Announcing a New Studio
After much discussion with other developers, investors, and publishers, we have decided to open our own development studio. In fact, this is the reason I was unable to attend GDC this year–I had several meetings with investors during this time and primarily participated in GDC through phone conversations. Who, you ask, is starting this new company up alongside me? I’m not yet allowed to divulge this information, but let’s just say there is a reason certain key members of teams have left their current studios.
What are we making? A massively multiplayer online game, of course. One that will knock your socks off. A game of political intrigue, of constant danger, of city building, of a lush world in the distant future on a magic-infused planet of Science-Fantasy. A world that is gritty, yet beautiful. A world that sometimes seems much like our own, but other times seems so divergent it would never be compared to Earth.
A game that is two parts role-playing, one part strategy, and yet another part action. A game that is not for the weak or faint of heart. A game that requires you to have skill–you must aim your guns and your magic, block with your shield, swing your sword at specific body locations, dodge attacks, and outsmart your opponents. A game that is so hardcore it would make baby McQuaid cry.
This “new game” at the “new studio” will launch with three server rulesets: PvP, PvP RP, and PvP Permadeath. It emphasizes twitch-based gameplay, city creation and maintenance, faction building, political wheeling and dealing, and many other Really Cool Things™. Nowhere in this world is safe. Even the cities and your own homes pose constant dangers.
The AI will include complex behaviors never-before-seen in any game. Roads will begin to develop along popular pathways that players take. Cities will found themselves at major crossroads automatically, though the development of these cities will take place nearly in real-time. All NPCs in the game will have jobs–they won’t wait around with their sole purpose in life being to get ganked by players. NPCs will have babies, mothers must nurse them, and they will develop from babies to grown adults over time, staking their unique claim in the world just as players do.
All players will begin as babies. You will start the game by designing your parents. Each pair of parents is allocated a specific number of points that you can distribute into different categories. Looks, job, station in life, etc. Their looks will determine how you will look when you grow up. Their station in life will determine where you begin the game. Their skills will become your favored skills in the future.
When beginning the game as a baby, you will have to actively learn in order to improve your character at this stage. At first, you can’t even understand the language your parents speak. After much effort on your part, you will begin learning their language, how to crawl, how to walk, etc. You must make your way to adulthood over the course of real-time weeks, and your active participation will determine how strong and intelligent you are when you reach the point that you can have a job of your own (roughly when a character hits its teens).
In this world you will experience unmoderated player-created content alongside the content we, the developers, add to the game ourselves. There will be but one server world per ruleset for all players to converge and conquer. Home and city placement is not restricted, though certain areas will lead to constant attacks by NPCs for your incursion on their lands and your home can be permanently destroyed.
The trees, when cut down, must regrow before they can be harvested again. It is entirely possible that the world will become a wasteland without trees if players do not self-regulate the harvesting of them. Mines will go dry, oceans will pollute, creature populations can become extinct. If players are not careful, they will be forced to venture to and colonize nearby moons and planets to get the raw materials they need to survive.
Experience real world physics and natural behaviors. Glacial movements could lead to a worldwide ice age, tsunamis may move in and cause temporary terror followed by the utopian growth of trees, canyons will form beneath ancient rivers. Creatures may hibernate, migrate, or even evolve into other creatures for survival or efficiency. What was once a sprawling metropolis can eventually become a dilapidated shadow of its former glory because of the furies of nature, the sands of time, or the folly of man .
This game, as I so clearly stated previously, is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t ultra-hardcore and willing to battle with other players at every turn; defend against PC and NPC onslaughts from the sea, air, land, and underground simultaneously; swear off your social life; quit your job; and generally break all contact with the outside world; you will fail. More information will become available soon, so stay tuned.
Edit: Now that it’s not April Fools Day, I went ahead and explained what made this entire post so absurd if it wasn’t already clear. I did so in a comment that is nearly as long as the original post… Shrug.
It is funny that I was getting pretty excited about this game until I figured out that it was a joke. There are some very interesting elements that you mentioned that I think would make for a cool game, up until you started getting into the outrageous claims. Nice progression though because I thought it was true and it got progressively more bogus.
I especially like the idea of designing your character’s parents and think that could actually be interesting, but I don’t think many people would enjoy the playing as a baby part. :p But really it’s an idea I have never heard before and that’s pretty rare.
wait, that was a joke?
’cause i bet there’s a lot of people who would pay a lot more than $15 a month to play a game like that…
i don’t think any of the claims were too outrageous. in fact, they’re exactly what i expected an MMO would be before i actually played one.
You blew at the “babies” part, GG.
Cael, that’s the point I intended to lose most people. If somehow people didn’t get lost by then, I went ahead and closed it out with a paragraph that any sane game developer would never say about their game (even if it were true).
I know some of the things in here were somewhat interesting and could be applied to varying degrees, but most of the Really Cool Things? just can’t happen yet in massively multiplayer games. I’ll try to explain each one briefly.
Complex AI behaviors bring a server to its knees with the massive NPC populations of these games. That’s the gist of that one. It would be cool, and current single player games can simulate behaviors pretty well, but we aren’t quite to the point in online games that this would be doable without ruining the player experience.
