The Good: We’re potentially on the brink of new advances in streaming content, like OnLive!. I can stream movies from Netflix through my Xbox 360 instantly! More content than I could ever possibly consume is at my doorstep asking to get in, and I’m more than happy to let it!
The Ugly: I actually wouldn’t be opposed to this if they offered an unlimited package—if you could offer cheap broadband to more people (say, $10 or $20 a month for limited bandwidth), you’d get closer to closing the “digital divide” between lower income families and middle/high income families. Broadband expands in the US, and we catch up with the rest of the world. Everyone wins. You could then offer your “power users”, who are admittedly a fairly small percent of your total user base, an unlimited package at a premium price, say somewhere between $50-$80 a month. The part that really bugs me is the low cap and the “gotcha” dollar-a-month add on beyond that.
I didn’t sign any kind of long term contract with them, so if this goes through without an unlimited option, I’m going to be looking seriously at their competitor(s?).
Sony Online’s new free-to-play MMO “Free Realms” is nearing open beta: you can register for it at their official site.
The interesting thing to me about their beta is that there’s no age limit on testers. Even for games targeted at younger audiences I can’t recall seeing a specific call to the under 18 market for testers.
I’d like to think that due to their youth and naivete they’d provide refreshingly honest and direct feedback, but I’m dubious that they’d provide much feedback at all, and that they might not be able to perceive the different between open beta and release product (obviously there would be exceptions to this…I’m talking more about the ~10-17 demographic as a whole). They would then see any bugs not as opportunities to give feedback, but more as inadequacies in what they see as the final game.
It does however, allow you to stock a server with a more realistic spread of players, and will probably help with stress and balance testing. If you have enough metrics logging in place, all you have to do is let them run rampant and then analyze the data. It’s also a great potential first look if they’re very confident about the quality of the game, which I’m guessing they are.
((Best of luck to the Free Realms team as it enters open beta next month!))
A year or so ago, I wrote a post about how guilds should not be a “hardcore feature” in MMOs. I stand by this statement, but it struck me that guilds have sort of evolved into a hardcore feature in MMOs, primarily because guilds have stopped being entirely about social play. If you really get to the crux of why many people are in large guilds in games like WoW, it is a purely self-serving desire—guilds are about getting loot for yourself.
Let’s take a step back and look at Ultima Online—there really wasn’t content that you could only see or do if you were in a guild. There wasn’t exclusive loot that could only be obtained by running dungeons that took 5, 10, or 20 people to complete. Guilds were social constructs. Some guilds were made of player killers who shared a common desire to prey on the helpless. Some guilds were then made of player killer hunters who protected that prey and tried to fight back against the other groups. Other guilds were totally off the wall—look at the Shadowclan Orcs. Here was a group of people who invented a whole new playstyle, adopting the dress of in game monsters, occupying their territory, speaking in their own language, and creating their own hierarchy. There was no content to unlock, there were simply groups of people with common interests.
Flash forward to Everquest 2. EQ2 has my favorite guild system of any MMO I’ve played, because it had a whole mechanism in it for guild XP and unlocking guild content. Players donated their time for the common good. They got rewards as a group in the form of exclusive content. While this is a cool group mechanism, it also created a reason to form guilds other than common interests—now there is content that can only be accessed by group play. This creates a common interest for all players, and thus makes all players potential guild members. I’d call this a net win, because players who form social bonds are more likely to stay with your game as opposed to jumping ship to the Next Big Thing(tm), with only the minor drawback of putting non-social elements into guilds.
Flash forward again to World of Warcraft. WoW certainly has the best organized guilds of any game, and I’ve been a part of many well organized, well run guilds. Everyone in those guilds has a common interest, to be sure. Loot. The primary goal of joining a large guild in WoW is to have access to a body of players with whom you can consume high level content. The end result? Loot for your character. The guild is only a partially social construct at this point, and really more of a social contract between people who all want to achieve personal gain. How do you measure the top guilds? By how far they have gotten in terms of raid progression, and by how well geared their members are. Purely social guilds do exist, but the measure of a successful guild is weighed in loot. (Hell, after a guild has proven they can down a boss, that boss goes on “farm” mode so that all of their members can have their shot at the good loot for themselves.)
Admit it. You only did Black Temple 100 times because you wanted this.
So…is this a bad thing?
The plus side is that it increases participation in guild systems. Players want the best loot, and so they find other players who they are compatible with to go get the best loot with. Players in guilds form friendships, players are retained as customers, everyone goes home happy.
The down side is that guilds are driven exclusively by progression, and drama forms very quickly in guilds when progression does not come fast enough. Remember, Onyxia is serious business… It seems like part of the fun of a good guild is taken away when the only concrete incentive is personal gain.
You can make the argument, of course, that everyone getting loot and downing tough bosses is the key in this case to being a part of something larger than yourself, but by tying that larger construct to something concrete and personal it feels a little less cool than it used to…
(Then again, I have been accused now and again of being a carebear, a roleplayer, as well as a sentimental fool for UO, so maybe I’m just misty eyed for the old days…)
Some enterprising Western Michigan University students have created games tied to their production of Bertold Brecht’s play “Mother Courage and Her Children”, which they have set up for theater-goers to play before the play and during intermission. From the article:
“In one, for example, titled “Bombardment of Riga,” players must try to get Mother Courage and her wagon across the bombed city while also protecting her children. They find out that it’s impossible to get across without at least one child being killed.”
Clever! Not a mixed-media presentation I would have thought of, and I’m not really sure how much a mini-game brings to Brecht’s piece, but I appreciate the integration of games with traditional art. I’d certainly go if I was in Michigan.
Though it sounds like the one game they describe needs a spoiler alert.
They’re using Tetris as their example. Apparently, if you show some undergrads some violent images and then sit them down in front of a good puzzle game, they are able to keep their minds off the images they were exposed to. While it’s neat that they are using games as a medical treatment, it seems to me that any activity that is engrossing and stimulating would probably produce the same effect.
Seems you’d also have to choose your therapy game wisely, since so many games have violence at their core…
Richard Garriott will become the first game developer in space later tonight when he launches aboard a Soyuz from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Nasa TV will be carrying it live starting around 1am CDT.
What I wouldn’t give to be in his shoes tonight…(actually, the exact amount I am not giving happens to be $30 million dollars).
The opinions and statements on this site do not reflect the opinions and statements of my current and former employers, nor are they necessarily related to any projects I am currently working on or have worked on in the past.
Posted by Will Wallace 
Posted by Will Wallace 
Posted by Will Wallace 
SOE Looking for Kids as Beta Testers
March 31, 2009Sony Online’s new free-to-play MMO “Free Realms” is nearing open beta: you can register for it at their official site.
The interesting thing to me about their beta is that there’s no age limit on testers. Even for games targeted at younger audiences I can’t recall seeing a specific call to the under 18 market for testers.
I’d like to think that due to their youth and naivete they’d provide refreshingly honest and direct feedback, but I’m dubious that they’d provide much feedback at all, and that they might not be able to perceive the different between open beta and release product (obviously there would be exceptions to this…I’m talking more about the ~10-17 demographic as a whole). They would then see any bugs not as opportunities to give feedback, but more as inadequacies in what they see as the final game.
It does however, allow you to stock a server with a more realistic spread of players, and will probably help with stress and balance testing. If you have enough metrics logging in place, all you have to do is let them run rampant and then analyze the data. It’s also a great potential first look if they’re very confident about the quality of the game, which I’m guessing they are.
((Best of luck to the Free Realms team as it enters open beta next month!))