Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor

The video gaming industry is an incestuous place. Before we get zealots crawling out of the woodwork to curse and damn us, let me explain my statement. In the video gaming industry, there’s a lot of movement between various development studios and you’ll often see the same people, albeit employed by different studios, all the time. Like professional sports, the “players” on these development studios are constantly traded back and forth. Once you make it in, you’re consistently passed from one company to the next.

If you read articles concerning the single player and console games, you’ll find this idea to have validity, but its even more true in the MMOG portion of the industry. There’s a running joke among many of the community and public relations managers that collecting business cards is just as good as Pokemon – you’ve gotta collect them all!

 

Brett Close talks with us at AGDC about redefining the MMOG genre.

So when new blood enters the water, there’s a relative feeding frenzy to see what these folks are up to. Such was the case with 38 Studios and there relatively unknown lineup of directors, managers, and executives. There are many recognizable names – Brett Close, Chaz Sutherland, Scott Cuthbertson, Mary Kirchoff, Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, and R.A. Salvatore to name a few – but those names don't coincide with a plethora of experience in the MMOG field. However, At the core of their studio lies a treasure trove of experience, with employees gathered from a variety of different studios in the industry. They've gathered the best and the brightest to create what the new blood brings to the table.

Luckily, Ten Ton Hammer was one of the early companies that joined that rush to get to know 38 Studios, and throughout the convention season, we’ve gotten to know the individuals at 38 Studios. At AGDC ’07, we again caught up with Brett Close and Mary Kirchoff, the president and chief marketing officer of 38 Studios. After chatting for a bit, Mary let Brett field our interview questions and we made our way to an empty speaker ready room.

Initially, I simply wanted to know what 38 Studios had been up to since ComicCon and what was next for the young studio. Brett was more than ready for the question and came out swinging. “ComicCon was huge and very successful for us thanks to Ten Ton Hammer and a few others sites,” Brett said. “There was some great follow-up press that made for a solid coming out party for the studio. I think some people now look at 38 Studios in a different light, but we still have the challenge and risk of how you address intellectual property when your product is two and a half years out and people want to hear about it now. We hope that we’ve deftly sidestepped that sort of agenda because we’re stubbornly (and smartly) holding that information back. I don’t think it’s wise for us to uncork the bottle just yet.”

I’d have to agree with Brett on their tactics concerning the release of information. Since they are building not only a game but a complete intellectual property, it would be a complete waste to announce the premise of the game now to allow their competition to build new products to match their own. By staying silent, they’ve restricted their competitive edge until its ready to be unveiled. To take a setting from Salvatore: It’s like the assassin’s hidden knife that isn’t revealed until it’s ready to cut.

However, when the game and intellectual property are released to the public, what sort of MMOG will we be seeing? This was the question I posed to Brett, and he divulged his own – and the company’s – thoughts of where they want to take MMOGs. “The industry is ripe for the next phase in the MMOG genre,” Brett said. “The first phase was the concept of existing in a 3D engine and world; you log on and can do pretty much what you could do in a 3D engine before – kill characters and go kill a boss. In MMOGs you can group up with your buddy and do these sort of things on top of grinding to get levels, but that’s basically it. I’m obviously leaving out a few things, but that’s kind of the barebones of the first phase.”

“The next frontier [for MMOGs], to me, is a lot like what happened with 3D shooters,” he explained. “You had these basic 3D shooters and somebody realized that this isn’t just a game; it’s a storytelling device and medium. Then you had companies like Valve making Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and EA making the Medal of Honor games. It’s all about storytelling.”

Bob Salvatore has already created extremely interesting worlds for his novels. Now he's trying to do it for MMOGs.

Amen to that. At least someone is finally figuring this out with MMOGs and doing their best to get something implemented that’s more than a simple competitive ladder to the top. If there’s a meaningful story, people might slow down and actual look at the content that’s being present and try to grasp the meaning behind it all. Like a good book, there may even be a reason to replay (or reread) the game simply to see if you missed any important details the first time around.

“In general, this industry is all about figuring out how to convey a story,” Brett said. “It’s no different than seeing a great movie or opening up a great book. If you can combine that with the fertile soil of MMOGs, then you won’t just go and hang out with your friends to grind and level up. Now you’ll have a clear motivation why you’re doing certain things and if you don’t go and defend a village, there’s a very clear outcome and you’ll see how the world changed.”

“It’s all extremely interesting,” he continued. “I don’t think we’re the first to say or think of that idea, but we’re probably in the best position to do this, since we have people like Bob Salvatore and Todd McFarlane. Bob’s in house frequently; he lives only thirty minutes away, and he’s a ridiculously avid MMOG player. It’s one of those things – and I know it sounds cliché – where you get all of these creative and talented minds together, and you simply turn up the heat and watch what happens. Things begin to bubble over and stew, and then stuff just happens.

“Right now we’re solving the implementation issues,” Brett said. “We’re doing engine evaluations, and we’re converging on that. We’ve just about got the team to a steady state for a prototype phase. Beyond that, we’ve got the tools to build an MMOG, we’ve got this great presence who can tell a story from beginning to end in an MMOG world, and we’ve got people who’ve been building MMOGs for a long, long time; now we just need to push it to that next frontier, that next phase in MMOG development.”