The Funeral of WoW Gold

SAN DIEGO – It’s no coincidence that most of the blockbuster video games of the past two decades have been gorefests and war simulations. Their creators were single guys in their teens and 20s whose all-night coding sessions were fueled by Doritos and Mountain Dew.

John Smedley was one of them. In the mid-1990s, he helped make the trailblazing online game EverQuest, a slash-’em-up fantasy world that only a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed geek could love.

But Smedley has grown up, and so has the industry.

Now 40, he is broadening his definition of fun and putting the finishing touches on a game that he wants his four children to be able to play. Free Realms, expected to go live on the Web in early April, reflects a level of maturity that’s starting to change the nature of games now bursting onto the market.

“The clich?of game developers 20 years ago is that of socially inept young men who sleep under their desks,” said Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with IDC who worked as a game producer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Many of those have now climbed out from under their desks and started families.”

Smedley and the San Diego company he runs, Sony Online Entertainment, are prime examples. Sony Online has gone from creating Cash Money Chaos, a bang-bang game released in 2006 that features guns, girls and gold, to Free Realms.

Instead of death, blood and foul language, Free Realms has tutu-wearing goblins, puppies and snow angels. Like EverQuest, the game has adventures, but these quests involve exploration rather than combat.

“I wanted to make a game that would be fun for my kids,” Smedley said. “But I also wanted to make it safe enough so parents like my wife wouldn’t have to worry about them.”

Smedley is in a good position to reinvent the nature of virtual worlds. He pioneered the game genre. As a computer science student at San Diego State University, Smedley spent $600 — and hundreds of hours — a month playing an online game called CyberStrike. It was so much money that he quit college after 18 months to get a job developing games for Alien Technology Group.

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In 1993, he shifted to Sony. Three years later, he proposed the idea for EverQuest, which could be played simultaneously by thousands of players in a lush graphical environment. It was a radical departure from the crudely rendered, text-based online games that existed then. Six years later, EverQuest was released.

Its creators hoped the game would break even within two years by garnering 70,000 players paying $10 a month. They doubled that in six months.

Today, these figures pale in comparison with the 11.5 million people who play World of Warcraft, an online game released in 2004. But in 1999, the EverQuest flood nearly ground San Diego’s Internet traffic to a halt.

“John really helped invent this genre,” said Geoff Keighley, executive in charge of game content at MTV Networks.

Players loved EverQuest, sometimes a little too much. Some clocked more hours in the game than they did for work, leading people to call the game “EverCrack.”

The game is rated “Teen,” meaning it’s suitable for players 13 and older. Smedley once took a call from an outraged parent who demanded to know why his son was banned.

“I told him his son used bad language,” Smedley said. “The parent insisted that his son never cursed. So I pulled up the logs of what his son had typed in the game and e-mailed it to him right then. He read it and said, ‘I’ll take care of this. ‘ “

The incident taught Smedley to be more aware of what his own kids were doing online.

Smedley is also motivated by the business opportunity.

“To succeed in this new market, developers are going beyond just making entertainment for themselves,” he said. “They’re now getting greater satisfaction, personally and financially, from entertaining a broader audience. That includes their families.”

In 1993, he shifted to Sony. Three years later, he proposed the idea for EverQuest, which could be played simultaneously by thousands of players in a lush graphical environment. It was a radical departure from the crudely rendered, text-based online games that existed then. Six years later, EverQuest was released.

Its creators hoped the game would break even within two years by garnering 70,000 players paying $10 a month. They doubled that in six months.

Today, these figures pale in comparison with the 11.5 million people who play World of Warcraft, an online game released in 2004. But in 1999, the EverQuest flood nearly ground San Diego’s Internet traffic to a halt.

“John really helped invent this genre,” said Geoff Keighley, executive in charge of game content at MTV Networks.

Players loved EverQuest, sometimes a little too much. Some clocked more hours in the game than they did for work, leading people to call the game “EverCrack.”

