First,  I’ll try and do some more of these answers at a later time. I saw this stuff dragging so I posted what I had already written.

I’ll try to get more of this done, but until things settle down a bit, this is what I’ve got.

Additionally, ot seems that some of you might be disappointed that I’m not going into gory details, or casting newfound light on events.

I will talk about how I perceive things, but in a general sense. I will talk about my feelings about some aspects of history.

Those of you wanting names, specifics, laser focused blame or exacting details.. Well.. I’ve got nothing for you. Not only do I not remember a lot of stuff to the level of detail that you guys expect, in a lot of ways, it’s not appropriate for me to post here.

I will talk about how I felt about things and my perspective. Under no circumstances will I point fingers or pillory anyone.

If this is unacceptable, I apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that maybe, somehow, it might be time to move on.

Here are a few cherry picked questions, rewritten to be answerable by me.

“How is working for SOE for a developer ?”

Kick ass actually.

I worked there for almost 6 years and got to work with some of the best people I have ever worked with A great experience.

I left, not because of anything they did, but because I had been working with the same people for a long time.

Figure >10 years with the Austin crowd. Mix in the time at SOE and I felt too complacent, too comfortable.

A complacent designer is a scary thing. So, I left and moved overseas, looking for a new challenge.

“Is it hard to develop a game such SWG with so much interferences from Lucasarts? ”

Lucasarts was the most pleasant IP owner I have ever worked with. Professional, fast, concise, and willing to bend over backwards to make sure we could do what we wanted to do.

Plus, all of the liason’s we had on their end went out of their way to streamline the process.

Very positive relationship all-around.

“Why was there such a rush to release the NGE?”

Holiday Season.

“Who is to blame? We want Names!”

That’s not how it works.

I am proud of the work I and everyone else has done over the years since Galaxies started development.

Even though I’m not at SOE anymore I respect the work they do every single day. Some of the best game developers I have ever worked with are still at SOE.

Every day the game continues to run, every day that that SWG has someone playing  is something I view as a great accomplishment, and one I’m proud to have been a part of.

So, if you want someone to blame, blame me. This isn’t about finger pointing or passing a buck.

“Why CU?”

I don’t remember specifics actually. I think it was reasonable, but we were trending down.

If you think about playstyle variances as a pendulum and use the extremes of the arc to represent playstyle differences, you can get a feel for how stagnant an area of play is at any given moment.

We saw this with UO, where one day, everyone was an archer, and the next, a mage. The less the overall oscillations, the more static everyone’s playstyle is.

With a player driven experience, playstyle monocultures are bad. Look at Ogame to see how it horks up an experience. So, CU was an attempt to whack that pendulum and get some more variance into the game.

Plus, it cleaned out a lot of the crufty bits we had put in pre-launch and made it more maintainable. “Why introduce loot and ruin crafting?”

This is an interesting design discussion. We had a curious problem where the economy was so inflationary, and so controleld by the crafters, that new players were simply unable to actually get into the game.

The items they needed were too expensive to purchase, and no manner of starting income could have fixed this.

Basically, the crafters did what they wanted, which was to control the economy.

When you’re looking for a large amount of new players coming into the game, this kind of lockdown is a problem.

We can debate the value of the change, but that was the impetus.

The decision was to comply supplant the player-driven economy, but merely to support it in parallel.  The reality, well..we can talk about that later.

Once the backlash of the community, and consumers, were made known and articles in the New York Times were published how much explaining or defending did you have to do with your friends and or family who were familar with your work - how tough was it?

I go hot and cold on this one. On one hand, I’ve had to develop callouses about external exposure of my work since UO days.

I get inured to commentary about how I should be “Put into a sack and kicked to death” on the forums.

On the other hand, it can still be tough. Nobody wants to work on a game nobody likes. Nobody wants to work on a game that makes some little kid cry when he gets it for christmas.

I find it helps to be introspective on the whole thing, to see what we did wrong, what we did right, and think about how to improve future things.

