The Other Side Of The Door

Continuing the "riffing on the news" theme from yesterday and as Jeromai mentioned in the comments, Mike O'Brien has left ArenaNet. This is kind of a big deal, seeing as how he co-founded the company. He's been with it for what seems like forever. His leaving is almost like taking down the sign over the door. And yet in a way it's also kind of not so big a deal after all. We've barely heard a word from him for what feels like a couple of years now.

He's leaving to start a new company called Mana Works. There's a lot of that going on these days. Paeroka at Nerdy Bookahs has an excellent, fully researched post up with all the details on just who's going to be working there, along with some speculation on what they might plan on doing.

There's clearly a lot going on here that no-one's going to talk about. Paeroka lists the eight people who have apparently jumped ship from ANet to follow Mike O'Brien to the sunlit uplands of independent development. That's a significant defection, especially coming off the back of the massive job cuts imposed by NCSoft earlier in the year.

When we learned that NCSoft had brought the curtain (or was it the guillotine?) down on a number of unspecified new projects I wasn't particularly concerned or, indeed interested, other than for the usual human concerns over the impact it would have on the individuals concerned. As far as Guild Wars 2 was concerned, my feeling was that a renewed corporate focus on core activities could only be to the benefit of that game and its players.

I didn't know then and hadn't heard since, until I read it in Paeroka's post this morning, that one of those cancelled projects might have been Guild Wars 3. Now that does make a difference.

GW2 is seven years old. As we are all coming to understand, seven years is barely into middle age for MMORPGs. The market is saturated with games that date back a decade, a decade and a half, twenty years, even. We all tend to get worked up over the occasional "sunsets" but few of us give a thought for the plethora of games drifting through a seemingly eternal twilight, neither growing towards the light nor shrinking into the darkness.

A long while back ANet claimed they planned to run GW2 indefinitely as their only ongoing MMORPG (the original Guild Wars having been officially shunted into maintenance mode). All that dithering with "cadences"  and "seasons", shuttling between a "Living Story" and a "Living World", that was ANet trying to figure out how to keep the ship afloat. They had to. There were no lifeboats.

Except apparently there were. Mike O'Brien may have been building one that could have launched, sometime, on a course for an undiscovered land, which might or might not have come to be known as "GW3".

Baby, it's cold outside.

Well that, as they say, is a pisser. While it's self-evident that GW2 could, and no doubt will, carry on largely as-is for many years, my personal feeling is that its future lies in the cruise ship trade. It long ago ceased to be an expeditionary vessel, headed away from the safety and security of the shore towards an unknown destiny beyond the horizon. These days it's a super-annuated hulk, living out its days as a half-heartedly refurbished tour boat, visiting only the best-known, most familiar ports.

Whose to say whether a new MMORPG from ArenaNet would have been any better? After all, the fine promises Mike and his team made before GW2's launch came to nothing and his custodianship was, to put it mildly, uneven. Even so, I'd have liked to have seen it.

And maybe we will. The Mana Works website currently consists of a single page that reads "This website will return October 9th." I await that date with bated breath. There's also a sub-reddit, whose strapline, as quoted by Paeroka, reads: “We aim to create worlds to live in, skills to discover, and adventures to share with friends."

The Kotaku piece makes the point that the eight defectors, all of whom comprise the collective that "amounted to the early development team for a new Guild Wars project, potentially Guild Wars 3", didn't take any of the work they'd done with them. Like NCSoft would have let them!

I'm guessing that they also won't have any rights or access to the intellectual property that comprises the Guild Wars franchise, despite Mike O'Brien having co-created it all. As far as I can tell, gaming stil resides somewhere in that nebulous legal hinterland that was known in the comics industry as "work made for hire".

Years of legal battles, particularly by Jack Kirby and his estate eventually saw that tradition broken. Kirby lost his claim but new writers were able to sign contracts that gave them royalties and rights, sometimes including ownership of the characters they created, which they were then able to take with them to other companies when they left.

The upshot of that was comics writers and artists becoming millionaires. Also a lot of very bad creator-owned comics. Freedom does not always equate to quality. For good or ill, that kind of freedom only seems to accrue to video game developers if they're canny enough to own the company that makes their games. Which may explain why so many of them leve to start their own studios.

Onwards and upwards

Regardless of the legal issues, the Mana Works tagline suggests Mike and the rest of his freedom-loving crew will be staying in the virtual world business. Whether that's in the form of an MMORPG or a plain old RPG it's a fair bet it will have something of the feel of Guild Wars about it, even though I'm certain any overt references to that I.P. will be assiduously avoided.

As I was saying yesterday, older creators tend to polish and burnish their ideas. They don't usually spend much time or effort on coming up with new ones and why should they? Those that try usually end up embarassing themselves and alienating their audience. (Yes, I know I always link to that clip. That's because it's always true. Also because I'm old so I have no new ideas).

If Mana Works would care to come up with a small-scale MMORPG-like game that reminds us all strongly of games their CEO made in the past, well that would be perfectly fine with me. As I also said yesterday, there's absolutely nothing wrong with elder creators refining and perfecting their art for the pleasure and enjoyment of the audience that grew up with thier earlier works and would like some more, please. I'm looking at you, Brad...

If I had to bet on a horse in the non-existent race between Playable Games and Mana Works, on the equally non-existent evidence of what they're doing now and the rather more solid form book of what they've done in the past, I'd probably give it to Mike O'Brien by a nose. His project at least sounds less abstract and more feasible.

I hope they both make it over the finishing line. We could do with more passion projects by committed creators, regardless of their age or origin.