The game is rated “Teen,” meaning it’s suitable for players 13 and older. Smedley once took a call from an outraged parent who demanded to know why his son was banned.

“I told him his son used bad language,” Smedley said. “The parent insisted that his son never cursed. So I pulled up the logs of what his son had typed in the game and e-mailed it to him right then. He read it and said, ‘I’ll take care of this. ‘ “

The incident taught Smedley to be more aware of what his own kids were doing online.

Smedley is also motivated by the business opportunity.

“To succeed in this new market, developers are going beyond just making entertainment for themselves,” he said. “They’re now getting greater satisfaction, personally and financially, from entertaining a broader audience. That includes their families.”

Mark Essen’s brutal, lo-fi video games are about to make him an art-world star.

Upon graduating from
Bard College last May, Mark Essen and his friends planned to buy cheap, damaged bikes on the Hudson Valley Craigslist, fix them up, then sell them in Manhattan. But they were too lazy to move them down to the city. Months later, after he was laid off from a tech job, Essen moved back in with his parents in Los Angeles, where he listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin. Since returning to New York, he’s been living out of his backpack, camped on friends’ couches.

Sounds like your typical slacker’s postcollegiate year, except for one thing: At 22, Essen is about to erupt on the art scene. He is the youngest of the 50 artists in the New Museum’s “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” the international exhibition exclusively showcasing the work of artists 33 and under (it opens April 8). His medium is as slacker-appropriate as it gets: Essen creates video games that are lo-fi in the extreme, evoking not the elegance of Shadow of the Colossus but dim memories of your old Commodore 64. “We looked at hundreds of portfolios,” says New Museum curator Lauren Cornell. “The way we made the selection was partly through the themes we saw, and one of the themes was obsolete technology. Mark’s working with video games because they’re cheap, available, and outdated, and he’s original in terms of applying his knowledge of avant-garde cinema to their creation.”

Until the New Museum called, he’d been showing in art festivals and fringey spaces like Brooklyn’s Light Industry. Ed Halter, Light Industry’s founder, is thrilled the Establishment is taking note of Essen. “It’s extremely fitting that they chose someone who works in computer gaming as a medium—not just referencing gaming, as someone like Cory Arcangel has done so well, but actually designing games as art. Independent game design is absolutely one of the most interesting emergent art forms right now.”

Essen studied film and video at Bard, where many of his teachers were experimental artists, and has been making video games since high school. He has a big fan base, many of whom download his games off his site (messhof.com), but he has yet to make money from his work; his only compensation so far: seven pairs of Nike sneakers, for a hurdling game he made for a French art magazine. “Younger Than Jesus” will project one of his games, Flywrench, so that visitors can play it. Except when testing games, Essen rarely sees laymen navigate his dizzying creations. In the first level of Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, for example, the hero, as the artist explains it, is “drugged up on drugs” and must steer a school bus along a convulsing, rotating highway. “I got nauseous making that, but now I’m used to it,” he says. “You can play World of Warcraft for days, and you don’t leave with anything. Play mine, and you’ll leave with horrible memories, maybe.”

A mellow and affable guy, Essen lights up when he talks about the brutality in his games. It’s hard to tell where this fascination comes from, though he is a fan of experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits, whose visually stunning “flicker” films of the sixties are filled with overwhelming, epileptic violence. Halter likens Essen’s approach to punk music: “For Mark, cunningly frustrating game-play functions the way a musician might use carefully orchestrated noise.”

Though Essen is learning to code for commercial Flash and iPhone games, his programming skills are intentionally minimal. For most projects, he uses Game Maker, free software intended mostly for teenagers, through which he imports images he either draws with Microsoft Paint or finds on the web. “I like the limitations,” he says. “It makes you think more about what you want to put in it, because you can’t [rely on] high-resolution images or a complex animation.” He shows me a new game that will debut at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art next month; it’s like Operation, only with a more complicated and horrifying premise. In the portion we watch, he lasers preternaturally glowing orange intestines, blue lungs, and a pink liver out of a body cavity. That it’s beautiful is incidental to the artist, who’s more interested in the soundtrack: “It will be brutal!”

