What was the worlds first graphical MMORPG?

The problem, of course, is what constitutes "first".

Who's Said What?

According to the Korea Times, Kingdom of the Winds was the first "graphical" MMORPG, launched in 1996.

According to Wikipedia's MMORPG section, there's a couple of firsts:

• Islands of Kesmai was the first "commercial" MMORPG, launched in 1984. 
• Neverwinter Nights was the first "graphical" MMORPG, launched in 1991.
• Meridien 59 was the first "modern" MMORPG, also launched in 1996.

This presentation by Raph Koster talks to the very breadth of factors to converge into the modern MMO, and while he lists Air Warrior (an MMO) as 1995, he mentions about Ultima Online and Lineage 1: "With these two, the modern MMORPG is born" (his timeline should also be required reading).

GameSpy agrees with Wikipedia on M59.

And then there's the question of the origin of the term "massively multiplayer" itself. GameSpy notes:

Meridian 59 also marks the introduction of the term "massively multiplayer." In 1996, as Hawkins tried to explain his game to the press, he used terms like "massively multiplayer" and "3D persistent world" quite liberally.

Rich Vogel, currently vice president of development at Sony Online Entertainment, was working at 3DO during that time. He confirms that these terms originated with Meridian 59. "The term 'massively' was first used at 3DO. Actually, 'massively multiplayer Internet game' was Meridian 59's revelation. We coined that phrase."

Koster, who worked at Origin Systems, remembers things differently.

"The massively multiplayer term was coined by Electronic Arts marketing. At that point, Ultima Online was announced. I remember the meeting in which they told us they were going to call it 'massively multiplayer' and we were like, 'Okay, whatever.'" (Looking back, Koster admits that it is possible that 3DO coined the phrase and that Electronic Arts marketing borrowed it.)

Where does it Begin?

Charting the history is almost impossible without taking into account the following:

1. The technology of playing games on a computational system. That goes back to ENIAC
2. The technology of bringing live people together into the same virtual space to play together or competitively. The first real example of that seems to be Space Wars from MIT. In 1962.
3. MUDs themselves, which have no clear beginning in concept either, though MUD, developing by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw is cited as the first one.
4. The emergent preference for playing games in 3D can be charted to Doom, in 1997.
5. The dawn of modern formalized fantasy, which some credit to JR Tolkien, and The Hobbit. 1934.

So it seems like a lot of different people can claim the "first" MMORPG, if they stretch the definition a bit.

What do you think?

While I hated this rule at the time, as a parent now I can see the value of it, or at least some variant.

And, according to Ars Technica, so does the magazine Pediatrics.

The short form:

According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV. "They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn't seem to correlate with doing worse in school," noted Dr. Sharif.

I can agree. Though my oldest is only four, my wife and I already see a huge difference in her behavior between when she watches TV or plays games on the computer and when she's not. In my admittedly untrained opinion, I feel this has to do with the amount of cognitive inputs she's receiving at any time. When the TV and computer are off, there's only so much her brain has to process. So no matter how engaging a meal or her latest drawing project might be, when Mommy or Daddy talk, she's almost got no choice but to listen.

She's a very focused kid, when she wants to be. Not having the TV or computer on makes it easier to be. 

This is an age of multi-tasking, with everyone yammering about how today's tweens are better than today's adults at it. But all I see is the continual problems. I'm no academic, but just from interacting with lots of people every single day, it seems to me that the brain can only process so much actively at a time. When focus shifts, so does attention. Are today's tweens simply better at shifting focus faster, making it appear as if they're multi-tasking? I don't know.

But what I do see is a lot of failures coming from attempts multi-tasking. People seem to think that because they can walk and chew gum at the same time, they can drive, be on a telecon, and checking their PDA concurently. Anyone who works with Crackberry users see this all the time in meetings, though it could also be any PDA or any connected laptop. Anyone who watches kids listen to music while IMing while emailing while gaming while studying can easily see that somethings not getting active attention. And it's usually the studying.

In my opinion, people need to be made more aware of their limitations. Society and commerce can expect whatever they want, and as an adaptive species, we'll always rise to the challenge in some way. However, I think people individually need to be held more accountable for what they try and attempt when they multi-task. And parents need to be more aware about the limitations of their kids, making honest assessments based on results rather than hype or hope.

Maybe it's just that people need to make that ONE BIG HUGE MISTAKE to learn. Seems to be the hallmark of humanity.

In this conversation with Dellaster though, I feel like it's high time we ask the fundamental questions:

What is the apple?

And, is there one by which all games can be measured?

Short answer: No.

