Smell The Monkey

#2

It's 5:20am on March 25th.

Think of something to write quick, dammit.

Right ...

Last time, you’ll remember I was discussing how Mud2 had blown its chance to become a genuine classic - a milestone amongst games, if you will. You’ll remember how I said that it didn’t have the exposure or respect it so richly deserves. You’ll remember all these things and you’ll shrug your shoulders and say: ‘So you do it better then, Monkey.’

All right, I will ...

Mud2 has a wonderfully rich land with intelligent characters and interesting puzzles and challenges. It’s a fantastically well balanced and deep game. The management and programmers maintain close links with the players and the community is a tight one.

These are hallmarks of an excellent online gaming experience.

Trouble is, Mud2 is positively antiquated when compared to other, more recent online RPGs - Dark Age of Camelot, the forthcoming Star Wars Galaxies, even Ultima Online makes Mud2 look plain OLD. What’s staggering though is that so few of these games manage to replicate the depth and richness of the simple text adventure Mud2.

It's pretty obvious which way to go. In fact, it’s obvious where this has all been headed for years now. The next logical extension of the game has been waiting to happen for years, yet we're still waiting ...

Where in the name of God is Mud3?

This game is essentially twenty years old, and it’s about time we put it out of its misery and moved on to bigger and better things. Not because Mud2 is BAD, but because Mud2 simply isn’t COMMERCIAL enough any more. The consumers want bigger, better and flashier, most of them wouldn't appreciate depth if it beat them about the head and neck with a hairbrush. You have to apply the old Mud2 rules to a new, bigger and flashier system.

Richard Bartle has a PhD in AI, lots of published texts on online gaming and twenty years' worth of experience in running this kind of show. He has the talent, but not the tools to do something on this scale; it’s too big an undertaking for what is essentially a relatively small company. We’re looking at the launch of a brand new global online RPG here. It’s not something that a company the size of Muse can pull off, especially when you have to count the likes of Lucasarts and EA amongst your competitors ...

Muse need to team up with a major multi-national games company and get to work on a 3D engine to apply to a brand new incarnation of Mud. Take The Land, transfer it to a 3D space, add lots of knobs, bells and whistles and release it as a beta. A few months later, release it as a complete game you can buy. Give it a larger land, blah, blah, blah. Sell it in shops, charge a small fee to maintain servers and you’re looking at a decent success story. A few months later, release expansion sets and proceed as every other online RPG does.

Of course, I say that as if it's an easy prospect. Just get it together with EA or something and it’s all done ... Well, of course it’s not that simple but it's important that the fortunes of Mud change soon. Something needs to be done to keep the Bartle family in Spam and chips after all.

So it’s a modest proposal. Take it to those large gaming companies who aren’t running an online game, show them the money that can be made and the success that can be enjoyed.

Give them the talent, let them provide the manpower.

Mud2 has been in existence since 1985. It’s time to evolve.

Online gaming and fantasy entertainment have never been bigger than they are today. Mud2 is still the best text-based online game available anywhere. Only Johnny Pessimist would suggest that it’s impossible for Muse to take that kind of glory again with its own twenty-first century incarnation of The Land. When you’re the champ, you have to fight to keep your gold. But Muse hasn’t been doing a lot of fighting and in the process young idiot upstarts like Everquest have gotten the upper hand.

I mean, Everquest for Christ’s sakes.

The hard part is finding the backing for such a venture. If it’s been tried already, try harder. If it’s never been tried before, why not?

Maybe it’s an impossible fantasy, but it’s the ONLY WAY TO GO now. To be competitive, Mud2 must make that evolutionary leap. It’s had an epic run, and it should be retired now before the users retire it via their own disinterest. If it’s impossible, then it’s time to concede defeat because without this next step, the Muse Multi User Dungeon will die a death within just a few years. Mud2 is not a growth game; it can only get smaller from here on in.

In 1985, Muse took something small and made it huge and made it great. In 2003, they could do it again. That same press coverage, that same respect, renewed interest in the history of the game, and a whole new future for The Land and its players. Mud2 is small, Mud3 could be enormous.

Richard Bartle @ http://mud.co.uk/richard/og01.htm

'Massively multiplayer games do have problems, but there are accessible solutions. Unfortunately, the designers of the second wave of games often don't seem to understand the problems (or even that there are problems!). They follow the wrong precedents, and they think they're infallible.

So much applies to any type of game designer, of course! Massively multiplayer designers have it worse because they often attribute the success of their games too much to the design and not enough to the players. These games are naturally sticky. Just because thousands of people play it, it doesn't mean its any good. 400,000 people play EverQuest, but 600,000 other people who bought the boxed set don't play it.

The second wave of designers also, in general, design for themselves rather than for their players. They don't think through the full consequences of their ideas, and (under the influence of marketing and customer support people) place way too much emphasis on the opinions of gaming lobbies.

The result is that we're getting games that players think they want, rather than the games they actually do want. The more we go down this road, the worse it's going to get.

Never forget, people: these are worlds, not games.

They work differently!’

The theory is all there, and it’s theory that has been proven to work in practise with Mud2. Here is a man who understands MMORPGs better than anyone else. He sees the problems, he has the solutions, so why is nobody using them? Also why isn’t Muse leading the way in this new generation of online games?

They’ve done it before. Times have changed, but good games are still good games. It’s the same old ideas applied to a new system, that's all.

I think we’ve waited long enough, don’t you?

J: PCM