It comes down to personal growth as a developer, and using mistakes we made to prevent mistakes in the future.

Do you feel that your work on SWG during the “nge” fiasco has impacted your ability to be employed in the game industry?

I’ve spoken quite frankly about these bits during interviews, so I’m not sure it’s had much of an impact.

I’m less interested in stock MMO’s, so that shift might have helped as well. So let’s go with Maybe.

Which version of the game do you personally prefer?

Jump to Lightspeed.

But I’m still traveling. Should be back in town on Sunday.

So I’m in DC for a week or so for work. Post some questions here about the NGE stuff. Keep them polite and I’ll see if I can post a followup answer to the best ones (or as many as I can get to).

Especially pertinent now.

Time To Cock - The amount of time it takes a player to use player-created-content tools to create a penis. Measured in microseconds.

Attributed to Jeff Freeman.

For the first time ever, I installed Ubuntu it seems useful.

Like I could really use this on a day to day basis.

Of course, if they really want it to be a normal person destop replacement I would recommend fixing:

1. Firefox fonts. They’re weird by default

2. Monitor detection so you can run over 640X480 by default. THIS IS A BIG DEAL

3. Nvidia driver stuff is a pain. Maybe you could default the all important control panel to on.

4. More comprehensive explanation of the theming.

5. NTFS support out of the box.

All in all though, it’s not too bad.

Beats the shit out if vista. I nuked it last night, reinstalled XP and now Ubuntu as well.

So good, it seems that trying to be honest about things doesn’t work well.

Instead, let’s talk about funny UO anecdotes.

This is one from a year or so ago that I recovered from an old blog backup. Feel free to add your own.

I worked on UO for around 4+ years for my career (started right after pre-alpha through ship, then came back for a stint for Rennaissance), and to this day I’m amazed by the memories and shared history it inspires.

Everyone talks fondly about it, but there’s never a happy story.

It’s always the shared moment of getting slaughtered in a dungeon, losing your stuff, hiding traps in your backpack and killing people who snooped and more.

But regardless of the tone, people still loved it. The fucked up moments, the slaughter of the innocents, the absolute depths that you could sink to.

When it first released, people would break into your house, steal all of your stuff, sapping you of thousands of hours of gameplay. Then, not content with having ruined your experience, they would leave you a book on the floor of your now empty house, with a note in it.

“You Suck”

You’d get killed, lose your stuff, and they’d make fun of your ghost.

They’d put a moongate in front of you and teleport you to a desert island and make you do tricks, or put you on top of the bank in Britain. Then people would wander by and make fun of you even more for being stuck.

Hell, the celebrities of the world weren’t role models or champions. You had people like Hobbes, not known for their public help, but for the sheer quantity of their enemies and slaughter of the innocents.

Those players who you saw for a split second, right before “Corp Por” which completely fucked you up.

And then you were there with 20 other ghosts, another hash mark in someones kill list.

That’s something you simply can’t deliberately create.

But it went beyond simple violence…

A friend of mine(Jeff Freeman) who I worked with for many years had a term he used called “Time to Cock”.

It’s the amount of time it takes players to use a feature to make a giant cock in the world.

In UO, one of the first thing I saw players doing was writing FUCK in giant letters using Fish.

Hell, I remember when we had a bug with sewing kits where if you tried to use it on a non-sewable object, it deleted the target, not the kit. We logged into the beta and saw most of the dynamic objects in the world missing.

And a solitary player comes running by, screaming, closely followed by another player.

and then he must’ve caught him, and POP… The running player was gone… Deleted by the jackass with the sewing kit.

I’ll be honest. I never got into the game. After having the absolute power of a god client on TC or a local server, you can’t really get back down to speed of normal play.

But regardless, UO was a truly amazing thing. We got to do things that normal developers wouldn’t touch nowadays. We got to be on the bleeding edge of development and online world creation.