Dellaster's latest comment got me thinking along these lines:

Raph's preferred metric, average weekly uniques, would be an improvement. But that wouldn't necessarily mean that those uniques have ever contributed to the bottom line ($$). If the companies could somehow be kept honest, a count of how many accounts have transfered money to the game operator in the past week/month would be more meaningful and would allow comparing subscription games with those that use some form of RMT. Also, it would be nice to see how much money was spent per account for that time period. We'd be comparing apples and apples that way.

Even a few years ago, games started entering the genre (or were finally recognized as being part of the genre) that did not have the flat monthly fee as their primary or even sole source of income. Whether it was the ability to buy pre-rolled characters from EA for UO, or it was using a premium service like changing your character's name in EQ (or the premium server itself), companies have for a while broaden their potential revenue sources.

This has only expanded. Soon games that solely exist on flat monthly fees alone will be the dinosaurs. Already we're seeing many different ways to structure and measure an MMOG company:

• Company A (CCP, Mythic, etc) might consider Average Weekly Uniques important because that helps them assess how much it costs them to continue running the online world populated only by people who pay a flat monthly fee to play it. To them, the higher the uniques, the more burden to their servers and systems, the less money to them (maybe).
• Company B (Wizet, GPotato, etc) might consider Per Player Revenue important because their business model relies on players using realworld money to buy ingame abilities as their sole source of income. Average Weekly Uniques matters to them as it would Company A, but is not something tied to direct revenue.
• Company C (SOE, Linden Labs, etc.) would take both into account plus look at the breadth of their offering of premium services for a measure of their total experience offering, something with a breadth that far exceeds Company A and B as it includes flat monthly fees, real item sales, extra community based premium services, and so on.
• Company D (Postopia, Millsburry, etc) may only be looking to advertising revenue as their main or sole source of income.
• Company E (MGA Entertainment/Miuchiz) may be funding their online world through the realworld sales of hardware at retail, potentially someday looking to activate a secondary stream of revenue.

To me, the "apple" is as different for each company as there are games. This very short list highlights the four main sources of income:

1. Flat monthly (tiered or one-size-fits-all)
2. Microtransactions
3. A hybrid of both
4. Advergaming
5. Hardware sales.

There's more. And there's more companies coming from left field bringing their own unique vision and business needs

WoW, to me, capped the Age of Flat Monthly Fees. The expectations for future games funded on this model are beyond the reach of probably 80% of those who are interested in this genre. But that certainly does not close the door on new games coming. It just means their relevance, both experientially and financially, must be different. When someone has "won", either someone else has to find their weakness and be better, or they have to change the rules and set new win conditions.

Or maybe, like so many recent entries, they just ignore the rules entirely and hit a different player altogether.

In the future, I expect to see any new game immediately categorized into a bucket populated by games of its ilk. To say "MMOG" won't nearly be enough". How the genre gets bracketed remains to be seen. But ultimately, it will need to be so that those who fund these things understand, truly, what they're paying for and what they're going to get.

It's not just about apples to apples anymore. It's about apples to apples, oranges to oranges, peaches to peaches and so on. 

—————————— 

Ref:

• The Numbers Game 

Throughout the year, my eye has been on the Nintendo Wii. This is likely the first console I'll actually buy since the Nintendo 32bit machine from the mid-1990s.

Today this decision was nailed home for me.

In a Gamasutra article, they reference this New York Times article (requires login) which details some new information about the Wii:

• North/South American Released: 11/19.
• 25 Games for launch
• Standard AAA titles will go for $50, which bucks industry trend of $60+
• Includes the digital delivery of classic games they expect to list for between $5 and $10.
• Integrated photo support for TV display as well as News and Weather "channels".

Add to the above their already way-innovative controller, and expand the "classic games" to include every Nintendo title ever made, and we have a system that could conceivable appeal to every Nintendo fan there ever has been and talks specifically to people who don't want to learn to play even higher-resolution games on the same old controller.

While Sony and Microsoft duked it out for dominance of the high-end graphics space in the last generation, Nintendo quietly talked to an audience neither of the other two even bothered to address. And then, earlier this year when the Wii Controller was revealed, both competitors fell over themselves trying to capture Nintendo fans by saying things like "oh, yea, the Wii will be a great second system to our PS3/Xbox!"

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Meanwhile, Nintendo is effectively saying that competition between Sony and MS is irrelevant to them. The very essence of Blue Ocean thinking.

Now, this isn't to say the competitors aren't thinking innovation either. Between the Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and Live Anywhere ideal, and Sony's own Virtual Console, this new generation is less about raw graphics and speed and more about what-else-can-it-do.

And that's an important development in my mind, beyond the innovations of expanding the playerbase. Many of us have watched the rise of platform independent media consumption, watching movies on cellphones, making phonecalls through Second Life, that sorta thing. But to date, the Living Room/Den of a house has been a sanctuary away from this always-on connectivity.

