take up the challenge to move toward earning the "journalist" name.

Laughing Target wrote: "Besides, Near Death bought the game off the original devs."

Actually, we bought the game from 3DO before they went bankrupt. If we hadn't, then M59 probably would have fallen into oblivion since the source code was on a failing hard drive when we got it. 3DO bought the company the original developers had formed, Archetype Interactive, in 1996. I personally started working on M59 at 3DO in 1998, and NDS (myself and Rob Ellis, one of original developers himself) bought the game in 2001 to relaunch it. Our goal was to preserve the game.

As I posted in my blog, I'm moving to other projects. I'm not dead yet. :)

Have fun!

Quite a few of us developers are avid pen and paper gamers and have run several campaigns. Unfortunately, a lot of these elements don't translate over to MMOs very well. The biggest issue is that the amount of content you have to create for a single big-budget MMO is much higher than what you put into even a few dozen modules. A better skill set might be world building, but few people have outstanding experience in that area.

Not to say that experienced people aren't a true asset. When we were able to afford a events manager for Meridian 59, we hired someone who ran LARPs. He was able to run wonderful events involving lots of players because he had done it in the offline world before.

As for the article itself, I never wrote in my original blog post that we had to throw out everything. My approach has always been to question the fundamentals and see where the cracks in the foundation are. Hopefully that will lead to us making better games.

Thanks for the comments, all. A few points:

I am a professional MMO developer and have been doing this for over 11 years now. I've worked primarily on Meridian 59 but have a few other titles (some unreleased) to my name. (I think it's funny the author here linked to my post, but then ignored Meridian 59 in favor of UO.)

I agree that some games try to capture elements of the sense of adventure. EVE Online does it for a lot of people, but it's very much a niche game. Nothing wrong with that, but there's room for other games, too. I wonder what a game would be like if you could put some of the more adventuresome elements from EVE into a fantasy-based MMO. Would this be possible?

But, alas, I don't have all the answers. I'm bringing up the question so that people can think about it. Looks like I've caught some peoples' attentions. :)

Thanks for the comments and discussions. Feel free to read my blog for followups as well.

Mewmew wrote:
It's probably just a coincidence I guess.

Probably. :) As I wrote in my piece, these posts came from Ferrel and my in-game discussion. I can't speak for Ferrel, but I don't remember reading a similar post previously. That's one of the reasons why I said we should post our thoughts.

Feel free to stop by my blog and leave a link in the comments to your post. I always enjoy further discussion!

GRT wrote:
> Another idiot...

Thank you for contributing positively to the discussion. :P

I'm not just any idiot, I happen to be a game developer. The purpose of my "Weekend Design Challenges" on my blog is to get people to think about design issues in games. I didn't buy the game and complain about it working as advertised, I'm writing to make people think about the design decision to include what is essentially a single-player aspect to the game. (And, actually, I didn't buy the game, but that's beside the point. ;)

Yes, there are some good aspects to it; as people mentioned here, it's a (generally) low-stress tutorial. On the other hand, it also cuts people off from the social fabric of the game to a large part; it even cuts you off from your friends as far as I understand, unless the "single player" part of the night quests means that your friends can also join you. From a design point of view, this can be dangerous because people who don't have in-game friends generally don't stick with a game in the long run. This design decision, like most, has both good and bad aspects. Most of the negative aspects, however, won't become obvious for a while yet.

Some further thoughts.