NCSoft’s COO, Sebastien Vidal talked with GamesIndustry.biz about the MMO business in the site’s first of several interviews kicking off its MMO week. Vidal started by revealing the secret of NCSoft’s success in the MMO market.
Our publishing and development strategy has always been to provide a wide range of titles from subscription based to free to play, from fantasy to science fiction. And there is even more diversity to come in the next few years, both on the business model and genre sides.
Unlike some publishers who focus on one or two MMO titles, typically within the fantasy setting, our strategy is to provide players with a portfolio of online gaming options, catering for all tastes and payment options, for both hardcore gamers and the casual audience.
The interview takes a look at current plans for NCSoft’s line up and also gives readers an idea of what the future holds for several of it’s MMOs. You’ll find information on Lineage and Lineage II, Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 and a bit on Aion as well. Vidal also touches on City of Heroes and City of Villains.
Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa has been a big project for NCSoft. Vidal talks a lot about the complexity of the game, which has had a very rocky start. NCSoft has been concentrating on balancing and polishing existing content rather than rushing to add more “end game” elements. The company plans to initiate a series of online trials in the middle of May to get more people to try the game, and hopefully stay.
Vidal is confident MMOs have a future on consoles. In fact he feels the change is inevitable. He stated NCSoft’s deal with Sony is just the beginning.
Well, in the end it’s just a platform - the important thing is the game itself, and whether you’re playing with a keyboard and mouse, or a control pad…a game designer can come up with something good for either interface.
So I can’t see any reason why they won’t do well on consoles - it’s a huge market, although the biggest market right now is the Nintendo Wii and DS, which aren’t the best platforms for MMOs.
But all the consoles, including the DS, can go on the web and browse, so really the platform is the web, and the console is simply the interface for the web. So I think in the future, for me, you can design a game for the web and it will be playable on any platform - the DS, Wii, PS3 or anything.
KingsIsle Entertainment has announced its existence after being founded in 2005 and revealed that they are working on several online games. The studio is headed up by CEO Elie Akilian, previously the co-founder of Inet Technologies, and president David Nichols, a former senior VP at Midway.
“We founded KingsIsle with an approach that fosters ingenuity,” said Akilian.
“Our focus is in the online environment and will continue to be so in the future. We’ve pulled together some of the most creative minds around and given them room to push boundaries and create superlative entertainment experiences.”
“We’ll continue to build on that base of originality.”
I wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical, of course. Time and again we’ve seen games try something that is supposedly different in the MMO space, yet simply amount to a sub-par World of Warcraft clone that isn’t worth your time or money. (’sup, Tabula Rasa?)
The development of KingsIsle’s first game, expected to enter beta this spring, is being headed by Todd Coleman, who previously played a key role in the Shadowbane MMO. Another of the company’s projects is being headed by creative director Tom Hall, co-founder of both id Software and ION Storm. So there’s no lack of talent, it would seem, but we’ll have to wait and see if they’re able to capture an audience in the crowded MMO market.
NCSoft is looking to expand its studio staff in several North American offices. Austin (TX), Aliso Viejo (CA) and Mountain View (CA) all have positions open.
The company is hiring for its Aion and Lineage II teams as well as their dedicated City of Heroes studio. There are also four senior-level positions open at NCSoft’s Orange County studio for its “top, top secret project.”
If you love the sun and game design you might want to check out PlayNC for a full list of details and positions.
NCsoft has announced that patch 1.6.5 for Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa is almost ready to make its debut on public servers. There are still a few bug fixes to clean up before patch 1.6.5 goes live. For a preview of changes included in patch 1.6.5 check out the Test Server Patch Notes.
Also take a look at the latest Tabula Rasa video “Patches to Ashes.” Mission designer, Jason Ford gives players a visual tour around this new area, introduces a few new MOBs and gives players a few tips on stopping this dangerously self-aware AI, Patch.
I have a problem. It’s not a serious addiction, in fact its much the opposite of an addiction. I can’t commit.
If the subject of my problem were a woman I’d be the very picture of a man who wouldn’t commit – frequent hot dates with a possibility of long term relationships are tossed to the side in search of the next shiny object or attractive game setting. I dawdle between games like a child with free run of a candy store and no oversight. I just can’t seem to find that special game to break me of my wanderlust.
