"Future of Online Games" - PAXEast video from MMORPG.com

[UruzSix]

Its very possible that after NWN launches more of the dev staff at Crpytic can spread around to the other games again.

Cryptic had an open window to up the budget on CO once we migrated over and bought stuff, and little came of it. I don't think CO is closing down anytime soon, but my optimism on getting more staff post-NWN is in pretty bad shape. Especially since there's rumors of another new Cryptic project in the works.

[dwturducken]

Wouldn't be surprised if they have something more cooking. I could swear I once heard either one of those self-help guys or succeed-in-business guys say something along the lines of, "If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward." It would seem, though, since they appear to have a little more autonomy than we've heard Paragon had, they could bring on some additional staff...

(I shoulda looked here first. The "game designer" position could indicate a new project on the horizon.)

[Mistress Urd]

That was a good panel. Quite a variety of backgrounds and points of view with developers of Wildstar, Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter, EverQuest, Star Citizen, and Elder Scrolls.

I especially liked the question about if MMOs should ever be shut down, specifically referring to City of Heroes, and the guy from EverQuest was emphatic about how that should never have happened. It was hard to tell exactly what Jack said after that, but it sounded something like having NCsoft pick up the phone and call him to get CoH back. I'm not sure how serious he was about that comment (most likely was just ear candy chit-chat for the people in the room), but he did seem to slouch a lot during the panel, almost like he wasn't terribly excited about being there.

I also thought it was interesting that EVE Online never got mentioned in passing about being a long-running sandbox MMO.

Why would they want to mention a game that worked with its players and grew their game? Its certainly on the minds of the devs of Pathfinder Online.

Chris Roberts most definitely played some EVE online based on his death of a spaceman blog. If Star Citizen ends up competing directly with EVE it will probably be an interesting competition. It would probably do better if its not EVE and being more player skill based than just gear/character skilling.

[Surelle]

Thank you so much for this link, but I cannot for the life of me figure out exactly what Jack said in either sentence.  Even with the sound blasting up, it's too muffled.

I tend to think it was a bit of a joke, though, with how everyone laughed afterward.  And he looked a little sheepish, like "yo, they closed my game down."  After all, it was Jack's game first.

I wish he'd been serious and that there was some forward motion about CoH, though.  That would be amazing.  But I can't help but think it was a humorous passing comment and nothing more.  If someone can actually get a clearer transcription, that would be awesome.

Hey, has anyone posted on the CO forums or PM'd Jack via those forums to see what he really meant?  Strike while the iron's hot and all that; we'd be no worse for it than we are now, no matter what he says in response, but at least we'd know.  I tend to think a public forum post over at STO or CO might get more of a response, especially if other people joined in and wanted to know, too, but anything is better than us just doing nothing and letting a potential opportunity pass by.

[Samuraiko]

I actually just sent a link to this video to Eliot Lefebvre (the regular Massively columnist for COH and now for CO), calling his attention to the response about the closure of games and Jack's comment. Should be interesting to see if Massively is able to get more info on this for an article. :)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

[Surelle]

I actually just sent a link to this video to Eliot Lefebvre (the regular Massively columnist for COH and now for CO), calling his attention to the response about the closure of games and Jack's comment. Should be interesting to see if Massively is able to get more info on this for an article. :)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Wow, what a great idea!

Maybe I can scavange up my old CO forum name.  I only played the game for a week or so during launch, but now that it's F2P, I'd think my forum account would always be on....

[Surelle]

Rats, my CO forum login still works, but I'm not allowed to post.

Is it only subscribers that are allowed to post there?

Does anyone have an active, paying CO account that would like to ask Jack about his http://da.twitch.tv/pax/b/380836937    7:14 comments concerning CoH?  This recording is much clearer than the original link.

[dwturducken]

Does Jack respond? The CM (TrailTurtle) and BanHammer (can't find his/her name, off hand) seem to be doing the posting that I was seeing.

Slightly tangential: I'm very disappointed with myself for not recognizing Chris Roberts' name before he was formally introduced. I've played all the Wing Commander games, and many of the spinoffs.

[General Idiot]

Its very possible that after NWN launches more of the dev staff at Crpytic can spread around to the other games again. Even if CoH was purchased with only the intention of maintenance mode for a while, I'd personally be ok with that.