This new generation of consoles stands to change that. Photos on the TV, streamed movies from the computer, banking on a console, it's all converging. Now whether people want this, or continue to relegate their consoles to the media room remains to be seen.

Personally, I expect the adopters and deniers to be separated by generation. And for both groups to find commonality with the Wii.

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.

In any case, the Wayback Machine feature at the site is so very wonderful. Have a page you just knew existed years ago but which is now broken (like, the WinXP tweaks site Blackviper.com)? Throw the URL into that text box there and be presented with a list of links pointing to snapshots of the site on specific days. It doesn't seem to follow links very deeply, but I am just beginning to look at what they archive and how.

Could be an interesting problem for folks who want to have pages forgotten and went so far as to ask Google to de-list them. Yet another example of revisionist historians butting up against modern tech

By way of GameSpot, I have long wondered, in a number of places, about this fascination with creating graphics engines from the ground up for MMOGs. That has felt to me like a big money sink for results that, to the average end user, are more different in aesthetic and style than in any nuance of performance and scalability.

There's good reasons to make an engine of course. That scalability for one, owning it being another and being able to tweak it for your exacting needs a third (not in order).

Yet, SOE is licensing the Unreal Engine 3 from Epic Games for use in the DC Comics MMO.

To me this could be a sign of them wanting a tighter budget, maybe a leaner development schedule. I personally feel it's a good move. I don't know anything about the technical capabilities of the engine, but I imagine they do and deem it good enough for them for this project.

They, of course, are not the first to do this. Neither is this the first time for them. Lum offered up a concise lists of other games and companies that have or are licensing graphics engines, for similar goals in efficiency, and SirBruce offered more depth for those using the Unreal engine by providing the version of the engine.

• Aion: CryENGINE
• Chronicles of Spellborn: Unreal 2.5
• Dark Age of Camelot: Netimmerse/Gamebyro
• DC Comics: Unreal
• Endless Saga (now cancelled): Unreal 3.0
• Fury: Unreal 3.0
• Huxley: Unreal 3.0
• Lineage 2: Unreal 2.0
• Priston Tale 2: Unreal 2.5
• Ragnarok Online 2: Unreal 2.5
• Stargate Worlds: Unreal 3.0
• Ultima X: Unreal 2.0
• Warhammer Online: Netimmerse/Gamebyro
• Vanguard: Unreal 2.5

I say kudos to this. Maybe these companies will save wads of cash and time and be able to focus more on the game system, features and style (particularly important for the licensed games).

According to sources quoted by website XbitLabs, Microsoft will not release version 10 of the DirectX application programming interface (API) for Windows XP, but will instead make it an exclusive for the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.The news, which has not been officially confirmed, was apparently mentioned at a recent event in London, with ATI Technologies’ software developers relations chief Richard Huddy commenting that Windows Vista will integrate DirectX 10 and DirectX 9 APIs for different types of hardware, but that Windows XP will not get DirectX 10 support. The lack of DirectX 10 support will essentially place a glass ceiling on software technology created for Windows XP, with new graphics cards specifically designed for DirectX 10 (planned by both ATI and nVidia for later in the year) only being fully utilized when using Windows Vista. The logic behind Microsoft’s decision is obvious, in that it further enforces the idea of Windows Vista as a necessary upgrade for game players, and allows Windows Vista and DirectX 10 to combine much more efficiently, but it also has the risk of further narrowing the market for cutting-edge PC games. Currently, Windows Vista is not expected to be widely available as a stand-alone release until January 2007

If this information is official, I think Microsoft will eventually change their mind anyway, for a few reasons:

1. Most people buy a new computer rather than upgrade their existing one. Sure gamers like us may get in their, wipe the drive, do a clean install, and all that. But for the most part, that's not really been proven to be typical consumer behavior.
2. It's just not that easy. I haven't seen a new OS yet that wouldn't truly benefit from a completely wiped drive and clean install. How many people are comfortable with that?
3. Games are so mainstream now, the "average person" can be considered a target for anything that benefits a gamer. This is sort of trickle-down theory applied to gaming. Some cutting edge physics system in a next gen graphics engine can make Lemmings more fun.
4. WinXP has been on the market for years, but the growth and dominance didn't happen overnight. Even Microsoft discontinuing support for Win95 haven't stopped people from not upgrading to XP, much less 98.

Smartly, Microsoft's system requirements for Vista are not that steep. Even a fairly robust computer bought four years ago should have more than enough power to take advantage of the highlights of the new OS. However, I doubt this will drive a new consumer comfort level with upgrading their OS. Basically, if this moves forward as is, forcing Vista on those who want DX10 will delay use of the API in all its glory for some time. Maybe into 2008 or 2009 even. Trying to get developers to use all the new foozles is going to be a bit tricky in the short term.