Now you might not think this a serious problem, I mean after all, who doesn’t play multiple games? But my issue goes beyond rotating pastimes to keep from losing interest. I have a staple game I play – Guild Wars – mostly because its free and doesn’t require a huge commitment of time or energy to hop into any of its settings and grind out a few missions or quests. Guild Wars is like the partner who dislikes your wandering habits but lets you come home whenever you feel like it because it knows it’ll always get what it can while you’re around. Read the full article
NCsoft has released a Tabula Rasa video featuring glimpses of the creature AI enhancements in the upcoming 1.5 patch release. The Thrax Pistol Soldier picks up a new trick around level 25; learning how to summoning a little mechanical daemon that explodes corpses. The Juggernaut has been revamped as well. Players will find it a more impressive and difficult opponent. Lightbenders and the AFS Mechs will also receive some upgrades.
Be warned of potential spoilers. Not only does the video show players the changes made to creatures, it outlines strategies to circumvent these enhancements.
Despite what a report in The Korea Times claims, NCsoft doesn’t view last year’s MMO Tabula Rasa as a “financial disaster,” said the company’s communications director, David Swofford. He claims that the writer who penned the story is “notorious for writing sloppy and sensational articles about NCsoft,” and he also referred to the story as “inflammatory.”
The TR development did not cost $100 million. I don’t know where that came from. The price tag for the product was much less…a fraction of that cost. Tabula Rasa was not restarted more than twice. It had one overhaul and that came after 2-3 years of development.
The article made it sound like the TR launch led to some sort of falling out with Robert Garriott. That is so far from the truth. In fact Robert has been promoted to work more with CEO TJ Kim on business development. Yes Robert is out of the day-to-day operations, but he’s still in the office and now travels much more for the company than he did before.
Yes there’s a possibility that there could be downsizing with the TR team. Some of that is due to the cyclical nature of game development (product is out and the team downsizes). Some is due to the fact that the product could have done a little better. But there is a lot going on with the TR team. They are working on more updates. We are planning a Japan launch later in the year. And the company is planning on investing millions into the product, so it’s not going away and in fact we have plans to grow it.
Be that as it may, it doesn’t change the fact that the overall sentiment regarding Tabula Rasa was that it ended up being just another MMO with a futuristic setting. At least we know it won’t be the downfall of NCsoft as we know it, as the Korea Times story seemingly wants us to believe.
There’s a new video that complements the Tabula Rasa Q&A with Paul Sage we featured yesterday. MMORPG has exclusive footage from NCsoft of the hybrids resulting from splicing your character’s DNA with alien stock. Although Tabula Rasa got off to a shaky start, it’s new content like this that will decide whether the MMO regroups or if the AFS will go down fighting.
Game|Life has an interview up with Tabula Rasa’s lead designerPaul Sage discussing the upcoming changes and the feedback integrated into the upcoming 1.4 game patch. One of the more interesting aspects of the interview was the admission that players wanted to play something other than stock humans and that the developer was taking steps to make that happen.
“We took some of that feedback and we ran with it,” says Paul Sage, the game’s lead designer. The result is that as of version 1.4, which should be available some time this week, you can finally play as a Brann, Forean, or Thrax. Sort of.
The characters are actually human/alien hybrids. “You use the DNA from the aliens to augment yourself,” explains Sage. Adding aliens to the playable roster was always part of the plan for Tabula Rasa, but the community feedback inspired the team to include it “a little earlier than we thought we would.”
The introduction of the hybrid option is explained further by Sage as he says that players looking to exercise these options will have to be around 15th level and must complete a quest chain.
Sage also talks about some of the changes coming to the game dealing with the cloning options and their effect on gameplay.
“Our attribute system wasn’t exactly what we originally envisioned,” says Sage, who explains that how players assigned attribute points didn’t have as much impact on their game world as the team had hoped. “The way it was supposed to work was you were supposed to become more of an individual based on how you leveled up, but that didn’t really happen.”
The team spent a lot of time tweaking the attributes for version 1.4, and now “they have a lot more impact on the game.”
PlayNC.com has announced a change affecting all NCsoft supported accounts. Support and billing may be shifting slightly in the new year as the time zone used for accounts will be changing from EST to Coordinated Universal Time which is the same as GMT. Players with Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners and Guild Wars accounts as well as other NCsoft titles should check your account details after January 1st.
On New Year’s Day, January 1, 2008, we’ll be changing the time zone used for all customer account work from Eastern time (EST) to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, basically the same as GMT). This shouldn’t make much of a difference to most customers, though some may notice (depending on what time during the day their billing takes place) that the listed billing date may move up by a day (however, technically speaking, you’re actually not gaining any extra time).
It’s time once again for the File-N-Forget Podcast. This week, Shawn and Ron discuss several of the games that have come out recently, and offer up a few thoughts on each of them. Listen in as they discuss Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4, Rock Band, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Tabula Rasa, Kane & Lynch and Uncharted in our holiday game roundup.