He considers galleries the best setting for his work, even if “you can’t really sell games in a gallery”—his first reference to making, you know, a living. But who knows what will happen after “Younger Than Jesus”? “It hasn’t sunk in yet, the implications of being in the show,” says Essen, who is, however, excited about wearing one of his brand-new pairs of Nikes to the opening.

Job cutting in every industry makes this a bad time to play video games on company time, but, hey, it was for work. Honest.

And it was only two games. For real.

Hawaii-based Tetris Online Inc. has unveiled Tetris Friends Online Games.

It is currently in beta testing, but it is for real.

Tetris Online has developed and published Tetris titles for the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, while related company Blue Planet Software has worked with companies to develop Tetris games for mobile devices.

For Tetris Friends, however, there is no need to purchase a console for hundreds of dollars and spend more money buying games on disc or via download, or on additional controllers or other paraphernalia.

One also needn’t spend a few to several dollars to download the game onto your mobile phone; it is right there on the World Wide Web — free, providing you already have a computer with an Internet connection.

“We are proud to offer fans of Tetris unlimited access to
America’s favorite casual game on Tetris Friends Online Games,” said Minoru Arakawa, president and chief executive officer of Tetris Online, in a statement.

Players register with an e-mail address, screen name and password, and have the option of keeping one’s date of birth from being displayed.

There are six versions of Tetris to be played on the site at the moment, two of which pit you against other online players.

Given Tetris’ worldwide popularity over the past 25 years — yes, 25 years — there is bound to be somebody else playing the game no matter the time of day.

“Our goal is to continue to expand Tetris Friends Online Games over time with additional games and community features to become the premiere social gaming network on the Web,” Arakawa said.

Ding, ding, ding!

Social networking rears its head on the gaming level, though gaming and social networking are not exactly new to each other.

World of Warcraft is a … “M-M-O-R-P-G,” your columnist’s daughter said, finishing the sentence for her noob of a mother. (Noob is the new way to say “newbie,” for fellow noobs out there.)

It stands for “massively multiplayer online role playing game,” she helpfully explained.

Old-timers also remember online game-play from when the Internet was in its infancy — it was text-based back then.

Beyond advertising on the Tetris Friends site, which exists, it was unclear how the company plans to further monetize the site, as officials could not be reached.

If you’ve been paying attention to the MMO blogosphere at all recently, you’ll notice there’s been some banter back and forth between Syncaine and Tobold in regards to what Syncaine calls “WoW Tourism”. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the idea is that someone who has only played WoW, and thus has that shiny “first mmo love” with it (as anyone who has played MMOs over the years can attest - the first one that really gets you always has a part of your heart long after you leave) but then proceeds to judge everything else by World of Warcraft. The further away it is, the more it sucks, the more it will fail, etc. This is really telling when they are talking about a game with completely different mechanics like say, EVE Online, which you can’t even begin to put into the same general neighborhood if you’ve ever actually played the two games. But we digress…

In all the bantering back and forth, one thing was stated that’s been ringing around in our heads ever since. In his most recent posting, Syncaine ends off with “Perhaps then we can finally stop using 11 million as the size of the MMO genre, and realize WoW (along with being a good game) was a product of market timing and luck.” Regardless of your feelings on the recent banter, this is an interesting observation, and one we wanted to ask you about this morning. Do you think that World of Warcraft’s 11 million players was just a fluke that no other MMO will ever see again - including Blizzard with their next MMO? Was WoW just a product of right-place, right-time? Or do you think that there really is some type of ‘magic formula’ as it were; more properly will Blizzard - or anyone else - ever be able to repeat that 11 million players number?

