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October 11, 2010 by blur

Why don’t TOR developers interact with their community?

There’s a thread over on the TOR forums at present (click here if you’re interested), called Request for More Developer Interaction and I think it’s making a truly excellent point.

Since the TOR forums began, interaction with developers has been minimal. I can count on one hand (and, if the truth be told, one finger on one hand), the number of times a developer has said something in response to one of my forum postings. And, besides my own material, I read a lot of other threads, and I don’t believe I’ve seen a developer EVER respond to someone else. And no, before you respond, I’m not saying it’s NEVER happened, but I AM saying that it’s been pretty rare and I seem to have been one of the few people to ever get a response.

Now… why is this?

In past MMO communities, it has been very common… extremely common… for developers to be on their official forums, making comments and engaging with their community. In Star Wars Galaxies (SWG), lead developer Raph Koster seemed to be on the forums non-stop. You ended up talking to Raph as often as you talked to your own guildmates, to the point where the first 100 of us got into beta testing and Raph was standing there on Tatooine and we just walked right up to him and had a conversation with him like he was an old mate, such was our familiarity.

Could I see that ever happening with a TOR developer? Nope.

And do you want to know some huge irony here? Bioware also makes a game called Dragon Age where the lead writer is a bloke by the name of David Gaider. My wife is quite the Dragon Age fanatic and she is constantly telling me funny things that Gaider is saying on the Bioware Social Network. It seems that a day hardly goes by where I don’t hear her giggling at his comments or shouting, “Gaider just quoted me again!” and, when you look at the thrill it is for her to interact with a developer, you see what the TOR guys could be doing, but are failing really badly at.

This is a great shame, to my mind, given that I think online communities genuinely respect developers more — even if they’re saying totally crazy stuff that the community doesn’t want to agree with — if they are turning up on the forums and at least being part of “the conversation” that’s happening. It’s when developers give the impression of, “We’ll speak to you when we’re ready…” and, “Yes, there are certainly things we could tell you about the game right now but {yawn} why should we?” that I think communities unnecessarily lose a bit of respect for developers.

You only have to look at how the community takes some of the more, ahem, “famous” quotes from certain TOR developers and puts its own sarcastic spin on them to see a real lack of respect that I think, quite honestly, would be lessened with more real contact between the devs and the community. Oh sure, there will still be haters — there are sadly ALWAYS haters in every online community — but I really don’t think the sarcasm and the hating and the general ill-will that the developers cop at present would be as bad if they interacted with their community.

Because there’s the whole point in one short, simple sentence– it’s THEIR community.

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Permalink | Posted in Opinion, Rant, Star Wars, The Old Republic | 2 Comments »

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May 20, 2010 by blur

Wise words from a developer…

I was pointed towards this blog recently by some people on the TOR forums. It’s by TOR developer, Damion Schubert. In the blog he talks a lot about designing game worlds, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of both “world” and “game” philosophies in MMOs and then goes on to talk about communities, too. This is the first time since late 2008 that I’ve actually seen a TOR developer address some of my biggest concerns so openly and frankly (particularly about whether this will be a “real” MMO with a “real” community), so I really enjoyed reading lines like this:

I’ve long advocated that moderation is the way to go, and I believe on The Old Republic we are successfully travelling a middle path, a centrist path that takes the strengths of both: provide a directed and balanced game experience inside a lush, free-form Star Wars world.

But I also believe that the game vs. world debate is missing a third element: community.

Community is the crazy notion that massively multiplayer games are more interesting when other players matter. Advocates of this viewpoint savor competition and cooperation above all else. Community-driven players want, above all else, to be able to interact and gather with other players, in a civil way. They share ideals with the other schools of thought: community-driven players tend to value balance and fairness, but they also want the freedom to express themselves and interact with others.

Now, does this article answer all my questions? No. Address all my concerns? No. But, after reading it, I did feel some weight lift from my shoulders because the issues I’ve been worrying about for a long time are at least on the table, sketched on the whiteboards and in the minds of the people making this game. And sure, I also know that things can change and what developers say when a game is being created can sometimes be a million miles away from what actually happens in-game (anyone remember the excitement that built up around Age of Conan, only to be smashed into a million tiny pieces when the game came out?), but for now, just read this and hope for the best.

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January 22, 2010 by blur

Bioware didn’t invent the concept of “story”

You’d think after working in PR and marketing for many years, that hyperbolic comments in press releases and interviews would be water off a duck’s back, right? Wrong. If anything, the more I’ve worked in PR and marketing, the more easily I’ve been able to sniff a BS comment from 20 paces.

And that’s what happened in the early days of TOR’s initial announcement with comments like this:

The Old Republic is a massively multiplayer game, but it’s one where we wanted to take story and bring it to the MMO space.