Personally if it was up to me and Cryptic managed to get NCSoft to sell CoH, I'd put both games in maintenence mode and work on a CoH 2, or CO 2. Take the best parts from both games, update them a little with lessons learned since both were made, and release one new game that has both worlds in it. After all, they both have interdimensional portals. There's a ready-made reason for them to be able to coexist in one game. :p

[JWBullfrog]

Or - just maybe - he actually cares about something he helped create. No matter how big a jerk someone is, he's still nominally human.

COH was his (and others of course) baby. I cannot think of anybody who would put in that much work on a project and not want it to continue. That would be a bit like Paul McCartney looking at Revolver  and saying "that old bit of rubbish? shred it."

I'm not saying he's mister perfect but he is still human.

[ukaserex]

I realize that there were at least several players that didn't care much for the way Jack handled some things with CoH. However, in retrospect, wasn't ED a good idea?

The problem, as I see it, is the idea of the same studio running two super-hero IPs. As Aggelakis stated, CoH is running some pretty ancient stuff. However, who knows? Maybe if Cryptic can get the IP to CoH, then they can roll out a third title, using CoH as the model.

However, our current reality is still a waiting game. I've a feeling the Missing Worlds Media will get theirs off the ground before anything else happens with the CoH title - but, I hope I'm wrong.

[Blondeshell]

I spent some time with this video tonight and came up with what I think is a pretty accurate transcript of the City of Heroes question and answers. I wasn't quite sure about a couple of Jack's words, so I'm open to suggestions/clarifications there.

-------------------------

Garrett Fuller – MMORPG.com Industry Relations Manager
Jeremy Gaffney – Carbine Studios ("WildStar")
John Peters – Arenanet ("Guild Wars 2")
Jack Emmert – Cryptic Studios ("Neverwinter")
Dave Georgeson – Sony Online ("EverQuest")
Chris Roberts – Roberts Space Industries ("Star Citizen")
Matt Firor – ZeniMax Online ("The Elder Scrolls")

Question: Hi, um, so City of Heroes has come up quite a bit and, uh, interestingly enough, that's the first major dead MMO that I can think of. Um, so I guess this is a little bit of a darker question, but, uh, is this kind of what players need to prepare themselves for? Is this inevitable, and how you guys protect your games, and how far ahead do you plan to keep them around?
Garrett: I don't know.
Dave: They should never die.
Garrett: I'm not saying anything.
Dave: They should never die. I mean, uh, if you continue to develop the game and you continue to feed your fans what they want, and everything like that, you should be able to keep those alive. It's only when something really drastic happens and it's business-oriented that, I mean... City of Heroes shouldn't have died, damn it! That was a great game. [Crowd cheering] And, uh, MMOs are built to last forever. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to play EverQuest in 2000, you know, fifty. It's just a, it's one of those things. Um, so yeah, uh, I mean, that's just, that's my soapbox, but there's, there should be no shelf life on these things.
Jeremy:  So, I was Executive Producer on the NCsoft side for, uh, City of Heroes and then the, and I'm gonna strongly agree. I don't think we should shut down games, almost ever. I mean you look at Brian Green's out there, he's got, what, Gemstone 3 is still alive for God's sake, you know, with, pluggin' away and keeping it with Near Death Studios, which is the best name ever. [Crowd laughter] There's no reason, there's no reason not to keep them alive, or when there are reasons it's on the business side. And so even as an NCsoft employee I'll...
Jack: I'll, I'll tell you what, Jeremy, just tell anybody at NCsoft, pick up the phone, I'm there. Let's [see about] City of Heroes [getting home].
Jeremy: [(unclear)]
Chris: I'll, I mean, I'll say on my side that, you know, I think there are several things that you can do. I mean, obviously it becomes more difficult when you're part of a much bigger company because there's a whole different sort of cost culture which makes the expenses, uh. It's just, you know, you're a big company, you just have more expenses, and therefore your cost of running it in general it's always about, is, uh, the game bringing in enough money to at least cover its, uh, outgoing costs. Uh, but I mean there's some other things you can do, so like we are trying on Star Citizen, we, you know, we did it on Freelancer and have the ability for people to run their own servers and host it. It's not as big as, say, the full system universe, but you'll certainly able to host a server and have, you know, 100, 200 people playing in your universe or world. And in that case, yeah, you know, the game's always gonna be there for you. I mean, and I have to say that Freelancer's a really great example of this. The game shipped in 2003, and there is still a very large and strong active base playing and running their own servers. And Microsoft stopped supporting it essentially in 2003 or four because they were focusing on the xBox, and that was what they really cared about. Uh, but the users have kept Freelancer going, and you can still go there, and go into all the different modding pages, and a lot of them are all in Germany, but there's ones here in the U.S., too. And they're running servers, and there's different servers you can go to. So I think you can provide some tools for, um, your community in a way that maybe they can take on some of the load power, that would definitely help. And the other thing is just figuring out a way that your infrastructure costs are cheap enough that it makes it economically valid to run it. So I think everybody probably on this panel, and I know I am, and I'm pretty sure everyone else is figuring out, "Hey, how can we do this so it's more scalable, we can bring it up and down quickly, you don't have these huge dedicated datacenters that cost us a lot of money." So, you know, I'm definitely looking at sort of more cloud-based, um, solutions in some cases because that allows you to sort of scale them down occasionally. But all those things, and so, but I think definitely that your goal should be this universe should live forever. That's the whole idea of it.
Garrett: Cool. Thanks. That was a tough question, but it was a good one.

