The Future of Online Games Panel

[agra]

I agree Valdur, none of it was particularly inspiring (long on promise, short on details).

They could announce and release the game within 30 days. They could also announce and release the game within 2,3 or 6 months. The problem is maintaining the hype level. TERA ran into this problem. Even with a news release every other day, I found myself (in 2010) getting so sick of the constant barrage of pointless tidbits, it made me dislike the game before I saw even one play test. Just from their marketing strategy.
Oh look, another screenshot. Wooo. <not clicking!> Oh look, another single paragraph of non-information <not clicking again!> Oh look, another video that is a rehash of all the other videos we've seen so far <definitely not clicking!>

So, I appreciate the desire to do that differently. If they broke up information release into history, geography, races, and classes, they could either do one per day for a month or one per week for a month. This would disseminate all that information out in a very short time. It would also severely restrict the speculation and "omg, protest! petition!" that tends to come from the MMO-armchair-projectionists. In particular when they find out the Erathi or Niskaru aren't playable races.

It's been mentioned several times the client and server for the MMO are stable, playable, and have been in-house for well over a year now. I doubt this will be done on a whim or rushed. The reckoning information release was done pretty well, but could have been done faster.
If they want feedback, they'll stretch out the information release over a longer period. If they want to create legit hype in a way that's never been done before, AND they don't want feedback from the public during this phase, they will make it a shorter period of time. I would imagine a great deal of time and money has gone into trying to determine the sweet spot for "just right" with respect to how long the hype machine can run effectively.

When it comes down to it, the bare essentials they need to launch is enough bandwidth to support the client downloads & client-server traffic, customers to play/pay, and payment clearing. Yes, there is marketing, support, all the post-launch production operational issues, but technically, the rest is window dressing.

In my mind, it all comes down to whether or not they will fall into the same pit of pain as so many other MMO's have, and listen to customers this late in the development cycle, pre-launch. Feedback or not? That's the crux, I think!

[DeathtoGnomes]

The truly sad thing about Tera, is that its a convert from Korea and they are labeling it as a "brand new" IP. But, with all the converting needs to dumb it down to "Amicanize it" and the other crap about the racial prevert removal (P R E V E R T, yes its not quite full fledged). Whatever the spin associated with this game, its all BS marketing to hide the real truth : It was a popular game developed in the Asian markets first. The Asian market has much different standards than we do, I'm not how to explain it without a wall of text.

[eidos]

If this panel represents the future of MMO then I'm losing all hopes to see the genre move forward significantly.

This was just who agreed to do a panel at PAX East, so it doesn't fully represent the genre, but I can see your concern from what was represented here.

[DeathtoGnomes]

Watching some of that again, I really dont think Curt wanted to say what he did about changing the MMO genre/industry. But no doubt he felt the pressure to say something just from being on the panel.

[Kurik Lein]

I believe Curt is a pretty good speaker so I don't think he just said it to say something.

[Bossner]

I believe Curt is a pretty good speaker so I don't think he just said it to say something.

He probably can't give anything away, so he said the most generic thing possible even though it was likely from the heart and sincere.

[eidos]

He probably can't give anything away, so he said the most generic thing possible even though it was likely from the heart and sincere.

Well, we do have this emoticon for a reason:

[Bossner]

Well, we do have this emoticon for a reason:

Maybe they weren't allowed to use emoticons on the panel

[eidos]

Maybe they weren't allowed to use emoticons on the panel

Maybe they should have.

[Nybling]

I'd be surprised if they released it in 2012. My personal bet is Q1 2013.

And I like the panel, nothing amazing but still nice to see Curt talk about stuff.

Agreed 100%.