But it all ended and I was free once again. While I wanted to hit South Hall again to finish up with games I hadn't learned enough about yet, it was my duty to actually, you know, see the other 2/3 of the show. To Kentia and West I did go.

Kentia

Kentia had its usual hodge-podge of games, gear and assorted oddities. The focus down there seemed to be on active play (punching, driving, surfing accessories), mobile games (how does anyone seriously game on these things?!) and random utilities like development tools, testers and hardware. Most of this stuff I had just seen at GDC, but the floor felt more compressed. I can't be sure, but it feels like there was more private-viewing booths and meeting rooms both in Kentia and in West this year than when I last was here in 2004.

So to the West I went.

Concourse

Along the way I managed a detour into Lucasarts. Sworn to silence, I've got nothing to say except that anyone who's a gamer should pay particular attention to two things in early-part 2007: Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter. By themselves they are "just another" behavior and physics engine respectively. You'll see why together they mean something though.

West Hall

This Hall had Nintendo, Sony and Miscellaneous. Those two booths were impossible to miss as they took up what appeared to be 2/3 of the available exhibition space. As I noted in Kentia, the whole back of the hall was private office areas, where things like Warhammer Online (awesome WoW-level CGI movie though) were tucked.

Nintendo

My first stop was to see about the line for the Nintendo Wii. As expected, it was far longer than I could justify standing on. I'll see the unit soon enough, so wasting half my available time on that line didn't seem worth it. Ah well.

The rest of the booth was dominated Nintendo DSes and various games. None particularly stuck out to me, but I'm nowhere near the target audience for their titles. I did get to see the relatively new DS Lite. This is a rather nice device, something I'm seriously considering buying. It looks sorta like an iPod when closed, is far less hefty than the chunky original, and of course has the benefit of the most creative software I've seen for any mobile platform, befitting the creative interface devices available on the system.

I'll probably buy the Wii because of the control system alone. Like the DS, there's true creative potential there.

Finally having my fill of Brain Age, I moved cross the aisle to Sony.

Sony

Another enormous booth, I was very surprised by the rather lackluster interest being shown the PS3 compared to that of the Wii. I figure this is based on two elements:

1. While the PS3 is a technical wonder of technology straight from a sci-fi novel, there just isn't much more to it than making games more immersive. Whoopie they added a motion sensor to the controller. The thing is just a silver dual shock controller from years ago. I don't care how much power the system have, if the control system is exactly the same, chances are the developers will continue to dip into the barrel of what they know.
2. They did have ample playable demos on the floor, probably around 30-35 stations of PS3s featuring multiple playable versions of things like Warhawk (modern flight combat sim), Gran Turismo HD (best graphics tech demo there), Resistance: Fall of Man (near-future combat), Heavenly Sword (fighting game). Meanwhile, the only way to play the Wii was to stand on line or somehow sneak in.

I didn't figure I'd be buying the PS3 this year or at all, and see no reason to change my mind. Making the games in HD format was a great idea, but they're still the same games I was playing a decade ago.

The PSP was another story. I have been somewhat disappointed with it since I bought it a year ago. I've got a laptop and two portable DVD players, so travel movies is not an issue and doesn't require I buy a new library. The games I had tried were mostly direct rips of console-based or console-like titles. My last console was the Nintendo 64 for a reason. I hate the controls and haven't been truly engaged by a game since the first Turok.

But this year I saw a number of titles that make me glad I haven't eBay'd the device. There seems to be an influx of puzzlers, which is exactly what I want to play on the device.

• Miami Vice was a surprise in that it isn't about the show nor upcoming movie. It probably has that sort of Jan Hammer type music, but I couldn't hear sounds on any of the scores of playable units they had around the booth. You have this ship which looks like something out of Asteroids, and the object seems to be to fly around exploding at the right time to make cubes explode. All pretty abstract. All just straight pretty. And intellectually stimulating.
• Tekken. Good. I need a fighter game.
• EEE. This had a name. I think it starts with "Endless". For the life of me though I cannot recall the name. It was fun though, a puzzler in the vein of Miami Vice.
• LocoRoco- puzzler. I saw this at GDC at the Sony booth there, and a good analog of the experience was shown as part of the Independent Games Festival as well. Rotate the world to move an amorphous object around it. Good times.

Still no word on a keyboard for the device though. To me, this continued lack is an insane oversight, something for which I have no explanation. I can't imagine it'd take even a halfway decent coder any more than 30 minutes to create a driver for it. And it's not like Logitech doesn't have enough keyboards kicking around. What keeps either company, or anyone else, from marketing a keyboard is just beyond me. If the device had a touchscreen, it'd be passable. This things cries out for a keyboard, and I'd die happy if it could support a mouse.

They also had some Guitar Hero 2 stations here. Fun game.