Fishing can turn into quite a profitable career for a midlevel World of Warcraft character. Fishing is a secondary skill, meaning that it will not interfere with the two professions a character can take in the game. Fishing is learned by a fishing trainer and needs a fishing pole. Baubles and lures can up your skill, along with specialty items and some enchantments. Some fish bring high gold on the auction house, but if you want a quicker and easier method for getting gold on World of Warcraft, you’ll need to learn about trunk fishing.

World of Warcraft has pools where you can fish for a specific fish or item. These pools are animated swirls of water that are darker and easily recognized. You will have to keep casting your fishing line until it gets inside this swirled circle of the pool. Landing outside of it will not give you what the pool is for. You are looking for pools called “Floating Debris” or “Floating Wreckage”. These have crates and boxes in them. You may get some other items, but generally you will get a trunk out of these pools. There are four types of trunks: a Tightly Sealed Trunk, a Watertight Trunk, an Iron Bound Trunk, and a Mithril Bound Trunk. What you will find inside will vary according to the trunk that you fish out. The types of trunks will also be determined by the level of the area you are fishing in.

Trunks contain money, potions, recipes, cloth, leather, and some armor and weapons. Not all trunks will contain multiple items; some will just have a single item. However some will have many things inside. I fished out an iron bound trunk that had 8 items in it once. It is all the luck of the draw. These items are handy for leatherworkers and tailors that would rather fish than kill for their basics. Also, it is good for anyone wishing to make a fortune off the auction house. These bolts of cloth and the stacks of higher grade leather sell for quite a bit, and in a matter of a couple of hours you can have quite a few gold worth of items.

Items you can hope to find according to the trunk:

Tightly Sealed Trunk:

Light Leather

Medium Leather

Bolt of Linen

Bolt of Woolen Cloth

Minor Mana Potion

Lesser Healing Potion

Watertight Trunk:

Medium Leather

Heavy Leather

Bolt of Woolen Cloth

Bolt of Silk Cloth

Lesser Mana Potion

Healing Potion

Iron Bound Trunk:

Heavy Leather

Thick Leather

Bolt of Silk Cloth

Bolt of Mageweave Cloth

Mana Potion

Greater Healing Potion

Mithril Bound Trunk:

Thick Leather

Rugged Leather

Bolt of Mageweave Cloth

Bolt of Runecloth

Greater Mana Potion

Superior Healing Potion.

Flagship Studios was one of the most ambitious game development studios started in recent years. It launched a critically acclaimed game, Hellgate:
London, in November, 2007 that had garnered more than 60 game review magazine covers.

The game sold more than 450,000 copies (at $50 each, that’s $22.5 million at retail) But by August, 2008, it was out of business.

Stephen Goldstein, former director of business development and general counsel of Flagship, said in a talk at the Game Developers Conference that the lessons learned in Flagship’s fall are useful for all entrepreneurs. They’re particularly relevant, even at a time when the game industry is still growing, since there are numerous losers in the game business who have been hit with layoffs and studio closings.

Flagship was founded in 2005 by Bill Roper, a veteran game developer who worked on Blizzard’s smash hits such as Diablo. He was joined by other former Blizzard team members, many of whom were frustrated with their parent company, which had told them their game Diablo III wasn’t ready to ship. This team was seasoned, with sales of more than 17 million games behind them. They quit and started Flagship in San Francisco to make the high-end sci-fi/fantasy game Hellgate: London, which would break new ground.

The vision was to create a 3-D first-person game with high-quality graphics. It had all sorts of demons to kill and levels that you could explore in a faithful reproduction of London, albeit in a ruined state. You could also go online and play in groups, much like in the mega-hit World of Warcraft. But WoW was one of Flagship’s problems, because it was so successful that it was drowning out other titles (right now, WoW has more than 12 million subscribers worldwide).

Goldstein didn’t go into financial details. But some public information is available. Flagship raised tens of millions of dollars, both through its U.S. publisher Namco and Korean online publisher Hanbitsoft. The reputation of the team was so solid that six publishers lined up to launch the game worldwide. Co-marketers signed up to do merchandise and comic books ahead of the game launch. There were 11 partners whose names went on the box. But then things went wrong.

