Cromm Offline

This is the topic of my first real contribution to WGFriends' new Official Content Developer (OCD) section. It'll be a two parter, as I don't want to bore you all entirely with one ginormous post. I have long been interested in exploring the subject at length, as I've attempted to play WoW, EQ, Star Wars Galaxies, and a few others here and there, and I've always returned to PBBGs and (more often) MUDs.

Violette's post does a fantastic job of exploring MUDs at length, and there are other resources which describe PBBGs at length (and WGFriends should, perhaps, include some of this content for the uninitiated), so I won't take too much of your time defining the terms. For the sake of the discussion, though, I think it's fairly safe to say that the categories are separated in large part by the fact that the large MMOs I speak of tend to be developed by a game design firm or company which employs teams of people who are devoted to the development of a specific game, complete with producers, quality assurance folks, designers, artists, sound designers, CEOs -- the whole she-bang. Our games, though, are generally created by lone individuals or very small teams who just want to build the game they want to play, usually without significant dreams of "hitting it big" fiscally.

Perhaps this is the core difference between the two industries (commercial games vs non-commercial) -- that MMOs have dedicated employees (where I think employee is a very important term) producing not only the game engine but each segment of the game's content. They have more "buying power", especially in the design and then development phases, with which to get done the myriad tasks required in game development. Non-commercial games are, in contrast, built generally in the developer(s)' free time, and most of these developers tend to have, you know, jobs and responsibilities and stuff.

There are of course exceptions to any rule, including the success of an online game, commercial or non. Just take a look at Runescape (I guess it counts, though it DOES, supposedly, have more players than even WoW) or Tribal Wars for examples of browser-based games that have done exceptionally well. On the MUD side of the house, I think most every MUDder who's been around the block has heard of the Iron Realms games (Achaea, Imperian, and Lusternia, and Aetolia), BatMUD, and Materia Magica. Conversely, of course, there are commercial MMOs that have done exceptionally poorly, leading almost inevitably to shut down.

One of the first issues that comes to mind is the sheer quantity of PBBGs/MUDs relative to the number of big-name MMOs out there. I don't have exact numbers, but I think a ratio approaching 10:1 is fairly close to the mark (what I mean is that for every 1 "WoW", you could probably locate 10 PBBGs/MUDs). By default, this means that the average number of players per game is going to be vastly larger for an MMO than it would be for a PBBG or MUD -- it's a matter of "spreading the peanut butter thin". The largest online player counts I've come across out of MUDs is around 500, and for PBBGs perhaps 1000 (though how online status is measured can be suspect in browser-games in particular). I don't know what the count would be for WoW across each of its servers combined, but suffice it to say the number is considerably larger.

Another thing I find lacking in many non-commercial games (and it makes sense) is production value. Here I mean consistent, high-quality artistic design where applicable, storyline development, world design and orientation, etc. I simply cannot abide a game that doesn't appear to have had any TLC put into its creation, and there are many, many examples of this (the script-kiddies that download a copy of a game's source, change the title, and ftp it right back to a free server, for example). Of course, these games may simply be ignored, but when I'm assailed over and over again by the same horrid content, it becomes difficult to stay motivated to find a new game.

One PBBG that surprised me in this regard was ReIIgn, or Reign II (haven't tried the first). Immediately I was entranced by the beautiful web design (I'm a sucker for a good-looking website, no jokes about this one please). Then I registered. The next page played a haunting, space-like background track and a voice sounding for all the world as if it was being transmitted via radio began speaking to me. It welcomed me to the planet's airspace (or spacespace, I guess) and asked my name (the username I would be using) and which of the game's two worlds I wanted to join. Fast-forward a bit and I was well into a tutorial on the basics of this real-time strategy game (a genre I'd never before been able to get into).

This same kind of quality in production is (generally) enhanced ten-fold by the dedicated teams who do nothing but create it in a commercial game. This makes sense -- those guys are getting paid to create beautiful stuff. Good production value can make all the difference in the world, at least to me, and it's something that is unfortunately lacking in many of the non-commercial games we see online.

MUDs have a rich legacy of high-quality content (and PBBGs in general are getting there). Of course, as codebases became more and more available, we started seeing a thousand new servers pop up with themes like "the b3st draGonBall Z game evar!11!!". Again, I think the problem is oversaturation of the market by horrid games, because the good ones are still around, you just can't find the damned things.

So then, so far I've identified two distinct issues that I believe contribute to the greater success and popularity of individual MMOs vs individual MUDs/PBBGs -- dedicated development teams and production quality.

In the next segment of this discussion, I'd like to get a bit further into a comparison of specific games from the two industries. I suppose right now, though I better actually get some work done (since I am writing this from the Command Post). Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

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Posted in: Industry Discussion