Have some of our games been in the oven too long?
Late last night Fran tried out the character creation process for Champions online. – it is so versatile that it truly is a “mini-game” all by itself. As we sat there, engrossed in the process as a burgeoning superhero formed before our very eyes the cookies in the nearby oven went entirely forgotten. Well not ENTIRELY forgotten…not at least until the cookies were burnt beyond recognition. Mind you, Fran’s culinary expertise normally rivals the proverbial “great chefs of Europe” (or at least the great down home chefs of America). As I sat there staring at the charred remains of what was once a cookie a thought went through my mind…
I wonder if it was left in the oven too long…
Now mind you it wasn’t the cookie I had in mind when I thought this. I simply thought of the cookie as being served “Cajun Style”…like blackened catfish, only this was a cookie. I sat there chewing the cookie, putting my carefully honed mental powers to work as I ignored the charred cookie bottom. And two words went through my mind:
Ultima Online
With it’s isometric view and less than spectacular animation there are those who would say that the game has “been in the oven a bit too long” (or a “getting long in the tooth” as grandma used to put it). But I don’t think that is the case, and here is why…
Mind you, I haven’t played the game in years, but like the first love of your life, it was my first mmo. One of the greatest pleasures of doing the No Prisoners, No Mercy show is the opportunity to sit down and have a good conversation about videogames with members of the mmo community. As it did during the recording of he last show (not out yet), the conversation often turns to Ultima Online when the topic changes game mechanics.
As anyone who has ever played an mmo is all too painfully aware, everyone everywhere compares games to the 800 pound Blizzard Gorilla – if only because of it’s sheer number of subscribers. When that factor is set aside, however, there always seem to be two games that come up during the conversation, and one of them is Ultima Online (UO).
UO is skill based, which some bloggers and reviewers will try and convince you is a disadvantage (it isn’t). It does have quests now, but at one time it did not. At one time it was entirely a sand box game with the players left to make the world in whatever image they saw fit. With its non-instanced player housing, for better or for worse the players could actually affect the face of the virtual world. It doesn’t have a first person perspective like so many shooters. It barely has a three dimensional perspective (you can’t actually look behind a wall – the system has to remove part of the wall for you to do so). Yet all these years later the game still has an active community. Not only is it being supported by EA, they just came out with another expansion for the game.
Before you dismiss games like Ultima Online, consider the success of many of the flash based face book applications. Farmville, which is in the news today because of money it’s creators donated, has 60 million players. Now as anyone will tell you, in any free to play situation, the number of subscribers doesn’t translate directly into gross income for the games producers.
Still, it certainly does give one pause for thought doesn’t it?
With the advent of so many successful games for social applications like face book with names like “Mafia Wars” and “Farmville” perhaps something is missing in the way games are being developed for the mmo market. Perhaps that part of the market that adds “role playing game” after its title is moving in the wrong direction. I would put forth that when Richard Garriott was known as “Lord British” he had a lot more going on than some people give him credit for – and perhaps NCSoft shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss there association with him. Like the rest of life, perhaps the game development industry is like a circle – and we just may be headed back toward where the circle started.
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather