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Scott Jennings: I can talk about lots of things; just not much about the game I’m working on. We aren’t going to announce anything until we’re nailed down and ready to talk about it. We don’t want to get hopes up to high because we’re doing some very ambitious things.

Scott: Yes, it is going to be a fantasy MMO. But it’s going to be a fantasy MMO that is done by a lot of veterans that have a fairly good grasp on making these types of games.

Scott: I think there’s always going to be the blockbuster mentality; people are always going to try to reproduce WoW by throwing a bunch of money at it and seeing what happens. And often, if you throw a lot of money at a game, you probably will get a big hit – it’s the Titanic of MMO design. You’ll have a big enough budget and have enough time for polish and hire the best people in the field and you’ll make a great game. That’s just going to happen.

One of the things I discussed in my talk was this idea that games are really embracing the movie model style of entertainment. WoW is really the first bestselling blockbuster, and we’re going to see a lot more of those. There are a lot of people who want to sink $100 or $200 million dollars into game development.

Grand Theft Auto IV cost $100 million to make, and it had a dev team of 1,000 people. It made its money back in the first weekend. It’s a very profitable scheme.

But you’re going to see lots of people who are simply re-making WoW. Those people are going to succeed simply because they’re going to sink enough money into the game to succeed. And the money is there! You’re going to see games like Grand Theft Auto Online and people are going to throw unbelievable amounts of money and people at this development goal, and you’re going to end up with a product that meets the bar that people have set for that sort of product.

That bar is going to keep getting higher and higher and higher, and it’s going to become a marketplace where three or four companies are the only companies that can afford to make these blockbusters.

Scott: Most individual investors won’t be able to afford a single MMO budget, let alone a blockbuster. How many investors are willing to throw $100 or $200 million at a project?

That said, you’re going to get some of what I call “stupid money.” Those are the $20 to $50 millions that are going to try and compete with WoW. And there are some people who are going to try and do that. When I was working on Dark Age of Camelot, we tried to do that with EverQuest. They had a big huge headstart, a huge amount of content, and we had a much smaller development team and a much much smaller budget. But we were able to carve out a 250,000 customer niche, which wasn’t really a niche at the time.

There are going to be a good group of people out there who are able to compete with the big name games on a much smaller budget. And they’re going to make an insane amount of money. That is going to drive people to invest in just about anything because there will be people out there that claim that they can drive WoW and GTA size results with only a small fraction of the investment. A few of those people are going to be right, but many of them won’t be and they’ll fail.

Scott: I think they will expand beyond GTA IV’s numbers, but I think we’re going to start running into some scaling issues and the folks from Rockstar and Blizzard will be very much in demand because they’ll know how to manage a 1,000 person team. That is very different from managing a 20 person or even a 100 person dev team. It’s going to require some very specific skills out there.

Then you’re going to run into what I call the “trendy indies”. These are the Puzzle Pirates and the EVE Online’s; they’re very successful games. EVE Online is tremendously successful in a niche. They have the group that they targeted, and they made the game that they wanted to play. They wanted a core space MMO with punishing PvP, a one world game, and the best MMO economy in the market. They nailed it, kept to it even though it didn’t do well initially, but they kept with it and now they’re successful. They did that with a smaller budget, even though they’re not making WoW sized numbers.

But that’s the sort of game that drives innovation. You’re not going to innovate with a $100 million dollar budget; they’re not going to be allowed to. That’s a lot of money to waste on somebody’s half-assed design idea. You’re going to see iteration, not innovation off of these huge blockbuster titles. You just can’t take those sort of risks with these huge budgets. As budgets get larger and larger in this ever increasing arms race, you’re going to see much less risk.

It’s going to be the smaller titles that drive the risk and the innovation. If you want to play a space MMO right now, you’re playing EVE. EVE players love it; they’re rabid. They fly out to Iceland for community gatherings for God’s sake. I wouldn’t fly out to Iceland for anything!

Scott: Is there going to be an online version of Ishtar? *laughs* Yes – absolutely. And the first game that does that will be the generator of thousands of stories and hundreds of reviews and it’s going to be a complete crash-and-burn failure. And it’s not going to be the last, because not everyone is going to succeed.

There is a point of diminishing returns where you can only throw so many people and money at a problem. MMOs are actually less susceptible to that problem than movies, because movies are linear. You can’t make a twelve-hour movie, most of the time. There are some very hard limits.

MMOs are inherently non-linear. The more content you throw into an MMO, the richer the world becomes because you don’t have to experience it all in one fell swoop. You can drop in, play something, then drop in again. You’re not watching a movie for a year, but you’re playing an MMO for a year.

Scott: Right. I’m still playing WoW. How long has it been out now?

Scott: Exactly! People played EQ for a long time simply because they had a huge amount of content. The only way you can get that content, unfortunately, is by spending money.

