Gamers have grown to have unrealistic expectations from MMOs. Of course much of this is due to the developers themselves using 'colorful' descriptions to make common features sound revolutionary.
Afraid of missing out on the 'big money' games are being pushed into a stagnant mold based on past successes in order to try to appeal to everyone and what we're left with is a bland, watered down, generic game that only appeals to the small amount of gamers who need the familiarity of rehashed content in order to feel comfortable. The rest of us are damn tired of buying a new game that promises something different just to end up doing the same old crap with a slightly different skin.
That's why these guys were destined to fail. They'd already given us their best. No matter how you dress the wife up, you're still punching the same old cow. A garter belt and high heels isn't going to suddenly turn her into Jenna Jameson when all she knows how to do is the missionary position.
Smedley has never really fallen from grace. First of all he never been popular and secondly he still leads SOE.
Is the picture of Roper messed with? He didn't have as large forehead in the other pictures I seen of him. Maybe it just is a weird angle but he looks a bit like pharaoh Akhenaton.
Richard Garriot was a visionary in his day. There was nothing else like UO at the time he created it. I think the fall of these devs has more to do with them just getting too old and out of touch to be able to keep up with gaming trends. They eventually failed to understand gamers and evolve with the rest of the gaming industry.
You're right. There was nothing else like UO at the time he created it because there were no other graphical MMOs (there were other MMOs but they were text-based, like Megawars). Is that being visionary, or just being in the right place at the right time?
EQ wasn't really visionary because it added a graphical interface to the daiku MUD. I think people don't give enough credit to the early designers of the text-based MUDs of the early 90s, many of which never made a single cent from their efforts. If anything, they're the true visionaries...
I'm puzzled by what people consider to be flops here. EQ is a flop? DAoC is a flop? I don't think so. Pre-WoW, they were huge successes! If you had several 100,000 players, you were a success. Only in post-WoW are they considered flops. DAoC has done well overall and only now has a low population due to bleeding away to other games, which is inevitable for most older games.
Why do you think WoW has been changed to try to attract new players? Blizzard is worried the same thing will happen to WoW.
sorry, but who cares? Lord British being given that much regard?
You make it look like without him no one in the west would ever play role playing games....or computer games. Sorry but growing up few people I knew in RPG leagues and guilds (the ones that were OFFLINE prior to going online) played Ultima Online....
I love how you make no mention of people who actually did something long term. You speak of short term work on people who were part of larger teams. How about people like Warren Spector who bridged Role Playing with first person shooters and delivered games like System Shock and Deus Ex? How about Tim Sweeny who invented and created the Unreal Engine and Unreal Tournament?
How about Carmack? That guy not only made Quake and Doom, but also created VIDEO CARD TECHNOLOGIES that are found in practically every major video card today and used in practically every major game out there...even today! Not only did he create games and improvements on video cards, but also created his own engines which most now use in some form of another.
Those names you mentioned are people I really do not care about and are known if VERY few places...You can go into an Asian Forum in South Korea or Japan and anyone who speaks about video games and technologies knows Carmack, specially how he defied microsoft and always coded his games in OpenGL instead of DirectX.
Unlike the names mentioned in this article, the ones I mentioned are ACTIVE and still producing. 2012 - 2014 = the Next Unreal Engine and the next Quake Engine. ^^
"Unlike the names mentioned in this article, the ones I mentioned are ACTIVE and still producing. 2012 - 2014 = the Next Unreal Engine and the next Quake Engine."
Shinami, this is an article of developers who fell from their lofty perch due to games that didn't live up to their hype. ALL of the ones you mentioned haven't done so. Comprehension is your friend, before getting all huffy.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Yeah I would definitely add Raph Koster to the list. I'd also add the guy who started Horizons and Alganon.
Designing a game is much different than running a studio and really different from running a game. One person can't be great at all of these. I would guess that the most successful MMOs have figured out that what they really need is someone who can hire brilliant people and knows how to keep them happy.
