[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Adam Wiggins]

On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Koster, Raph wrote:
> > From: Adam Wiggins [mailto:adam at angel.com]
> > 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?

Good point.  At least in the case of Arctic, they started up shortly
after the diku codebase was released, and many of the things they did
then were semi-revolutionary (heavy emphasis on skills, spells learned
from spellbooks found about the world rather than in the guild,
free pk/psteal with a justice system) but now are considered fairly
standard.  I doubt they weighed the different approaches they could
take: they started with a certain codebase, and tried to make the
best mud they could.  In time many of the originally very scripted elements
became more simulationist; many objects in rooms that were originally just
extra descs became real objects that could be manipulated in a more
consistent manner.

I would say that one of the best things mud dev has done is made
potential new admins analyze the existing art a little more carefully,
and maybe realize that they *do* have a choice as to how they are
going to approach it.

Then again, maybe not.  It's a nice thought, though.

> > 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.

True.  In this case I'm not referring to monetary success, but rather
impact on the gaming population as a whole.  Perhaps it's not fair to
Gemstone that the (potential) online gaming population is now much larger
to due availibility of both computers and cheap internet connections, but
there you go.

I'd say that no online game has ever had the immense impact upon both
the online gaming community and the gaming community in general (ie,
people that wouldn't normally play multiplayer, mud-like games) as UO.
This is how I am defining success.

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

What we're talking about, a simulationist engine. :)

> 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.

Indeed.  I would refer to the art as "functional" (it works well and
there's a ton of it), but not really pretty.  Ultima 8 probably was
more aethetically pleasing.

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

Well, certainly it's impressive enough, but that's still not what I was
referring to.  Since we were discussing the pros and cons of a simulationist
versus a (traditional) scripted quest/"storytelling" game, that's what
I meant by "technology."  Sorry, I should have been clearer.

> > 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

Bah, I remember your post to the Legend message board asking for beta testers,
you think that didn't get people excited? :)

> 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.

Whether it was internal or external marketing, it still boils down to the
same thing for the purpose of my question.  Simply by coming from Origin
rather than (say) KosterSoft, Inc. generated quite a bit of buzz.

Only 5 ads, really?  I could have sworn I saw both that one with the
picture of the back of some woman's neck and the one with the Tim Hildebrant
painting on the back of at least a couple game magazines for many months
running.  I call that a fair amount of marketing, especially since the ads
were well done (in contrast to the ads for games like Kesmai and MPath,
which have usually looked pretty amatuerish).

> > 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.

In other words, you DO think the simulation element had a big effect on
the size of the playerbase and the game press' interest in it.

> > 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. :)

True, but you know what I mean - KosterSoft, Inc releasing their
simulationist, multiplayer game The Legend of Legend!  With 16-bit,
scrolling graphics!  Be a fisherman, a tailor, or an alchemist! etc.

> 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.

Very true.  A similar effect is happening elsewhere, as well: movie studios,
record companies, and other entertainment publishers want to put all their
money behind sure-fire successes and bump off the less likely candidates.
People are only going to see X number of movies or buy X CDs or play X
computer games during a given timeperiod, and they'll tend to choose the
"best" (== most hyped up) ones.  So it's much more worthwhile for a publisher
to put serious money behind a big contender and make sure they are on
everyone's must-have/must-see list rather than invest in a bunch of small
ones that will probably all get overlooked.

The statistic I heard is that 300 new computer games get released every month.
Of those, the average software store stocks the "top" (as rated by magazines
and other market tests) 50 or so.  At the end of the month they clear most of
those out to make room for the next 50.

It's a very, very tough market right now.  Multiplayer games are in a
slightly different category, of course, but still not completely immune
to these effects.

> >  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...

True, but Diablo wasn't an ongoing world (with, I might add, an ongoing
pay-to-play), so it missed its chance.

But this raises another good question: could Blizzard have turned
Diablo into a game with the scope and long-term playability as UO,
and still be going just as strong today?  Or would people have gotten
bored of the same-sameness, and this is the reason why UO's approach
was "better" in the long run?

Likely somewhere inbetween.  An interesting question to ponder, however.

Incidentally, I ran into Ron Millar about six months ago, at his new
start-up.  He was the senior designer for the first Diablo.  I asked
him a bit about why the design for multiplayer Diablo worked out the
way that it did; he said that he was largely ignorant of what could
be done at that time, but he had recently gotten into playing these
cool text games called "muds" and in fact had downloaded a diku codebase
and begun to fool with it...
I sent him an invite to mud-dev but unfortunately he begged off due to
lack of time.

> 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. :)

Nod.  More than that though - it's longevity.  Normal computer games are
dead and off the shelf in a few months, or a year or two at best if they
are extremely successful (again, reference Diablo).  Regardless they
are generally close-ended enough that people will get bored and move onto
the sequel or the clones.  (Witness Quake...)

UO is only gaining popularity, it seems; and better yet, Origin gets
to real in $10 a month per player, every month.  Diablo only gets sold
once.

Question: could Origin have given away the UO client and still
made money?  I wager so.  I know in my own case, I spent ~$30 on the
game itself and then was a paying customer for nearly a year, amounting
to $120.  (Of course, I wasn't playing most of that time, I just
kept forgetting to cancel it...)

> 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).

I disagree with the last part.  Certainly I think UO has made a bigger
impact on the gaming community as a whole, but if you want to use the
simplest judge, money made, I see it like this:

Diablo: (1 million copies) X ($20 a pop back to Blizzard) = $20 million
UO: (.5 million copies) X ($20 a pop back to Origin) +
    (60,000 players a month) X ($10 a month) X (12 months) = $17.2 million

(If my numbers are way off the mark, let me know, I'm just guessing.
I realize you're probably not allowed to "speculate" on such things, but
if I'm dead wrong just say so.)

And consider that UO is going to continue making that money, while Diablo
is mostly through.  I don't think that looks "puny" at all.

Or were you refering to something else?

Adam W.