“We made a series of mistakes that every entrepreneur may make,” said Goldstein.

The ambition was part of the problem. The company was swinging for the fences, trying to hit a home run with both a single-player game and a subscription online multiplayer experience. It was trying to do a lot of things its team members hadn’t done before, such as making a high-end 3-D game, doing an online game, and other things. There were so many partners, and they all wanted something in return, which took up a lot of staff time. If something went wrong, the company didn’t really have a backup plan, Goldstein said. It wasn’t built on a strategy that allowed it to either delay the game or scale it back.

Another problem was how long it took for the team to get money. It received its money from the publishers as an advance. So it had to sell a certain number of copies before any new royalty revenue could come in. Players could play the game for free online. But to get new levels, they would have to pay. The subscription revenues would go into Flagship’s pocket, but the money was coming in really late.

Goldstein said the company should have just skipped the free multiplayer play and done what others, such as WoW, had done: give players 30 days of free multiplayer play and then charge them a subscription fee after that.

Initial sales might have been lower, but subscriptions would have come in faster that way, he said. The company also had complicated tasks that it put off for too long, such as building the online infrastructure and setting up a billing system. It tried to launch worldwide all at once, but that meant doing 17 different versions for 17 languages. The company believed a little too much of its own hype.

Flagship could have raised $20 to $30 million from venture capitalists. In 2006, VCs had funded big online game companies such as Red5, Slipgate Ironworks, Trion World Network and Perpetual Entertainment. Goldstein said that raising money from VCs would have given Flagship the cushion to delay its launch. The game ran off schedule, and the company needed four or five months to complete it. But it had to launch in November, 2007, anyway. As a result, players complained it was buggy.

“This was the company-killing moment,” Goldstein said. “If somebody offers you money, take it.”

That money could have come with some rich advice from outsiders on how to run the company. Flagship didn’t have the benefit of people from outside who could give it a reality check. The game didn’t meet expectations, and so sales just didn’t materialize.

In July, 2008, the company laid off all of its 100-plus employees. Creditors claimed its game rights. And the employees said they’d been “Flagshipped,” or basically screwed over.

“This was one of the most painful times in my career,” Goldstein said. “Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a lot more of it happen.”

Long before World of Warcraft, a game called Everquest introduced hundreds of thousands of players to the wonders of massively multiplayer online worlds.

Screen Play only very briefly dabbled in Everquest’s fantasy worlds, but a visit to Sony Online Entertainment in
San Diego during the game’s heyday made a big impression - the resources necessary to keep Everquest and other online communities active were astonishing.

Earlier this month Everquest celebrated its 10th anniversary, and longtime player and regular Your Turn columnist Anthony Murphy decided to mark the occasion by writing a piece for Screen Play on his early experiences with the game.

Click below for his latest blog, which is in the running for a PlayStation 3 console.

Happy Birthday!

On March 16, 1999, Verant Interactive launched Everquest. Along with Ultima Online it was
one of the very first attempts to create a massively multiplayer online game from the same structure that defined MUDS since the late 1970’s.

Players would log into the game and play a character in a large world that persisted between play sessions. You could meet up with hundreds of other players, trade with them, enter into alliances or simply go exploring together. For the privilege the developer asked a monthly fee to support the game and pay for the network resources it used.

This period between the release of Ultima Online and World of Warcraft is considered the Wild West days of the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) genre - projects of this type and scale had not been attempted before. Despite all the uncertainty, Everquest must have done something right because it’s still running today, ten years later.

The game systems were primitive and even brutal towards a player on occasions, the death of a player resulted in that character moving backwards along their advancement path; something unthinkable in today’s online games. If the character died their body would lay where fell until they could get close enough to recover it. If the character died in a particularly dangerous area it could take the efforts of many allies to get to it, who in the process may also be killed. If a player did not retrieve their body in a certain amount of time it would be destroyed along with all of the equipment on it.