Funcom

Since a number of games are shown at a number of booths, it was no surprise to stumble upon Age of Conan at the Funcom booth, nor to learn some more new interesting info about it:

• Levels 1-20 only need to be done once. Players are not required to repeat them if they don't want to. This makes the archetype/sub-class choice for palpable to me, since done once, players can instantly choose another class if their first class didn't work out.
• These levels are free. No subscription fee is collected until one reaches 20 and makes a class choice.
• They target these levels to take about 10-15 hours of game play.
• The taverns in these levels are persistent, so players can mingle. They're not sure they're going to allow trade though, which makes sense. No sense building twinking in right at the start.

Further, another bit of news on cities: guild leaders can build a Town Hall somewhere and the town can grow around it. They really want towns to work with the landscape but to not blight it. They will carefully control where and how building happens.

Finally, the demos didn't feature any magic because their particles system wasn't done. They will, of course, have it though. It'll be elemental-based and powerful and all those glowing promises we always hear before launch.

Given how this game has progressed though, this could be the title that lets me forgive Funcom for the train wreck that was initial AO.

CCP

In the corner of the Hall was tucked the Eve booth. This was largely a meeting space, though they did have a guided demo up. The big feature here was the new graphics engine, which will come this summer, but not with the next content patch. They remodelled and re-textured every ship in the game, and will finalize the overhaul with brand new effects.

They also featured the upcoming integration of voicechat support, brought to them by Vivox. Yet another system at GDC, this suite comes from a company with a strong telecom background. Eve could, if they wanted, allow players to make phone calls right from the game, such is the level of Vivox integration with telecom. Right now, more pedestrian goals like spacial chat and seeing who's speaking are the goals.

Sony Online Entertainment

This booth is remarkably different from 2004. They are much more open with their games now, ringing the outside of their private-viewing area with presented demos of their library of titles. Having just played EQ2, knowing EQ1 pretty well, and seeing not much different with PS and Untold Legends, I focused on SWG.

Now, a word here first. I like playing dumb at these shows. It's not like I'm some fount of unique intelligence. It's just that I find people will open up to the ignorant more than they will to some know-it-all yutz who can't shut up about their own geekness. I've seen a number of these folks at the show, and they annoy me with their transparent questions having no other purpose than tripping up the hired presenters. I almost asked one idiot to move along when he started mocking the Vanguard presenter in the Microsoft games booth about why the game had no business being there. I decided on a simple "you know the announcement was about a three way relationship right?". Stupid kids.

Anyhoo, I had the pleasure of meeting Kurt "Thunderheart" Stangl again. He wouldn't know me from Adam anyway, but he was the one I spoke to the last time I got a good run-down on SWG. This guy really does care. The most telling indicator of this was just how much he had to hold back on the impact the NGE had on the community. Here I was, some random E3 guy who professed to having just some basic awareness of this "online Star Wars game", and he had to struggle to hide his emotions when I asked about some new changes I heard about to the game. He cares about the players, truly. Makes sense given his role of course.

So with that, I got to hear some cool stuff:

• If you don't know by now, they're blowing up Restus on Rori this summer. There'll be a long server-wide quest that leads up to a final battle around the starport in Restus. The story itself is cool, so I won't spoil it. But the outcome of the battle is preordained anyway, so the ending isn't a spoil. And the impact is both huge and immediately rewarding. The entire city goes from alive to all ruins in a matter of seconds, resulting in a ragtag band of survivors giving out quests. Once this event ends, all of Restus becomes a "battleground", a full PvP zone. Really good stuff, even if it does sound like a certain other 'opening of' quest.
• Heavy weapons are in, and they are cool. In a nice nod, every player can use Scatter Pistols and Flamethrowers, though unlike Commandos that specialize in them, other combat classes will lose Action to use them. They still work though. Kurt demoed them on some content on Kashyyyk. Fun stuff, particularly the Flamethrower, which targets the ground.
• True collision detection is coming. As it has been for six months. No real word on when, but they think in a matter of months.
• They have some goodies coming for space too, but those I can't talk about.
• If a player who is flagged PvP gets killed by another player, a dialog box pops up asking if they want to put a bounty on that player. Each player can place up to a 1mil credit bounty on another, and each player can have up to twenty bounties on them.

All in all, they are not giving up on this game. There's a real energy about it from both SOE and Lucasarts. People are really interested in fulfilling the promise the NGE set out to start. I give them credit for maintaining this level of excitement about the game, and maybe in six months it'll finally be a complete package of relevant newness.

NC Soft and Tabula Rasa

At the end of the day, after hours on my feet seeing stuff relevant for my other notes more so than here, I decided to end with what has emerged as my favorite title of the show: Tabula Rasa. I'm glad I did. The fun I had yesterday was trumped.

I was invited to an open chair that turned out to have a different classification. Unlike the "Free Play" stations, this one was "Guided Demo" and included a walking tour/adventure with NCS Richard, playing from NC Soft headquarters. But this was no museum tour.

