Up Your Butt and Around the Corner
Do you remember that phrase? Yeah, if you’re around my age, you probably thought it was hilarious at one time. You may find that it is, in fact, no longer hilarious. But, to be fair, no one over the age of 10 ever found that funny. Perhaps a better example would be The Karate Kid trilogy. Those movies were awesome. In the 80s. If you released those movies now, they would fail miserably. What about Jaws? If it were released in the exact same state for the first time today, it would be a Sci Fi original, not a blockbuster.
What once was good simply is not anymore. The technology, the techniques, the writing, everything. It just doesn’t hold up anymore. Even if you updated the technology in Jaws and left everything else the same, then released it to a world that had never seen a Jaws movie before, it probably wouldn’t do well. Times change, preferences change, the market changes. Movies like Jaws are still awesome only because of the nostalgia and the knowledge that it was made in the 70s.
This is just as true in the video game industry. Things change, people change, mechanics change. There are very few games released more than a few years ago that could come out now and still be successful. Yeah, there are games like Tetris that would still do well if released today for the first time (movies too, like The Godfather). But, those are few and far between.
For most games, and most genres, the mechanics get stale quickly. If you were to release Ultima Online or EverQuest today in their original state, even if you updated the graphics, they would fail. In the real world (as opposed to Ideal Nostalgialand), the MMO market has matured. It has moved on beyond mechanics like experience loss, equipment loss, and PKs preying upon players who only want to PvE.
Yeah, some people would want to play those games. But, probably not too many. That’s okay, except that it means you have to budget such a project knowing that the game will be niche. That means a sub-8-figure budget (most likely), which means the game can’t be nearly as impressive as what players are used to.
Meaning, it’s virtually impossible to make a game just like WoW (for example), except super hardcore mechanically. World of Warcraft took at least 8, if not 9 figures to make (thats dozens to over a hundred million dollars).
Okay, a bit of a tangent there. The really important thing to take away from this is that as much as some of us (even game developers) want an “old school” MMO, trying to make it old school by implementing throwback mechanics is a bad idea. At least, it’s a bad idea if we’re trying to make a very successful game (though, I admit, in relative terms a Nostalgia MMO could be successful if the budget were conservative enough).
That isn’t to say that it is entirely impossible to capture some of the nostalgia–some of the magic–of an MMO from ages past. You just need to identify what that magic was, and doing that takes voodoo in itself. I’ll try to follow up tomorrow with a post about capturing (and reproducing) the magic of an old school game in a modern MMO.
This is interesting stuff. Looking forward to seeing your conclusions. The size of the landmass alone is a huge problem for games like UO right now. For a game so reliant on player interaction having 2 facets with a huge area and THEN the 3 (4?) added by expansions the chances of meeting someone in a >10 year old game are minimal. This is a sad thing
I agree with some of your points, especially in regards to MMOs, but some games remain truly great no matter when you play them.
I can sit through Final Fantasy 3/6 and play the game top to bottom and have as much fun as when I first played it as a kid. Granted, the first playthrough was one of the most amazing gaming experiences I had had up to that point, but the first time is always the best.
Even games like Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Zelda and even the original Final Fantasy on the NES I can play over and over again.
Yes, technology and graphics help to make things prettier, but the games of yesteryear (or what I call the Golden Age of the NES and SNES) hold up really well to a lot of games today because of one thing: QUALITY. The quality of the gameplay during that time was simply amazing. Yes, there are a lot of great games today too, but it seems a lot of people would rather focus on things like graphics and sound instead of what really makes a great game: quality gameplay.
38 Studios could make a game with UOs graphics and have the best gameplay in the world and I’d play it over a game like “XYZ” that has amazing graphics and craptacular gameplay.
Combine both great graphics and great gameplay and you have a real gem.
This follows the “polished turd” paradigm for movies: you might get a blockbuster if you put a lot of polish, postproduction, and hype on a bad script, but it’s still a bad story (and it also might bust). On the flipside, look at movies like “The Outlaw Josie Wales”. The production (by today’s standards) is poor, but the script was so good, and Clint’s delivery so on-the-mark, the movie remains a classic.
The overriding lesson here is that in the MMO world, you truly “Can’t go home again.” Those new games that will be successful witll EVOKE the memories of older games. They may be filled with “inside” references that only old-school gamers can really appreciate. They have to be new games on some level to be received on a large scale. The days of cloning older games is over. All you have to do is look at LotRO. One year ago, they came out with a very nice looking, polished game. After playing for a month or two all I could think is “If I want to play WoW, why don’t I just go play WoW.”
Designers need to take the elements that make a game fun, and that evoke emotions (very difficult, I know) in their player base in order to be successful in this new world. Cloning and time travel don’t really work for people in the real world, and it won’t work long-term in virtual worlds either.
