• AMD Athlon 2000xp (1.73gHz)
• 1gb RAM
• Sapphire Radeon 9800pro, 128mb RAM
• SoundBlaster Audigy
• Win XP Pro SP2 

LoTRO on my new PC

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2×2.4GHz)
• 2gb RAM
• nVidia GeForce 8800, 640mb RAM
• SoundBlaster X-Fi
• Win XP Pro SP2

• Maplestory (comments)
• Kart Rider
• Audition

I really don't know anything about Audition beyond what Wikipedia had to say, but the first and second are huge.

Snatching these up for North America while pushing ahead with their alternate-demographic virtual lifestyley games shows a rather impressive degree of diversity for a company new to the game space. Whatever audience Viacom can attract to Laguna Beach, VMTV and LogoWorld will likely be additive to whoever they can attract to the above three, which are already very popular.

Trouble is, it doesn't sound new at all.

From the press release:

WEBZEN Inc. (NASDAQ:WZEN), a leading global online entertainment company, today announced that the company will present a new payment model to its gamers in Korea for its upcoming online video game, "Soul of the Ultimate Nation." The highly anticipated game, which is currently in the open beta phase in Korea, will offer players free basic service in the market with optional in-game items and services offered for nominal fees, also known as micropayments.

How is this "new"? Is it new to Webzen? I would expect most new MMORPGs launching in Korea to be based on micropayments. To me, the question is how long it'll take before they start becoming the standard in the West.

Not that I think the few that are here now are representative of huge hits in North America. Space Cowboy, Archlord, Maplestory and apparently Everquest 2's trade-enabled servers all seem to have not yet gained serious traction in the U.S., or are reporting numbers in ways the usual gentries of aggragated ranting don't pick up upon. Can't blame the punditry of course. Most have been disliking microtransactions/RMTs since the days buying and trading Ultima Online gold was the big thing to hate.

Played this at E3 a bit. Except that you could set some fairly interesting parameters for the instances you enter, it seemed likely a prettier version of Guild Wars. I don't know what their business plan is for North America and Europe. But between the above announcement and their earlier one about partnering with Massive Entertainment to provide ingame advertising, another no-no for the veteran set, I wonder who their target player is going to be in the West.

And that got me thinking about designing for the past, or at least, designing an old idea during an age of change.

These games take years to produce, refine, tweak and launch. And then they generally have years more to continue producing, refining, tweaking and expanding. There is no clear dilineation between generations, beyond what is used in advertising. There is also, as yet, no metric by which people measure when a game should close. The entire genre itself (depending on where you start) is only slightly older than the more recognizable names in it. Within the span of time that covers MMORPGs, some games have been around "forever".

So we're in an age of both new and old, where old ideas are rehashed such that they aren't even considered old anymore.

Some designers take a look at the contemporary space, identify the successes and look to refine the problems. Yet in doing so, they are automatically designing for the past. Their vision will not be realized for at least a year (if it's a small-scope game) or three (if it's not). What has happened throughout that development process though? Who has come in from left field to radically alter the measures of success or introduce new "must have" features? How have player sensibilities changed, either due to the players themselves changing or by a massive influx of new ones with new ideas?

Development is no easy task. In some cases, the process is so complex it can effectively take people out of the genre, almost altogether, the old "we don't have time to play anymore" problem. In a way, they can enter a form of temporal stasis. Their focus on their project prevents the constant exploration of an ever-changing space.

To offset this, they rely on their fans and early testers. Unfortunately, both groups are generally fairly narrow in their own perspectives, depending on the sort of game being made. These groups come from the genre as it is. They love what is there and are seeking merely a slightly tweaked version of it. Hopefully that group is big enough to get the market share one needs. Often times it is not though, something discovered only much later, after a number of binding decisions have already been made.

Trendspotting is an art and a science. It requires constant diligence, either by the designer or by the right group of people inputing. It's basic research at a time when it seems some companies still think these games are labors of love, garage-brewed on a shoe-string budget until a venture capitalist or publisher can be convinced otherwise.

We are well beyond the point where just being an MMORPG is an automatic ticket to some success though. Gamers make their choices these days well before they pay for the game. It has long been my contention that open betas are folly, for they allow everyone, from gamers to reporters, to make their assessment of a game before they've paid a dime into it. And as more games continue to come, more are preordained successes or failures earlier in the proto-stages of their lives.

The keys to success continue to change.

• It's not just IP, but how well one understands both it and what makes the fans like it.
• It's not just about launching content complete, but whether that content is any good throughout the game.
• It's not just about players being able to customized their character or spaces (or WoW and GW would have long ago tanked), but whether that personalization is part of a broader game mechanic that is compelling to many.
• And, it's not about how many players you can attract, but whether you attract a sufficient quantity of the right ones for your game.

