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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
"You're running a fucking service!" Bernie Yee growls at a group of his industry peers. He's trying to persuade his fellow MMOG developers not to force their subscribers into "a Darwinian survival of the fittest," which benefits their most obsessed subscribers. Instead, he argues, the developers should cater to casual gamers, even at the expense of their hardcore fans.
"That's a new law, then," another developer scoffs back, suggesting that designer Raph Koster's influential "Rules of Online Gaming" will need an addition: "survival of the wimpiest."
Yee refuses to budge: "You tell me -- who do you want to alienate more?" Since developers are often as hardcore about games as their audience, many are evidently unwilling to buy his reasoning.
The exchange took place at the Game Developers Conference in March, during a heated round table on the future of MMORPGs. Yee, former director of programming at Sony Online Entertainment, was the moderator. And from the start, the dialogue was interspersed by shouts and smack talk. It was also an early glimpse at the oncoming train wreck of soon-to-fail games.
"Will all the women in the room please stand up?" an overwrought British developer fumes. "It's white males, all wearing glasses! Look at us!" The bespectacled Caucasians in attendance nod: The lack of women players and developers, they agree, is keeping their games from becoming truly mass market. And with so much potential revenue out there, where are the games that aren't sci-fi or fantasy? "We're all the Star Wars, D&D, Tolkien fans; those are the games we create," another developer admits glumly.
Both Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online aim to break out of the hardcore ghetto. And so, for varying reasons, the eyes of the gaming world are upon them.
"Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online probably impressed our editors more than other MMORPGs this year," says Ken Brown, editor at Computer Gaming World. Set to launch sometime this December, both these games -- from Sony Online Entertainment/LucasArts and Maxis Studios/Electronic Arts, respectively -- represent the game industry's first (and perhaps last) chance to prove how large the market for massively multiplayer games can really be.
"We think Sims and Star Wars Galaxies will be a real indication of the potential for the market," says DFC's Cole. As indicators of the MMORPGs' overall appeal, he added, "either or both could be the first games to top the 1 million [subscriber] mark."
Set shortly after the destruction of the Death Star, from the first Star Wars film, Galaxies provides players with eight to 12 planets to explore, including four (Tatooine, Naboo, Endor, and Yavin 4) featured in the movies. (Spacefaring is planned in later releases; for now, automated shuttles ferry players between these destinations.) Each planet, according to LucasArts producer Haden Blackman, is bigger than the entire Everquest landmass.
Major characters from the first trilogy are on hand: Jabba the Hut offers assignments to prospective bounty hunters, for example, while Han Solo or Boba Fett may drop in on the player, when the right circumstances obtain. The designers also plan to have special events, in which their "digiteer" staffers will take control of Lucas' most beloved characters, in order to engage players in live, semi-improvisational online theater. Killing any of the franchise's key archetypes, however, will be impossible, as they'll usually appear in contexts where fighting is prohibited, while only the best player characters even stand a chance of beating them to a draw. (LucasArts staffers doggedly maintain the game's internal consistency to the world conceived by Lucas, even squaring it with the films' other cross-media tie-ins -- books, comics, and so on -- the aggregate of which they lovingly refer to as "the continuity." They also speak with quiet pride of the role Galaxies will play, after Lucas releases the next and final film -- when the MMORPG will alone remain, as LucasArts publicist Tom Sarris puts it, "to carry on the canon.")
It's the kind of space, in other words, that you can imagine "Star Wars" devotees spending their entire lives in.
And that may be a problem. Is there room for a normal person in a world of Lucas fanatics?
"Casual gamers -- even gamers most people would consider hardcore -- are intimidated by the zealots investing four to six hours a day into an MMORPG character," says Erik Peterson, a freelance game reviewer. "It ruins the game for them and turns playing into an escalating arms race of online gaming hours that they just can't win." Not to mention the even more noxious subset, who hack cheats into a game, or still worse, the "griefers" who actively sabotage the game, harassing newcomers (often sexually) or springing practical jokes that leave their hapless marks lost, poor or dead. "Making it so the hardcore experienced players don't totally take advantage of and ruin it for the newbie players is essential," says Cole.