Making it so forests could get cut down and no more wood could be harvested would mean that it would happen (even if not through normal harvesting, certain griefers are creative in their methods). This could be applied to a degree–if each tree were cut down and regrew within a day, it might work out. Same thing with other natural resources (fish populations in oceans, ore in mines, whatever else I mentioned).
Creature populations may never be able to go extinct, because even if they were to go extinct and be replaced by something that looks the same with a different name, the database would overflow with creatures. Possibly avoidable, but the model reuse would make the whole idea lose its attractiveness (and you’d have to reuse models unless you had billions to spend on art).
That “babies” idea might be interesting to try out. I doubt I’d ever make players start as an actual baby, but having them evolve from a child to an adult (and continue to get older, requiring spells and such to keep your body in good condition unless every race happens to be temporaly immortal) and allowing the player to hone their skills during this time could be fun. I came up with the “design your parents” aspect while I was typing that paragraph, but it could have some kind of merit in some kind of game.
Ah player-created content. I don’t even want to delve into this because I’m so scared of player-created content. Obviously, it works in some games. Some games actually rely on it to exist. I guess I’m just an asshole developer who likes to have that extra bit of quality control. Perhaps one day we can start using quest lines and such from players. We’ll see. A limited implementation for player-created content could exist in most games, though. Players could add bounties, create quests from templates, hand them out (with automatically generated rewards and such), etc. I’ve wanted to see this idea explored in games for a while.
Real world physics and the natural world evolving despite what players do. That’s an interesting one that is, like AI, completely improbable at this time. It will be possible in the future. Oh yes, it will be, and it will be awesome. But right now it would simply take too much power to be viable.
And lastly, twitch-based gameplay. We’re just about there. Some games do it already. It’s very difficult to pull off in games that generally don’t require great server latency (by great, I mean minimal). I don’t think we’re quite to the point in which fully twitch-based games can exist (aim your swords, aim your guns, actively block, actively dodge, etc.). For that to exist, it requires minimal other Really Cool Things? to exist in the game (like NPCs and AI), because it uses so many resources itself. Soon, though. Real soon.
That should explain the entire post. Or at least, why almost nothing I said would be in the game could possibly be in a game just yet. Although in theory, some of the stuff that has a technological barriers will be doable within the next few years, so planning for a game to include that kind of goodness might not be wholly insane.
Seriously, send me an email about AI.
There’s things that we do in the simulation field that might shock you.
GG> I doubt I?d ever make players start as an actual baby, but having them evolve from a child to an adult (and continue to get older, requiring spells and such to keep your body in good condition unless every race happens to be temporaly immortal)
I’d toyed around with this as the “tutorial” phase for a world- your character starting as an early-teen in (for a fantasy setting) a village. Basic interactions and navigation could come through a “play” phase with peers, with combat essentially introduced through the equivalent of playground fights. The challenge- and enjoyment- of exploring would be as they were through the eyes of the kids.
When the kids stumble over a raiding party/hostile animals, the “conning” system can be introduced, and they learn something about the Archetype (or, preferably, the “skill tree”) system as village heroes fend off the attack. Dialogue with each AT could lead to mini-quests for the players to “dabble” with that path, or explore crafting, or even learn the culture of their people. A harvest fair might even be there to encourage skills in roleplaying.
Ideally, some of the decisions here would impact the larger game- exceptional results at a task might result in access to a wizened old patron who still recalls your heroics on that raid… or a childhood friend whose bond extends to adulthood (maybe he’s willing to have one more adventure with his old friend, filling an essential gap with an NPC, maybe he’s just a merchant willing to give a discount, when he can). Or… maybe you start with a rival from the old days- someone who might just act against you, given the chance…
I’d hope that, in this way, instruction could seem more seamless with the content, and the player could be conditioned to be a little more immersed- to see the character differently, and maybe be more inclined to see playing a role as part of the gameplay.
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Of course, for all the benefits, I’d better have good reason for diverting art assets that would allow the character customization at 2 stages of life (pre-teen and adult) or come up with a reasonable illusion to save development assets. Even if I had use of “kids” art assets in the full game, I could probably do the same without all the customization facets that players would prefer, so I’d likely have to justify ALOT of development assets.
Then, there are the roleplayers that have to have a story that breaks the norm (and there are alot of them). They’re the vampires or lycanthropes in worlds that don’t have vampires or werewolves… the characters whose twisted history MUST defy the backstory of the devs… the “I was a troll raised by elves, mortal enemies of all trolls” ilk. Not to mention the dimension hoppers and “immortals” from centuries past. Most current tutorials aren’t THAT difficult to “shrug off,” but one that assumes a “normal” teen years might turn these guys away.
[...] Nerfbat: Announcing a New Studio [...]
[...] Some awesome MMG ideas from Nerfbat’s April Fools joke. A massively multiplayer online game, of course. One that will knock your socks off. A game of political intrigue, of constant danger, of city building, of a lush world in the distant future on a magic-infused planet of Science-Fantasy. A world that is gritty, yet beautiful. A world that sometimes seems much like our own, but other times seems so divergent it would never be compared to Earth.A game that is two parts role-playing, one part strategy, and yet another part action. A game that is not for the weak or faint of heart. A game that requires you to have skill?you must aim your guns and your magic, block with your shield, swing your sword at specific body locations, dodge attacks, and outsmart your opponents. A game that is so hardcore it would make baby McQuaid cry. [...]