I have a high opinion of Raph Koster. You guys probably know him from his previous work (Ultimate Online, Star Wars Galaxies), but you should see his blog. He's written [dozens of articles](https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/15/the-best-articles/) on the underlying design of the MMORPG genre, why it is the way it is - and how it should be done differently. Insightful stuff. Example: [Do levels suck?](https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/16/do-levels-suck/)
So I'm not surprised he's saying all the right things about Playable Worlds. I'd expect no less. But.. I am so burned out on big ideas and promises about future MMORPGs that are inevitably disappointing when they release, if they get finished at all. I'm just done being hyped about hypothetical upcoming MMORPGs. I'll believe in it when it's in front of me, fully playable.
I hear you — there are lots of good reasons for the MMO playerbase to be pretty darn cynical at this point. All we can do is show what we have made and hope we can rekindle a bit of hope. ;)
Woah. I'm 36 I still play UO everyday. Crazy yo see you on reddit..... Started when I was 11 and played damn near everyday. Sadly I consolidated all my shit to one account and haven't logged into osi for a year. It's unfortunate a free server, outlands, has more gameplay and updates.
Just go take Bonnie's job please and make UO great again. It has been and will be the greatest game ever imo.
I have! But mostly I have been working in areas other than MMOs. I sold a startup to Disney. The tech became the backend for Club Penguin. I redesigned bar trivia for Buzztime and it was probably the most popular bar game in the country for a while. I worked with Google for a couple of years on core technology for AR.
But I’ve spent the last five years on Playable Worlds.
Ralph, SWG came out the year I graduated college, and it is to this day the best MMO I've ever played, and I still have friends to this day I met in that game. In fact SWG is the very first of a series of events that allowed me to meet my wife of 12 years (we both played, though we met in WoW oddly), the friend I met her through I met in SWG.
I say that just to say thanks for your part in SWG, it was a special game for a lot of us that had the opportunity to play it, and still means a great deal to so many of us. I wish you the very best with your new company, and the best of luck!
I haven’t worked directly on a pure game MMO since those, unless you count being chief creative officer at Sony Online during the period that launched EQ2, Planetside, etc. Those weren’t my games as such, I was an executive there, not on the team.
I did do a virtual world MMO (eg more social… it was actually a competitor to Roblox, in the early 2000s) called Metaplace. It wasn’t all that successful but the MMO technology we built for it was, sold to Disney and became the back end for Club Penguin and a few dozen other smaller scale games.
But — I don’t know why exactly that matters? I am a game designer, I worked on other sorts of games for a while. There are very few people in the planet who have worked on three MMOs in the space of thirty years. They take a lot of money and time to make so many people never get multiple shots at it at all. There are very few game designers who have only had hit games, either.
> But — I don’t know why exactly that matters?
It matters because a lot of times there’s some dev that worked on a super successful MMORPG a long time in the past and then they start talking about a new MMORPG. Like it’s cool so-and-so made a great MMORPG 20 years ago but what have they done since then?
This is nothing against you. Just trying to clarify why it might matter to people what MMORPGs you may have worked on since UO and SWG of ~15 years ago.
I get that folks have been burned and are jaded about it all. But it’s also a little bit like saying a musician shouldn’t make a comeback album, or an actor have a comeback movie. :D
I think you should make your game and I wish you plenty of luck. I was clarifying as to why people might be asking what MMORPGs you've worked on since UO/SWG since you said you didn't know why it matters.
ESO rather famously collapsed upon launch and had to rush to change its payment model and get propped up by one of the biggest publishers in the world. Similar story for FF14 actually. They eventually turned it around but not before radically changing expectations and projections and getting rid of most of their teams.
GW2 was solid. But that's 1 (or 3) out of like... 200?
I know this is over a day old but I’m curious on your thoughts on EverQuest Next (the failed MMO that never was) and their use of voxels making everything destructible/interactive.
That’s the direction Im envisioning when I hear the things you’re talking about.
From what I've heard, you're not far off. Though I think they've said there are permission limits to an extent - set by the players - to limit just like digging out someone's house.
I hear this take a lot, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It was a time of real creative ferment. All of us doing MMO design knew each other, we were hanging out on one mailing list and running a rogue conference alongside GDC and trading ideas and all that.
Many of the concepts that arose out of that time period ended up reshaping all of games — not just MMOs. There were no player economies before then. There were no player housing systems. The crafting in every game these days came from that time period. The way guilds work was defined then.
It doesn’t mean that any of those games done the same way would be successful today. But it’s also not true that there was no competition because of the raw level of invention, of novelty. A lot was drawn from MUDs, but most of it had never been seen in commercial graphical games before.
but.. it is that simple.
EQ didn't become a juggernaut in 1999-2004 because the gameplay loop of sitting in a damp corner of Lguk grindind 100'000 froglok was breathtaking... EQ become a big thing because Meridian 59 was their only competition and social media did not exist, so any online chat room was new and fresh.
This is also why Brad McQuaid and the boomers who made EQ / DAoC / Meridian / UO never managed to make another successful MMO post-WoW era, despite multiple tries.
They didn't invent fantasy either... it's all DnD. half of EQ system don't actually do anything, they just exist because DND had them.
Yeah, this isn’t accurate.
EQ was successful because it was a fun game capturing the DikuMUD experience in 3d that was incredibly immersive for the time, as one of the first games that required a 3d card and took real advantage of it. The gameplay today may seem grindy but that model had already addicted hundreds of thousands in text MUDs for a decade prior, it was a proven design. Most MMOs still live off it.
It had real competition, and not just in the form of Ultima Online, which was also a massive hit. Asheron’s Call was quite popular for its time as well.
There were in fact follow up projects that did quite well, from the same people. Star Wars Galaxies despite its troubled history was a big seller and made tidy profits. The DAOC team is basically the same leads who gave you Elder Scrolls Online. There are other examples.
Almost none of those games were made by boomers by the way. The core teams on all of them were GenX, maybe excepting DAOC as Mark Jacobs was already a veteran online game designer of several decades.
I think I am the only person alive that enjoyed Asherons Call 2, I just wish a game would show up with SWG's crafting and harvesting system I miss having to think.
Old is not necessarily bad. Especially when you consider most modern MMOs have completely imploded and the genre has kind of collapsed.
People have been wanting stuff from that old design for a long long time.