New Tricks

As I was tabbed out, recovering from a bad pull where my Hunter's pet died twice, while the Hunter himself barely escaped with a sliver of life after two Feign Deaths and a long run to break aggro, I came across this interesting little item on Gamesindustry.biz.

There is, perhaps, nothing so very new in Raph Koster starting yet another MMO-focused project, although he's been rather quiet on that front of late. Metaplace, which closed its doors on 70,000 virtual worlds in 2009, seems to have been his last big MMO adventure. I confess I'd forgotten all about it.

It had also slipped my mind that Raph was Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment until  2006 and that he worked on (or at least would have had oversight of) the first and second expansions for EverQuest II, Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky

All of which is very interesting as far as it goes but it's not what first came to mind when I read the names of the people Raph will be working alongside at Playable Worlds. Several sounded rather familiar but Greg Kostikyan's name really stuck out.

Didn't I remember him from the 1980s? What was it he did? Oh yes, looking him up he turns out to have been the guy behind several of the more unusual tabletop RPGs of the 1970s and '80s. For example, the notorious Paranoia and the much-hyped and well-reviewed Toon.

I played sessions of both and they were, shall we say, not a great success. It was very hard to get anyone to take them seriously enough for any actual gameplay to emerge. And, to be fair to Greg, that was kind of the point, particularly in Toon.

That's by the by. It wasn't the quality or pragmatic value of his work that struck me so forcefully so much as his age. I found myself thinking "surely this guy must be older than I am" and I'll be sixty-one in in November.

So I checked and no, he isn't older than me. He's all of nine months younger. Greg Costikyan was born in July 1959, making him sixty this year.

What about the other people mentioned in the article? How about Raph?

Raph's birthdate as given by Wikipedia is September 7, 1971. That makes him just shy of fifty years old. Eric Goldberg, co-founder (with Raph) of Playable Games, has a short Wiki entry that doesn't give his exact age, but earlier this year VentureBeat described thim as "a 35-year veteran of the game, consumer internet, mobile, monetization, and edtech industries", which means he has to be in his mid-fifties at least.

I though his name rang a bell, too. Turns out he was behind one of my favortite 1980s pen and paper RPGs, SPI's Dragonquest. That game had a class which I believe might have been called "Beastmaster". I could go downstairs and dig out my ancient, boxed copy to check but it really doesn't matter what the class was called so much as the way it provided the archetype for all the MMORPG pet classes I've played over the years.

DragonQuest was published in 1980. Unless Eric was in his teens when he wrote it (which I guess he could have been) that pushes him up to around sixty.

Mat Broome, comics artist and games designer (and ex of Ashes of Creation, it seems), would appear to be the baby of the bunch. He began his comics career in 1993 so he's most likely in his mid-to-late 40s now. The only other Playable Games staffer mentioned by name in the article is Brian Crowder, "an SOE veteran with stints at Electronic Arts and Zynga". His role is "lead server engineer" and, not surprisingly, he doesn't have a presence on Wikipedia so I have no idea how old he is. He is "a veteran" though, so let's assume he's at least in his 40s.

And where, you may well ask, am I going with all this? Well, somewhere quite awkward. I probaly wouldn't be saying it if I wasn't ancient myself.

I think it's still very easy to imagine the people behind the MMORPGs we play as being "young". Aren't video games made by young people for young people?

No. No, they're not. Not the big ones for sure and not most of the little ones, not in the MMORPG field, anyway. They're made by people in mid-life and now, as evidenced by Raph's latest venture, by those in, or about to enter, their senior years.

Does that matter? The same is true of movies and music and books, isn't it? Creative artists mature, don't they? Isn't some of the best work in the field often produced by writers and artists and musicians in the later phases of their career?

Yes, yes and yes again. But...

Those maturing and mature creators are rarely innovators. They perfect and polish and sometimes produce exquisite examples of their style... but that style is set. Occasional geniuses confound expectations by carrying their ability to surprsise and shock into later life but geniuses are rare.

There's a feeling that surfaces frequently among MMORPG fans; the genre is stale, flat, treading water before it goes under, perhaps for the final time. It's not a feeling I share but it's one I understand.

If the success of WoW Classic and the lesser but still significant successes of the EverQuest Nostalgia Train and Old School Runescape prove anything it's that a lot of people don't want innovation. They want, and quite reasonably so, well-made, familiar games that play the way they understand MMORPGs ought to play.

All new buildings above ten storeys high to be fitted with zeppelin mooring masts. It's the future of transport.

It's a fine and respectable market and it deserves to be well-served. It won't, however, push the genre forward. It won't innovate.

That was what the overhyped and underprepared EQNext proposed to do. It's what EQNext's would-be spiritual successor, Ashes of Creation would like us to believe it will do. It's what any number of smaller-scale projects wish or claim or believe they can do.

And all of them are being built and designed by "industry veterans", people with a proven track record in the industry. People who know what can and can't be done. Or think they do.

Raph Koster is a genuine thinker in the genre. He does know what he's about. Even so, I find it hard to imagine a team of people around my age creating "a completely new experience that will push the boundaries of persistent game worlds and social competitive play".

I rather think that will come, if it comes at all, from some twenty-somethings who don't know what can and can't be done. People with the deep conviction and confidence of inexperience. They won't have wikipedia entries or names that ring bells. They'll have energy and ideas and uncynical self-belief. That's how we got Ultima Online and EverQuest and Asheron's Call and EVE Online and...

When they appear we'll know them by their works, not by their reputation.

Meanwhile, best of luck to Playable Games. Dad Rock has been a huge commercial success. No reason Dad Gaming can't be, too.