– Bioware’s director of design James Ohlen

Say what? So all these years I’ve been playing MMOs, stretching back into the late 1990s, NONE of them had story? Yep, apparantly so. Why? Because Bioware says so. Please, read on…

We feel that role-playing can be divided into four parts, and at BioWare that’s our philosophy: there’s the exploration filler, the combat filler, the progression filler and the story filler. But we’ve always thought that with MMOs the story filler hasn’t been there.

– Bioware’s director of design James Ohlen

And you know the scary part about all of this? As we sit here in 2010, Bioware fanboi’s and the like TOTALLY BELIEVE THESE COMMENTS. I challenge you to step onto the TOR forums and call these comments for that they are, and a veritible army of fanboi’s will stand up and tell you that YOU’RE wrong. Yep, Bioware has, apparantly, invented the concept of “story” in MMOs. Every MMO you’ve ever played didn’t have a storyline. All those boxes of text you read, didn’t exist. All the voiceovers you heard, never happened. The cutscenes that progressed the story? Yep, you imagined them.

I actually find this worrying in more ways than one. On the one level, I hate it when companies try and pretend they have invented something that already exists. That just sucks, period. Consumers should never be treated like idiots. But on a higher, much more important level, I am also utterly dismayed that there are now young people out there whom can be told something and, so long as they like the person or company telling them that information, they will apply absolutely no critical thought to it and then go blindly spouting the oft-quoted “company line” to anyone who will listen. Do they no longer teach critical thought or independent thinking or similar in schools these days?

Anyway, why am I talking about this now? Isn’t it old news? Yep, it is, but there’s been some talk about it again on the official TOR forums recently and it’s hammered home to me that the more time the kids out there have lived with this comment that Bioware is bringing “story” to MMOs, the more they have come to believe it. One of them even tried to tell me that by “story”, Bioware means an interactive story with multiple endings for characters. What he couldn’t seem to grasp, however, is that a story doesn’t need to be interactive in order to be a story. Thus, MMOs to date have actually been FULL of stories and Bioware is wrong about this. Otherwise, kids, put down that copy of Wuthering Heights, or whatever classic literature you’re reading. There’s no need to read it anymore — it’s non-interactive, you see, therefore can’t have a story. Huh? Yep, that’s what I thought, too…

Can these people not see how ludicrous their comments are?

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Permalink | Posted in Rant, The Old Republic | 3 Comments »

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January 14, 2009 by blur

Does Dragon Age reveal anything about TOR?

I was skimming through the Dragon Age Wikipedia entry earlier (I was there to remind myself when it was shipping), and I saw some interesting words that I think are worth repeating here:

The designers are incorporating ‘origin’ stories for each race and some classes in the game. For example, a Dwarf Noble will begin the game as part of the royal family in one of the Dwarven cities, and a Dwarf Commoner will begin on the streets of the city. Origin stories determine the background of the player’s character prior to the main events of the game’s story, forming an introduction to the game world and hours of game-play. People that the player meets during the origin story may reappear throughout the game, some of whom may be adversaries.

How closely do you guys think this might be mirrored in TOR, when it comes to our storylines?

Especially the whole concept of the introduction story… could TOR end up being like Age of Conan, with an initial section dedicated to setting the scene, depending on your class? Some would say, and I would agree, that it was a great way to start that game. And if another BioWare title is doing similar… hmmmm…

There is no tracking of alignment as in previous BioWare games, but the moral choices of the main character throughout the game will still affect the story. You may save the world whether you are good or evil, but the decisions that you make in the process will change the world around you–deciding who will become King, for example, and affecting nations and races and their places in the world. These decisions will also influence your companion NPCs, and could ultimately lead to an NPC deciding to leave your party if he does not agree with your approach.

Sounds a lot like being able to be the good guy on the Republic side and being the good guy on the Sith side, eh?

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November 11, 2008 by blur

PvP in a story-driven world

There are people out there who love PvP.

There are people out there who hate PvP.

There are even people out there who are indifferent to PvP, either way.

Which are you?

And, once you identify which you are, take this topic for a walk and see where it leads us:

Does PvP have a place in a story-driven world? By which I mean, PvP is often an end-game kind of proposition, or a way for people to extend the game (think LotRO, WoW, etc). When it is not used in that context, meanwhile, it tends to become the focus of the game (think Age of Conan PvP servers or Dark Age of Camelor or even WAR!).

But where does it sit in a story-driven world? ie: We’re not looking at a traditional end-game, nor are we looking at a game where combat across all levels = content.

So does it have a place? And will the answers to this question correlate with the type of gamer making them? ie: will PvP-friendly people conclude it has a place and PvP-haters say it doesn’t? Or will the results be more mixed? Have at it, ladies and gentlemen…

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