Obviously.
this is why all the new old school MMO that pop up every now and then are super popular with their 1k pop and unpaid volunteer devs keeping it alive.
Except... there aren't any Old School MMOs popping up. There are a handful of indie projects, Albion Online did well. But basically no one has been making oldschool MMOs.
Raph Koster has though. Look, it's a spiritual successor of UO and SWG, it's going to be amazing!
[https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/01/22/working-on-crowfall/](https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/01/22/working-on-crowfall/)
Oh...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/crowfall/](https://new.reddit.com/r/crowfall/)
Oh no.
If only it had rain turning into mud puddles it surely would've made it.
A whole bunch of old school themed MMO showed up... recently we had Genfadar try to make a runescape clone... Or Ember's Adrift who plastered ads in this forum...
IT's just that they all fail. quickly, forgotten... and have no real future other than adding another title to Josh Strife Hays "worst MMO ever" series.
Genfadar... a card game MMO?
And Embers Adrift, a game aiming to be a themepark (not oldschool), and has 11 total devs.
That squarely falls under what I said. A handful of indie projects with developers who have no experience. If you were to take all the indie projects from devs with no experience, the failed themepark clones would dwarf the sandbox ones 20/1.
it launched as a OSRS clone.
and it was really unpopular... because they don't have the nostalgia hyper-boost that OSRS does.... so it pivoted to a random card game before dying.
Likewise, Embers Adrift started as an open world sandbox, realized it didn't attract player, tried to pivot to a themepark.
> and has 11 total devs.
and how much does Palayable Worlds have?
>That squarely falls under what I said
unless you said that a whole bunch of dev tried to create old school MMO just to pivot after figuring out "new" old school MMO doesnt work.... no.
>the failed themepark clones would dwarf the sandbox ones 20/1.
obviously, because an army of studio tried to create a new themepark to rival WoW, while only delusionnal boomers tried to recreate EQ.
Not only does playable worlds have funding where those devs didn't, not only do they have about 10x as many devs (about 60-80 last I checked) but the resumes are stacked with some of the most successful software developers and designers in the industry. Ones with first hand experience making those classic MMOs, not guessing at half remembered features.
That's a world of difference.
And yet EQ is way more successful than any of those attempted wow remakes.
> And yet EQ is way more successful than any of those attempted wow remakes.
Yes, because nostalgia is a drug. Also let's not talk about the boxing problem on EQ where every human box 3-4 character , if not more.
>about 60-80 last I checked
wish you could make a noteworthy MMO on such a skeleton crew.
>most successful software developers and designers in the industry
lemme guess. some boomer who made a thing 20 years ago but nothing since? Like the lead dev referred in the post? whose last success is UO and... *checknote* club penguin?
Hopium is hell of a drug man.
Tell me again how this won't join the pile of "new" old school MMO that go bankrupt within the year because only a super tiny minority of boomer actually want to go back to old MMO without the nostalgia factor?
>only delusionnal boomers tried to recreate EQ.
And Blizzard.
I mean, WoW started as a slick EQ clone. :D
That isn't a knock on them, I just want to underscore that your understanding of the history here is a bit weird. Even the original WoW devs -- and, dude, many of them are friends of mine -- would admit that they took the EQ template and sanded all the rough edges off.
While I wish him the best of luck keep in mind that it is comparably easy to point at problems, even analyze them and offer vague solutions.
The real issue is to find a solution that works in every detailed aspect, is doable from an economical standpoint and most of all works with all the other underlying systems touching the topic.
That’s a big issue in MMOs.
I agree, my theory is it was mainly due to the people who were throwing money at were the ones that ran the big guilds and whatnot, so everything that was done production wise was to appease those people to keep them giving money
Oh I know I’m just fucking around and being dumb :D
Also being replied to by Raph Koster is wild - your game was the kickoff point of almost all the successes in my life! My career, my marriage, my parents marriage, and numerous friendships spanning decades are all from playing MMOs, starting with playing Ultima Online when I was 11 in 1998. So I’m excited for Playable Worlds!
I don’t agree with this take overall, and part of why is that we KNOW the design space is larger. We saw it clear back in the days of text MUDs, when there was much broader feature variety than what we see today. I often say that MMOs have removed more features from virtual worlds than they have added.
Path A is ultimately non-viable. It is too expensive to compete and the audience is tired of same ol’ same ol’ gameplay.
I do agree with your point about RuneScape — in particular, that we have a huge audience that came up with RS and expects that sort of freedom in their games today and just don’t find it in the sea of WoW theme park derivatives. And of course, RuneScape was very inspired by Ultima Online… we are pulling from similar roots.
Im not super familiar with OSRS but I always thought it looked cool. I've never seen it lumped into the same category as wow and ff14 though.
Runescapes skill system seems much more like UO and SWG and Raph led design on those. That's the big reason I'm looking forward to whatever they're cooking at Playable Worlds. I don't want nostalgia, I want to see that sandbox virtual world style brought into the future, or at least to the present.
I’m excited.
His vision of what a MMO could be aligns up with mine so I’m hoping he can pull it off.
His game will most likely be niche but if good will still be profitable.
I am fairly hopeful it won’t be niche. What we’ve been tracking is the way in which so many gamers grew up with more sandboxy games like OSRS, Minecraft, Eve, and so on, and are not finding that sort of flexibility and freedom in today’s MMOs. There is a lot of space, we think, for a sandbox that has the spirit of the older ones but also uses modern tech and gameplay.
I was not expecting a reply from the man himself lol.
I hope you are right, you would know better than I, like I said your vision is my kind of MMO. I’ve been wanting something along these lines for a long while.
Eh many people say they want a sandbox, not many people actually stick around especially today when you have dozens of games releasing every month.
But time will tell.
I think the issue with these games is that while there is an audience, there isn't a big audience that will stick around for years, which is what MMOs with x hundred million dollar budgets require. It's a similar issue in Holywood, as an example Blade Runner 2049 was marvelous, and it earned a lot of money, and a lot of people love it...BUT it cost between 150-180 million, and only made 267 losing everyone a lot of money. If you could make BR2049 for 75 million, it's financial story would be VERY different.
>We did do some market research that says there is an audience.
I'm curious, and while I know you can't share the details, do you think the audience that is there is more niche, or do you think a more sandbox MMO could reach a much larger audience?