This is a similar aspect to what I see over and over and over again over at Bob Salvatore’s official forums, and his character Drizzt. People, over and over again, wish for that “Drizzt virginity”. They comment on the fact that Drizzt has changed over the years. He’s no longer what he once was. In my opinion, it’s nostalgia. They want that “who is this badass dark elf?” feeling again.
Laethyn: I can somewhat sympathize with that feeling. When I first read King’s “The Gunslinger”, boy oh boy, how badass is Roland Deschain? As I continued the series, I still liked Roland, but I lost that feel of WOW what a badass! I think it happens over time. Authors get older, their thoughts and feelings change. In the end, they are people and people use their experiences and wisdom to change the way they think and the way they do things.
“Up your butt and around the corner” compared to…to… _Jaws_??
You DO realize Jaws was the shark movie, right? I think NetFlix sent you a copy of _Pretty In Pink_ by mistake.
Gah… my eye’s burn at such profane comparisons.
Hehe. I almost removed that entire slogan, but my wife said it the other day and I decided it needed to be integrated into the blog somehow. Since it sparked this entry I figured it would only be appropriate to include it here.
Hmm Up your butt and around the corner a few blocks away. That reminds me of I don’t shut up I throw up, and you go around the corner and lick it up(or something like this)
I remember us all chatting about this on the forums. The first EQ released now would fail. It is sad, because I wish I could play it. Waiting for your next blog thing.
[...] I posted about how old game mechanics often don’t translate to new games in a post called Up Your Butt and Around the Corner. I mentioned that I would talk a little bit more about capturing the magic of a game and [...]
I don’t see this as true for everyone because it entirely depends on what you want from a game. I just recently went back to EverQuest and I’m having as much fun as I ever did and more fun that I’ve had in new games once the new game smell faded. The only complaint I have about EQ is one of the same ones I had when I left 4 years ago… the “new” player models aren’t great, and in fact Sony has shown they can do better because the drakken models, newest race, are much better than the other races. If they would just go back and redo the redo of the player models, I’d be 100% happy.
Jason, your experience is always going to be true for individuals going back to a game. The fact is that not a lot of people are doing that and EQ subs continue their slow decline.
My original quote was about new games. You can’t make another EQ with updated models and different encounters but the same mechanics because you would end up with a small user base, and one that would not stay for years like the original. There are only so many times you can watch the same movie before you are bored, and the same holds true for MMOs. There are only so many times you can play EQ before you want something else. Whoever provides that “something else” will be well-rewarded.
Which do you see more of in Hollywood…re-releases, or re-makes?
Ryan’s right here…you can, at best, try to evoke the same feelings that an original game did, but if you just try to do the same thing over again (or update with prettier graphics, but the ’same ‘ol same ‘ol’)…well, you wind up with Greedo shooting first, and no one wants that.
Except, of course, for Greedo.
You should look at the Wikipedia entry for Old School. It differentiates between the terms “Old School” and “Nostalgia”. In the case that it might be changed, the current entry opens like this:
“Old school, variously spelled old skool, oldschool or oldskool, is a slang term referring to the subcultures of a school of discipline during a retro generation. Rather than carrying the negative connotation of obsolete, it may be used to refer to a time of perceived higher standards or level of craft.
Old school is often interchangeable with the word nostalgic, but practitioners of semantics often define old school as simply something of an earlier period but not necessarily inferior or hopelessly dated. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is often given a negative connotation. For example, as a sentimental attachment to dated works many of which are now considered embarrassingly ‘corny’ or ‘cheesy’ in their execution, yet retaining a place in one’s sentiments as a guilty pleasure or relic of one’s youth. Old school items or concepts, in contrast, are shown to have residual real-world functionality.”
The above commenter said this above, “some games remain truly great no matter when you play them”, and I agree. Some games are great. They have remained that way for a reason. Take the timeless example of Chrono Trigger. That experience has not even been close to being emulated by anything in the new generation of games. In some cases, and perhaps even in Chrono Trigger’s case, the success of some Old School games simply has not yet been eclipsed, even with the technology available today. But there are as well several other reasons Old School games can still be considered great today, and one of those reasons is that it does a lot of things right in its own element, and not in the elements available today. Consider the comparison between blocky and ambiguous sprites and incredibly detailed polygonal models. The closer 3D models become to realism, the less the viewer is able to fill in the absent details with his own imagination. If you’re privy to fine art terms, this is a lot like what is achieved through implied lines. It’s like books vs. movie adaptations of books. A lot of the time, a viewer will be disappointed with the on-screen rendition of a character, because their image of the character was perfect, and considering it was created in the mind of the reader, there are no restrictions as to the ability to make this character perfect to the reader. The more defined newer games become, the less able people are willing to make the perfect game for themselves in the experience the game provides. This is one of the very big reasons why many Old School games will always remain great, regardless of nostalgia.