Hide In Shadows

Online Games Roundtable #10

Last week I participated in a pretty interesting roundtable session at RPG Vault.

The topic was Build it and Will They Come?

"A few years ago, we saw a lot of hype about persistent state worlds were the future of gaming, how the number of players would soon explode into the millions, the impending death of single-player games, etc. So far, reality has fallen well short. For this Roundtable, we invited a group of knowledgeable people working in the genre to share their respective viewpoints on these unrealized predictions and expectations."

Claus Grovdal
Producer and Lead Designer, Darkfall
Razorwax
I think the main reason why the persistent state world games market has failed to achieve the numbers of players the hype predicted a few years ago is lack of quality in the titles released.

While we continue to see fresh and exciting single-player and multiplayer games released each quarter, the PSW titles have been either bland and boring and/or had fatal technological problems that have all but buried any signs of innovation and fun under crashes, lag, and frame rate problems.

While it can be argued that the PSW part of the gaming industry is still in its infancy, and that these issues will be marginalized once the PSW market starts moving for real, there are very few titles on the horizon that look really interesting - especially to the now bitter PSW gamer veterans, who feel they have been conned and cheated one time too many.

I think the only real option for the online gaming industry now is to snap out of the success of EverQuest trance that seems to be the bane of most developers and board rooms, and start producing some really fun and stable games.

There also has to be an end to companies releasing unfinished games. It is really hurting the online game business and it's scaring all aspiring PSW customers back to their single-player games and consoles. Very few people want to see their credit card charged every month while patiently waiting for the developers to finish a game they bought months ago.

The most significant improvement in PSW games lately has been in the field of graphics, but gamers are not prepared to pay a monthly fee just because player characters look hot in the screenshots. Don't get me wrong -improved graphics are great. Our company allocates a lot of resources to this field too, but you need to have a lot more in the box than a just a CD full of pretty textures and polygons.

It is time that PSW games start utilizing their biggest advantage, the fact that you have the opportunity to pit the players up against each other. They have killed uninteresting computer controlled monsters for years now, and I think most of them are ready to be challenged in a more exciting way.

So no, if you just build it they won't come. Build it to be fun, innovative and stable, and they will show up in masses.

Claus

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