Much larger. Sandboxy gameplay is at the heart of huge hits. Zelda since BOTW is a sandbox. RuneScape is a sandbox. Animal Crossing is a sandbox. Sims is a sandbox. Sandboxy play is much more broadly appealing than people tend to think. It just is often packaged up in kinda inaccessible ways. In MMOs it is too often paired with free for all PVP which is a huge turnoff to a broader audience.
I think its just important that you stick to your guns when it comes to complexity.
Take New World, at launch they mirrored Eve online and if you wanted a resource in another town, you have to move it there manually. They caved on that premise early on and introduced universal storage. Which as a consequence no one has a reason to enter the open world and the open world died. Changing Eve to a universal storage system would kill a 2 decade old game overnight.
People are going to ask for a lot of things. But catering to everyone in an mmo means serving no one.
Pax Dei I feel like has taken to heart many sandbox concepts. This doesn’t surprise me that there is an audience out there looking for social sandbox MMORPGs with gameplay/social elements not seen since the early 2000’s
Please tell me you were part of the original ideas of crowfall, before they changed things? I backed that game super early based on the ideas of the original pre alpha videos. I thought it had some really new exciting ideas.
Crowfall had a lot of good ideas and there was a brief amount of fun to be had doing ZvZ similar to Albion. They just failed to execute and ran out of money. Unfortunate, because the brief time I spent with it had a lot of promise.
I agree with this, crowfall was on its way to being amazing with so much potential, they just didn’t have the resources to do it since all of their investors were basically on the biggest Zerg guild and wanted to dictate eve to thing
FWIW Crowfall had a lot of really cool systems and had "good bones" as a game. They mainly fumbled on a lot of polish and relatively uninteresting but important-to-get-right systems like the chat window, tutorials, and some of their combat animation stuff. If they'd had more time to work on those things I think the pretty solid core of the game would have done very well.
He is most likely out of touch, especially regarding technology. You do need to know your technology to design a game.
A great example is Everquest Next. They had ambitious plans, but anyone can design an ambitious game. But they never managed to make it work.
Wow, that's extremely exciting. I was a huge fan of UO && SWG. Even though I have been burned by other big industry names, I would still throw money at this. Joined Playable World's mailing list and I'm looking forward to any future announcements.
Bad weather = traveling through mud? Sure. Easy. Makes sense.
Discover secrets in an MMO — and no easy wiki holding all the answers? Ehhhhhhhhhhhh I don't see how that could possibly exist in today's world.
Procedural generation designed by smarter AI most likely. Every dungeon would be different but would still feel handmade. Sounds a bit far fetched though with our current limited tech.
If the world or parts of the world were procedurally generated in some way you could make it so a guide can't give you all the specifics. Look at The Planet Crafter. They institutes some procedural stuff and their reddit is full of people complaining that they can't navigate it partially because there is no way to build a guide for it. Not saying that's what they're doing, but that is one way I could see it.
Guide for static world: For Quest 09, Go to Canyon Dungeon, collect box at coordinates X, Y, Z.
Guide for procedurally generated world: For Quest 09, Go to Canyon Dungeon, look for glowing box that should spawn somewhere in north side of dungeon. Picture of box on right.
There are plenty of procedurally generated systems in MMOs, all have guides. AI isn't unpredictable, if anything it makes the dungeons feel more homogenous not less.
You are definitely making a lot of assumptions about how this game is going to work and what sort of things would need guides? I'm playing devils advocate with how this could work without guides being possible and you're using pre-existing systems to try and shut it down before we even know how it works. Weird move.
Also, most procedural generation in MMOs is done ahead of launch, what I'm talking about would be happening mid game. So your Canyon dungeon would already be looted and nothing available. So a guide would be useless as you'd have to look for the resource somewhere else.
But it's a persistent, shared world. It's not going to generate new stuff just for you, it's going to do it for everyone(at least everyone on your server). Which means that people will be able to catalogue it.
Except for in this instance it doesn't stop. It keeps expanding so there is always something new to see. So there is always something new to explore. And it might be instanced out - we have 0 idea how this works. There are many ways it can though.
If the world keeps expanding, then eventually the population will be spread so thinly around it that the game stops feeling like MMO. It'll be like NMS, where the world is so big, that you're unlikely to ever find another player.
Unless it gets regenerated on the regular, it doesn't matter. If the world is persistent and gets generated once, people will explore and catalogue it.
I have nothing against the man, but all he does is tweet. The same goes for Greg Street. When are they going to show us gameplay? Honestly, I respect Eastern developers; they work more and talk less, even though their games are pay-to-win grind fests.
Are you sure you aren’t mixing me up with someone else? I never had any team sent to the unemployment line, and I never got a golden parachute of any sort.
I don’t see how SWG was a failure? It was an amazing game for its time, introduced vehicle combat (JTL) to MMOs. Overall great game and I played it religiously until WoW came out. WoWs combat system just outshined everything else possible.
https://preview.redd.it/6qjqlqgnez7d1.png?width=1884&format=png&auto=webp&s=b51d0b6d308dab0ec3a19fbcab57f458f87cacb0
Here are the posts from today on [http://facebook.com/playableworlds](http://facebook.com/playableworlds) - [http://x.com/playableworlds](http://x.com/playableworlds) - [http://instagram.com/playableworlds](http://instagram.com/playableworlds)
I'm still in touch with a quite a number of friends I met on SWG. Nothing else seemed to form an online bond like that game. Anyway, we routinely have conversations of why the hell isn't there another big sandbox MMO? I must think about SWG on average at least once a week. I hope there's another game that's somewhat similar before I die. OSRS is close, but it's just a bit too reptitive.
Honestly, the only thing I'm curious about is how far along it is. It could be the greatest idea I've ever heard, but if it's in some alpha state or earlier, I would rather just not know that it's exists. The development cycle for MMOs is just so crazy long; I don't really understand why any developers announce their games before they're *far* into development unless they're looking to get some crowdfunding or something (which again, can easily turn into bad blood with backers if the game still has a long way to go).
Empty words and empty promises, something I have seen so many times before, from many other studios that failed to deliver on them. Call me back when they will actually have any videos to show the actual gameplay.
You're right to be cynical, we've all seen it too many times before. Raph has been really involved in a personal way within the unofficial Discord server for the game, he has very noble goals too - lofty, yes, but he seems very committed to making the MMO that everyone's dreamed of for years. If you look at the team, there's some rock stars from the industry working on this game too.