That would be Dave Allen. Good designer, but really bad at business, effective team management and picking partners. Given that the last two have back stabbed him, thats pretty obvious.
I'm surprised that David Bowman wasn't on the list. Given the number of games that he managed to damage, or run into the ground, that would seem to be a given.
I'd like to see Gaute and McQuaid make a comeback. Gaute's ideas were fine for a pre-WoW era MMO. One where people did not care about being able to stack jewels and stones onto armour, where people cared about prestige, where gear was no indication of skill and where it certainly wasn't the one and only thing to determine it's outcome.
McQuaid did a fine job on Everquest and can only be given credit for the only truely massive MMO; Vanguard. Where else could you actually own boats, have naval battles, have a plethora of race/class combos, have extensive crafting, ... I guess they were simply too ambitious and should have kept some content fot future expansions.
The rest of em? They need not make a return. Garriott should've quit after Ultima 7 or at least pre-Trammel. Bill Roper? Not after Star Trek Online. Jacobs? Not sure. Having had a lot of fun with DAoC myself, I have to admit it's only competition as a true PvP-centric MMO was Shadowbane, which was for too many people too brutal. DAoC was just as entertaining, but caused a lot less frustration.
I'd really only want for Gaute and McQuaid to team up. Give me Age of Conan 2 with it's brutal PvP and it's non-gear-centric approach while letting me quest in the vast worlds which can only be found in either Vanguard or Everquest. Add to that the wonderfull community of LotRO and I'm buying lifetime subs for the whole d*mn family
Hmm... often, the assessments of the players, who are the ones providing the backlash, are based on incomplete information. For example, Mark Jacobs is well-known as a pioneer in online gaming and massive games going back far longer than DAOC, to the days of CompuServe and GEnie. Whatever you thought of Warhammer, his place in the history of our favorite medium is assured.
(And while Metaplace the world shut down, the company continued, moved into making social games, and did well enough to get bought. I now work for Playdom/Disney).
I think the part that is most missing in this sort of discussion is usually the human perspective. People forget that someone like that Will Wright once shipped SimAnt. Even the best and brightest fail all the time, and a better measure of someone's career success and for that matter personal success is whether they kept moving forward, learning from the failures. It's impossibly hard for someone on the outside to know what factors led to a failure, and it's always all too easy to blame whoever was the public face.
The player backlash is probably inevitable either way, alas. But remember, there are always a lot more sides to the story than you get from the outside.
Hmm... often, the assessments of the players, who are the ones providing the backlash, are based on incomplete information. For example, Mark Jacobs is well-known as a pioneer in online gaming and massive games going back far longer than DAOC, to the days of CompuServe and GEnie. Whatever you thought of Warhammer, his place in the history of our favorite medium is assured.
(And while Metaplace the world shut down, the company continued, moved into making social games, and did well enough to get bought. I now work for Playdom/Disney).
I think the part that is most missing in this sort of discussion is usually the human perspective. People forget that someone like that Will Wright once shipped SimAnt. Even the best and brightest fail all the time, and a better measure of someone's career success and for that matter personal success is whether they kept moving forward, learning from the failures. It's impossibly hard for someone on the outside to know what factors led to a failure, and it's always all too easy to blame whoever was the public face.
The player backlash is probably inevitable either way, alas. But remember, there are always a lot more sides to the story than you get from the outside.
I'd like to see Gaute and McQuaid make a comeback. Gaute's ideas were fine for a pre-WoW era MMO. One where people did not care about being able to stack jewels and stones onto armour, where people cared about prestige, where gear was no indication of skill and where it certainly wasn't the one and only thing to determine it's outcome.
McQuaid did a fine job on Everquest and can only be given credit for the only truely massive MMO; Vanguard. Where else could you actually own boats, have naval battles, have a plethora of race/class combos, have extensive crafting, ... I guess they were simply too ambitious and should have kept some content fot future expansions.
