Archive for March, 2009
Artifacts of roleplaying: the Marvel Super Heroes City Map
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Personal, Roleplaying on March 27th, 2009
Roleplayers put a lot of stock in maps.
Maps can fire the imagination, make you see worlds in a way that description can’t. A good map of a fantasy world can supercharge your play experience, and take you into that world better than anything else. I think there’s a reason why the most popular request for Collector’s Edition items in MMOGs was always “a cloth map”.
Not all maps are of fantasy locations, however, and the map that made the greatest impression on my mind as a roleplaying teenager was this:
The city map as seen in the original ‘yellow box’ of Marvel Super Heroes, from TSR in 1984.
No single item (with the probable exception of the map that came in the Advanced Set, two years later) had more of a jumpstart on my gaming than this map. I played endlessly on this thing, generating plotlines simply based off the names on the buildings. It came alone in the box, with no explanation, no attempt to define everything you’d find on it; in other words, your imagination was allowed to run wild.
Looking at it brings back waves of nostalgia, to be sure, but also two definite urges: one, to use it again; and two, to create something similar for myself, even if my illustration knowledge is minimal. Let’s see what I can do….
Methods and madness
Posted by Rockjaw in Community, MMO-related on March 20th, 2009
Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.
Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.
I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control.
That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.
If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.
Variety gives me a gazil – okay, four more thoughts on Gazillion
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others, MMO-related, Press on March 19th, 2009
While most of the gaming press pretty much shrugged and moved on regarding Gazillion (or in the case of some blogs, sneered – but hey, that’s what blogs usually do) Ben Fritz at Variety* did that crazy ‘journalism’ thing and got the right people on the phone to comment.
In the process, he discovered a whole bunch of new facts which are very interesting, and led me to some more thoughts. You absolutely should read the article, but I’ll pull out some corkers here:
1. Gazillion has eight ‘projects’ in the works.
Four we know about (LEGO Universe, Marvel Super Hero Squad, Marvel Universe, Slipgate Ironworks’ MMO) but that leaves four more they’re keeping under wraps. That’s pretty huge. Again to give you context, while at NCsoft there were usually half-a-dozen or more MMO projects in various stages of development in Korea, it was rare any of them were made public.
Right now, again by comparison, NCsoft has four MMOs in development that you know about (Guild Wars 2, Aion: The Tower of Eternity, Carbine Studios’ MMO, Blade & Soul) but I guarantee you more are under wraps.
Still, of those projects you’re aware of, some have been in development since 2005, and hey, you’ve known about others since 2006. With Gazillion’s announcement and lots of speculation that they’re releasing Marvel Super Hero Squad in 2010, they’re already ahead of the game. I have a sneaking suspicion other publishers may try to follow this ‘late breaking’ approach in future.
The new 800lb gorilla: Gazillion
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related on March 17th, 2009
If I had cornflakes to choke on, I might have done just that this morning. Big, big news:
Online game startup Gazillion Entertainment is announcing today a major partnership with comic book king Marvel Entertainment to build a series of online game worlds with Marvel’s comic book characters.
The first game is a kid-oriented online world based on brand-new Marvel property Super Hero Squad. This show for kids will debut on the Cartoon Network in the fall and the game will debut sometime in 2010. Gazillion, based in San Mateo, Calif., has already been working on it for a year.
Heretofore unknown, Gazillion is unveiling itself as one of the most ambitious game startups in the world. It has 300 employees and is squarely focused as a pure play company developing online game worlds for the mass market, with game projects based on Marvel, LEGO, and its own original properties.
Why is this big? Hmm, well, how about this:
- Gazillion owns, outright, four development studios including NetDevil, Slipgate Ironworks, Gargantuan and The Amazing Society
- They have a 10-year deal with Marvel to produce “any number of games” based on their characters
- They already have a casual, browser-based Marvel game in production (at The Amazing Society)
- They already have Marvel Universe in production (at Gargantuan)
- They have LEGO Universe (at NetDevil)
- They have a John Romero-created MMO (at Slipgate Ironworks)
- They’re VC-funded… there’s no Marvel money flowing in here
- Did I mention they have 300 employees already? (Comparison: NCsoft Europe had about 150 at peak; NCI had just over 400 at one point I believe.)
In other words, it’s sort of like, say, Atari announcing “Oh by the way, we bought Cryptic, Flagship, Red 5 and 38 Studios in the last four years. We just didn’t think to mention it until now.”
You said what?