Well, we can always wait for He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Well, here's hoping you don't get knocked off the project only to watch it go spiraling down to hell. I'm still waiting for my massive online Morrowind/UO clone. With pony-skinning, town-building, and levelless design.

I'll get excited about Rickey when it looks like there's really something behind what he's talking about. In other words, show me the game. I'm long past the desire to try and make a mental connection with something that doesn't exist yet.

I don't want anybody to get excited about it yet. Right now, the project is me, a programmer as crazy as I am, an executive producer, and the revenue stream from her virtual horse and puppy web games. We're going to be spending a year building AI and the server architecture to support it before we even begin to produce something that will resemble a playable game.

If my half-baked theories about online games and why people play them are correct, this game will hit the market like a shark in the guppy tank. More likely, we'll create a moderately successful niche game and use the proceeds to make the next game a real contender. Worse comes to worst, I leave a Dave Rickey shaped impression on the wall that is labelled "Non EQ Clone Fantasy Game".

My career cannot survive another ignominious failure. I need a *spectacular* failure, or I need a success.

--Dave

"Wow, even if I lose I'll be famous!"

Look at it this way. No matter what you do, Dawn did it worse.

Well, except launch.

I'd argue that a small project like you've described could only hit the current market like, say an ill-tempered sea bass in the pond.

Not a shark with a frikkin laser in the guppy tank.

YMMV.

-Walt

Exactly. Where is my MMOG set in the 'War of Seven States' period of China? Feudal Japan? Maya v Aztec v. Nomads in the Americas? Ancient Mesopotamia? Greek Mythology? Rome?

Besides, Fantasy has *always* sold better than sci-fi in terms of RPG's.

Anyone remember Planescape:Torment? Anyone remember why most people wouldn't play it?

Thought so.

Not that I think about it, make it about an eternal war between Vampires, werewolves with humans caught in the middle, set in Mideival Europe, or perhaps even the 'modern' era.

Oh wait.

$10M budget is "small"? Okay, I know Mark is spending WoW/EQ2-like money on Imperator, but $10M is still 4 times the original budget for Camelot. For the first year the team is small while we work on "plumbing", the AI and the servers to support it, but the team hopefully won't stay small. Most of the budget for the current generation is going into building content, laboriously by hand, in a way that is both inefficient and specifically designed to create an EQ-like game. I'm not making an EQ-like game.

But damn, man, blowing off $10M like that? Have we gone Hollywood, or what?

--Dave

WoW has changed everything. Good luck with that.

What the fuck has WoW changed? Is there going to be the same level of hoopla about it six months from now, or three years from now when Dave might actually have something in the chamber ready to fire? Are MMOG players going to suddenly stop becoming jaded and picky as they become more experienced? Are they not becoming jaded and picky about WoW right now?

New MMOGs don't need to be made just for their own sake, but if there's actually something new to be experienced that can't be delivered by another game, that's a market future.

I didn't translate this into $10 mill.



No, no it is not. Good luck riding the shark.

-Walt

I know what game *I'D* make. A Massively Multiplayer Online Massively Multiplayer Online Game. People would log in PvP each other using Game Design Attacks and Defenses. You could join different guilds (Various fansites/blogs/boards). The point of the game relates to the lore, that dictates that whoever grinds fastest and hardest through the ranks (levels), from QA to Lead Designer, will achieve the Epic title of GameDev. At that point, they'll be able to edit the server code of the game, and change the properties for further development by everyone else. Of course, some people might not want to level, and could become crafters, and try to make games themselves by buying, creating or otherwise acquiring pieces of games that other crafters make. But it's really hard to sell these to other players because they just get better stuff from NPCs. Every now and then, a crafter will mine a rare Investor Treasure chest, that can be redeemed for better materials for crafting. Unfortunately, this drop is so rare, that when a crafter DOES find it, they usually waste it on materials they don't need, or to create items people won't buy. I'd ban the use of Ebay in my ToS, for selling in-game currency, but it turns out that 100,000i (i=ideas), isn't worth $1.00USD. This low value is due to a coding flaw, where every player can generate their own i, and convince the server code it's worth the same as every other i. Oops. Damn bugs.

That went longer than expected.

Yeah not having perma-death would break the lore, but obviously wouldn't work in a MMOG either. Or you could do that whole thing with family heritage, etc. (Reap revenge on those that beheaded your father...erm, that might be copyrighted)

Otherwise, only the griefers would survive. Although, I think there is supposed to be some poetic ending, but it never comes...

I'd say that "i" would not be a currency that would probably have much value since 12i = 10 cents. A more valid forum of scorekeeping to show how much influence you can exert in game would be "s". s= subscriber, and this would be interesting because more than one player could lay claim to the same "s". How much effort you put into getting an "s" would be the relative value of the "s". A single "s" may mean more to one player than another, and to see what lengths players would go to to keep or acquire more "s"'s would be interesting for those of us who would be levelling up a different class, known as "industry analysts".

FANTASY!

What about the client? It sounds completely off your line of sight.

Dude, they've been working on it for the industry version of five minutes. How about we wait a bit before asking for beta invites, k?

What will the shard names be Dave?