As usual, there’s a Rant & Rave section, and a mention of this week’s FileFront Frag Night.
You can also check out some of our older episodes on our podcast page.
If you have any comments on the show, suggestions for topics, or if you’d like to submit questions or comments to be read during the podcast, email us at podcast@filefront.com.
Thanks to Evil Avatar for spotting these deals at Amazon – you can save up to 50% on games for almost any system; PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, 360, PC, Mac, DS, GBA, and GC. Sure, the 50% sales don’t apply to the really good stuff (for the most part), but there are some really sweet deals on there.
Some of the highlights include World in Conflict for $30, the PS3 Collector’s Edition of Stranglehold for $50, Tabula Rasa for $25, and plenty of others.
Richard Garriott talked about the successes and failures of the marketing strategies used for his Tabula Rasa MMORPG at the 2007 Independent Game Conference.
“Marketing is a black art. We regularly go back and forth between it being all important, and irrelevant. At some basic level, I do believe that all great games will sell eventually, through word of mouth.”
He continued, “Marketing can definitely get you on the shelf, and in the first few weeks, get you off the shelf. In the long run, even with the best marketing, if it’s a bad game, word gets out, and your sales will come to halt.”
Specifically, “I think the formal marketing did fine,” he replied. “They let people know the game existed, and was coming out. I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team. We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken.”
“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun,” he said, adding, “As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.”
He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”
He said the Guild Wars team did the best job, with their friends-and-family beta test remaining very small throughout development. “Only about two or three weeks before launch did they do the ‘open it up for pretty much anybody to play,’ when the game was basically done,” concluded Garriott.
Unfortunately in my opinion Tabula Rasa is just not a great game. It’s got a few features that are truly innovative like the cloning system. Still, even on high settings I just can’t get the game to look like it does in the screenshots. The combat feels repetitive, and it just doesn’t break enough new ground.
Richard Garriott has announced a last minute surprise in-game event for Tabula Rasa players, the AFS Sci-Fi Trivia Challenge.
Garriott who has become known for his impromptu appearances in the game as General British wants to celebrate the success of Tabula Rasa’s launch with this event.
“I wanted to quickly do something fun in-game as a thank you to the players who have made this such a smooth launch. We have continued NCsoft’s track record for incredibly successful launches and player interest and excitement is higher than we expected in both North America and Europe. The battlefields are full of players taking down Bane invaders & we’re having a blast kicking alien butt.”
Join General British for a special in-game event to win credits by demonstrating your sci-fi knowledge. See Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa for times and details.
Richard Garriott is truly a veteran of the video game industry. As his Ultima series changed what gamers expected of video games for the PC, his brainchild Ultima Online opened the gates to industry powerhouse that is Massively Multiplayer Online gaming today.
The New York Times has a feature on this brilliant if somewhat eccentric man who’s name is being introduced to a whole new generation of gamers. This time, Garriott is exploring the realm of sci-fi in his new innovative MMORPG Tabula Rasa.
“I’ve been doing medieval fantasy for 25 years in a row, and it was just time to do something new,” Mr. Garriott, in his customary uniform of denim shirt, jeans, white tube socks and sneakers, said here at the offices of NCsoft, the South Korean company publishing the game. “The first element we wanted to focus on was fast-paced tactical combat. No. 2 was creating a dynamic battlefield where the player feels there is action going on around them all the time. And third was creating a story line that includes ethical parables and problems.”
With Tabula Rasa, Garriott aims to put story and role playing back into MMORPGs. He’s not pulling punches in his criticism of the directions many of the most popular competition have taken, including World of Warcraft.
“As many kudos as I would like to give World of Warcraft, it’s basically a remake of EverQuest, just incredibly polished and refined,” he said. “There are harbingers of failure in that model. Everyone in these games is obsessed with the concept of how much damage-per-second they are inflicting and maximizing their D.P.S. When you do that, you are no longer playing a role; you are playing an inventory-management game.”
He added, “With Tabula Rasa we wanted the player to spend as much time as possible actually looking at the environment and what they’re shooting at.”
You can read more about Richard Garriott and Tabula Rasa in the The New York Times.
Since the November 2 release date for Tabula Rasa is fast approaching, NCsoft has announced there will be a Veteran Rewards program for players of the game. For every three months that a player has an active account, they will receive exclusive access to in-game content, such as emotes, gear, crafting schematics, titles, pets and more. They’ll also get a reward for the first month that includes access to three emotes. Since you lose access to all those items if you freeze your account, I suppose would this would be a good way to keep up an active community. You can check out more specific info on how to get the rewards at the Tabula Rasa site.