[Captain Electric]

Thank you SO much Blondeshell.

I love Chris Roberts, I really do. Huge fan. But when he blurted out and started going on a speel, all I could think about was what Statesman had just said. All I wanted to hear was Statesman continue talking.

I don't think Chris really heard Jack Emmert. If he had, he would have been like, "ORLY?" I think Chris was sitting there thinking about what he wanted to say, and jumped in when he heard the first quiet moment. It's the one moment in my life when I didn't appreciate Chris Roberts.

In some parallel universe, I'm sure you could just hear the record-player needle screech to a halt, and the panel turned to Statesman and asked him to elaborate. And inside that universe, there is little to no doubt about what Jack meant between the lines.

That universe is just a little bit cooler than this one, maybe a lot.

[Thunder Glove]

COH was his (and others of course) baby. I cannot think of anybody who would put in that much work on a project and not want it to continue. That would be a bit like Paul McCartney looking at Revolver  and saying "that old bit of rubbish? shred it."

I'm not saying he's mister perfect but he is still human.

Not only that, but CoH's lore ultimately has its roots in Jack and his friends' tabletop RP sessions.  Statesman is his character and Paragon City is his world in a way that Defender and Millennium City are not (having been created long before CoH ever existed), and he may just want them back.

[Lightslinger]

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,8176.0.html

I've started a Call to Action regarding Jack's comments. In what i'm calling "Phase 1" we are focusing on getting the word out to the press, Cryptic, & NCSoft that we support what Jack said and try to urge this thing along. I need some help in getting Phase 2: Phase Harder ready to launch.

I've never done one of these before so any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

[Maressa]

Finally my article on the panel has gone live! http://www.onrpg.com/MMO/Everquest-Next/news/Looking-to-the-Future-of-MMOs---A-PAX-Panel

Oh, and I watched the video...if you hear someone in the audience cheering when CoH is mentioned that's me. :P I may have been somewhat excited by the question and the answers.

[eabrace]

Looking forward to reading that when I get home (blocked at work - but that doesn't stop me from posting a Titan re-tweet.)

[dwturducken]

I think I recall the excited outcry. :)

So, have you seen what Lightslinger is working on? I'm not gonna run over and out ya, but you might find yourself at the top of his Rolodex. There's a bit of buzz around getting someone like yourself interested in pressing Jack for further thoughts on the matter of CoH, since it appears he had more that he wanted to say before Roberts took the focus to the other side of the lectern.

[Lightslinger]

I think I recall the excited outcry. :)

So, have you seen what Lightslinger is working on? I'm not gonna run over and out ya, but you might find yourself at the top of his Rolodex. There's a bit of buzz around getting someone like yourself interested in pressing Jack for further thoughts on the matter of CoH, since it appears he had more that he wanted to say before Roberts took the focus to the other side of the lectern.

Yep, getting Jack to clarify and hopefully further discuss this is one of the main goals of Bring CoH Home.

[Lily Barclay]

Its very possible that after NWN launches more of the dev staff at Crpytic can spread around to the other games again. Even if CoH was purchased with only the intention of maintenance mode for a while, I'd personally be ok with that.

To be nit picky because this is one of my pet peeves.

NWN= Neverwinter Nights, Bioware's old game

NWO= Neverwinter Online, Cryptic's new title. Also can be abbreviated just NW.

NWN was a great game and all, but it isn't the same one.  ;)