There's an upcoming AMA within this subreddit, maybe go along and ask a question/see what their answers are. And as the fellow commenter beneath has very rightly said, there seems to be a countdown to... "something", so I guess we'll find out some more info at the end of the countdown :o
Much love though, I can truly appreciate your sentiments <3
Having "rock star" devs literally means absolutely jack shit. if the game is good then its good, nobody gives a flying fuck about how or why you got there.
These teasers seem to be a countdown, so we can call you back in about... 7 days.
None of the things "promised" in these teasers are that far fetched. MMOs from the 90s had a lot of these features. They were just abandoned as the genre got big and publishers weren't interested in this stuff
Show, don't tell.
It used to be we had devs with no pedigree promising the moon and delivering a turd, but since the early 2010s we have seen folks like Richard Garriott, Mark Jacobs, Brad McQuaid, and other early guys sell us on old-school appeal and "getting back to the fundamentals" and all that jazz.
The trouble is that talk is cheap and most of these guys just talk for 5-10 years and nothing good comes of it. They do this because the average MMORPG player has some peculiar mental illness whereby deep huffs of hopium mixed with copium have removed all rationality, making them helpless against hype.
It is all right to be interested, but please don't prop up yet another veteran's dream as the genre's messiah. Don't give them free rein to chat a good game but deliver bupkis, and don't place your hopes on something that is definitely not as far along, as polished, or even as realistic to bring to fruition as so many flim-flam artists have led us on about for decades now.
SWG ran for 8 years before the plug was pulled because Sony's contract to use Star Wars was up. Not a failure and always brought up in best mmo threads. He went to a different position in Sony before any of the controversial major overhauls.
I never played and don't know anything about EQ2 but he wasn't a dev for that and it looks like its still running.
He's been in gaming the whole time, just not MMOs. And working on this new one for the past 5 years.
Weird random hostility, doesn't seem deserved.
I like it. There was an attempt at an MMO many years ago which involved more than just combat. It wasn't reinventing the wheel or anything but it had some fresh ideas. It was Vanguard. I liked a lot but it failed or the company failed. Can't recall which.
extremely low populations and possible "moderators/owners" who will ban you if you beat them in PvP (happened to me with another private server long ago, didn't cheat, was just better/lucky and got banned)
i think a new game with larger population and the requirement to be fair to everyone equally is better. even when I play rust or conan exiles, i play official servers so i dont have to deal with mods/owners of private servers being bad people.
This is actually a great sentiment to dig into further. It could *possibly* be two modes of thinking. 1. I like crafted storyline or WoW type games. Fair enough! 2. I'm of a generation that has not yet experienced a true MMO Sandbox in the old definition of the term (Ie. Ultima Online, SWG); Persistent large scale server impacted by the entire player community.
Oh, so it's gonna be dogshit then? Because we don't have anywhere near the tech for something like that to be good.
Are we taking bets on whether or not this is just gonna be some nonsense metaverse garbage?
I have a high opinion of Raph Koster. You guys probably know him from his previous work (Ultimate Online, Star Wars Galaxies), but you should see his blog. He's written [dozens of articles](https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/15/the-best-articles/) on the underlying design of the MMORPG genre, why it is the way it is - and how it should be done differently. Insightful stuff. Example: [Do levels suck?](https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/16/do-levels-suck/) So I'm not surprised he's saying all the right things about Playable Worlds. I'd expect no less. But.. I am so burned out on big ideas and promises about future MMORPGs that are inevitably disappointing when they release, if they get finished at all. I'm just done being hyped about hypothetical upcoming MMORPGs. I'll believe in it when it's in front of me, fully playable.
I hear you — there are lots of good reasons for the MMO playerbase to be pretty darn cynical at this point. All we can do is show what we have made and hope we can rekindle a bit of hope. ;)
Yeah, we've been beaten down for sure. But I have high hopes for this project.
I'm an oldie in the "jaded, yet cautiously optimistic" group. I won't bite 'til I see the worm wriggle, but I'm definitely rooting for y'all.
Thanks!
Woah. I'm 36 I still play UO everyday. Crazy yo see you on reddit..... Started when I was 11 and played damn near everyday. Sadly I consolidated all my shit to one account and haven't logged into osi for a year. It's unfortunate a free server, outlands, has more gameplay and updates. Just go take Bonnie's job please and make UO great again. It has been and will be the greatest game ever imo.
After 22+ years of following your work, Raph, I think the stars are aligned on this one ;)
His book 'Theory of fun' is really good
UO and SWG are old as heck... has he had any success in the past 15 years?
I have! But mostly I have been working in areas other than MMOs. I sold a startup to Disney. The tech became the backend for Club Penguin. I redesigned bar trivia for Buzztime and it was probably the most popular bar game in the country for a while. I worked with Google for a couple of years on core technology for AR. But I’ve spent the last five years on Playable Worlds.
Literally answering himself, what a chad
Ralph, SWG came out the year I graduated college, and it is to this day the best MMO I've ever played, and I still have friends to this day I met in that game. In fact SWG is the very first of a series of events that allowed me to meet my wife of 12 years (we both played, though we met in WoW oddly), the friend I met her through I met in SWG. I say that just to say thanks for your part in SWG, it was a special game for a lot of us that had the opportunity to play it, and still means a great deal to so many of us. I wish you the very best with your new company, and the best of luck!
You’re welcome!
word! Kettemoor represent ;)
What happened between the ideas of Crowfall and the final product?
I wasn’t that closely involved tbh!
Hey I really like your book Theory of fun, is there any other that you can suggest? I'm into MMOs ane MOBAs
If you are interested in MMOs specifically, Richard Bartle’s books on them are great.
Perfect thanks a lot for answering
I suppose what the other guy was meaning is if you’ve had any success in terms of MMORPGs since UO/SWG?
I haven’t worked directly on a pure game MMO since those, unless you count being chief creative officer at Sony Online during the period that launched EQ2, Planetside, etc. Those weren’t my games as such, I was an executive there, not on the team. I did do a virtual world MMO (eg more social… it was actually a competitor to Roblox, in the early 2000s) called Metaplace. It wasn’t all that successful but the MMO technology we built for it was, sold to Disney and became the back end for Club Penguin and a few dozen other smaller scale games. But — I don’t know why exactly that matters? I am a game designer, I worked on other sorts of games for a while. There are very few people in the planet who have worked on three MMOs in the space of thirty years. They take a lot of money and time to make so many people never get multiple shots at it at all. There are very few game designers who have only had hit games, either.