The developers placed the tools to ease these burdens in the hands of the players. Necromancers and Rogues could aid in recovering your corpse; whilst Wizards and Druids could facilitate crossing the vast lands of Everquest very quickly. This demonstrated a common thread running throughout the early years of the game; rather than fix a problem by removing it, the developers would build a solution into one of the character classes. This meant that the players looked to other players to help solve their problems which fostered a sense of community. Everyone helped everyone else because you didn’t know when you were going to be the one in need.

There was no in-game auction house: players sold their wares by meeting in a common location and advertising their wares to the local area. On my server this was the tunnel in the East Commonlands, it was convenient for all players to get to. No one was rude or attempted to rip anyone off, the server population was too small and a bad name was something you could not afford.

I came by Everquest in a roundabout way. I was a fan of the Ultima series of games from my youth and I was playing Ultima Online at the time. Everyone was talking about the impending release of Everquest, which was considered “the competition”. When the game was released I sat on the fence for a little while before purchasing it from an online store. At the time no games store in Australia had ever heard of it.

Once the software had arrived I created my character, the look and feel of the game was a little primitive, the graphics could be compared to Quake which was then three years old. I quickly came to understand that the game traded graphical quality of large open playable areas. The game had no in game map so I quickly became lost, I wandered out of my starting area into the hills where night had fallen and was attacked by a wolf. I barely managed to kill it and struggled to the top of a hill where I saw my first real time 3D sunrise.

At the time I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends, including Cameron
and Chris who also played a MUD called Medievia. One weekend I lugged my Pentium PC over to West Heidelberg in my HQ Kingswood and let them have a go of it. Within a week they’d both bought the game and their first 3D accelerator cards.

This was the start of a journey for the three of us that would continue across many worlds and as many characters. My most enduring memory? Sitting on the beach in South Ro fishing whilst Cameron and Chris jumped in and out of the water trying to scare the fish away. In the end it’s not the awesome loot or the character leveling that you take away from the game, it’s the people you meet along the way.

Happy 10th Birthday Everquest!

GDC 2009: We sit down with the upcoming online strategy game League of Legends and come away feeling like we just found a diamond in a coal pile.

Stepping into my hands-on with Riot Games’ League of Legends, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I hadn’t really heard much about it other than that it was an RTS/RPG game that started out as the popular Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients. When I sat down and actually played with the game for a while, I quickly realized that this was one of the coolest games on display at this year’s Game Developers Conference.

The basic premise of the game is that players play the role of a summoner who enters into battles with other summoners: each summoner chooses a champion to fight on his behalf, and then players control the avatars in battle. Each avatar possesses totally different abilities and combat styles: Nuna the Yeti-Rider is effectively a tank unit, Master Yi is a sneaky swordsman, and Alistar the Minotaur is a brawler. The match I participated in had me playing as a healer/priest, but I learned that it was possible to use my champion as both a support and attack class once I learned her strengths and limitations. Learning to control—and eventually mastering—any of these characters will take some time to learn, but once you’ve got the basics down, they’re a ton of fun to play.

The game is built on the idea of creating an RPG/RTS title that utilizes the same concept of multiplayer matches in the way that games like Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2 do. Players will choose their avatars and level them up during matches as they gain experience. However, the avatars’ abilities will reset at the beginning of each match. Meanwhile, as summoners earn experience points, they will earn new abilities and spells that won’t reset at the end of a match.

When I first saw League of Legends, I was convinced that the developer had actually managed to adapt the World of Warcraft graphics engine to work with RTS gameplay. The graphics feature the same cartoony style that dominates Blizzard’s games, but closer inspection revealed that the game featured differences in environment and character models. I was informed that Riot had developed their own internal graphics engine and Hokyo Lim (the man behind the graphics of the Sly Cooper games) was League of Legends’ art director. The game really looks great, featuring dynamic colors and an animation-like style.

