[MUD-Dev] Re: Fun vs Realism [ Was: OT: Sid Meier ]

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brandon J. Rickman [mailto:ashes at pc4.zennet.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 1998 11:40 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Fun vs Realism [ Was: OT: Sid Meier ]
> 
> 
> On Sun, 26 Jul 1998, Damion Schubert wrote:
> > While other companies work to reinvent the RPG experience, 
> M&MVI stays
> > true to it's form and provides an extension of the old 
> CRPGs - Bards Tale 2,
> > Might and Magic I, Ultima III, Wizardry.  [MM6] did a bloody 
> good job, and
> > the
> > game took ~120 hours of my life away.  I'd never accuse it 
> of being a ROLE-
> > playing game, or a fantastic story, but gosh, it was fun.
> 
> It works perhaps better than television as a kind of pointless
> stimulation, but one thing that concerns me is that there is little
> attempt to make this game appeal to a more mature market.  
> How about an
> RPG with a range of skill levels, with a sense of narrative, and a
> remappable keyboard? :)

For several years now, the consensus in the industry was that such would
never fly. RPGs were regarded as a dying breed. Lists of the top ten
RPGs of the year had only four names on them because only four RPGs were
released. Diablo (over a million seller) changed all that, with some
subsidiary help from Fallout (over 200k units).

Hence the dual trend now: some people are going back to "real CRPGs"
(Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate) and others are attempting hybrids they hope
can reach a wider market (Rage of Mages is crossed with real-time
strategy games, Hexplore is voxel-based, Diablo 2 is adding more RPG
into its original formula, and then there's Ultima: Ascension, which
there's plenty of controversy over). There's also the people from the
first-person shooter world trying to graft a plot onto Quake:
Anachronox, Daikatana, Deus Ex.

Part of the mechanic driving this is that the game industry is
hit-driven. 90% of the money is made by the top ten products of the
year. Just about all the rest don't turn a profit. The industry is also
strongly seasonal, partly because of the public companies now involved
that must have pretty numbers at the end of fiscal quarters. This means
that accepted wisdom is that making a product for a mature sophisticated
audience isn't worth it: it will lose money. Everyone right now is
chasing after the "casual gamer" who isn't really up for a mature
sophisticated product (so goes the theory anyway). Hence the Deer Hunter
and Frogger and You Don't Know Jack games. Which, it should be noted,
are hitting top ten. (Deer Hunter was actually commissioned by WalMart,
which knows its target audience a lot better than a computer game
company does. They were dead-on, and everyone made big bucks.)

-Raph