It was a bad ass experience, and I love the fact that it’s the source of so many of these killer stories.

originally posted January 2007

After continual thought, I still think this is a worthwhile discussion. I am cleaning out some of the assiness so we can maybe have a legitimate talk.

If I have ever created something that you didn’t like or that brought
you sadness, I apologize.

That is never the goal of a game developer.

However.

Let us set the record straight.

Let us set the history of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE into something
that makes a little more sense to those from the outside.

First, some ground rules.

I am a game designer. I make video games. I manage teams, develop
features, and turn the creative insanity that is game development into
demonstrable and sellable products.

A lot of this manifests itself in the form of direct implementation.
Scripting, writing, hands on content development.

I do not sit in a room and give orders. Generally, nobody I’ve worked
with ever did this.

We provided a means to create something to make money.

As professional developers, it is our job to execute on these types of
creative endeavors within the context of limited finances, linear
time, and sometimes explicit creative direction.

Sometimes this context is direction from Raph Koster. Sometimes it is
to meet a marketing need, other times it is one of business decisions.

At times, I describe it as,

‘If someone asks for pink fluffy bunnies, we give then bunnies done to the best of our abilities. You might hate bunnies, but you make the best bunnies you can possibly make. That is your job”

That is what we do. All of this is tempered with reality. Sometimes things take longer than we’d like.
Sometimes things end up more or less fun than we intended.

This is the job of a designer.

This is what I did on UO, Galaxies, JTL and every other game I worked
and am working on.

So we were given the directive to make Galaxies better.

Not just make Galaxies better, but make it succesful. Not the 200k
subs it had, but really succesful. The idea was that we had the most
valuable IP in the entire world, and we fucked it up to the point of
having 200k subs.

And yes, all 200k of you were important, but 200k means nothing in the
scheme of things.
I worked on Galaxies for around 5 and a half years. That’s a long time.

I wrote the combat system, mission system, spawning system. I wrote
the combat model for JTL, implemented all of the development tools and
ship interior systems and more.

Hell, I implemented the original Jedi System in 2 weeks after we
launched. Not because it was how we wanted it, but because we had 2
weeks to do it.

I have the understanding of where we went wrong and how. I see the
misteps and how the experience was misaligned with what most people
wanted from a Star Wars game.

So, when the NGE push came along, we were asked to reimagine the game.

Not just small changes, but rebuild it.

And it was needed. When we were asked, we were bleeding subscribers.

If I remember correctly, somewhere around 10k a month. LOSING 10,000
subs a month.
Note - I think our subs were closer to 160-180 than 200k. It was a bad financial situation no matter how you look at it.

It was not idyllic. You can remember it as an amazing game, but it wasn’t.

Hell, all of you who recall the grand ole days of launch seem to
conveniently forget that everyone quit shortly afterwards.

It’s similiar to the UO rose colored glasses. Everyone remembers the
positives, but nobody remembers how unpalatable UO was before Trammel.
Nobody acknowledges that after Renaissance, UO’s numbers rose from
110k to 220k.

But I digress.

WOW was out. SWG was niche and clunky. Or so it seemed. There’s a question of how close we got to the product, how our perspective changed as competitors launched.
We were told to imagine something new and unique. To push it to the
next level.

Originally, it was specced as a tutorial. A tutorial
paired with a new marketing push, new and grandiose relaunch that
would recapture the magic that we missed when we first released.

But a tutorial wasn’t enough. We scrambled to come up with something
more impressive.

We tested out a new combat system on a whim. I did a quick prototype
and we discussed it internally.

The difference was the control scheme, not the rules. You clicked, You shot.

When we demonstrated it, the first comment was “Wooooah….”

And the producer left the room.

He came back shortly and was torn. He knew that we had to make the
change. It was THAT much better. At least, that much potentially better.

We did a side by side comparison. We tried to play the old system. We couldn’t.

However, we made a mistake. A BIG mistake.

Somewhere during the discussions it was strongly recommended that we
streamline our characters.

