Azaroth

Oh Danny boy.

Obviously he doesn’t have much time for blogging, since this front page post was actually created on March 23rd of last year, but Daniel James posted on his site decrying the vile swamp of cookie cutter multi-million dollar MMOs he saw at E3. Now, Daniel is a nice guy. But I’m not sure he’s getting it. He’s both ahead of and behind the times.

In fact, he’s a lot like I was for a long time.

Daniel obviously operates Three Rings, which does Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy. Clearly he’s a proponent of non-traditional MMOs, and really not big on the never ending sea of graphical DikuMUDS. That’s great. I feel the same way. So did Richard Bartle.

But a quick trip over to Mr. Bartle’s blog some time ago revealed to me that he had started, and completed, one level 60 World of Warcraft character. “Just to show them I can”, he said. “I still hate these games”, he said.

Fine. Good.

Many months later, I stopped by his site again. I believe at this point, he had three or four characters at level 60 - and was planning to level his mage to 70.

Yet, before this marathon of WoW gaming, I had never seen anything but cold hatred coming from his keyboard when he wrote about games like WoW. Alright - cold… indifference? Can I not sensationalize a little? RATINGS, baby. Can’t you tell I’m all about the money with these crazy ads all over the place?

I, myself, after being the biggest EQ hater in the world and the hugest proponent for more games in the mould of UO - I’m going to admit, I have a few level 60s on a WoW account somewhere, too.

We all love the sandbox for our own reasons. We all love various incarnations of non-Dikus for our own reasons. We all love the virtual world, as opposed to the virtual game. We’ve all done the grind before. We’re all very sorry that EQ caught on like it did.

Yet even someone like myself, even someone like Richard Bartle, and people all over that I don’t have examples of on hand (but are obviously supported by the account numbers), are falling into the trap.

So why is every game with a large budget being cut from the same pattern?

It’s safe. It’s easy. It’s proven. In that, it’s probably the only way to GET that large budget money from VCs.

It’s going to be hard enough to raise the funds for a MMO in the first place. I’m sure most investors want to be shown success, and told that you’re going to do it like THAT. Not shown success, then shown failures or mediocre successes and told that you’re going to do it like that… and hope YOU’RE the one to get it right where so many others have failed.

Because they do fail. Spectacularly. And often.

Which all kinds of MMOs do, including Diku style MMOs. But they also have the big successes, too. That’s what counts when you’re pitching something.

It’s really hard to do something “different” and succeed. Maybe Raph can get funding for that. But Johnny B. Wonderful the MMO dreamer isn’t going to approach a VC and come away with $25m for an MMO very often in the first place. Let alone when he walks in saying “I want to spend a lot of money making something that traditionally doesn’t make a lot of money. There is no example of this type of thing succeeding at the level I’m proposing, and ESPECIALLY not at the level of that big shiny one OVER THERE“.

And guess what?

We all play that one over there.

Tired as you may be of the grind since 1982, if you started playing WoW with a friend or two - you’d be in the exact same predicament as Mr. Bartle, Daniel. I’m just guessing.

I’m no graphics whore. I’m certainly not a leveling kind of guy. I hate the time = power equation that WoW, EQ, etc design themselves after. The guy that smells like the ass of a cat will always beat the crap out of my casual UBRS slash MC geared ass, because he just got done farming T3 for 20 hours a day the last twelve weeks.

But you know what?

Sometimes you just want to whomp the rats.

Solid gameplay, constant and visible, rewarded progression… well put together class designs, massive mountains of content, good graphics… it’s just too much for a puny mortal when it comes down to it. I don’t know why. But most people don’t want to learn anything else, and those that have — they still don’t mind the same basic gameplay, down to the same ‘-20′ bling bling hit points that pop up over the poor hapless goblin/frogluk/lionwing/krog/alien lizard thing as you pummel it into glittering transluscent fade-away.

I’ll admit that I can’t explain exactly why. But I do know that it’s a successful formula, and while it does require life-sucking amounts of time to compete at the higher levels - you can still log in, enjoy the content, and view tangible progression toward a goal as you play.

And since some people DO learn to eventually hate it, you can consider yourself ahead of the curve. But since all of us who already do hate it seem to be in need of learning to hate it AGAIN, I’ll also say you’re behind. You need to get in there and truly understand why everyone is trying to make WoW. Or maybe I’ve just been subliminally zombified to recruit new players for Blizzard and Sony.

I sincerely hope we see more Puzzle Pirates, ATITDs, UOs, Eves, and even Second Lifes (we can probably skip the yiffing though). But the simple fact is that these things will need to come from indie sources, probably without entirely traditional sources of funding - and certainly not funding the size of WoW.

That’s why everything you see at E3 with a double-digit million dollar budget is the same crap.