Overall, I found League of Legends to be fast, fun, and stylish; aspects that are lacking in many of the games that I’ve seen on display during the week so far. The game is tentatively scheduled for a release later on this year, and since it will provide fast-paced RTS/RPG action online (sadly, no single-player campaign is scheduled) with no subscription costs, it seems safe to say that anyone interested in games like Warcraft or Starcraft should definitely keep their eyes on this title.

It wasn’t all mistakes and regrets for former World of Warcraft director Jeffery Kaplan during his Game Developers Conference lecture, “”The Cruise Director of Azeroth.”

The jam-packed presentation also saw the release of many World of Warcraft statistics, including the average number of quests completed daily, and the circumstances that led to the extremely popular MMO sporting, at last count, some 7650 different quests.

Between
6/30/2007 and 3/5/2009, some 8,570,222,436 quests were completed in the World of Warcraft.

Daily average of quests completed: 16,641,209

Kaplan, now working on Blizzard’s next MMO, talked about designing the original release of World of Warcraft, saying that the first total quest target was 600. This number was a result of needing to compete with EverQuest’s estimated 1200 quests–a total that he and others estimated by looking at EverQuest “spoiler sites.”

The team designed a game with enough quests to keep players busy, but not so many that they didn’t run out occasionally–which turned out to be a contentious issue within the studio.

Said Kaplan: “And then we went into alpha, [and testers were] going, ‘What the fuck?’ Because we focused so hard on the newbie experience, you’re going to have a totally quest-driven game… and we did that, and we had the internal alpha, I think it ended around level 10.”

While players of other MMOs might be used to running out of quests, the other Blizzard designers “wouldn’t stand for it.”

“All of the other teams were coming to the WoW team and saying, ‘This is BS, my quest log is broken.’”

“We were comparing ourselves to other games, and we found that WoW had evolved into its own thing that felt really broken any time you had an empty quest log.”

As a result, the following statistics were presented:

Target total quests for original WoW release: 600

Original WoW total quests: 2600

Burning Crusade: 5300

Wrath of the Lich King: 7650

“We felt like discovery and exploration are really cool, valuable things, but not when it comes to your core game experience,” added Kaplan.

Each Wednesday will be news day. I’ll cover the top PC gaming stories of the week and offer any thoughts I may have on a particular story.

MMO subscription revenue to hit $2 billion by 2013 according to media analyst Screen Digest, which says it will remain the key method of monetizing virtual worlds. The report, entitled Subscription MMOGs: Life beyond World of Warcraft, shows that the MMO market grew by 22 per cent in 2008, with consumer spending levels of USD 1.4 billion in North America and
Europe. World of Warcraft accounted for 58% share of Western consumer spending on subscription MMOs. However, spending on other subscription titles was also strong in 2008, growing 27%. (I guess it’s safe to say MMOs are definitely recession-proof!)

Today, Ubisoft announced the launch of R.U.S.E., a new intellectual property developed by Eugen Systems, creators of the critically acclaimed strategy title Act of War: Direct Action. R.U.S.E. is scheduled for release on Windows PC for fiscal year 2009/2010. R.U.S.E. is a one-of-a-kind real-time strategy game that allows players to bluff their enemies to lead their nation to victory, controlling the action using views that range seamlessly from the heart of the battlefield to the full theatre of war. Players will be plunged into the action thanks to the exclusive IRISZOOMTM Engine which offers an intuitive interface that allows for smooth, rapid transitions from a birds-eye view of the entire conflict, down into the heat of the battle and vice versa. (This should be interesting. The RTS genre needs to be revitalized.)

On March 24, Valve announced a new set of advanced features delivered in Steamworks, a complete suite of publishing and development tools that are available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide. Headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology that compliments the already existing anti-piracy solution offered in Steamworks. A customer friendly approach to anti-piracy, CEG makes unique copies of games for each user allowing them to access the application on multiple machines without install limits and without having to install root kits on their PC.

