Tag Archive for 'MMOs'

Reflecting On ‘Star Wars Galaxies’

Published
on January 30, 2009
in Review
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As much as some would like to forget, BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic is not the first massively multiplayer online game to tread the waters of the galaxy far far away. Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies was the first MMO I ever played, and the oddball experience has colored my approach to every MMO after.

My love for the franchise compelled me to start playing SWG in the final stages of the beta, where everything was still broken as hell. Characters who sat in a certain chair in a campground would teleport to the exact middle of the world, where a set of women’s underwear hung in the air and graphic glitches played off the plains like thunder. It was charming as hell.

The game encompassed ten planets, all rendered as wide-open 15 km by 15 km squares of terrain. You could go anywhere, walk up any surface, swim across any body of water. Each planet featured a few movie landmarks — Jabba the Hutt’s palace and the droid’s escape pod on Tatooine, the lakes of Naboo, the Massassi temples on Yavin IV, and the Ewok village on Endor, to name a few.

They were fun to explore, but more like theme parks than anything else. The game had a few World of Warcraft style quests, but most players turned to the mission assignments for money and experience. Computer terminals randomly assigned a mob lair to destroy, which could be Womp Rats on Tatooine, smugglers on Corellia, or Rancors on Dathomir.

I loved the beta and all its flaws so much that I picked up SWG when it was released on June 26, 2003, and started playing the next day (the log-in servers were tellingly broken on the first day). I joined the Damorian Corporation, which constructed the first guild hall on the Chilastra server and later spawned Nova Enterprises.

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BioWare Brings Companions, Epic Combat to ‘The Old Republic’

Published
on December 4, 2008
in Preview
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An Edge magazine preview of the new Star Wars MMO The Old Republic has new details on how BioWare’s first attempt at a massively multiplayer game will differ from the competition in atmosphere and play style, including the use of companion characters.

“This is a faster-paced system that focuses on making the player feel like a hero,” said Creative Designer James Ohlen. “Four players all beating on one enemy; that’s not what you think of as heroic. It’s usually the heroes who are outnumbered, and that’s the kind of feeling we’re going for.”

BioWare is trying to integrate the epic, personal, and ascending narratives of their single player titles into the MMO genre, where individual players are normally cogs in a massive machine and one hero among thousands.

Lead Writer Daniel Erickson said that players would have to make big, character-defining choices and live with the consequences, but could not say if or how those choices would change the game world.

The Edge mentioned companion characters as one BioWare mainstay making its way into the game. A single ally can fight alongside a player character, and these allies have opinions and backstories.

Their role is to continually comment on, and presumably try to influence, your behaviour. Greg Zeschuk (BioWare’s president and co-founder) describes them as “the lens through which you see the world,” and they won’t hesitate to make their feelings known, good or bad, and will even abandon you if you’re constantly doing things they object to.

The article also gives early impressions of the new game’s art style.

The game takes a few visual cues from the new Clone Wars aesthetic introduced by the recent film and TV series: characters have simplified body structures, bright flat colors and the odd exaggerated feature. Each asset is hand-painted rather than using photo-sourced textures, giving everything a slightly unreal and highly distinctive sheen.

This is the same approach that Blizzard took with World of Warcraft. They compensated for aging graphics with unique art and design that kept everything fresh. Its the most economic plan for MMOs because it allows for stunning visuals and an expansive user base to play on low-end machines.

BioWare Pushes MMO Storytelling With ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’

Published
on November 13, 2008
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It came as no surprise that Electronic Arts, LucasArts, and BioWare put World of Warcraft on notice when they announced Star Wars: The Old Republic late last month.

Every MMO released this year has tried to distinguish itself from Blizzard’s monolith in some aspect, and with The Old Republic, BioWare is focusing on storytelling, their realm of expertise.

Developers from BioWare Austin talked about how they will address this chronically underserved aspect of the genre at a round-table discussion, covered by Joystiq. Most of all, they want to treat the player as seriously as if this were a single-player experience.

“You will never in the game go into a cantina and poke a random person to see if you can solve their problems and they’ll give you money,” said Lead Writer Daniel Erickson. “You will never have some stranger on the street ask you to save their cat. You do large, heroic things.

