Announcing a New MMO
No, I’m not talking about “Copernicus” from 38 Studios. I’m announcing a whole different beast entirely, and many of us at the company are working on it. We discovered that our licenses for Unreal and BigWorld extend to any number of games and apply even to individual members of the company, so I and 9 others have formed Mad Alchemist Laboratories to make a smaller scale project on the side.
What are we working on? I suppose I can’t keep you in suspense forever. We’re doing to World of Warcraft what Blizzard did to EverQuest: streamlining it to include only the fun elements of traditional massively multiplayer games.
The reasons are twofold: First, there are only 10 of us, and it would be unreasonable to assume we could make a game that could be as fun as WoW without a $1 billion investment in our MMO. Second, because nobody enjoys the tedium that is inherent to games like World of Warcraft.
What are the top 10 elements we aim to address?
- Who has 300+ hours to max out? We feel like most people only have fun at the “end game” anyway, so why make them dedicate months to getting there?
- Travel can take forever, and it’s always boring. I appreciate having time to get a drink during griffin rides sometimes, but it’s usually just a pain to deal with.
- I hate seeing people who look the same as everyone else, just because they all want what is perceived to be the “best” set of gear in the game for their class.
- I’m getting tired of rerolling characters just to try out another class. There’s no need to pigeonhole players by restricting their class choice. Why CAN’T I cast fireballs just because I’m a Warrior?
- It’s almost impossible for players to make their gameplay unique in games like WoW that have fairly strict classes. Sure I have a few talent choices, but what do those even do?
- Crafting is almost always an afterthought. The items they make are never as good as the items players get from questing or randomly slaughtering creatures.
- Questing can be boring and repetitive. How many times is “Kill 10 Rats” going to remain interesting, and when will players demand more from quest designers?
- It takes so much effort to get together a group or raid, and most of the time spent in any game these days is solo. Not to mention, players have more fun soloing.
- Death in most MMOs is either meaningless or too painful. I either don’t give a crap that I died and am just annoyed by wasting time running back, or I’m really upset that I died.
- Downtime sucks. Regular downtimes for server maintenance, rolling server crashes, lag, and all that annoying stuff needs to go. We’re tired of it, and so are you.
How will we address each of these major issues? Here’s how…
- No levels. You heard it here first, folks. This game has no levels, so there’s no grinding necessary to max out. You can get to the enjoyment portion instantly.
- No travel. You will never need to hoof it anywhere, even the first time. Instead, you can get free passage to anywhere in the world at any time using a travel item in your inventory.
- No gear restrictions, full gear access. All players will have access to every visual look available in the game from the get-go, so they can always look how they want.
- No classes. Yep, this game relies entirely on a character’s individual skills, and is not defined by what “class” some designer arbitrarily made up.
- No skill restrictions. Each character can earn every single skill in the game over time to ensure that every player can create his own unique gameplay.
- No crafting. We agree that tradeskills aren’t given enough attention, so we’re not including them at all since we know we won’t focus on them if they are included.
- No quests. Do you remember the good old days when YOU got to forge your OWN destiny? You can again, because we’re removing quests and letting you do what YOU want to do.
- No group or raid play. We’ve made everything solo. Now you can be a true hero, slaying dragons and giants and monsters of all sorts by yourself, as a true hero.
- No online play. Welcome to the world’s first entirely offline MMO. Now you can play your favorite MMO even on Tuesday morning, because it’s hosted right on your computer. No more server lag, no more zone crashes, no more rolling restarts, no more maintenance.
I hope you’re as excited about this new project, codenamed “Vernal Equinox,” as we at Mad Alchemist are. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m confident that we are all equal to the challenge.
Update: April Fools! I could have taken the higher road and not participated in April Fools’ Day shenanigans, but I tend to ride my power wheels on the lower road.
Can I be in the beta?
Sounds exciting
Almost believable!!!
Can I be a content designer? I made some badass areas in my MUD admin days.
Oh yea, you can pay me with Twinkies.
This is such an April Fools joke, lols.
Haha, that’s good. An MMO without online play!
Okay, seriously? Back to EVE Online. <3
I don’t know what it is about today, but it seems that everyone is just bursting with great ideas, everywhere I look! Sign me up for the beta of this one!
can i be in beta?
please can i be in beta?
cibib?
I read this entry in a somewhat serious way. I first thought that 38 Studios must be a truly innovative company, readily supporting intrapreneurship, and enabling skunkworks studio organizations to spring up. Then I read the comments (i.e., spoilers.)
On a side note, I’ve been accepted to do the music for said MMO. Hope you like techno, rock, and classical soundtrack style
obey the fist!
I was actually liking the idea :-p seriously, no crafting is way better than shitty crafting… but i began to get suspicious when you said “no quests” was the fix for the quests issue.
daaang i fell for it so hard, i was already gathering links so you could see some neat ideas, like the “translation game” post at the Lost Garden blog… i’m not sure if i’m pissed :-p
in my culture, there aint Aprils Fool. *goes to vent somewhere else*
The funny thing is tho, that up until point 5 you are describing the, imo, perfect MMO
bizz wrote:
What’s wrong with 5? You’ve never played Ultima Online?
Nope i didn’t
it’s just not very appealing to me 
#5 is only dumb because of the way I worded it, stating that you can get all of the skills over time without limits so you can be “unique.” If you can get every skill, your character is exactly the same as everyone else when you have them all maxed out and you are as far from unique as possible.
And, feel free to send fun ideas over. I’m still making an MMO, just for 38 Studios and not on my own.
Skills are only one aspect of the personalization paradigm. (Thought I’d sound smart.) Your list of features (or lack of features) doesn’t preclude the game from having twitch-dependent combat, adding “talent vs. skill” to the paradigm.. Since there are no gear restrictions, players would be free to wear whatever they want. Since there’s no crafting, specifically user-driven crafting, usable items such as dyes could be sold via vendors and such. No travel means that players can define their identity by the areas where they congregate a la street gangs. If everything’s soloable, then there’s an element of personal achievement and so new, tougher monsters can be added every now and then for another element of personalization. No online play would be Spore-like in that what you do is saved and uploaded later on, allowing players to make progress as they wish.
What you’ve listed actually seems to be a good start to designing a great game.
Well, if you’ve never played Ultima Online, you really don’t have any reason to think the game wouldn’t appeal to you. You can download Ultima Online for free and play on free shards. What’s stopping you?
This sounds lame with a capital L.