This year’s most anticipated and best selling titles have been heavily sci-fi in influence, leaning sharply away from the fantasy characters and settings that have been staples of the video game industry.
The New York Times takes a look at some of this year’s top games including BioShock, Halo 3, and Mass Effect asking not just what is driving the shift, but why the industry pushes so few genres with such extreme settings in the first place.
“When you’re making a video game, you’re trying to give the player special experiences and abilities that go beyond the everyday as much as possible,” said Casey Hudson, project director for Mass Effect, a new science-fiction role-playing game to be released next month. “You want to be able to give somebody an experience where they can leave behind their everyday life.”
Or as put by Bill Roper, chief executive of Flagship Studios, which plans to release Hellgate: London later this month, “No one wants to play a game where they are a C.P.A. trying to figure out a deduction.”
The article also deals with the tendency of the industry to throw out story and character development in favor of action and graphically spectacular special effects.
“What we have not really gotten in games,” Mr. Hudson said, “which you do get when you watch a great television drama, is that as exciting as the setting may be, what’s really interesting are the people, the personal, human stories.” Naturally, Mr. Hudson and the rest of his team at BioWare hope to change that with Mass Effect.
It’s Wednesday, and that means another golden video game review for The Escapist’s Yahtzee Croshaw. This time on Zero Punctuation, he takes a look at the beta for Tabula Rasa currently available. As usual, he doesn’t hold back and the result is more hilarity and great lines I’ll probably be quoting before the day is done. Be sure to check out his other videos on The Escapist’s site if you haven’t already.
NCSoft has announced they will be holding a special Halloween event as part of their 3-day Pre-Order Headstart. Those who pre-order the game and log into the beta on Halloween will get a chance to partake in the festivities. Players will run missions that involve spreading Halloween goodies. You’ll also be able to collect 9 different masks, like at the right, from the development team that are yours to keep. Be sure to pick up the Tabula Rasa Pre-Order Bonus Pack if you want to take part in this event.
For those of you intrigued by Gaming Today’s recent interview with Tabula Rasa’s Community Manager April Burba, Stratics recently had the opportunity to get a video interview with her. Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa promises to hook players with fast paced combat, cutting back traditional elements of incremental play such as long periods of travel and running based missions. Burba talks about the clans and PvP in the game including Clan vs. Clan combat. She builds a picture of a highly dynamic world setting.
NCSoft’s COO, Sebastien Vidal talked with GamesIndustry.biz about the MMO business in the site’s first of several interviews kicking off its MMO week. Vidal started by revealing the secret of NCSoft’s success in the MMO market.
NCSoft is looking to expand its studio staff in several North American offices. Austin (TX), Aliso Viejo (CA) and Mountain View (CA) all have positions open.
I have a problem. It’s not a serious addiction, in fact its much the opposite of an addiction. I can’t commit.
Game|Life has an interview up with Tabula Rasa’s lead designer Paul Sage discussing the upcoming changes and the feedback integrated into the upcoming 1.4 game patch. One of the more interesting aspects of the interview was the admission that players wanted to play something other than stock humans and that the developer was taking steps to make that happen.
PlayNC.com has announced a change affecting all NCsoft supported accounts. Support and billing may be shifting slightly in the new year as the time zone used for accounts will be changing from EST to Coordinated Universal Time which is the same as GMT. Players with Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners and Guild Wars accounts as well as other NCsoft titles should check your account details after January 1st.
Thanks to Evil Avatar for spotting these deals at Amazon – you can save up to 50% on games for almost any system; PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, 360, PC, Mac, DS, GBA, and GC. Sure, the 50% sales don’t apply to the really good stuff (for the most part), but there are some really sweet deals on there.
Richard Garriott talked about the successes and failures of the marketing strategies used for his Tabula Rasa MMORPG at the 2007 Independent Game Conference.
Richard Garriott has announced a last minute surprise in-game event for Tabula Rasa players, the AFS Sci-Fi Trivia Challenge.
Richard Garriott is truly a veteran of the video game industry. As his Ultima series changed what gamers expected of video games for the PC, his brainchild Ultima Online opened the gates to industry powerhouse that is Massively Multiplayer Online gaming today.
NCSoft has announced they will be holding a special Halloween event as part of their 3-day Pre-Order Headstart. Those who pre-order the game and log into the beta on Halloween will get a chance to partake in the festivities. Players will run missions that involve spreading Halloween goodies. You’ll also be able to collect 9 different masks, like at the right, from the development team that are yours to keep. Be sure to pick up the Tabula Rasa Pre-Order Bonus Pack if you want to take part in this event.