And…

Microsoft has unveiled the latest features and upgrades making their way to its Games for Windows Live platform, with a focus on increasing anti-piracy efforts. Games for Windows will now offer “zero day piracy protection”, including server side authentication on top of a further layer of authentication required for online play. In addition, sellers on the platform’s market place will now be able to design their own storefronts, while the “roaming” function will allow consumers to save their personal settings and have access to them on any other compatible Windows PC. “This update and other features currently in development represent a tipping point in the evolution of Games for Windows Live as a leading online PC gaming network,” said Ron Pessner, general manager of Games for Windows Live. “In the coming months, we will continue to deliver on our promise to provide gamers and publishers with the industry’s best connected gaming experiences through the Live service.” Dave Luehmann, general manager of Window games for Microsoft Game Studios, added: “As a publisher, no one is more excited to see the continued growth and evolution of Games for Windows Live than Microsoft Game Studios.” “We have several projects underway which will incorporate the Live service, and we’re continuing to build new developer relationships here at GDC to bring the best in the industry to Games for Windows Live.”

And again…

Stardock announced today that the forthcoming update to its digital distribution platform, Impulse, will include a new technology aimed to pave the way to solving some of the common complaints of digital distribution. The new technology, known as Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), is a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock’s virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo’d program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again. (All of these articles prove that piracy is rapidly becoming a threat of the past. As digital delivery gets pushed to the forefront, I expect we’ll see more publishers using similar methods to protect their games.)

According to GamesIndustry.biz, The Game Developers Conference has been voted the most important event on the busy industry calendar, with over 40 per cent of those surveyed labeling the San Francisco show as essential. The annual developers conference beat E3, the show once considered the industry’s glitzy showcase, but which has spent the past two year’s struggling with an identity crisis that left it down-sized and lacking inspiration. GDC09 runs from March 23-27 this year. (It’s nice to see GDC get some love this year. E3 has become an embarrasment with its emphasis on sizzle over steak!)

Square Enix, Inc., the publisher of Square Enix interactive entertainment products in North America, announced today that the Games for Windows® version of THE LAST REMNANT™ has shipped to North American retailers today. Brought to life by both rising stars and veteran Square Enix developers, THE LAST REMNANT is an epic RPG adventure that was released for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft last holiday season. This Games for Windows version features all-new elements not seen in the Xbox 360 version, such as a speed selection option for battle sequences and the removal of leader unit restrictions when creating unions. The Games for Windows version of THE LAST REMNANT invites a new audience of players into a lush, real-time fantasy world where they control massive cinematic battles. With a carefully crafted battle system and epic storytelling, Square Enix offers an exciting adventure for all RPG lovers. (If it’s one thing Square knows and knows well, it’s EPIC RPG!)

Aspyr Media and Activision Publishing, Inc. have teamed once again to rock the computer gaming world with the announcement of Guitar Hero World Tour for Windows PC and Mac. Transforming music gaming by expanding Guitar Hero’s signature guitar gameplay into a cooperative band experience, Guitar Hero World Tour for PC and Mac offers state-of-the-art wireless controllers to computer gamers for the first time, new online and offline gameplay modes and a Music Studio feature for composing and editing original rock and roll anthems. Guitar Hero World Tour is the most complete music game to-date with 86 on-disc tracks from music legends such as The Eagles, Van Halen, Metallica, Michael Jackson and The Doors and features in-game appearances by world famous artists such as Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Corgan and Travis Barker. (Mixed feelings here… I like the fact that the PC isn’t being ignored by one of the hottest trends in the business. But this game lends itself best to a large screen. Sitting in front of a 19″ monitor just doesn’t seem to be the best way to play Guitar Hero…)

Here are the top 10 PC game sales for the week of March 8-14 according to NPD Group:
1. Empire: Total War
2. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
4. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War II
5. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
6. World Of Warcraft
7. The Sims 2 Apartment Life Expansion Pack
8. Spore
9. Mystery Case Files: Return To Ravenhearst
10. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3