I was struggling to find anything to talk about this morning. Luckily I checked Paul Barnett’s blog to find a follow up question to the popular “What game would you unmake?”. This time Paul wants to know “What game would you make a success?”.
“A follow on from what game would you unmake is the idea that you can change a game (or hardware) from failiure or small success into big success. I mean would the landscape look different if that Virtual Reality stuff had been really popular? How about the Dreamcast selling massive? Maybe that game “The Sentinel” cold have altered game history? So if you could change the face of the game world by granting stunning success, just what would you pick?” – Paul Barnett
This question is a tough one. It’s not asking us what game we would make better or what game we would change. It’s simply asking which game (or hardware) we would grant stunning success. I wish that SWG and Vanguard were more successful on one hand, but on the other do I really? Had those games been a stunning success then flawed mechanics and horrible gameplay would have been mainstream. So which game or hardware, as is/was, would I grant stunning success?
I would grant Dark Age of Camelot enormous and stunning success. I feel that it was a small or barely medium success in comparison to some mmorpgs out there. The influence that DAOC had on the industry could have been more. What if it had been an enormous success? It could have changed PvP in mmos immensely. Had it been an epic success then maybe World of Warcraft would have focused more on their open world PvP instead of PvE — It would have actually been a Warcraft game! Just imagine if WoW had shown more DAOC influence… that would have been a fantastic game and one I would likely still be playing today. World of Warcraft itself has had such an impact on mmo gaming. (arguably for good or bad) Granting DAOC more success could have allowed the greatness of DAOC to permeate throughout the industry.  Perhaps a greater DAOC success would have boosted Warhammer Online’s development giving us a quicker release. Hey, maybe Mythic would have expanded instead of merging with EA and developed Imperator as well! DAOC has a lot of great features which are manifesting themselves in WAR, but had they been influential in their prime we could have seen a whole lot more.
What game or hardware would you make a success?
I dunno. DAoC *was* a success, for a PvP-oriented game. Being PvP inherently limits your success as a game, just because most people like controlling the amount of risk they assume while playing a game. PvP makes risk unpredictable, and also attracts people whose only apparent goal is to ruin someone else’s fun in any way possible. I think Mythic did a fantastic job on DAoC and it probably did as well as any PvP-based MMO can.
A game to make a success? I’d probably go with Planescape: Torment. Deep story, intriguing characters, good writing, and it may have inspired early MMO devs to put story above stats.
Sure it did fine; even as well as could be expected from a independent developer. A small to medium success. But the question was which would I pick to make a stunning success so that it could have altered game history. Had DAOC been WoW popular, things would have been very different. Look at how things have already changed since WoW’s success. That’s how – I – would have changed things.
As for PvP-oriented games being inherently limited, I would have to disagree really. I think the problem isn’t PvP. It’s how it’s implemented.
Except when the PvP is limited to frontiers ala DAOC or RvR areas ala WAR. At which point the risk is predictable. As for attracting asshats — you’ll find them everywhere, not just in PvP.
I would go back and make the very first Starseige Tribes game a huge, ground breaking success. The kind of success that get prime time commericals, cartoons and movies.
For its time, that was had some serious and intense ground breaking involved in it. It was the first game that focused almost solely on multiplayer competition, had a long list of deployable stations, guns and vechicles as well as jetpacks! You can’t go wrong with jetpacks! They added a whole new dimension to fighting and to the game. All of the bases were in the air, the flags were and the vechicles were. You had to get good at flying around and learning how to fight efficently while avoiding a painful crash landing. The game also had a system where you chould choose different armors with different weaposn and inventory items. I can’t understand why it wasn’t more popular and why people still aren’t imiating it today.
It was the first game I became a die-hard fan of. I started playing it in middle school when it was released and talking about it even now, makes me want to go play it.
Ahhh Starsiege Tribes! Great choice. I was also diehard addicted to Tribes to the point that I would want to fake sick to stay home and play. 😛 It was a fantastic game waaay before its time. Tribes 2 was equally fantastic. Graev and I talk about Tribes quite often as we recall fond memories of our favorite maps, vehicles, and moments.
