Colossal Studios Interview

MMORPG.com has published a short interview with Colossal Studios’ James Moffet about the content outsourcing they do for massively multiplayer titles, as well as the MMORPG industry as a whole. Here’s a bit to get you started:

Q: As someone working in the MMO-genre, but without a project, you can offer us a unique perspective. What do you think about the current crop of MMORPGs and those coming down the pipe? What is good? What is bad? What is missing?

A: What is good? Graphics. Graphics just keep getting better (at least for some).
What is bad: Instanced game play (personal preference).
What is missing? Innovation!

/rant on.

I see a lot of games in development but with very little innovation (there are some, but they are few and far between). The art changes, the story changes (or does it?), however the game mechanics and features change only slightly. For those people who have been playing MMOs since the Ultima days, most of these new titles are going to be extremely boring.

Since MMOs are expensive to build and extremely high risk in terms of gaining market share, we are seeing a plethora of low risk, high profile licenses that provide the same basic MMO features as all the others, but with slight differences to combat, questing, etc. These are games designed to make a whole bunch of money in the first six months based on the hype provided by the license.

Luckily, the number of people who play MMOs is constantly expanding with new kids coming of age, college kids graduating and now having disposable income, broadband becoming more available, etc.; such that these new games will appear exciting and new to people who have never played MMOs before.

Another trend I see is the consolidation of the industry by the console manufacturers. Right now MMOs are hosted primarily on personal computers. However, I think that you will see MMOs moving away from the PC and migrating to the next generation consoles (for grins, go to your local EB and see how many PC games are available). This may have the side effect of virtually eliminating MMO development by independent studios which historically provide innovation.

But all is not lost. My crystal ball suggests that innovation will continue to surface out of the independent developers for PC. Know however, that once the (next big thing) is developed, it will be copied by the giants, over-hyped, and replicated ad nauseam until the cycle repeats again and again. It’s the pioneer you find dead by the side of the trail with arrows in their back.

/rant off