But I only live here, what do I know?

I now return you to your regularly scheduled MMO discussion.

Thanks for the good feedback.

I did an article on 38 Studios a few months back. (http://www.r1ft.com/dev/a-letter-to-curt-schilling-and-38-studios/)

38 Studios could be the answer to getting a MMO out of the normal Orcs / Elves / Swords / Magic genre… but I’m not totally sure.

On one side, we have Todd McFarlane, which could promise some City of X type comic / Spawnish “Fantasy” came that might be actually different. However, on the other hand, they have R.A. Salvatore for the lore / storywriting of it, who is mostly known for the Drizzt / Forgotten Realm series (which I love, dont get me wrong). If it’s a FR game, then we’re just looking at WoW/AoC/WAR/DDO all over again, rehashed.

I guess we’ll see next year. My money was on Fallout Online for the next “big game” … but hey, they didn’t want to hire me, so their loss.

I think by calling a game a ‘WoW killer’ it almost dooms it from the beginning because people will invariably, whether consciously or subconsciously, compare it to WoW. And it will be really really hard for any new game to match the polish and the depth (not to mention the existing online user-base) of WoW. As Daniel points out, only Blizzard can really kill WoW, but even if they lose users and don’t manage to sustain the ridiculous base they have now, there will always be people playing WoW, questing with the guilds they have been playing with for ___ years.

I think there is loads of opportunity to expand the pie, and bring lots more users into the ‘massively multiplayer online’ space. It might be heretical, but I am personally tired of people equating ‘MMO’ with ‘fantasy-based questing game.’ There are lots of other opportunities to make cool games that bring loads of people together to play them. Massively’s question got a bunch of cool ideas for bringing existing IPs into the MMO space (http://www.massively.com/2008/07/31/the-daily-grind-name-your-mmo-dream-team/).

I think it will just take a team with a bunch of money behind them (Slipgate, 38 Studios?) to pound through the technology limitations (make the world fast and big), and have someone with a big enough brain to think up, and then polish the tremendous gameplay needed to make an MMO work (how do you balance characters in a GI Joe-themed world? Why can’t everyone be a freaking Jedi in Star Wars?). And I think the clincher will be to make it really easy to play, and non-threatening to the non-tech – can you do a drug-dealer model, and get all those people playing Pogo and Wii to ‘upgrade’ to a massively multiplayer world?

Mimes scare me.

It’s the reason ive tried a free 14 days on Eve 3 times now. I want to like Eve, but the combat is not my style.