Bio Break summarizes LotRO’s free-to-play discussion more thoroughly than I possibly could. My initial thoughts are:
- If I’d bought a lifetime subscription, I might be disappointed now. But it looks like they gave some serious thought to mitigating this.
- I’m extremely likely to check it out when it happens.
- Hey, I think my Guardian was level 35 or so and I can pick him back up!
I’m slightly surprised that Ryzom’s release as open source hasn’t attracted more attention in the blogosphere. From the Ryzom Open Source FAQ:
Ryzom is released in its entirety – all of the framework (NeL, NeLNS), game client, tools, utilities and game servers (services) is released. In addition to all of the source code Ryzom has also released its entire library of 3D assets such as high-quality textures, 3D models, animations, particle systems and more. All of the source code will be licensed under GNU AGPLv3 and all of the media assets will be licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.
The only thing that isn’t available is the Ryzom world-data. I haven’t looked closely, but I assume this means such things as landscape, missions and likely behaviours and mechanics won’t be available. So there won’t be clone servers of Ryzom.
Nonetheless, the server and world-building tools are available, including the data necessary for a rudimentary world. Servers can be made to run on Windows or Linux. Members of the community have released binaries for those who don’t wish to go through the process of compiling (there are a few tricks).
In theory, an enterprising arm-chair designer with the ability to configure windows software might be able to establsh a world to call their own.
It’s an intriguing possibility. A great opportunity for an outsider to understand better the work that goes into crafting even simple worlds. A great opportunity for an outsider to [demonstrate their l33t skills | embarass themselves] in quest and world design. Yet another project for the pile. 
I had a modest challenge, following the last round of coding. I had my “accelerating / velocity” physics mutator working, and now I needed to add a “wrap” flag to it, allowing objects to move from one side to the other. Easy enough, right?
NO, of course not!
First, I managed to distract myself for quite some time rigging a meter to track FPS over time. But, that mission was accomplished eventually! Then I got the wrap mutator working, which was actually pretty easy.
So far, so good. Time for collision checking! This was, surprisingly, almost easy. But then I realized that sure, the traces SAID collisions were happening, but I couldn’t SEE them, so how did I know if they were right? Tappity tappity, now game objects had a “dirty” flag AND were responsible for drawing themselves, contingent on “collided” state. (It’s just a “top-right-triangle-brute-force” kinda thing; I’ll probably have dozens of game objects in a ~900×900 space, so there’s no need to move towards a quadtree or anything fancy.)
Then I broke my build. I don’t know how I did this, but some combination of bad SVN checkin / update / weak SVN-fu completely busted my build. In frustration, I deleted the whole project, checked it back out, manually deleted every built SWF I found, and… all was good with the world again.
In happiness, I added background image loading to the game area, and then a click-to-spawn-game-object handler. Progress is good.
At least it’s getting a little prettier!
CVG quotes SW:TOR writing director Daniel Erickson of Bioware (the story is also copiedcarried by the Escapist) …
“In the early days when they first announced that there were MMOs [...] I knew in my head what that meant [...] It was just giant Role Playing Games. And then MMO showed up, and it wasn’t that. It was the ruleset to an RPG: [...] but that was all. Someone had left out the module. There was no story, there was no point.
I call tauren-poop on that. I think this guy misses the point.
Modules, in early PnP games were great. Some were awesome examples of a story and mission design. Sometimes it was handy to not have to make your own mission for the weekly session. But the real fun was the collaboration between DM and players to weave their own tapestry.
After years of running a campaign, our group had imagined the details of a whole continent, socio-political history and economic system. There were cities of thousands (and some sections of some cities were lovingly mapped in great detail), and lonely trading outposts. There were kingdoms, some ruled by players, carved from once wild-lands. Orcs had actually become something of an endangered species due to the earlier proclivitiy of players to slaughter them en masse. We had imagined and told each other a story. We didn’t need somebody else’s modules.
For me, early MMORPG were just a computerized version of this. There was a shared space, a rule-set, and some wandering mobs to set the back-drop. The real point was the shared telling of a story: the competition between guilds, players and player-run vendors. I dreamed (and I don’t think i was alone) of future enhancements that would allow us to contest and hold territory, to shape the landscape and to more fully own the story ourselves.
I blame it on the console players. A deluge of Link-wannabe’s descended on MMOdom and demanded to be led by the nose through pre-scripted hurdles. The promise of simulated free-form play was replaced with the structured grind of canned missions that you played in-the-company-of others.
I don’t believe that a studio of a few hundred people designing quests and dialogue trees can possibly provide a sufficient quantity of quality entertainment. It takes a player only minutes to consume content that might take the game studio hours to produce. And the average player, by some studies, plays as much as 20 hours a week. That implies a lot of effort to keep that player entertained with pre-crafted content.
And this is why we have boring, storyless grind … because no studio has can afford sufficient resources to lead us by the nose for years on end … certainly not at the price of $15.00 / month.
What I want are systems that allow me and my fellow players to jointly craft the world, subject to a common rule-set and world-history. Sure, throw in some great modules to occupy down-days and amuse the console players.
The quote, and reaction to it, has raised eyebrows and spawned discussion at other sites around the blogosphere.
New Scientist presented an article reviewing the potential of games and gamers.
One quote, attributed to Edward Castronova, caught my attention:
“For a lot of people, contemporary reality sucks. And everybody wants to be a hero [...] That person is looking at this choice: I could either work in a coffee-shop or be a starship captain.”
Are gamer’s motivations really that bleak? I can think of several positive reasons why I play MMOG’s. MMOG’s can be an opportunity to socialize with friends, to relax, to have fun, and can stoke creative fires.
The article goes on to list positive characeristics that may be shared by gamers:
“they relish intellectual challenges, they are independent, they know how to gather resources and information, and they can solve problems. [they] carry these attributes beyond the confines of the game into the real world.”
The article closes with a discussion of how games, game mechanics and gamers can be harnessed to improve the world. Games can potentially make common tasks more rewarding (customer reward programs, for example), solve problems and educate.
I haven’t played more than a couple of hours of MMO since I resumed student life last September.
Weird, eh? Considering “student” is typically synonymous with “MMOG addicted gamer” … isn’t it? Even now that I’m off for the summer, I don’t seem to have the time to play anything more than a (great) facebook game.
So, I finally decided to cancel my LotRO subscription. For the first time in a long time, I am MMOGless.
Of course, now that my subscription is counting down its final hours … the urge to play is overwhelming.
I still genuinely want to work on this Flash game idea, but it’s slow going and I have much less time than I expected. I’ll recap two learnings and a screenshot.
1. You can’t subclass Array. this[0] is null!
2. flash.display.Sprite outperformed its Flex equivalent by a factor of at least 6x — that is to say, my debug build runs at my 60fps target, while the old one ran at 10. Sad!
I didn’t say it would be MUCH of a screenshot.
Like most of my game projects, I have another idea that will probably end up encountering a showstopper and sitting on the cutting room floor. But that said, I’m intrigued by the “one-click” approach that platforms like iPhone are helping make more popular.
Way back when I bought my first ATI Radeon card, it came with a real-time render of this movie. That was stunning at the time!
In my mind, now, I have a simple 1-click mechanic based on this concept. More to come… unless I give up! (OK, even if I give up, I promise I’ll post-mortem it this time!)