Content creation costs money. The best sort of content creation is the kind created by the players, but the problem with that is most developers just talk about throwing out user content in the terms of providing YouTube-esque type tools. I don’t know about you, but I don’t watch 90% of what’s on YouTube. It’s all just some camp girl going off about her boyfriend. I don’t care about that.

At the other end of the scale, player created content is guild drama. Everybody knows about guild drama and everyone loves guild drama. AFK Gamer, the World of Warcraft blog, is almost nothing but guild drama. However, that’s not really something you can budget.

Scott: It’s classic MUDflation, and WoW has really embrace that model and has said as much. They know that Wrath of the Lich King will cause everything in Burning Crusade to become outdated, but they also know that one of their most popular patches was 2.4 where they did the Dustwallow Marsh revamp. It was really necessary, and it was one of the few times that they’ve added a whole new level of polish onto something from the original game and now the area works really well. It’s something you can do besides Stranglethorn Veil at that level range. I think every live MMO team would benefit from that level of going through and taking what you’ve learned and using that in a new way.

If you have an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of resources, it’s always worthwhile to go through and redo those areas. Not many studios have an infinite amount of resources, but it’s a good activity to go to those areas where people never seem to go and try to fix those areas.

Scott: I tend to disagree with it because I come from a PvP background, and I’m very much a PvP focused player. That’s where I tend to focus my design as well, and MUDflation is death to PvP. I was working on Trials of Atlantis for Dark Age of Camelot and that was the first expansion that really introduced MUDflation to the game.

It hurt us tremendously, and it’s been something that Mythic has been very up front about. We raised the bar in what you had to do to compete in PvP. You had to go out and get these artifacts and what-not. It felt like a broken compact; we had told players that that’s where they need to go to be competitive, and then we moved that bar. It was not a good decision, and that’s really why I tend to be against MUDflation and against moving that bar.

With WoW it’s not a problem because the core game is the progression of levels and acquisition of items, but PvP players do mind that and thankfully there are some “welfare” epics that you can get. The gear is competitive enough that the players who never do PvP actually want to go in and get these pieces of equipment just to get those epics.

It’s a good solution – it’s not the best, but it’s workable for them. However, I would definitely be more for the idea of having a solid baseline and then making that baseline wider rather than taller.

Scott: You give them things to do. Players are always wanting to advance their characters, and one of the best ways to do that is with an alternative advancement system. EverQuest had the “Alternate Advancement”, Dark Age of Camelot had “Realm Rank”, and World of Warcraft has a “Talent Tree”. The principal idea here is that you’re developing your character beyond their normal abilities. There’s ways to advance your character that are wider not taller. You give your character more flexibility and abilities to handle various situations. If you’re a tanking character, you might give him a bit of healing to off-heal.

There are ways to give players more tools in their toolbox that don’t completely blow the ability spectrum out of wack. It’s one of those things that’s very upward focused, and that’s why you need tons and tons of testing cause it’s the quickest way to kill your game.

Scott: It’s not an original idea, but it’s a good one.

Scott: That’s just one way to do things, but it’s a good way. You don’t want players to grind through things in order to get to an objective that they consider fun. If a player is just playing a game for PvP, they want to be PvPing in the first week. You want them to start having fun right away. The quicker they have fun; the quicker they’re going to give you more money.

It’s all about making sure people have fun and forcing players to do things that they don’t like to do to get to the cool bits isn’t fun. MMOs traditionally get away with that because there’s so little competition. One of the things I hear the most about with WoW is that doing things like Reputation grinding isn’t fun and that players hate it. But they do it because there aren’t any other games on the market that are like WoW.

Of course, as someone who doesn’t work at Blizzard it makes me want to pull my hair out, but for them, WoW’s the only blockbuster right now. That’s what they see as no competition in the market. Once there is more competition in the market, people won’t put up with that anymore.

Ultima Online is a perfect example of that. When you have cats and dogs  - PvEers and PvPers living together in the same space, things don’t work out to well. They still got away with it for a couple years because there simply wasn’t any competition. Then EverQuest came out – a safe PvE space – and all of a sudden everyone who hated getting PKed in UO moved.

Scott: Absolutely. It’s what makes a game truly massive. Battleground PvP is fun, but you’re not going to see that truly electrifying spectacle of crossing a hill and seeing a thousand enemies there.

Sure your framerate is going to hell and you’ll die a horrible death, but you’ll never have another experience like that in a different game. That’s what makes MMOs special.

Scott: It’s almost impossible. We’re just now starting to get the metrics and things that are necessary for seeing how players are doing. I think you’re going to see more openness on how players spec out their characters and choose sides. That’s because once we allow players to make those choices, we can see what decisions players are making and how those decisions are affecting our game.

Scott: Be more demanding. Don’t accept mediocrity. Don’t accept games that try to deliver less polish. WoW has set the standards that we have to meet, and if games don’t meet it they will fail and deserve to fail. That standard has now been set and we have to meet it.