There is no bullet-point list of answers, just an ever-changing list of questions. They need to continually be asked lest one be left behind. This is more than just knowing your audience. It's knowing who they will be at launch and beyond.

Basically, who will win the future?

I'm a big fan of convergence discussions. There's generally a pretty clear end goal in mind for various bits of technologies and efforts. For example, mobile devices. I'm pretty sure we could all agree that the ultimate mobile device includes:

• Cellphone
• PDA functionality
• Media playback (music, movies, games)
• General office tools
• Email

Some would go further out and say things like foldup screens or eye pieces or brain-connections, but the above five are at least all conventional technologies. They just can't be put together for cheap enough for the masses.

Who's going to be the first to do that? Apple adding cell and office tools to iPod? 3G cellphones adding media playback and infrastructure to deliver them? Microsoft with yet another attempt at a touchscreen oversized-PSP-like device? Who knows.

The point is that it's not about delivering the product. We can do that already. It's about who will be successful at doing so, either by delivering it cheaply or convincing the masses to shell out more for it?

And that brings us to MMOs.

Right now there seems to be two distinct foundations for the future of interactive experiences in an online social settings:

1. Games that build social communities (WoW, EQ, et al). Single-experience game environments that attract a certain group of players. But because they are single-experience/motivation games, they are not as good a representative of society at large maybe.
2. Social networks that feature games (Neopets, MySpace, SL, ARGs in general maybe). Being not about a single experience they have the potential of attracting a broader array of personalities.

Going purely by reported numbers, #2 is currently the winner. However, we can't go by virtual numbers for the same reason I can't compare all MMOs to each other by using MMOGcharts. 25 million Neopets accounts doesn't tell us anything about how much revenue each account brings to the game, for example. Could be that 7mil World of Warcraft accounts generate much more cash per player simply because all of those translate into some form of guaranteed revenue per month. Besides, the costs to develop, maintain, expand and explore business relationships in Neopets are very different than WoW.

Yet they're both "MMOs" and represent two foundations for them.

There's a lot of talk about MySpace going MMO or Xbox Live already being one after a a fashion. I can't say I disagree with that in theory. They do attract a wider crosssection of people because they're not all expected to experience the environment the same way.

Yet there's something to be said for the number of people who seem to enjoy the common experience of a good game done right. Obviously there was growth potential for traditional MMORPGs beyond what the punditry assumed in 2004. The genre doubled in size in some territories in 2005/6 almost entirely due to WoW and Guild Wars. So maybe there's more growth potential, even if many analysts think otherwise?

I don't know. But it's sure going to be fun to watch.

On the one hand, I'm getting worried that I'm getting to the point where I've been around long enough to be seeing new people learn old lessons.

On the other, it was interesting to hear their take on my favorite topic. I think some of the talk was a bit single-minded though, particularly the focus on hardcore gamers.

You can get a lot of time and interest from hardcore gamers. They're a great fit, the ambassadors for MMOGs in particular. However, you can't grow this genre except incrementally without appealing to casual gamers. And I mean <i>real</i> casual gamers, not someone who's casual because they only raid two nights a week instead of seven.

World of Warcraft proved this. They didn't increment into doubling the amount of Westerners playing MMORPGs. They grew by appealing to those already here and adding truckloads of new ones turned off by the time sinks. The vast majority of those people are not repeating Blackwing Lair (BWL) for new drops. They play the game as an RPG and either leave when they realize they can only grow beyond 60 by repeating BWL for new drops, or stick around to play a different portion of the game from a different perspective. And they'll be back for Burning Crusade because 60-70 is being structured the same as 1-60 was. And leave at 70 because that won't be.

But forget WoW. Big as it is, it is not the future. It is just one part of it. Segments of the punditry in this genre are fixated on Everquest (EQ), things like EQ and things that aren't like EQ but still take a whole lot of time to be successful within. Hardcore, hardcore, hardcore.

Other segments look beyond the typical CD>patch>subscription-fee model to see where the real growth is happening. It's easy to ignore this part because it doesn't show up on MMOGchart, but it's there, real, and is where a lot of companies disinterested in spending $60mil to take on the ultimate diku are looking.

You can get casual people to play MMOGs. Look at the top six titles at one of the hotter destinations for casual games. Until recently, three of them were MMOGs (Club Penguin, which has been top almost since launch, Runescape which has been there since their launch, and Puzzle Pirates which appears to have fallen off again).

That's saying something.

The future is not by reskinning diku for hopefully millions more. Rather, it's about getting more people to join a persistent online ecosystem where they can be plied for more cash by being given more experiences. The average person is not interested in an MC drop to start the tech tree to eventually take down Ony/Naxx/whatever. They want a fun game they can get into and out of that may be part of a longer-term growth strategy. And particularly in the U.S., there's a lot more average people out there playing casual online games than there are playing massively-multiplayer ones.