Scarabre and Broadside = FUN!
Oh man Broadside was amazing. There was a time when me and a friend of mine were a two man team. In the Renegades mod, we would camp the roof with our sniper rifles and mount laser turrents off ot the front of their base so they’d get shot down when they tried to take off.
I was a die hard fan of all the tribes games. Even the latest one, Vengence. Although, it was rather stream lined and cut down. It lacked the feel that the orgional and 2 had.
Hmm, that’s a tough one, but I think Paul mentioned what would be my choice. I’d make the Dreamcast a stunning, resounding success. I loved my Dreamcast, but Sony killed it. We might be living in a different console world today if the Dreamcast had been successful and the Sony consoles had been kept in check. Certainly we might have a less annoyingly arrogant Sony to deal with, and that alone is worth a lot.
As a runner up, I’d make the original Missionforce: Cyberstorm a resounding success. Not the sequel, that sucked. Turn based tactical game using customizable HERCs from the starseige universe? Sold! Either that, or a turn based tactical Battletech game if there ever was one. The RTS ones (what were they called?) were ok, but real time Battletech just sucked the fun out of it for me. It’s hard to make different classes of mechs useful without the turn based rules to back them up.
Netstorm
Now that was a fantastic game that should have been a lot more successful.
I’d have made Netrek’s success more enduring. The first internet team spaceship game. Quite possibly the world’s first graphical internet team PvP game.
Metaservers, private servers, tournaments, team chat, message macros, unit classes, tactical roles, persistent stats (well, stat), ogging, bots/antibot design wars.
So many of the “standard” game mechanics were in there, on a game written in the late 80s, only played by CompSci students buried in labs on shiny Unix workstations that really should have been spending their CPU cycles doing something worthwhile.
Good times. 🙂
Diablo 2.
Yes, it was certainly a success by any measure. It’s still one of the top-selling PC games seven(!) years after its release, and it’s been mimicked countless times. But it was mimicked in the wrong ways. What other developers learned from it was that hack-and-slash, item-focused combat could be a hit.
What they should have learned is the importance of dynamics, unpredictability, and replayability. Flood a game with unpredictable dynamics and the result is constantly fresh gameplay; the result is hopeful anticipation of enjoyable surprises; the result is individual, personal experiences. And if you can design the experience so that it lasts for months or even years, why shouldn’t you?
Diablo 2 multiplayer also proves how the almighty “balance” (of character types) is a red herring. In both co-op and PvP gameplay, players of vastly different skill arrangements enjoy playing together. Two barbarians can be different to a crazy degree, and they love it. Make the game less predictable, more about exploration, and your players won’t all look alike (MMOs, I’m looking at you).
I wish more designers looked beyond the hack-and-slash and saw the huge amount of inspiration to be drawn from that game.
No doubt: Asheron’s Call. A great, open-ended game with fantastic combat dynamics. Stat progression and traits based on real custom choices. You spend xp into stats and skills yourself, so you feel progress between levels, not just by the “ding”‘s. You tailor your skill choices to become a character, not choose a character and follow the skill tree. And the world is totally unlike any other out there (no elves, no green-skinned orcs, etc.) with great lore and a rich story. And by most accounts (though I didn’t partake) great PvP play. Now that most games are trying to be similar to WoW to gain success, I wish someone would see how AC did it and try making something old into something new.
Now the game is 8+ years old and the graphics are dated. No wishing on what might have been, but I can hope for an AC3.
Any console MMO (theres only been two attempts that I know of). That way developers and investors would warm up to the idea more. and we might have a different control interface than the keyboard to choose from, maybe… possibly… Ok that was a long shot. 😛
The Asheron’s Call *I* remember was overrun with cookie-cutter template super-builds, like the Archer-Mage. That’s something you get with skill-based games — it’s only unique until everyone discovers the magic mix, and then people gravitate toward those, in effect making classes of sorts, though those classes may be unique in themselves.