> But — I don’t know why exactly that matters? It matters because a lot of times there’s some dev that worked on a super successful MMORPG a long time in the past and then they start talking about a new MMORPG. Like it’s cool so-and-so made a great MMORPG 20 years ago but what have they done since then? This is nothing against you. Just trying to clarify why it might matter to people what MMORPGs you may have worked on since UO and SWG of ~15 years ago.
I get that folks have been burned and are jaded about it all. But it’s also a little bit like saying a musician shouldn’t make a comeback album, or an actor have a comeback movie. :D
I think you should make your game and I wish you plenty of luck. I was clarifying as to why people might be asking what MMORPGs you've worked on since UO/SWG since you said you didn't know why it matters.
He kinda already has/is ;)
“Kinda already” might be good enough to sway you to spend your money. For myself and others, “kinda already” isn’t good enough.
Successful MMORPGs haven't been a thing in 15 years, bro. You're inventing a scenario that's impossible to exist.
What about FFXIV or ESO or GW2?
ESO rather famously collapsed upon launch and had to rush to change its payment model and get propped up by one of the biggest publishers in the world. Similar story for FF14 actually. They eventually turned it around but not before radically changing expectations and projections and getting rid of most of their teams. GW2 was solid. But that's 1 (or 3) out of like... 200?
GW2 is 12 years old btw. Barely too young for the arbitrary 15 year cut off given by the other commenter.
Good points... but it's Raph ;)
Yes, it sure is?
I know this is over a day old but I’m curious on your thoughts on EverQuest Next (the failed MMO that never was) and their use of voxels making everything destructible/interactive. That’s the direction Im envisioning when I hear the things you’re talking about.
My understanding is that they ran into technical issues, but I wasn’t at SOE at that point.
Thanks for the response Raph. Wishing you the best for this next one and can’t wait to play!
From what I've heard, you're not far off. Though I think they've said there are permission limits to an extent - set by the players - to limit just like digging out someone's house.
I'm probably not the target audience for club penguin or some trivia game. Good luck to you!
Oh, this game isn’t that, certainly. It is the spiritual sequel to my previous MMOs.
If you can recreate the SWG crafting and resource prospecting / mining you will fill a niche that has been empty for far too long.
Sounds like a plan. ;)
I think you're in for a treat ;)
Lol!!!
Still two of the best games ever, both went to shit of course (Trammel and the NG thing for SWG), but in their pure form, amazing.
mostly because back then the scene had next to no competition.
I hear this take a lot, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It was a time of real creative ferment. All of us doing MMO design knew each other, we were hanging out on one mailing list and running a rogue conference alongside GDC and trading ideas and all that. Many of the concepts that arose out of that time period ended up reshaping all of games — not just MMOs. There were no player economies before then. There were no player housing systems. The crafting in every game these days came from that time period. The way guilds work was defined then. It doesn’t mean that any of those games done the same way would be successful today. But it’s also not true that there was no competition because of the raw level of invention, of novelty. A lot was drawn from MUDs, but most of it had never been seen in commercial graphical games before.
but.. it is that simple. EQ didn't become a juggernaut in 1999-2004 because the gameplay loop of sitting in a damp corner of Lguk grindind 100'000 froglok was breathtaking... EQ become a big thing because Meridian 59 was their only competition and social media did not exist, so any online chat room was new and fresh. This is also why Brad McQuaid and the boomers who made EQ / DAoC / Meridian / UO never managed to make another successful MMO post-WoW era, despite multiple tries. They didn't invent fantasy either... it's all DnD. half of EQ system don't actually do anything, they just exist because DND had them.
Yeah, this isn’t accurate. EQ was successful because it was a fun game capturing the DikuMUD experience in 3d that was incredibly immersive for the time, as one of the first games that required a 3d card and took real advantage of it. The gameplay today may seem grindy but that model had already addicted hundreds of thousands in text MUDs for a decade prior, it was a proven design. Most MMOs still live off it. It had real competition, and not just in the form of Ultima Online, which was also a massive hit. Asheron’s Call was quite popular for its time as well. There were in fact follow up projects that did quite well, from the same people. Star Wars Galaxies despite its troubled history was a big seller and made tidy profits. The DAOC team is basically the same leads who gave you Elder Scrolls Online. There are other examples. Almost none of those games were made by boomers by the way. The core teams on all of them were GenX, maybe excepting DAOC as Mark Jacobs was already a veteran online game designer of several decades.
I think I am the only person alive that enjoyed Asherons Call 2, I just wish a game would show up with SWG's crafting and harvesting system I miss having to think.
ok buddy. See you when your game end up joining Vanguard and Pantheon on the pile of "" we want to recapture the old school MMO sandbox!"" game.
Oh, we aren’t out to recapture something old. We are interested in looking forward, not back. :)
Wow, eh, so much vitriol. You sound like no answer will satisfy you. Clearly, you got outgeeked ;)
What can I say. History have a tendency to repeat itself
Only on reddit will you find some guy sitting at home in a dark room arguing with a literal pioneer of the field. Absolutely amazing.
I expect nothing less from this subreddit
It made my shitty monday slightly better seeing someone argue with someone far better knowledgeable than him🤣
Raph is the best. Reminds me of his long posts and discussions on pre-alpha SWG forums, circa 2001.
Old is not necessarily bad. Especially when you consider most modern MMOs have completely imploded and the genre has kind of collapsed. People have been wanting stuff from that old design for a long long time.
Obviously. this is why all the new old school MMO that pop up every now and then are super popular with their 1k pop and unpaid volunteer devs keeping it alive.
Except... there aren't any Old School MMOs popping up. There are a handful of indie projects, Albion Online did well. But basically no one has been making oldschool MMOs.
Raph Koster has though. Look, it's a spiritual successor of UO and SWG, it's going to be amazing! [https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/01/22/working-on-crowfall/](https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/01/22/working-on-crowfall/) Oh... [https://www.reddit.com/r/crowfall/](https://new.reddit.com/r/crowfall/) Oh no. If only it had rain turning into mud puddles it surely would've made it.