“I always tell my writers,” Erickson continued, “to imagine if the very first response you could ever choose to any quest they might pitch is, ‘Excuse me, I’m saving the world. Is this important?’”

According to BioWare, The Old Republic contains more dialog and content than all its past titles combined.

“If you roll a Jedi character and you play them from the first level to the last level, and then you roll a Sith and you play them from the first level to the last level, you will not see one repeated quest, line of dialogue, or piece of content,” said Erickson. “It is a 100% different story experience.”

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Authorial Control in MMOs, and How Players Can Change the World

Published
on October 12, 2008
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I’ve written a little about authorial control on this blog, but never addressed how interactive storytelling can apply to the phenomenally popular, naturally static worlds of massively multiplayer online games. A blog post by Snipehunter on Dopass.com poses a question popular among players: How can MMO developers deliver control to players?

It’s impossible for a player to be immersed in a world where independent choice and exploration are untenable, writes Snipehunter, the alias of a game designer with experience on the MMO Auto Assault. To create the “illusion of reality,” MMOs need to give authorial control to the players.

The PvE aspects of World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Auto Assault, Snipehunter takes note, are “basically a linear game… You’re guided, some might cynically say ‘by the nose,’ the whole way, with no encouragement (and in some cases active discouragement) to explore or make your own choices, along the way. For some players, I think, this amounts to having the game ‘happen to them’ instead of ‘making it happen.’”

In his blog post, Snipehunter reminisces on the more open world of Ultima Online. “I didn’t ask the game for a to-do list of chores,” he wrote.

“Instead, I decided for myself what my goals would me. ‘I’m going to get a boat’ or ‘I want to explore Avatar Isle’ were, in essence, the quests I wrote for myself. I went to that world specifically to be able to make those kinds of choices; to write my own experience as an adventurer in that world. I decided what my role and level of impact in the world was.”

Snipehunter said that this is the experience MMO players want when they ask for control. “Hand written quests and hand authored raids and events are a huge boon for MMOs,” he concluded. “They allow the skills of good writers and good designers to be leveraged to provide heroic experiences you can’t get in an open, true virtual world.”

As it stands, players can take the initiative to set up events like this, but there are no in-game tools to support the crowd of players looking for a role-playing experience. Interactive storytelling is about involving the player in the process of creating and populating a world, and Snipehunter’s idea, albeit simple, is a very good start.

MMO Players Love Underdog Role, Says Daedalus Project Poll

Published
on October 10, 2008
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Massively multiplayer online games are all about choosing a role for your character to fill in a complete and crowded world, and a new study at the always fascinating Daedalus Project asks MMO players eight questions about the roles they love to role-play.

The most interesting finding had to do with game factions.

“In many games where there are warring factions, disparities between the faction populations typically arise,” said the report. Rebels outnumbered Imperials in Star Wars Galaxies, there are more Alliance than Horde in World of Warcraft, and so far Destruction is destroying Order in Warhammer Online.

Yet the 80% of respondents in the Daedalus Project poll said they would prefer to take up arms for the minority side if given a choice. Who wouldn’t want to play the desperate partisan struggling against overwhelming odds? Or maybe they just want to avoid waiting in line for player vs player battlegrounds.

Another interesting conclusion came from gender choices in character creation. According to the poll, men are four times as likely as women to create a character of the opposite gender, with 26% of men admitting to gender-bending.

When it comes to character classes, things stayed pretty even between the four archetypes of warrior, cleric, mage and archer. “The stereotypical gender difference is also seen,” found the report. “Men prefer to be warriors while women prefer to be healers. There were no gender differences in the archer or mage classes.”

The poll also asked participants about their favorite settings and which roles they preferred in specific settings. It’s worth taking a look at, if just for the comparison between male and female players.

REVIEW: ‘Age of Conan’ a Strong Alternative to Current MMOs

Published
on July 9, 2008
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Two months after its release, Funcom’s massively multiplayer online RPG Age of Conan is overcoming its launch problems and providing players with a world where roleplaying is actually viable.

Based in the sword and sorcery fiction of Robert E. Howard, whose 1920s and ’30s pulp fantasy invented the genre, the world of Age of Conan is just as intense and lively as the prose of its creator.