He starts me in the world as if I knew nothing (quite my purpose) and explains something I immediately realized I had wrong from yesterday. The Q key rotates weapons while the E key rotates alternate abilities. I thought they were for ammo. Some cool stuff here on this character, which was explained to me as being a "Specialist". Aside from normal weapons, I could "cast" Chain Lightning (jumps between enemies) and place Pulse Turrets on the ground, something very Planetside Engineer-esque.

Properly trained and equipped, he guided me through the first few quests which culminated in a romp through an instanced zone. The story here was these biomech warrior things just kept coming, and the humans wanted to know why. Working with their allies, they found the source and decided to go shut it down. That was our goal.

A solid 20 minutes of game play later, we were done, and I was hooked. The game is going to come out when it is done, but probably this year. It's fairly polished as is, but I can't speak for its level of content completeness.

Richard Garriot became the Creative Lead on the project around the time all these crazy changes happened, in addition to being the Executive Producer. This means the complete theme and play shift was his doing. I applaud the result. I also like that they kept the same language. No longer a fantasy title, at least all this means is I have to change what my Triskelion looks like.

Conclusion

Today has turned out to be my last day. Conference call in the morning and a 2pm flight back home. I think I've seen everything I've wanted to see though, and then some.

I set out to find innovation, and I feel like I found enough of it in Pirates of the Burning Sea, Age of Conan and Tabula Rasa. They were quite unexpected, but pleasantly so. These will be the titles I follow for this year while enjoying the offerings already live, for different reason.

For Pirates, it's a game I see as potentially Eve-like in a more mass marketable theme and offering (since players do have avatars. For Conan it's the fantasy theme but the very unique and compelling control system. And for TR, it's the theme and control system together which, like Conan, together finally bring MMORPGs out of the morass of auto-lock dice rolling combat systems I'm so very tired of.

Will that mean I avoid WoW's Burning Crusade? No. By then the Mage Talent Respec will be finally balanced, and the Draenei interest me. They are a noble race (or could be) and new content is new content. WoW is still a very fun game. I just don't need to play it to the exclusion of truly innovative titles.

So that's my 2006. A few new MMORPGs that truly break the mold, the MMOFPS I wish I could have played while here, and the generally rising chaos of life itself.

It was a good show. Probably not the best, and I imagine some people will think it's subdued or on the downswing or just getting more legit and therefore more sanitized for the corporations. But everyone has their own way to deal with the smell of money and success, and eventually the general gamer will come around to the idea that yes, games are business.

• Age of Conan (and again here)
• Eve
• Exteel
• Huxley
• Mu
• Pirates of the Burning Sea
• Project Wiki
• Star Wars Galaxies
• SUN
• Tabula Rasa (and again here)
• Vanguard

The Basics

Having arrived late, not being subjected to any bag search (as nobody else was either apparently), suffering the use of my cellphone as a voice recorder and noting everything wi-fi hotspot I could find, I managed to basically live in South Hall for what time I could actually walk the floor. Such is my life of late that the daily surprises of work are little more than the default expectation.

I originally decided to do the show backwards as it were. As loud and boisterous the South Hall and the ample MMOG and mobile offerings can be, the true noise (notable from the new consoles) comes from the West. That I've saved for tomorrow. Or Friday. Not sure yet, as except for actually using that funky Nintendo Revolution/Wii controller, I'm no more interested in consoles today than I was at the dawn of the previous few generations.

My hope this year is to find strong indications of innovation in the MMOG space. Importantly, that means you'll need to get your WoW info elsewhere. You already know about the Draenai. Except that I was glad to have guessed correctly, I otherwise just don't care.

So, into the South Hall I go.

South Hall

The booths were so large in this hall that it didn't seem to make sense to do the usual row crawl. I decided to spiral in from the perimeter to the center. Or put another way, I started at Webzen and went where my noise took me.

Webzen

This company has intrigued me of late, in much the same way NC Soft did two years ago. Though not sporting as many titles as NC even then, their three are very diverse and interesting in their own way. Also, it was apparent how new they were to the U.S. market as when trying to get real answers from people who actually knew what they were talking about, there was a decided language barrier.