A whole bunch of old school themed MMO showed up... recently we had Genfadar try to make a runescape clone... Or Ember's Adrift who plastered ads in this forum... IT's just that they all fail. quickly, forgotten... and have no real future other than adding another title to Josh Strife Hays "worst MMO ever" series.
Genfadar... a card game MMO? And Embers Adrift, a game aiming to be a themepark (not oldschool), and has 11 total devs. That squarely falls under what I said. A handful of indie projects with developers who have no experience. If you were to take all the indie projects from devs with no experience, the failed themepark clones would dwarf the sandbox ones 20/1.
it launched as a OSRS clone. and it was really unpopular... because they don't have the nostalgia hyper-boost that OSRS does.... so it pivoted to a random card game before dying. Likewise, Embers Adrift started as an open world sandbox, realized it didn't attract player, tried to pivot to a themepark. > and has 11 total devs. and how much does Palayable Worlds have? >That squarely falls under what I said unless you said that a whole bunch of dev tried to create old school MMO just to pivot after figuring out "new" old school MMO doesnt work.... no. >the failed themepark clones would dwarf the sandbox ones 20/1. obviously, because an army of studio tried to create a new themepark to rival WoW, while only delusionnal boomers tried to recreate EQ.
Not only does playable worlds have funding where those devs didn't, not only do they have about 10x as many devs (about 60-80 last I checked) but the resumes are stacked with some of the most successful software developers and designers in the industry. Ones with first hand experience making those classic MMOs, not guessing at half remembered features. That's a world of difference. And yet EQ is way more successful than any of those attempted wow remakes.
> And yet EQ is way more successful than any of those attempted wow remakes. Yes, because nostalgia is a drug. Also let's not talk about the boxing problem on EQ where every human box 3-4 character , if not more. >about 60-80 last I checked wish you could make a noteworthy MMO on such a skeleton crew. >most successful software developers and designers in the industry lemme guess. some boomer who made a thing 20 years ago but nothing since? Like the lead dev referred in the post? whose last success is UO and... *checknote* club penguin? Hopium is hell of a drug man. Tell me again how this won't join the pile of "new" old school MMO that go bankrupt within the year because only a super tiny minority of boomer actually want to go back to old MMO without the nostalgia factor?
>only delusionnal boomers tried to recreate EQ. And Blizzard. I mean, WoW started as a slick EQ clone. :D That isn't a knock on them, I just want to underscore that your understanding of the history here is a bit weird. Even the original WoW devs -- and, dude, many of them are friends of mine -- would admit that they took the EQ template and sanded all the rough edges off.
oh yeah, such a clone. I remember solo'ing to max level in EQ... fast travel everywhere... questing for 99% of the level'ing... such a clone.
While I wish him the best of luck keep in mind that it is comparably easy to point at problems, even analyze them and offer vague solutions. The real issue is to find a solution that works in every detailed aspect, is doable from an economical standpoint and most of all works with all the other underlying systems touching the topic. That’s a big issue in MMOs.
Hopefully this isn’t the same team that did crowfall
The original ideas of crow fall were awesome. But that game got morphed and watered down into something totally different.
I agree, my theory is it was mainly due to the people who were throwing money at were the ones that ran the big guilds and whatnot, so everything that was done production wise was to appease those people to keep them giving money
Why would they be be the same?
Ultimate Online sounds like a kMMO nightmare
It was Ultima Online, autocomplete probably added the extra letters. :)
Oh I know I’m just fucking around and being dumb :D Also being replied to by Raph Koster is wild - your game was the kickoff point of almost all the successes in my life! My career, my marriage, my parents marriage, and numerous friendships spanning decades are all from playing MMOs, starting with playing Ultima Online when I was 11 in 1998. So I’m excited for Playable Worlds!
Hahahaha!!
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I don’t agree with this take overall, and part of why is that we KNOW the design space is larger. We saw it clear back in the days of text MUDs, when there was much broader feature variety than what we see today. I often say that MMOs have removed more features from virtual worlds than they have added. Path A is ultimately non-viable. It is too expensive to compete and the audience is tired of same ol’ same ol’ gameplay. I do agree with your point about RuneScape — in particular, that we have a huge audience that came up with RS and expects that sort of freedom in their games today and just don’t find it in the sea of WoW theme park derivatives. And of course, RuneScape was very inspired by Ultima Online… we are pulling from similar roots.
Im not super familiar with OSRS but I always thought it looked cool. I've never seen it lumped into the same category as wow and ff14 though. Runescapes skill system seems much more like UO and SWG and Raph led design on those. That's the big reason I'm looking forward to whatever they're cooking at Playable Worlds. I don't want nostalgia, I want to see that sandbox virtual world style brought into the future, or at least to the present.
I’m excited. His vision of what a MMO could be aligns up with mine so I’m hoping he can pull it off. His game will most likely be niche but if good will still be profitable.
I am fairly hopeful it won’t be niche. What we’ve been tracking is the way in which so many gamers grew up with more sandboxy games like OSRS, Minecraft, Eve, and so on, and are not finding that sort of flexibility and freedom in today’s MMOs. There is a lot of space, we think, for a sandbox that has the spirit of the older ones but also uses modern tech and gameplay.
I was not expecting a reply from the man himself lol. I hope you are right, you would know better than I, like I said your vision is my kind of MMO. I’ve been wanting something along these lines for a long while.
Me too! I thought someone else would have built it by now!
"I was not expecting a reply from the man himself lol." Haha I didn't even notice until I saw your comment, damn
Eh many people say they want a sandbox, not many people actually stick around especially today when you have dozens of games releasing every month. But time will tell.
We’ll see. We did do some market research that says there is an audience.
I think the issue with these games is that while there is an audience, there isn't a big audience that will stick around for years, which is what MMOs with x hundred million dollar budgets require. It's a similar issue in Holywood, as an example Blade Runner 2049 was marvelous, and it earned a lot of money, and a lot of people love it...BUT it cost between 150-180 million, and only made 267 losing everyone a lot of money. If you could make BR2049 for 75 million, it's financial story would be VERY different. >We did do some market research that says there is an audience. I'm curious, and while I know you can't share the details, do you think the audience that is there is more niche, or do you think a more sandbox MMO could reach a much larger audience?
Much larger. Sandboxy gameplay is at the heart of huge hits. Zelda since BOTW is a sandbox. RuneScape is a sandbox. Animal Crossing is a sandbox. Sims is a sandbox. Sandboxy play is much more broadly appealing than people tend to think. It just is often packaged up in kinda inaccessible ways. In MMOs it is too often paired with free for all PVP which is a huge turnoff to a broader audience.