People wanted something simpler, more direct, more accessible.

We told them. “If you do this, you will lose all of our subscribers. It is that significant.”

The response was that we would gain more due to the marketing push and relaunch.

So, we pushed forward.

If I remember the dates correctly, we did our NGE conversion in 2-3
months of solid crunch. It was some of the heaviest crunch I’ve ever
done.

We had an immovable date, and an insane set of features.

We were working in parallel, maintaining old code on the off chance
that we would pull the plug on the implementation.

Note - We didn’t notify anyone about the change until 2 weeks before launch because until 2 weeks before launch we hadn’t made a decision. You basically found out when we found out.
We launched, the marketing push failed, and we lost subscribers.

It was a misread at an organizational level. Design, Marketing, Production,
community. You name it.

We made huge mistakes. We got too close to the changes. Design took something and made it bigger than it should’ve been.

We got swept up in the wave of changes and ran with it. And we fucked it up. All of us.

Note - To those who think I might be pointing fingers. I say it out loud, Italicized and Bold.

I fucked it up.

Not all of it, but I made mistakes.

Some big ones, Some small ones,

Some that I’m still torn about to this day.

That is how things work. We make mistakes. We are not infallible.

We take these lessons and try not to fuck up again.

That is the nature of design.

Did the buck stop with design? Did the buck stop with Me?

No.

When I say it was an organizational failure, I mean it. Design made mistakes, Marketing made mistakes, Management made mistakes, Production made mistakes.

Did I alone give the go/no-go?

No.

Did design alone give the go/no-go?

No

Did an organization, made up of over 200 people give the go/no-go?

Yes.

Does that obviate us of blame?

Nope.

It was still a huge fuckup.

Epoch grade fuckup.

I think it lost a lot of the Raphy goodness that makes MMOs work, and that was a profound loss.

That was a huge mistake.

But I think the control scheme changes were dead on.

Does that matter? Not really.
The point, the fuckup, the mistake that we made, was answering an
unasked question.

“Can you change an MMO drastically after it launches?”

Categorically, NO.

If we were to do it again, and wanted to make those types of changes,
you have to make a new game.

Relaunch with a new title.

Or shut down Galaxies and relaunch for real.

You cannot change it at runtime.

A lot of you were upset. A lot of you still seem to be upset. I’m
sorry if you feel betrayed, or that we ruined something you liked.

But I’m proud of the work I and the rest of the team did. I’m proud of
the choices we made, the direction we took. ALL of SWG.

JTL, NGE, Launch, Jedi Fuckups. You name it.

We made mistakes. We made a LOT of mistakes. We crunched, we argued,
we fired people, we hired people.

But we fucking launched a goddamned game. We launched a SECOND
succesful MMO (post-uo). We made a fucking amazing space game using
the same fucking game engine, integrated action combat, interior
spaceships and in 9 MOTHERFUCKING MONTHS, all while running a
succesful, cash positive product.

NGE was done in right around 2 months by a team of people.

I am proud of the work that we did, even if I am torn about the end product.

So those who think it’s about blame or credit or who ruined what or
how great it used to be when kids didn’t swear so much…

Take a deep breath and move on. Times change. Games don’t last forever.

Except UO. It’s still running. And I bet people are still pissed about
some fucked up code I wrote in 1997.

That, I am genuinely sorry for.

I still like this. Eat a dick if you don’t like Cars with Guns.

Dream games. All developers and designers have them. In fact, everyone has them.

But we never make them. We all want to but don’t have the time or the resources.

So all designers have dream games. We bandy them around but tend not to talk to them while employed as there’s always a fear of “losing your idea” to your parent company.

But we tend not to make these.

Especially with massively multiplayer development.

Currently nobody’s making anything new for MMO development. There’s a smattering of small developers pushing the envelope but the majority of the big publishers out there (Except Blizzard) isn’t doing shit.