According to Star Wars Galaxies lead designer Raph Koster, they're making a concerted effort to bring in more casual players as well. "We're hoping that we can reduce the time commitment required to play these sorts of games," Koster tells me by e-mail. "Until now, it's not been uncommon to see the average player spending 20 hours a week online ... So we're hoping to cut that in half. Of course, the die-hard Star Wars fans may well prove us wrong on that in the end."
To ease the players' anxiety of leaving their world, Koster and his team have implemented ways for remaining engaged with it offline. For example, if you choose to play a merchant, you can hire a computer-controlled character to staff your shop for you while you're grappling with real life. You can also give missions to other players, subcontracting tasks while you're away. Features like these have helped mesmerize gamers during Galaxies' long production cycle over the last couple of years.
"The sheer number of skills and professions is exciting," says Rick Moffat, 36, a hardened veteran of games like Everquest and Asheron's Call. "If they can actually make some of the professions viable -- bounty hunters, explorers, smugglers -- it's going to stretch the boundaries of what's possible in an MMORPG."
It's impressive, to be sure, but I wonder if Koster and Rich Vogel, his design partner, underestimate the militant devotion that the franchise has accreted. There are people who actually waited in long lines for the premiere of "Attack of the Clones." You have to ponder how the same kind of Jedi masochists -- who kept the flame burning even after the disheartening "Phantom Menace" -- might drive off the more blasé fans. Who wants to hang out in cyberspace with the kind of guy who spent a week outside the multiplex in a pup tent?
"That's a definite possibility," says Ken Brown. "But I think guys like Raph Koster and Rich Vogel are among the smartest online designers in the business, and they know how to make a game appealing to as many people as possible." Wright speculates that it may come down to how well Koster and Vogel can mediate a balance between the players who "are just hardcore -- they've been playing this thing 40 hours a week, and now they're a super Jedi -- versus somebody who just dropped into the world and is just cannon fodder."
LucasArts' Blackman insists this won't be the case. "The interaction we've seen on our community message boards have been heartening," he says. "The hardcore Star Wars fans have patiently educated all the less-informed board members on the nuances of Star Wars, while the hardcore MMORPG players have done the same for MMORPG newbies." (And the zeal of the former group has an influence on the design team as well: On learning that Wookie characters would speak English, as opposed to the grunts and trills they associated with the beloved Chewbacca, "the hardcore fans," says Blackman, "freaked out." Now, before you can understand a Wookie, you must first learn the lingua franca of Wookiese.)
Many in the industry argue that MMOGs won't become a breakout success until they can bring in a substantial number of women into the audience, and the Galaxies team says they have accounted for that.
"We're definitely including elements that will appeal to women," says Blackman, pointing in particular to the many ways players can customize the social interactivity aspects (like stylized chat text), and a far more granular selection of female character body types. (In previous MMORPGs, women often complained that the options for their online alter ego were restricted to thin and busty -- or, well, curvy and busty.) You can also customize appearance to an infinite degree-- every facial feature can be subtly altered with a slider control, as can skin tone -- to create a persona that's truly unique. Of the 700 or so learnable skills available, only a third are combat-related, with a number designed to appeal to women -- or at any rate to those less interested in a life of galactic swashbuckling. "I'm kind of embarrassed to mention this," says Blackman, "but we have a hairdressing skill tree."
This attentiveness will also be evident in the game's handling of the griefer problem, which anecdotal evidence suggests plagues female players disproportionately. The anti-griefer policy hasn't been totally enumerated yet, Blackman says, but will operate on a basic principle: "Anything that loses revenue is bad." So bad, the game will include a hot key for instant harassment reporting. (It also transmits a snapshot of the victim's last five minutes of conversation with the accused, allowing the company moderator to make a fair deliberation between them.) Still, of the 250,000 people registered on the Galaxies community site, LucasArts staffers estimate that only 10 to 15 percent are women.
The breadth of choice may end up overwhelming the uninitiated. "It might be too deep for casual players," says Computer Gaming World's Brown, "but it will offer a rich, detailed, engrossing world to those willing to spend a little time with it." Which might also mean a game that's all things to all people -- but beloved by none. "The gamers who would consider themselves mild Star Wars geeks won't subscribe to the game," game reviewer Peterson predicts, "because either they don't enjoy MMORPG games or they feel intimidated by both the more hardcore Star Wars geeks and the more hardcore gamers who play MMORPGs like they are a part-time job."