• Huxley- A new MMOFPS to enter the fray. This one appears to have all the makings of a success though. In addition to the massive battles of Planetside, it has pretty high production values, and is more than just about the battles themselves. Featuring ample storyline and game-directed content, Huxley could offer that magic combination of the superior control system of PS but with a more mass-marketable way of retaining players through new content release. The server will support up to 5,000 players concurrently logged in, but they appear to have some effort left to go before their 2007 launch since the game was lagging fairly noticably with just the 30 concurrent players they were hosting at the show.
• SUN: Soul of the Ultimate Nation- This is a fairly standard RPG that feels a bit like Guild Wars.
  • I find the graphics to be superior, but otherwise the game features the same fast paced action, the same boutique customizable instanced battle zones and the same element of PvP.
  • The difference here seems to reside on the ability of players to create their own games, FPS style. A player can visit an instanced zone, choose to create a map, and then set some minor parameters about it. Other players can then join that map and the game begins.
  • The games I played all featured players visiting the same zone each with the same objective: kill as many mobs as possible. The twist? You could kill your opponents also, to prevent them from getting kills. Players respawned right where they died and could be attacked that moment, but this is, after all, a beta build.
  • Play as a Berserker (Tank), Dragon Knight (Monk-like), Valkyrie (Healer) or an Elementalist (Mage).
  • Except that this fills out Webzen's U.S. library of offerings fairly well, this is an otherwise fairly recognizable, and therefore merely passable, title.
• Project Wiki- Looks like it uses the SUN engine but with a cell-shaded style. I couldn't get confirmation on whether that was the case. The game targets teenagers with what appears to be a Dofus-like experience.
• Mu- Another intriguing title, I first heard of this years ago as a game played in China both on PC and on cellphone. Beyond that, I haven't really heard much, and there wasn't more info at the Webzen booth to learn. It seems Webzen will be bringing the title to the U.S, but I plan to dig in on that more tomorrow.

Yedang Online

Another Korea-based company looking to import titles to the U.S. Their two titles were Priston Tale 2: Enigma and LaxeLore, a game link I can't provide as the path to get there (from yedangonline site) is riddled with Flash-UI. Neither game appears to promise much in the way of innovation, and the booth lacked anything in the way of details.

Microsoft Game Play Booth

Like other E3s, Microsoft featured a pavilion of various PC games, each with a representative from the company. I've always liked this feature of the show, and how both ATI and nVidia do this as well. This allows a more individualized conversation about the game, separate from the din of the host company's booth.

• Vanguard- Given how new the announcement was, it wasn't surprising to see Vanguard featured both here and at the SOE booth. My cumulative report of the game is that it's basically ok. It's as close to EQ1 one can get without hell levels. It does feature some interesting elements though:
  • All enemies that are currently targeting you are listed on the upper right.
  • Players can have both Offensive and Defensive targets. The former would be enemies you attack, the latter people supported, with things like heals and buffs.
  • Some characters can transform. Standard stuff here: Necros to Skeletons, Shamans to Bears or Wolves, Druids to Trees. These guys did make EQ1 after all. But here the Necro needs to become a Skeleton/Zombie/Something to manage their undead minions. I don't know if that impacts things beyond what a character looks like (ie, does transforming to an undead decrease faction?).
  • The graphics are ok. They feel like someone started with the EQ2 world and threw some vibrant colors at it. Animations were ok. Servicable, but nothing to write home about. Which of course makes me wonder why I wrote about them.
  • They've implemented a system like EQ2 Heroic Opportunities where moves can be linked together to perform uber actions.
  • Counterspells. This was cool. Enemies that cast spells can display an icon of that spell next to their name. If you have the appropriate counterspell and activate it in time, you can affect that spell before it is completed casting. Sometimes you can cancel it. Other times you can reflect it back to the caster.
  • They use a modified Unreal 2 engine.
  • Their goal is a 100% seamless indoor and outdoor world with no zoning anywhere. I did see some noticable lag when crossing a zone boundary, but it's a closed beta.
  • This month's Computer Gamer magazine has some beta keys.
• Age of Conan- This title now interests me much more than it had previously, for a few reasons:
  • Combat is very real time. I was particularly intrigued by their implementation of the sword-swinging function. WoW this is not. They mapped the Num-key pad to perform sword swings at specific angles. For example, the 7 key would swing a sword from upper left to lower right while the 6 key would swing laterally from right to left. Fighting is very direct. Beheadings and lifting-enemies-by-their-neck-to-gut-them. PG-13 type stuff here.
  • Further to the above, as players advance, they learn combo moves. These combo moves require the pressing of the number keys in sequence and in time, sorta like combo moves in a martial arts title for the arcade or consoles. This alone is a big leap beyond the standard system of smacking keys as needed, and more tactile even than FFXI Renkai or EQ2 Heroic Opportunities.
  • Archery is different. Switching to that mode brings up a gray targeting reticle. It turns red when something can be hit, but the actual hitting is ased on whether you're moving, they're moving and when you fire. Then dice take over.
  • Horse riding is cool. They used mo-cap to get the horse running right, but the riders don't look that great when riding. Horse riding includes horse fighting, and it's tricky to time a sword swing just right to hit a target.
  • The world itself is very alive. Both NPCs and Players can build their own cities. The one city I saw (Torontia) was, in a word, enormous. Imagine Coronet from SWG but in the style of Minith Tirith from LoTR. And all of it was navigable by the player. This is a "hub" city, one of three. I was extremely impressed by both the size and the style. Within the city, guards salute players who have the proper status, kids play, beggars beg, whinos deficate in neon green. Nothings sanitized here. People of fragile sensibilities should avoid this one.

