Hardcore
Gamespy ran a nice piece on hardcore gamers. This is pretty relevant to WWIIOL in that we have a lot of grognards. Grognards to me are a lot like hardcore gamers but they are specific about the games they play. In reading the article I think all of the participants missed the boat in defining the hardcore games as someone who buys a lot more games than everyone else instead of realizing that hardcore gamers play a lot more than anyone else, even if they play only a few games each year. This oversight is probably because no one asked was speaking from a MMO view point, although Bioware did throw this out:
Anyway, read the article. I really like the flavor from the different departments.
Managment says "I don't really understand much of this so here's the comapny line, hardcore am good, dem buy stuff and dem talk stuff".
Marketing says "Not enough hardcore gamers to matter" which should read "Harcore gamers are a cynical bunch who never fall for my marketing tripe".
Developers say "Harcore are a great sounding board but don't let them run your design". Developers tend to be a pretty smart bunch.
Media says "..." Ok, I already forgot what the meda guy said. Probably what the Managment guy said only backwards (add a fnord or two in there to boot as media guys are, like, all hip and cool and junk).
Huh, well maybe you don't need to read it after all. Nah, go on, Greg and Ray are freaking brilliant any way you slice them.
Link
Ray Muzyka: ... relevant to BioWare's types of games -- RPGs and MMOs, "I don't seem to recall playing a Bioware MMO..hmm...you? Well, OK, they did recently open a studio in Austin and they did hire my all time hero Rich Vogel. His Production presentation at AGDC is probably the highlight of my year. Those cats are gonna be up to something amazing I have no doubt.
Anyway, read the article. I really like the flavor from the different departments.
Managment says "I don't really understand much of this so here's the comapny line, hardcore am good, dem buy stuff and dem talk stuff".
Marketing says "Not enough hardcore gamers to matter" which should read "Harcore gamers are a cynical bunch who never fall for my marketing tripe".
Developers say "Harcore are a great sounding board but don't let them run your design". Developers tend to be a pretty smart bunch.
Media says "..." Ok, I already forgot what the meda guy said. Probably what the Managment guy said only backwards (add a fnord or two in there to boot as media guys are, like, all hip and cool and junk).
Huh, well maybe you don't need to read it after all. Nah, go on, Greg and Ray are freaking brilliant any way you slice them.
Link
9 Comments:
There are a huge number of persistant worlds that players run for Neverwinter Nights. They operate them just like the regular MMORPGs, although I believe the limit is 64 players per host. However, worlds link together several hosts for hundreds of players in their world at the same time (although still with a limit of 64 in any given area of that world). This is the closest thing to a Bioware MMORPG that I know of.
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Hmmmm...a definition of "grognard" that doesn't have at its center a concern for valid treatment of history?
Wow...that's quite a shift from the definition back in the boardgame days. Sure, grognards always bought lots of games and played a lot, but that was just a manifestation of their historical-simulation fixation.
Maybe not too many current game developers are old enough to have once been boardgame developers and lived that history, eh? 8^)
Or maybe I'm remembering wrong... must be the advancing age. 8^)
Anyway...it's certainly not what the commenters were referring to. They don't need history. They don't even conceptualize history as relevant to their development work, because their customers don't. In some ways, that must be easy mode.
I ran an NWN hub world. Basically a city that had at anytime between 10 and 30 modules linked off of it. You could go to any of them and return to the hub, though only one module would be active at any one time. I think that's why I just didn't get into DDO. I can already play that game really.
You're right J. Doing a game where your IP is fictional and not historical would seem to be way easier.
So are the additional design-constraints and workload created by a project commitment to a particular degree of historical validity justified by the extent to which the resulting product is perceived by grognard-customers to not have any significant competitors and therefore is strongly appealing to them retention-wise, compared to a "normal" RPG/shooter/fantasy-oriented game project that would not have those grognard customers and would have to retain "normal" customers who see it as having many more competitors?
Tough to quantify really. There are a lot of outside variables to measure success. We can say that the grognard devotion to the game and genre is readily apparent in that year 1 players still playing represent the second largest group of players with players of less than a year being bigger, which is to be expected. On the other hand, grognards are a fairly small group in comparison to the overall gaming market and present very similar issues as the hardcore gamer as explored in the article.
You know, I still haven't finished kicking myself for not applying for that job since they opened the Austin office and what one of the guys said about the result of that job hunt. They're even looking at hiring a bunch of them for off-site work.
*sigh*
Intersting that 'grognard' seems to be the idiom for 'subset of game players that the (majority) doesn't quite understand'.
Like jwilly said, grognards used to be (in the board wargame world) the guys who would sit and argue for hours over the button colors on the 1809 Austrian 'Homburg-Hesse' cavalry regiment while the rest of us just played the game.
Now apparently grognard merely means 'hardcore' dedicated player?
Generally I see it to be used in the sense of 'someone who knows an admirable amount about the minutae of [the game], but who seems to take [the game] to an excessive level of obsession' to offer a more generic definition...
-Styopa
I think you got it in one Sty.
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