I think its just important that you stick to your guns when it comes to complexity. Take New World, at launch they mirrored Eve online and if you wanted a resource in another town, you have to move it there manually. They caved on that premise early on and introduced universal storage. Which as a consequence no one has a reason to enter the open world and the open world died. Changing Eve to a universal storage system would kill a 2 decade old game overnight. People are going to ask for a lot of things. But catering to everyone in an mmo means serving no one.
You want me to stick to The Vision(tm)!! Ok, I will be stubborn. ;)
Rust, also mega popular.
Interesting, as someone that loves those games, I'm going to be over here rooting very loudly that you are right!
Pax Dei I feel like has taken to heart many sandbox concepts. This doesn’t surprise me that there is an audience out there looking for social sandbox MMORPGs with gameplay/social elements not seen since the early 2000’s
Oh, we are there ;) And it looks like the Dune Awakening guys came to the same conclusion on the sandbox bit.
Wasn't Raph Koster involved with Crowfall?
From what I’ve read it sounds like he was basically an outside consultant on Crowfall. I don’t think he was any kind of decision maker.
That’s correct.
Please tell me you were part of the original ideas of crowfall, before they changed things? I backed that game super early based on the ideas of the original pre alpha videos. I thought it had some really new exciting ideas.
Crowfall had a lot of good ideas and there was a brief amount of fun to be had doing ZvZ similar to Albion. They just failed to execute and ran out of money. Unfortunate, because the brief time I spent with it had a lot of promise.
I agree with this, crowfall was on its way to being amazing with so much potential, they just didn’t have the resources to do it since all of their investors were basically on the biggest Zerg guild and wanted to dictate eve to thing
FWIW Crowfall had a lot of really cool systems and had "good bones" as a game. They mainly fumbled on a lot of polish and relatively uninteresting but important-to-get-right systems like the chat window, tutorials, and some of their combat animation stuff. If they'd had more time to work on those things I think the pretty solid core of the game would have done very well.
They failed by using unity for a massive pvp game
Easy. He did not deliver anything substantial for the past 20 years. Expecting anything at this point is just insane.
Why would that make a difference?
He is most likely out of touch, especially regarding technology. You do need to know your technology to design a game. A great example is Everquest Next. They had ambitious plans, but anyone can design an ambitious game. But they never managed to make it work.
Wow, that's extremely exciting. I was a huge fan of UO && SWG. Even though I have been burned by other big industry names, I would still throw money at this. Joined Playable World's mailing list and I'm looking forward to any future announcements.
We have been dropping little leaks in the Discord for months now. So if you want a bit more stuff to chew over, that would be the place to go.
I didn't see a Discord on the Playable Worlds site, or are you referencing some other Discord community?
There’s an unofficial Discord set up by some of the folks who have been following the project for years.
Ah, thank you! I will look for it when I get home from work in a few hours.
You got a link to a Twitter or discord?
Bad weather = traveling through mud? Sure. Easy. Makes sense. Discover secrets in an MMO — and no easy wiki holding all the answers? Ehhhhhhhhhhhh I don't see how that could possibly exist in today's world.
Procedural generation designed by smarter AI most likely. Every dungeon would be different but would still feel handmade. Sounds a bit far fetched though with our current limited tech.
If the world or parts of the world were procedurally generated in some way you could make it so a guide can't give you all the specifics. Look at The Planet Crafter. They institutes some procedural stuff and their reddit is full of people complaining that they can't navigate it partially because there is no way to build a guide for it. Not saying that's what they're doing, but that is one way I could see it.
Guide for static world: For Quest 09, Go to Canyon Dungeon, collect box at coordinates X, Y, Z. Guide for procedurally generated world: For Quest 09, Go to Canyon Dungeon, look for glowing box that should spawn somewhere in north side of dungeon. Picture of box on right. There are plenty of procedurally generated systems in MMOs, all have guides. AI isn't unpredictable, if anything it makes the dungeons feel more homogenous not less.
You are definitely making a lot of assumptions about how this game is going to work and what sort of things would need guides? I'm playing devils advocate with how this could work without guides being possible and you're using pre-existing systems to try and shut it down before we even know how it works. Weird move. Also, most procedural generation in MMOs is done ahead of launch, what I'm talking about would be happening mid game. So your Canyon dungeon would already be looted and nothing available. So a guide would be useless as you'd have to look for the resource somewhere else.
That works for instanced areas, but it wouldn't work for open world, unless the players accept that it gets reshaped regularly.
I mean, depends on how the open world works. It could grow as we explore and generate new stuff as you go.
But it's a persistent, shared world. It's not going to generate new stuff just for you, it's going to do it for everyone(at least everyone on your server). Which means that people will be able to catalogue it.
Yes but they won't be able to catalogue the new stuff before it's generated so the first person will find things for the first time.
That is no different to a regular world that is unknown until it is first explored and mapped probably within hours or days.
Except for in this instance it doesn't stop. It keeps expanding so there is always something new to see. So there is always something new to explore. And it might be instanced out - we have 0 idea how this works. There are many ways it can though.
If the world keeps expanding, then eventually the population will be spread so thinly around it that the game stops feeling like MMO. It'll be like NMS, where the world is so big, that you're unlikely to ever find another player.
Servers? Where we're going...\*Flips down metallic sunglasses\*...we won't need...servers. (Well not in the typical sense)
In which case, it would be even easier to keep track of all the secrets.
What if entire worlds were being generated? ;)
Unless it gets regenerated on the regular, it doesn't matter. If the world is persistent and gets generated once, people will explore and catalogue it.
I believe worlds are generated by the player's command. And unused worlds disappear.
So it's not really an MMO, then? If everyone gets their own world that also isn't persistent.
Why do you say it isn't an MMO? You can travel to other worlds.
Because having a game where each player gets their own world is a lobby game. Sure, you can connect to other players. It's not a shared world, though.
That is a lot of assuming.
>teasers (so far) Cya in 20 years...
Those are good teasers.
I have nothing against the man, but all he does is tweet. The same goes for Greg Street. When are they going to show us gameplay? Honestly, I respect Eastern developers; they work more and talk less, even though their games are pay-to-win grind fests.