Make the persistent long term rewards easy to understand and a natural evolution for people you attract through casual games. Then you've got them. Just don't expect to keep them with raiding.

And finally, here's a quote I found particularly funny, given the source:

Sigil Games’ Zack Karlsson pointed out that in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (due sometime this winter), they are finding gamers well outside of the typical 18-35 year-old male demographic.

From a guy working for the makers of a game that previously made another game in which Nick Yee revealed, through qualitative study, the same info, almost four years ago.

 "2Moons" to be Directed by Game Development Veteran David Perry

Acclaim Games announces a free, totally brutal massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) designed specifically for adult gamers. Bearing the tagline: “No mercy for the weak, no pity for the dying, no tears for the slain.” 2Moons was created to be an easy to get into game set in an aggressive, dangerous and visually stunning world. This M-Rated title is targeted at those looking for an adrenaline soaked experience and aimed squarely at players looking to kick @$$ for free!

With 24-years of experience in the video game development business David Perry, whose latest Matrix Movie related game projects grossed over $300 million, hand picked his key creative partner, Mr. Sunghun Baek for the 2Moons project. Mr. Baek is the Designer and Chief Technical Officer for GameHi, a blockbuster game maker from Korea.

As Acclaim CEO Howard Marks explains “David is a superstar in the game world and his first MMORPG is going to change the ‘game.’” “2Moons is a game that focuses on training players to become saviors in a world where any hope for survival was virtually nil,” says Perry. “Instead of wading through a lot of heavy back story, the game’s narrative is all about the individual’s journey as they grow to become a level 100+ warrior. And the arcade style fighting system in the game lets you dive right in and go hand to hand with some of the most impressive enemies in a massively multiplayer game yet.”This collaboration of two leading game designers from either side of the planet, working on a game of this titanic scale, is hailed as visionary and very exciting. But perhaps the partnership’s most beneficial component for players is that Acclaim’s model is based on releasing full-price games for free. With no subscriptions, and no charge to download the game, it will be funded mostly by advertising–and (even more radically) the user will be allowed to turn off the in-game adverting if they choose. With Perry's approach, Acclaim is determined to offer truly free gameplay by creating a new kind of advertising model for the industry.

I've been to Korea twice in the last few months and have met with a lot of very impressive talent.” Perry, who also sits on the Advisory board of the Game Developer Conference, said. “GameHi’s Chairman Mike Kim is extremely forward-thinking, and he really wants the Western gamers to experience the unbelievable work his teams do and I'm going to help him do just that.”

You may register immediately to be a member of the 2Moons closed beta (for free) at www.acclaim.com.  Log on today and make sure you are one of the first in the world to experience this exciting new game! More information will become available in the coming months.

So what do we know so far:

• Free to play
• Ad-supported revenue model
• Players may be able to "opt-out" of seeing the ads, though I think it highly likely they'll have to pay a price of some sort to do so
• They consider backstory less relevant than grinding to 100+
• They want to use an arcade-style combat system
• This is being co-developed with the Korean group. I imagine that will impact a lot of the game design elements. Hopefully they can straddle the East/West divide in playstyle preferences unlike those that have come before them.
• They seem to like the number+noun name convention, as 2Moon comes shortly after the announcement of 9 Dragons. 

This could end up being a straight Korean import, or maybe they will inject Western sensibilities enough so a Western audience will play it. Regardless, the above press release reads like an accountants attempt to spin the same "play2crush" message Wolfpack Studioes created for Shadowbane so many years ago. And it comes off just as comical.

But I give them props for trying. Everyone should try to make an MMOG. It'll help evolve the genre, because they can't all look to rip each other's ideas off and expect to survive.

But one thing I just got concerned with is the minimum system specs, as posted on Stratics:

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Windows® 2000/XP/Vista
• 512 MB System RAM
• 2.5 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 or equivalent AMD™ processor
• 128 MB Direct3D and Shader 2.0 compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
• 8x DVD-ROM drive
• 4.6 GB free hard disk space
• DirectX 9.0c
• DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
• Keyboard, Mouse
• Broadband Internet connection

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS:

• Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• 3.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD processor
• 2 GB System RAM
• ATI™ X1800 series, NVIDIA® GeForce 7800 series, or higher 3.0 Shader compliant video card

For an FPS, that feels right. For an MMO though, that feels high. The trouble with TR is that it's not really an FPS in the traditional sense. By integrating traditional RPG components in a hybrid system that feels like player skill matters, I feel they're balancing the good part of Planetside (an FPS for the rest of us) and the longterm interest of the average player, as seen in traditional MMORPGs.

