I saw the Shattered Reality Interactive video from the Techcrunch 50 conference today. That was brutal. I thought the speaker did a horrible job. The entire talk was full of assumptions, like WoW is great and games need to follow their model.
Some other great gems from the talk. The speaker said he has been playing MMOs for a decade. And apparently 10 years is as far back as MMOs go because UO was the first one. ….. Uh what? How about Meridian 59 or Habitat or even MUDs. The fact that this guy can give proper “Props” to the history of MMOs and instead relies only on his experience makes me feel uneasy about this company.
Another gem was when the presenter showed a graphic stating that the standard MMO model is PVP, Arenas, Battle grounds, Quests (from least to most content developed for those areas). Yeah, that is standard, if you want to make WoW. What about other MMOs that do not focus on those aspects? What else can we do except copy WoW?
Another quote was “most of the games out there today, 95% are all fantasy games.” (Umm maybe the ones you have played.) And so these guys wanted to try something new, something called a Sci-Fi game. They call it an ancient future game (which I took as being fantasy with Hi-Tech items). Considering I can think of a number of Sci-Fi MMOs; Planet-side, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa, this idea is not new.
Finally, a very smart guy named Sean Parker seemed to be the only panelist that wanted to actually question the competency of this company. He talked about the problems with gamers create their own world and how controlling the story will be a major problem. To which the presenter stated that, yes the company itself will control a lot about the game but just that they will be listening to their players throughout the rest of the game’s development. HOW IS THIS ANY DIFFERENT FROM AN ALPHA OR BETA TEST. Besides the fact that you are only beta testing 30% of the world at once instead of 80%.
This talk pissed me off, another WoW clone just trying to find a hook.