There’s a palpable sense of fear and terror amongst mmo developers right now. They’re scared shitless of WOW. They see it, believe it’s insurmountable, tuck their tails and go the opposite direction.

What does that mean?

It means you’re going to have company after company fucking around with smalltime, smallscale free products. Myspace Killers, Habbo Killers, Runescape Killers, you name it.

It’s going to be reactive, marketing driven, and for the most part, failure after failure.

It’s going to be company after company saying things like “We’d like to focus on the Casual market instead of the hardcore”.

You know what I think about the myth of the casual gamer already (I think these casual friendly mmo’s are a fine idea if that were part of a concerted broad spectrum effort.

But they’re not. They’re indicative of a larger and more endemic problem. Everyone looks at MMO development as “Competing” with WOW. And nobody wants to do it. They’d rather scrabble for the detritus that falls from their pockets. They’d rather go for spillover and for some fucked up reason, focus on the Non-Gaming market.

And once again, I ask “What The Fuck?”. We haven’t figured out how to reliably create and sell games to the people who buy games and we’re fucking around trying to sell games to people who don’t even play games?

It’s very frustrating to see this on a bunch of levels.

We’re once again not using the strength of the medium, once again not asking the questions that need to be asked. The people who hold the purse strings aren’t interested. They’ve retreated into their developmental shells in an attempt to go for the “untapped potential” market.

The thing is, we’ve seen this happen over and over historically. If you single track your product lines like this you’re going to end up fucked. You’re might see some short term success but long term you’re going to end up in very bad financial shape.

We’re not in a static environment of game players, game developers, game sales, game platforms. There’s an ever evolving sense of tastes and ever shifting marketplace. Our marketing efforts and development dollars tend to use history as the basis for choices. Unfortunately this is only part of the equation.

We should be looking historically as well as looking forward for future trends and desires.

Companies should be developing a broad spectrum profile of online products. We’re going to need the smaller scale, free, “simpler” style products. We’re also going to need the game oriented solutions.

In fact, long-term we’re going to need far more game oriented solutions because if we do our jobs right, the simpler products are simply gateways to turning a passing interest in online products into a burning desire for more interesting gametypes.

But all we’re doing now is focusing on the preliminary entry into gaming. Everyone’s piling into that rowboat because we’ve convinced ourselves that WOW is insurmountable.

And to a degree we’re right. WOW is not something you can ever compete with. So DON’T.

I will bold this yet again.

STOP TRYING TO MAKE THAT SAME FUCKING GAME.

Raph made a comment a few years back that WOW was going to set our industry back 10 years. It wasn’t meant as a derogatory statement about WOW but instead about the reactive, bullshit nature of us.

And you know what? He was right about that too.

This might seem like just me bitching abou the state of the industry without any solutions.

And so far, yeah that’s all it’s been.

But there are plenty of solutions. There are plenty of new games that we COULD be making.

Assume these use the game structure I defined here

Autoduel Online

So the main arguments you’ll hear against this one are as follows:

Not Casual Friendly - Bullllllshit. You’re fucking telling me that a GTA driving model, Driving rock soundtrack, semi-apocalyptic setting, full car customization, PVE and PVP combat, extenisve missions in a fully realized online world with FPS and driving combat would be a failure?

Total fucking bullshit.

You craft the experience, you focus on the dream realization, you focus on the ease of play, focus on the CONCEPT, focus on the presentation adn you’re golden.

And if someone so much as MENTIONS the failure of Auto Assault, you are permitted to punch them in the mouth. I’ll leave it at that.

Start with your cars. For fucks sake, use real car designs. Look back at the 1968-1973 muscle car designs to start. GTO udge, Mustang Fastback. Interstate ’76’s car designs were a great example of a solid linkage between real world and imaginary.

Mix in some more modern designs, the Lotus Exige/Elise, Lamborghini Gallardo, BMW M5. Toss in Pickups, SUV’s from all eas, add in Trucks, Buses, and Vans.