The rest of em? They need not make a return. Garriott should've quit after Ultima 7 or at least pre-Trammel. Bill Roper? Not after Star Trek Online. Jacobs? Not sure. Having had a lot of fun with DAoC myself, I have to admit it's only competition as a true PvP-centric MMO was Shadowbane, which was for too many people too brutal. DAoC was just as entertaining, but caused a lot less frustration.
I'd really only want for Gaute and McQuaid to team up. Give me Age of Conan 2 with it's brutal PvP and it's non-gear-centric approach while letting me quest in the vast worlds which can only be found in either Vanguard or Everquest. Add to that the wonderfull community of LotRO and I'm buying lifetime subs for the whole d*mn family
Just one quick comment about that color of blue: it's very hard to read (at least on my monitor).
Secondly, I'd like to point out that AO is a bad example of a skill-is-more-important game. Gear was everything in AO, as evidenced by the hours of twinking that people would go through. You could be the absolute best Soldier skill-wise on Rubi-Ka, but if you were going up against a Soldier with a higher QL gun and better armor, well... it's pretty obvious who would win. The twinking game was a game unto itself and why Traders and MPs were played at all, I wager
Comments
where the hell is smedley for ruining swg?!
Gamers have grown to have unrealistic expectations from MMOs. Of course much of this is due to the developers themselves using 'colorful' descriptions to make common features sound revolutionary.
Afraid of missing out on the 'big money' games are being pushed into a stagnant mold based on past successes in order to try to appeal to everyone and what we're left with is a bland, watered down, generic game that only appeals to the small amount of gamers who need the familiarity of rehashed content in order to feel comfortable. The rest of us are damn tired of buying a new game that promises something different just to end up doing the same old crap with a slightly different skin.
That's why these guys were destined to fail. They'd already given us their best. No matter how you dress the wife up, you're still punching the same old cow. A garter belt and high heels isn't going to suddenly turn her into Jenna Jameson when all she knows how to do is the missionary position.
Smedley has never really fallen from grace. First of all he never been popular and secondly he still leads SOE.
Is the picture of Roper messed with? He didn't have as large forehead in the other pictures I seen of him. Maybe it just is a weird angle but he looks a bit like pharaoh Akhenaton.
You're right. There was nothing else like UO at the time he created it because there were no other graphical MMOs (there were other MMOs but they were text-based, like Megawars). Is that being visionary, or just being in the right place at the right time?
EQ wasn't really visionary because it added a graphical interface to the daiku MUD. I think people don't give enough credit to the early designers of the text-based MUDs of the early 90s, many of which never made a single cent from their efforts. If anything, they're the true visionaries...
I'm puzzled by what people consider to be flops here. EQ is a flop? DAoC is a flop? I don't think so. Pre-WoW, they were huge successes! If you had several 100,000 players, you were a success. Only in post-WoW are they considered flops. DAoC has done well overall and only now has a low population due to bleeding away to other games, which is inevitable for most older games.
Why do you think WoW has been changed to try to attract new players? Blizzard is worried the same thing will happen to WoW.
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
sorry, but who cares? Lord British being given that much regard?
You make it look like without him no one in the west would ever play role playing games....or computer games. Sorry but growing up few people I knew in RPG leagues and guilds (the ones that were OFFLINE prior to going online) played Ultima Online....
I love how you make no mention of people who actually did something long term. You speak of short term work on people who were part of larger teams. How about people like Warren Spector who bridged Role Playing with first person shooters and delivered games like System Shock and Deus Ex? How about Tim Sweeny who invented and created the Unreal Engine and Unreal Tournament?
How about Carmack? That guy not only made Quake and Doom, but also created VIDEO CARD TECHNOLOGIES that are found in practically every major video card today and used in practically every major game out there...even today! Not only did he create games and improvements on video cards, but also created his own engines which most now use in some form of another.