NC Soft

• Tabula Rasa- I once loved this game. After the considerable changes started 18 months ago, I wasn’t sure. I now am. I love this game. Even the presenters have said this game was “completely redesigned from the ground up” a year and a half ago. It shows.
  • For starters, it’s sci-fi now, pure and simple. No dragons here. It’s a pretty well-done form of sci-fi too. Anyone looking for a Starship Troopers type experience won’t be disappointed with TR. The style just works.
  • Combat is completely different. Right now, the set up is very twitch. Use the Q key to scroll through various weapons one can use. Use the E key to scroll through various types of ammo one can use for that weapon. Use the mouse to target and the mouse button to shoot. The game does employ target locking on a per-weapon basis (ie, for some it’s required, for others it is implied), and the chance to hit feels very similar to Planetside in that it is not pure physics-based collision detection. But the action here is amp’d up, so it feels less “why didn’t that work” like PS can be. Basically, you need to keep something under the target reticle. That’s enough to push it beyond the ubiquitous target-locking I’m growing so very tired of in this milieu.
  • All characters are born as recruits. As they level up, they can choose specific specialties (sub-classing), with that first choice being at level 10. There are 7 sub-classes. Everyone can use the basic weapons (the ubiquitous pistol, rifle and machine gun), with the sub-classes gaining access to more specialized equipment. The character I was running had two rocket launchers and a flamethrower to complement the default equipment.
  • Knowing that people will change their mind about what they’ve specced, players can save clones of their character at these key decision point levels. If they
  • Right now the game is PvE, with all the trimmings of game directed content. To me the most important point here is that it’s a PvE MMORPG set in a sci-fi space with a twitch-based control system. This could possibly do what Neocron could not though in appealing to a mass audience.
  • The world is constantly changing. Bases move around and spheres of influence constantly change. I do not know if this means installations look and use actually change. Bases are captured by capturing/holding/destroying the holographic flag in them. Beyond that meaning the base changes hands, therefore providing access to utilities therein, I don’t know what happens. It doesn’t look like someone could destroy the walls and buildings of a base.
• Exteel- I can’t tell if this game is supposed to be an MMO or not, but am assuming it isn’t. Basically, it’s a mechwarrior type game where each player is a robot with increasing abilities. The action is very fast paced, twitchy, and includes flight. It feels like City of Heros on crack. The game appears to be able to support up to 16 concurrent players, though this demo had 12 stations. It was fun to play, but there’s not much more to the game. The brochure includes this byline: “A fast-action, fully downloadable, ‘mech game’ that’s always free* at basic levels!”. The asterisk points to “Some charges may apply for advanced game play”. To me sounds like a Micropayment strategy, typical of Korean-focused offerings at this point.

Flying Lab Software

Tucked into the nVidia booth was Pirates of the Burning Sea. I've been following this title on and off for a few months, but am now even more intrigued with it.

• The game is mostly persistent, though they are talking about instanced player housing.
• The map is a scaled version of the Caribbean. This reduces travel time to something manageable.
• They project being able to have up to 5,000 concurrent users per server.
• The game started out as a Pirate game, and they've been growing the game around that core them. For example, their original economy was a simple WoW-style affair. But their lead economy designer is also a big fan of Eve. As a result, the Pirates economy feels much like that of Eve, being entirely player driven and involving all levels from resource acquisition through the creation (and loss) of gigantic Titan-like ships (in Pirates that'd be the 104 gun behemoth, something only an entire guild could make).
• On land you drive an avatar, in water you drive a ship. Ship driving follows the same conventions, but is affected by everything. Wind speed, wind heading, your heading. You can tell how fast you can go by how buffeted the sails are.
• The AI is impressive. It will try and flank you, force you to turn into the wind, force you aground.
• Players and guilds can own ports, by turning them (placing their flag). This puts a PvP ring around that port, allowing others to come and try and turn it back. Eve-like feel here again, where players can own multiple ports and hold choke points between them. If you own to ports across a bay from each other, you own the straight between them.
• Towns have taxes, but the idea is to not need taxes. Otherwise why would people come and buy from you?
• They plan to integrated persistent world Guild Halls and instantiated private player housing. Their dream is to also integrated Player Theaters for performances.

The Day's Report

A good day. I found a few titles I'm going to definitely check out again, to see if I can't get some more info. But I'm also now more convinced there is innovation happening. It's just not coming from the expected places, which I guess in actuality, is expected.

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