License your music. Skynyrd, AC/DC, Gone Jackals. You want driving music. You want evocative moments derived from reality. You want to build on the dream of owning a muscle car. You want to build on that shape, build on the visceral and raw appeal of cars such as that. Add in more modern fare for the more modern designs. You’ve got a weird dual appeal model going. You’re building off of the techno-lust that cars inspire. You’re layering the appeal of raw, unadulterated violence on top of that. You want music that builds on that feel. This means all eras, but each song should have a tone you want to build off of.

Hire Steven Wright to do your Radio Djing.

Build your Control Scheme. You need full FPS and driving capabilities. BF2 is a fine example of this. You want to be able to move/fight on foot and move/fight in a vehicle.

You want a fast, fun, accessible driving model. GTA is a great starting place for this. You need to maximize driving flexibility because of the customization options available for the cars. If you use FWD/RWD/AWD as a seprator, coupled with the larger vehicles, you’ve got a HUGE amount of control variability while keeping it playable for all skill levels.

For your camera, go with FPS on foot, go with third person/FPS in the cars. The newer driving games use a variable camera for steering that makes it easier to maneuver while driving, but I’d be concerned about the limited FOV. This is a place you’ll have to prototype and play extensively.

Add in your weapons, armor, engines, wheels, car accessories. Vulcan Machine Guns, Lasers, Rocket Launchers, Oil Slicks, Flamethrowers, Tire Spikes, Mines. Front/Back/Left/Right firing. Add in pros and cons for all. Play extensively.

Make sure this all works in multi-play for coop PVE and PVP.

Build your first town. On-foot controls only with shared spaces. Add in your bars, arenas, shops, construction bays, cloning facilities. Turn on PVP for the Arena. Add in your Mission givers.

Build your first road. Focus on Highways, on-ramps, off-ramps, abandoned ghost towns. You want to maximize the driving/gunning play while mixing in your fps style obstacles. Give players a reason to get out of the car, give them even more reasons to want to get back in.

Go with a SOFT itemization model. Items are not permanent. They’re liquid, fluid, and must be repaired and replaced. Think UO, think Jagged Alliance 2, think item turnover.

Put your content on another server than your social spaces. Run it at 3X the server framerate and minimize your total number of players. Build around an 8-16 player PVE content limit for these missions. Maximize the usage of your AI and minimize your development time. Put your Arenas on a different server. All PVP combat goes here and can run with a larger playerbase because there are no AI.

Build your gang social structure. Enable Extensive living space customization. Turn players into a valuable commodity for gang construction. Add in living space customization, car customization, indirect competition between gangs. Add in tour of duty content for gangs that occurs over a larger timescale than singular missions. Focus on maximizing the social play within gangs as the end game. It’s more maintainable and deeper than pure direct pvp but allows you to use direct and indirect pvp where appropriate.

Toss in a tiered gameplay pricing model. Free to start, free to sample, free to play in amateur night in the arena. Want a garage bay? 2 bux a month. Want to run your own gang? 5 bux. Soften the barrier to entry. Offer value added services.

Port to Xbox 360 and PC, offer a free playable version for everyone involved. Sell it in stores, on Steam, on Triton.

Sell gamecards and monthly fees via phone, credit card, check, in 7-11s, online, offline, you name it. Offer the maximum number of methods to pay for the product.

Name the product, come up with a cool taglined and release.

There. You’ve made a game that’s unique amongst the current marketplace.

Some will say that this doesn’t actually appeal to a large demographic. I’m going to call bullshit. You’re telling me that this has less appeal than something like Chromehounds, Midnight Club, or any other games that share stylistic details?

I think that’s crap. If you build your world correctly, if you spend the time to maximize the emotion of play for this kind of game you can fucking nail this type of experience.

And you know what?

If we don’t make this type of games, someone else will.

And they’ll be succesful, and we’ll react and start chasing them around the same way we’re chasing WOW around.

 originally posted July 2006