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Are you sure you aren’t mixing me up with someone else? I never had any team sent to the unemployment line, and I never got a golden parachute of any sort.
I don’t see how SWG was a failure? It was an amazing game for its time, introduced vehicle combat (JTL) to MMOs. Overall great game and I played it religiously until WoW came out. WoWs combat system just outshined everything else possible.
I just can't get excited for games, MMOs especially, until I see actual in-game footage and proof of it even being an MMO.
https://preview.redd.it/6qjqlqgnez7d1.png?width=1884&format=png&auto=webp&s=b51d0b6d308dab0ec3a19fbcab57f458f87cacb0 Here are the posts from today on [http://facebook.com/playableworlds](http://facebook.com/playableworlds) - [http://x.com/playableworlds](http://x.com/playableworlds) - [http://instagram.com/playableworlds](http://instagram.com/playableworlds)
I'm still in touch with a quite a number of friends I met on SWG. Nothing else seemed to form an online bond like that game. Anyway, we routinely have conversations of why the hell isn't there another big sandbox MMO? I must think about SWG on average at least once a week. I hope there's another game that's somewhat similar before I die. OSRS is close, but it's just a bit too reptitive.
Honestly, the only thing I'm curious about is how far along it is. It could be the greatest idea I've ever heard, but if it's in some alpha state or earlier, I would rather just not know that it's exists. The development cycle for MMOs is just so crazy long; I don't really understand why any developers announce their games before they're *far* into development unless they're looking to get some crowdfunding or something (which again, can easily turn into bad blood with backers if the game still has a long way to go).
The replies in here were awesome and the whole article was cool until the very end when the guy said we hope it comes out in our lifetime.
Edit:let this man cook
How so? Genuinely curious.
not hungry anymore ty
Empty words and empty promises, something I have seen so many times before, from many other studios that failed to deliver on them. Call me back when they will actually have any videos to show the actual gameplay.
You're right to be cynical, we've all seen it too many times before. Raph has been really involved in a personal way within the unofficial Discord server for the game, he has very noble goals too - lofty, yes, but he seems very committed to making the MMO that everyone's dreamed of for years. If you look at the team, there's some rock stars from the industry working on this game too. There's an upcoming AMA within this subreddit, maybe go along and ask a question/see what their answers are. And as the fellow commenter beneath has very rightly said, there seems to be a countdown to... "something", so I guess we'll find out some more info at the end of the countdown :o Much love though, I can truly appreciate your sentiments <3
Having "rock star" devs literally means absolutely jack shit. if the game is good then its good, nobody gives a flying fuck about how or why you got there.
These teasers seem to be a countdown, so we can call you back in about... 7 days. None of the things "promised" in these teasers are that far fetched. MMOs from the 90s had a lot of these features. They were just abandoned as the genre got big and publishers weren't interested in this stuff
In one of the Fireside Chats in the unofficial Discord, we already saw in-game footage. It was to show how meteor showers work.
Show, don't tell. It used to be we had devs with no pedigree promising the moon and delivering a turd, but since the early 2010s we have seen folks like Richard Garriott, Mark Jacobs, Brad McQuaid, and other early guys sell us on old-school appeal and "getting back to the fundamentals" and all that jazz. The trouble is that talk is cheap and most of these guys just talk for 5-10 years and nothing good comes of it. They do this because the average MMORPG player has some peculiar mental illness whereby deep huffs of hopium mixed with copium have removed all rationality, making them helpless against hype. It is all right to be interested, but please don't prop up yet another veteran's dream as the genre's messiah. Don't give them free rein to chat a good game but deliver bupkis, and don't place your hopes on something that is definitely not as far along, as polished, or even as realistic to bring to fruition as so many flim-flam artists have led us on about for decades now.
You’re being real weird about a video game announcement. Nobody is treating anyone like a messiah.
If it says Raph, whether it is his guitar work, or his games, I will check it out :D
Yawn, will believe when I get to play it. until then, nobody cares if we're gonna have to wait another 10 yrs
Gameplay or it's not actually happening.
Nah. I've done this dance so many times. Talk is cheap.
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SWG ran for 8 years before the plug was pulled because Sony's contract to use Star Wars was up. Not a failure and always brought up in best mmo threads. He went to a different position in Sony before any of the controversial major overhauls. I never played and don't know anything about EQ2 but he wasn't a dev for that and it looks like its still running. He's been in gaming the whole time, just not MMOs. And working on this new one for the past 5 years. Weird random hostility, doesn't seem deserved.
Raph, Make a high poly 3d isometric UO, profit.
We want to look forward, not back. :) That said, this is absolutely a spiritual sequel to UO, as well as to SWG.
I like it. There was an attempt at an MMO many years ago which involved more than just combat. It wasn't reinventing the wheel or anything but it had some fresh ideas. It was Vanguard. I liked a lot but it failed or the company failed. Can't recall which.
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And UO emulators have basically been like playing the actual servers (better in many cases) for over a decade now.
extremely low populations and possible "moderators/owners" who will ban you if you beat them in PvP (happened to me with another private server long ago, didn't cheat, was just better/lucky and got banned) i think a new game with larger population and the requirement to be fair to everyone equally is better. even when I play rust or conan exiles, i play official servers so i dont have to deal with mods/owners of private servers being bad people.
The words of another stranger; why should I invest any interest in what they have to say?
Sounds like second life with extra steps to me
What if... Epstein didn't kill himself?
Hmmm...
I don't want a sandbox.
Don’t play it then? I don’t think anyone is forcing you to, are they?
This is actually a great sentiment to dig into further. It could *possibly* be two modes of thinking. 1. I like crafted storyline or WoW type games. Fair enough! 2. I'm of a generation that has not yet experienced a true MMO Sandbox in the old definition of the term (Ie. Ultima Online, SWG); Persistent large scale server impacted by the entire player community.
That would be #1 for me. I prefer having a bit of a story or direction to lean into.
Every major MMO today is a theme park so go knock yourself out.
Thank god there are so many theme parks for you to pick from then.
Do you walk by food stalls at Carnivals randomly, telling each one, "I don't want a hot dog/cotton candy/pizza/popcorn/pretzels" when nobody asks?
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Oh, so it's gonna be dogshit then? Because we don't have anywhere near the tech for something like that to be good. Are we taking bets on whether or not this is just gonna be some nonsense metaverse garbage?