So for them to have what appears to be fairly high minimum specs (largely related to that 2.5GHz processor) seems to be taking a risk of cutting off the RPG side of things. Granted, if someone loves RPGs, they've probably got Oblivion and a rig to play it effectively. But MMOs still traditionally lag behind the leading edge of tech, because the needs of the game spans more than any one critical component. A graphics card alone does not solve issues with a slow hard drive, slow RAM or a slow processor.

At first I thought maybe it was just me lamenting the passing of my aging rig into a new stage of its life as a print server. But in this discussion at F13, I find that I'm not alone in my concern.

Whether this relates to any sort of eyecandy in Vista, or is just the way things are, I feel Destination Games may be casting a too narrow net by setting the bar too high.ven the minimum spec for TR is fairly high by conventional means. Sure anyone who loves and only plays Prey and that ilk will have no trouble with TR. But like the Planetside discussions of old, how many people are going to come from their FPS games to a gimped FPS, and specific to TR (and in some ways Huxley), one with decidedly RPG-overtones anyone?

These are different target markets for a reason.

I want TR to succeed. I've been intrigued by it since the first generation of the title. I'm hoping either these specs change, or there'll garner a lot of success in a previously-untapped market for folks with cutting-edge rigs.

Anyway, over time I've completely reformatted my Links page, something I never really did in the last iteration of this place. If anyone has any comments on it, please feel free to tell me about it here. I am specifically looking for any game recommendations to add to the longterm radar sections, because, you know, ya just can't have enougn MMORPG!

There actually isn't a "full story" here. I just wanted to put this line in to open up the Comments section. Fooled ya!

However, now I'm wondering if the realities of delivering these games may compel a shift in the sorts of games we play at all, as a way to make ingame advertising successful.

Right now MMOs are clearly dominated by unique custom IP mostly in a fantasy setting. Given the setting, ingame advertising doesn't really work to enhance the experience. Ads for any modern IP would be at odds with the lore of such games. Because players wouldn't readily accept its presence, the options for ad support would be so limited they'd become hard to sell as ad space at all.

But the costs of these games just continues to go up. Asset costs alone are a big chunk of the budget, and the fidelity of higher resolutions only makes creating those assets more complex. And while Spore is a nice idea to resolve this perennial problem, it would be at least years before the genre could retool their entire production pipeline and business methodology to benefit from the procedural approach of development.

Until then, add 10-20% per anum (or more) for development budget and either:

• Up the purchase/subscription price to offset it
• Hope you get sell-through in the millions at a time when the low hundred thousands is considered a win (probably by upping your own marketing budget).
• Offset both by selling and revolving ad space.

So, skyrocketing costs, no clear guarantee on skyrocketing ROI to match, and a genre dominated by a theme not suited for ad space.

As I see it, a few things could happen here:

1. Fantasy (Eastern or Western) will go away in favor of more experiences conducive to advertising, like sci-fi, contemporary or modern history settings. Of course, this could happen anyway, and some think it should. The sheer number of fantasy games out right now is enough for anyone to ask "do we need another friggin fantasy game?"
2. RPG statistics-based gaming goes away in favor of hybrid systems that lean RPG (Tabula Rasa), FPS (Planetside) or are entirely FPS (like Huxley).
3. Greater focus on Eastern Fantasy experiences integrating modern or futuristic settings with the trappings traditional Western Fantasy trappings. I'm thinking specifically of Final Fantasy here, but others could work.
4. Taken together, all of the above could shift the appeal of the genre across age groups, genders and lifestyles.

All of these question expose a deeper change that could be coming.

MMOGs are an advertisers' dream. You have a dedicated installed base of viewers who pop in for a few minutes or a few hours at a time, living within a single environment where they don't even think of changing the channel, and can't even they wanted to. I can think of no other experience where advertising could so easily hit, and keep the attention of, the player. This of course is well-known, and the reason why we've seen a number of attempts already to integrate advertising, either by making a licensed MMO or by placing ads in them.

As a result of this sheer potential, we could see subtle changes to the games to make them more conducive to ingame advertising.

Coincidentally, this is in line with my thinking on how games could or would be modified to make them more conducive to ingame item sales as well. For example, I am currently arguing that Space Cowboy was built specifically for this purpose. 

And ironically, shifting the genre to integrate advertising more readily could actually result in the delivery of one of the most requested brand extensions to date. Unlike WoW, a Galaxy of Starcraft could be more conducive to advertising.

I want to fast forward five years and see if I'm right.

Reference:

• Ingame Advertising turns 5- Project Entropia
• Ingame Advertising turns 4- Auto Assault
• Ingame Advertising turns 3- Anarchy Online
• Ingame Advertising turns 2- Planetside
• Ingame Advertising- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Mall Tycoon