The game pits players against evil armies, dangerous beasts, wicked cultists and their summoned creatures. It’s bloody combat, which uses a demanding system of combo attacks, often ends with decapitations and fatalities.

Conan’s “low fantasy” setting is much grittier than that of World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings. There are few real heroes, and every character presented in the opening act has bad qualities.

Age of Conan’s first act tells a story in the manner of traditional RPGs, with both single- and multiplayer content. It sets the game apart from other MMOs, and feels more like Oblivion or Baldur’s Gate.

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‘World of Warcraft’ Money Cap Reached

Published
on January 18, 2008
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World of Warcraft players are beginning to hit the game’s cap on gold, according to WoW Insider. The cap of 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper is a result of the game code. Blizzard has not commented so far.

In terms of story and character development, massively multiplayer online games are different beasts entirely, but it’s nonetheless interesting to consider how they function. Level caps exist in most games even outside this genre, preventing things from getting to easy and overbalanced. If you could get to level 9,000, somebody would, and it would end up being just like that episode of South Park.

But to have a ceiling on every quantifiable aspect of your character means that there’s a point of stasis and perfection, a point where you literally cannot develop anymore. At some point, after years of playing, you’ll be the max level with the best items and the most gold and there’s nothing for you to do but stand around Ironforge and gloat.

Is your WoW avatar a character, or a bucket you’re trying to fill to the brim for Internet prestige?

(Note: I’m grasping for news. Slow week in the story department.)

BioWare Austin Hiring Writers For New MMO

Published
on November 13, 2007
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BioWare’s upcoming MMO is their largest project to date, and they need your help. With one of the greatest reputations for video game writing in the industry, the creators of Baldur’s Gate II and Jade Empire are now hiring writers for their Austin, TX, branch.

Applicants should have some degree of experience, professional or in school, and must include a 15 to 30 minute module made with the Neverwinter Nights toolset that demonstrates your game writing abilities. Writing for games requires a unique brand of skill not found among all mortals.

“Just trying to explain the concept behind writing without a protagonist to someone who has never even been a dungeon master can be like showing card tricks to a dog,” said Daniel Erickson, principal lead writer with BioWare Austin, in an email to Penny Arcade.

Think a writer for the epitome of literary game developers could never come from your humble origins? Think again!

“In the history of the company, we’ve had published fantasy authors, screenwriters and editors all wash out of BioWare’s training program,” said Erickson in the same email. “On the flip side, we’ve had fantastic kids right of college, an ex CNN producer and a former gift wrapping clerk from Singapore all succeed in the BioWare writer family.”

So what the hell, give it a chance. I know I will.

See BioWare’s jobs page for more information on how to apply and on other jobs with the company.

Protagonist or Pawn: Canon in Video Game Tie-Ins

Published
on August 5, 2007
in Analysis
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Gamers regularly make choices when playing a game. But what if those decisions were truly important? What if they changed the future of the plot?

An article in the most recent issue of The Escapist looks at how games in multi-media franchises treat “canon” — the official position on plot and characters which is necessary to ensure continuity in series like Star Wars that span films, shows, books, graphic novels and games. That is, you delivered 100 pizzas in the Spider-Man game, but is that the Sam Raimi-approved number of pizzas delivered by Spider-Man?

This may seem like the realm of nerds and Star Trek enthusiasts, but the changing relationship between canon and video game tie-ins raises an interesting question: What if the player’s actions and choices tangible repercussions in movies, games, and books to follow? What if the player could influence a franchise in a way that readers and film and television audiences cannot?

Chris Dahlen’s Escapist article, titled “The Open Source Canon,” looks specifically at The Matrix Online, a tie-in to the Matrix films with an interesting catch. Troy Hewitt, a writer and community event manager for the game, said in 2005, “Our intention is that players who play a really big role, or make a key decision, become part of the Matrix canon, and they become part of the story.”

In other words, The Matrix Online’s player-driven events and their conclusions are part of the official canon. This includes everything from small quests to major plot events given to the community to play out. In 2005, one of these events resulted in the official death of Morpheus, demonstrating the magnitude of the story decisions players are allowed to make.

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