[MUD-Dev] Majestic and Failure of Episodic Games

[Christopher Allen]

There is an interesting article on the failure of EA's Majestic at

  http://gamepen.ugo.com/gamepen/Features.asp?itemid=130&pageid=1

The article's main point was that in general, the 'game play'
sucked.

I didn't ever play Majestic, but Skotos released a quasi-episodic
game called "Galactic Emperor: Succession" last year, and it has not
been a success either.

We thought that GE:S would appeal to the less avid gamer who could
not commit the time to play an intense long-term RPG-style game, but
who could afford a single's weeks commitment. However, it is exactly
this that I think is the source of the failure of the game --
because each week everyone starts over, there was little opportunity
for a community to form. We had lots of people play the game once,
but it didn't suck people into a community.

>From what I've seen of Majestic, a similar thing happens. When you
start the game, you are assigned to a group of 16 other players. You
play with them for the month, to try to understand the mystery of
Majestic. As many people drop out, and secrets are such a part of
the game, the chances of you forming a community are very small. I
also saw no sign of any attempt to create a meta-community of all
successful players either.

So if there is to be another start for episodic and/or casual games,
I think the designers need to start much earlier in the design how
to encourage and support player communities to form.

-- Christopher Allen

P.S. At least it didn't cost Skotos millions of dollars to discover
our design mistakes. One of the joys of our medium is that we can
afford to experiment more ;-)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev