By Spigot on Tuesday, July 17, 2001 - 10:26 pm:
Hey Mark! I liked the article, but I did have a problem with your comparison of Everquest to Asheron's Call.
"Part of that may be the inevitable comparisons to EverQuest. Both games are first-person 3D games and both games are heavy on the hack and slash. "
AC is NOT a first person game. You can play it in first person, but that's almost impossible, due to there not being any built-in mouse-look (though I'm sure someone has developed a patch for that by now).
And give me drudges over orcs and elves any day. I've been in love with the unique setting that is Dereth (the AC island) for nigh on 2 years now. That's the longest any game has kept me playing on an almost continual basis!
Woo!
By Michael Murphy (Murph) on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 12:05 am:
When did you write that? Third Dawn has been out for quite awhile by now...You seemed to indicate that it wasn't available yet.
Still -- it was, as usual, great. And very informative. Thanks.
By Mark Asher on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 12:34 am:
The article is several months old. It ran in the magazine quite some time ago. They just put it up on the website now for some reason.
By Michael Murphy (Murph) on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 12:40 am:
Okay -- I thought it seemed kinda familiar.
Didn't intend that as criticism - I figured that at least parts of it were old. I'd never accuse you of not being "in the know," so I hope that you didn't take it that way.
Perhaps I should have re-ordered my comments, so that the "Good article" came first...
At any rate...Good article. ;-)
By JessicaM on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 11:51 am:
Not bad overall, although some of the dates were off; probably typos. For example, News Corp. bought Kesmai in April of 1994, not 1992. And I think the date for Doom's release was Dec. 1993.
The dates on the Multima saga are generally correct. The reason the deal between Kesmai, GEnie and OSI was never completed was because someone at OSI (the then-Producer?) took our offer and shopped it to AOL, who immediately quadrupled it. You can imagine how less than overjoyed I was about that, after spending months putting the deal together, introducing them to Kesmai and fighting GE Info Services execs for the development money (at that point, the most GE had ever paid in advances for any MMOG was $3,000).
As OSI learned, the people in charge of games at AOL in 1990 were less interested in developing Multima than in making sure GEnie didn't; after all, NeverWinter Nights was already in development at AOL. After stringing OSI and Kesmai out for months, the 'deal' quietly died. Four years later, OSI started internal development on it.
By Brian Rucker on Wednesday, July 18, 2001 - 06:02 pm:
Mark, just saw your interview with Ralph Koster over on cgonline.com. I may not be UO's biggest fanboy but this guy, him I like. He's talking about the same kinds of future developments in MMOGs I have in other places - the difference being he knows what he's talking about. :)
I love the idea of 'impositional' worlds. I was running off at the mouth over at The Other Place in the forums and brought up what a great idea it would be to create worlds based on RL settings. My suggestion was Victorian London but I'll take Mr. Koster's Paris or Colonial Williamsburg too. The idea that the engine could control aspects of player behavior in order to enforce suspension-of-disbelief and keep cultural continuity intact is something I've thought about for a while. 'Impositional' huh? I like the sound of that.
Nice to know I'm not totally nuts. Thanks for asking the right questions to the right guy, Mark!