Those names you mentioned are people I really do not care about and are known if VERY few places...You can go into an Asian Forum in South Korea or Japan and anyone who speaks about video games and technologies knows Carmack, specially how he defied microsoft and always coded his games in OpenGL instead of DirectX.
Unlike the names mentioned in this article, the ones I mentioned are ACTIVE and still producing. 2012 - 2014 = the Next Unreal Engine and the next Quake Engine. ^^
Smedley is financially better off then any of these 5 guys so he didn't make the list. He may be hated but atleast he is still making money.
Shinami, this is an article of developers who fell from their lofty perch due to games that didn't live up to their hype. ALL of the ones you mentioned haven't done so. Comprehension is your friend, before getting all huffy.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
My Review Manifesto
Follow me on Twitter if you dare.
Smedley is financially better off then any of these 5 guys so he didn't make the list. He may be hated but atleast he is still making money.
He's also not a developer. This is a list of developers.Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
My Review Manifesto
Follow me on Twitter if you dare.
That would be Dave Allen. Good designer, but really bad at business, effective team management and picking partners. Given that the last two have back stabbed him, thats pretty obvious.
I'm surprised that David Bowman wasn't on the list. Given the number of games that he managed to damage, or run into the ground, that would seem to be a given.
I'd like to see Gaute and McQuaid make a comeback. Gaute's ideas were fine for a pre-WoW era MMO. One where people did not care about being able to stack jewels and stones onto armour, where people cared about prestige, where gear was no indication of skill and where it certainly wasn't the one and only thing to determine it's outcome.
McQuaid did a fine job on Everquest and can only be given credit for the only truely massive MMO; Vanguard. Where else could you actually own boats, have naval battles, have a plethora of race/class combos, have extensive crafting, ... I guess they were simply too ambitious and should have kept some content fot future expansions.
The rest of em? They need not make a return. Garriott should've quit after Ultima 7 or at least pre-Trammel. Bill Roper? Not after Star Trek Online. Jacobs? Not sure. Having had a lot of fun with DAoC myself, I have to admit it's only competition as a true PvP-centric MMO was Shadowbane, which was for too many people too brutal. DAoC was just as entertaining, but caused a lot less frustration.
I'd really only want for Gaute and McQuaid to team up. Give me Age of Conan 2 with it's brutal PvP and it's non-gear-centric approach while letting me quest in the vast worlds which can only be found in either Vanguard or Everquest. Add to that the wonderfull community of LotRO and I'm buying lifetime subs for the whole d*mn family
Hmm... often, the assessments of the players, who are the ones providing the backlash, are based on incomplete information. For example, Mark Jacobs is well-known as a pioneer in online gaming and massive games going back far longer than DAOC, to the days of CompuServe and GEnie. Whatever you thought of Warhammer, his place in the history of our favorite medium is assured.
(And while Metaplace the world shut down, the company continued, moved into making social games, and did well enough to get bought. I now work for Playdom/Disney).
I think the part that is most missing in this sort of discussion is usually the human perspective. People forget that someone like that Will Wright once shipped SimAnt. Even the best and brightest fail all the time, and a better measure of someone's career success and for that matter personal success is whether they kept moving forward, learning from the failures. It's impossibly hard for someone on the outside to know what factors led to a failure, and it's always all too easy to blame whoever was the public face.
The player backlash is probably inevitable either way, alas. But remember, there are always a lot more sides to the story than you get from the outside.
Preach on, Brother Raph!
PS: I loved your work on UO.
Just one quick comment about that color of blue: it's very hard to read (at least on my monitor).
Secondly, I'd like to point out that AO is a bad example of a skill-is-more-important game. Gear was everything in AO, as evidenced by the hours of twinking that people would go through. You could be the absolute best Soldier skill-wise on Rubi-Ka, but if you were going up against a Soldier with a higher QL gun and better armor, well... it's pretty obvious who would win. The twinking game was a game unto itself and why Traders and MPs were played at all, I wager
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.