[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Wiggins [mailto:adam at angel.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 1998 4:36 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions 
> 
> Which, of course, leaves you with two primary options: one, to try to 
> not innovate too terribly much, and instead just do it "the old way", 
> except do it
> really really well, and maybe put some twists on it that no 
> one has ever seen before.  Legend falls into this category, as (I'd
guess) 
> most of our favorite muds (Arctic, of course, is mine, and most 
> definitely qualifies
> in this category). 

Hmm, I really wonder whether an awareness of the "old way" as a "way"
was really present, if you know what I mean. Meaning, how many decided
to view the split between simulationist and storytelling as an aesthetic
choice, and how many actually just made the hodgepodge because it was
all they knew?

> Ultima Online is 
> another, and has
> experience wild success the likes of which the world has never seen
> before. 

Hurm... how successful was Gemstone III in its heyday? I don't actually
know the numbers, but I bet that it made a ton of money, because of the
amazingly high fees. So it'd depend on how you defined success, I guess.

> A tangential question this raises: Raph, how much of UO's 
> success would
> you attribute to cutting edge game technology,

That being?

Graphics? The fact of graphics in itself was not new.

The display engine? Bitmapped 640x480 16 bit color was nifty when we
started, but was just up to par when we shipped, and is now dated.

The capacity of the servers? New, but not earth-shatteringly so, and not
done so well as to blow the world away.

> and how much 
> to just having
> a ton of marketing 

UO actually had very little marketing, in that we ran a few ads (I think
there were five) prior to release, and had no online ads. We had a
website two and a half years in advance of release, of course. The
magazine coverage we got was just about all initiated by the press
themselves, rather than by our aggressively pursuing it.

> and one of the most popular single-player 
> RPGs whose
> shoulders you could ride on? 

That's a honking huge advantage, unquestionably. It resulted in a LOT of
press interest, for example. Press that Meridian 59 never got, and that
The Realm never got, and that Lyra's Underlight or Lords of Empyria
still haven't gotten.

I think, though, that what caught the initial fan base's attention was a
combination of the name, and the approach to the design: basically, a
simulationist world. People thought the idea of living in a virtual
world that they knew well from past games was very appealing. Early fan
writings and websites are full of "oh wow, you'll be able to do THIS in
it!"--the "this" being stuff that generally muds don't support, like
being pirates or running shops or whatever.

> If you did the same (or 
> similar) game but
> not Ultima and minus Origin's marketing, would it have done 
> as well, or
> nearly as well? 

Minus marketing, nothing does well. :) Minus a brandname, everything
does less well. It's very very rare that a new brand is established in
the games market and becomes a major hit. The industry right now is
seeing the vast majority of titles fail to make money. I think the
common phrase is that 90% of the money is made by 10% of the titles. The
ones that do tend to make it big usually have a strong franchise behind
them (read: sequels) and a major publisher behind them with lots of
marketing money.

>  If they had done Ultima Online as a 
> standard, scripted
> Ultima game with multiplayer capability and a burly central 
> server, would
> *that* have done as well?  Would it have done better?

Good question--there you are asking if UO done as a storytelling instead
of a simulationist game would have done better. Who knows? Nobody's done
a storytelling game at that scale and with that sort of presentation
yet. Everquest is about to try it, though they are lacking the brand.
Meridian was also lacking the brand, and its presentation wasn't quite
there. Also, at the time that it came out, Diablo had just made it to
market and was doing phenomenally doing basically what you describe...

For that matter, UO done the way it WAS done could easily have done
better in the market than it did, if we'd just taken slightly different
approaches to things. Such is hindsight. All told, though, it went #1 PC
software in Japan (not #1 game)  and looks to do it again, top ten game
in the States (top 40 for the year), was the fastest selling product in
EA history, is now in the top three bestselling Ultimas ever, and blah
blah blah. Secondguessing seems a bit like looking a gift horse in the
mouth. :) Doing it as a storyteller environment, and coming out six to
nine months earlier, maybe it would have traded places with Diablo
(which makes the above accomplishments look puny).

So who knows?

-Raph