Craig Morrison on success and failure

by Jef Reahard Sep 27th 2010 at 11:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, MMO industry, Warhammer Online, News items, Opinion

Last week's Craig Morrison blog topic brought a wave of interesting comments from readers and writers alike, illustrating why MMO number-crunching is always a hot-button issue. The Age of Conan game director takes another crack at a controversial topic with his followup post, and attempts to deconstruct the logic of fans who insist on labeling games "successes" or "failures" despite not having the information necessary to make such a judgment.

"Whether any title that displays a numbers trend similar to another can be deemed a success or a failure depends entirely on the budget, ambition and infrastructure of the project," he writes. While that's common sense to most folks, there are still some who insist that AoC and Warhammer are "failures" despite the fact that they remain open for business and profitable. Morrison acknowledges that both titles fell short of their ultimate subscriber goals, but also cautioned that equating lower-than-desired numbers to failure "is a very dangerous assumption to make."

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, blog, craig-morrison, dev-blog, failure, fan-logic, funcom, mmo-numbers, opinion, silirrion, success, Warhammer, Warhammer-Online

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Age of Conan's Morrison talks progression, design

by Jef Reahard Oct 20th 2010 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, MMO industry, News items, Opinion

Armchair designers of the world, take note. If you've ever wanted a peek inside the mind of an MMORPG developer, Craig Morrison's latest personal blog entry might be right up your alley. The Funcom executive and current Age of Conan boss has posted a lengthy look at his thoughts on massive design, and more specifically, progression.

Morrison examines progression versus entertainment, and goes on to contrast the need for the former with the desire for storytelling. He also touches on the vast array of player motivations, ultimately concluding that while "progression, and the need for it, is a bedrock of the expected player experience," future MMO designers should be mindful of the differences between what they want the player to do and what the player wants to do.

Clearly, there is no easy answer to the question of how does one design a good MMORPG. After all, one gamer's soul-sucking grind of death and despair is another's relaxing evening at home. That said, Morrison's perspective illuminates at least one line of developer thinking and is worthy of a read-through whether you're a dev, a player, or both.

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, blog, craig-morrison, design, funcom, leveling, mmo-design, mmo-development, opinion, personal-blog, progression, silirrion

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Age of Conan's Morrison on designing for challenge and accessibility

by Jef Reahard Nov 1st 2010 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, News items, Opinion

Funcom executive producer Craig Morrison is drawing on his game journalist roots of late, via a series of in-depth postings on his personal blog. Morrison, a former IGN editor prior to his Funcom days, has a lot to say about gaming trends, which is great news for industry watchers and anyone interested in occasional glimpses into the thought process of an MMO developer. In his latest opus, the former Anarchy Online (and current Age of Conan) game director discusses the challenges in developing, well, challenge.

In a followup post to his earlier discussion on progression, Morrison talks at length about the decisions developers face when it comes to providing players with a steady diet of dings and digital pats on the back, while simultaneously making it seem like something worthwhile is being accomplished. The post contains a number of interesting observations, among them the notion that most modern MMORPGs parcel out their challenging content in sideshows that are entirely optional (raids, dungeons, etc.) and, in many cases, tangential to the main event (questing and hunting).

While it would seem to be a relatively simple matter to add occasional challenges to the leveling treadmill, Morrison cautions that care is needed to avoid alienating segments of your playerbase. "If you are going to be able to inject occasional challenge or difficulty spikes into the standard progression as well, you need to have thought about it to make sure that it won't become a bottleneck, and that it will survive a review," he says.

Tags: accessibility, age-of-conan, anarchy-online, blog, challenge, craig-morrison, dev-blog, developers, difficulty, funcom, game-development, learning-curve, silirrion

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Age of Conan's Morrison talks tech upgrades

by Jef Reahard Oct 29th 2010 at 7:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, MMO industry, News items

Age of Conan's Craig Morrison is back with his latest monthly development update. The October edition is very tech-heavy, with a lot of emphasis on the tweaks and additions that Funcom engineers have been making to the game's Dreamworld engine. While a lot of the details may go unnoticed to your average player, the goal is to continue improving the game's performance as well as add tools to further content creation down the road.

Of particular note are the additions of Lua scripting capability (to facilitate dynamic events), improvements to the game's collision detection (and the implementation of nVidia PhysX), and tweaks to both DX9 and DX10 clients.

Morrison also confirms that Guardians will be the next class to receive a substantial update. He also clarifies the upcoming PvP minigame changes. Check out all the details on the official forums.

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, collision-detection, craig-morrison, development-update, Dreamworld, dreamworld-engine, funcom, lua, lua-scripting, nvidia-physx, technology-upgrade

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Craig Morrison on success and failure

by Jef Reahard Sep 27th 2010 at 11:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, MMO industry, Warhammer Online, News items, Opinion

Last week's Craig Morrison blog topic brought a wave of interesting comments from readers and writers alike, illustrating why MMO number-crunching is always a hot-button issue. The Age of Conan game director takes another crack at a controversial topic with his followup post, and attempts to deconstruct the logic of fans who insist on labeling games "successes" or "failures" despite not having the information necessary to make such a judgment.

"Whether any title that displays a numbers trend similar to another can be deemed a success or a failure depends entirely on the budget, ambition and infrastructure of the project," he writes. While that's common sense to most folks, there are still some who insist that AoC and Warhammer are "failures" despite the fact that they remain open for business and profitable. Morrison acknowledges that both titles fell short of their ultimate subscriber goals, but also cautioned that equating lower-than-desired numbers to failure "is a very dangerous assumption to make."

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, blog, craig-morrison, dev-blog, failure, fan-logic, funcom, mmo-numbers, opinion, silirrion, success, Warhammer, Warhammer-Online

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Craig Morrison talks MMO numbers (or the lack thereof)

by Jef Reahard Sep 23rd 2010 at 3:00PM

Filed under: Age of Conan, MMO industry, News items, Opinion

Ah, the numbers game. It's often quite comical when it comes to MMORPGs and their die-hard fans (or detractors, as the case may be). Aside from Blizzard, very few MMO development houses release real numbers relating to their playerbases, and forum jousters are thus relegated to citing guesstimates and, in most cases, pure supposition sprung from the likes of wildly inaccurate measuring tools such as Xfire or the late MMOGchart.

Funcom executive producer and Age of Conan game director Craig Morrison weighs in on the perplexing state of MMO number-crunching on his personal blog, offering a bit of insight as to why hard data is, well, hard to come by. He cites a lack of context for the near-universal reticence of developers when it comes to publicizing their community sizes. "Without standard definitions everything ends up in that vague, murky and entirely subjective middle ground... and a middle ground that very few could reasonably be expected to accept as being worthwhile exploring in a business sense," he writes.

So what's his solution? In broad terms, he mentions a rating system, citing television's Nielsen metrics as well as cinema box office figures as semi-comparable standards. While such a system probably wouldn't stop the endless fan bickering, it might at least provide an answer to the question of how each individual company defines success.

Tags: age-of-conan, blog, craig-morrison, forum-warriors, funcom, numbers, numbers-game, opinion, ratings, subscription-numbers, subscriptions, success, xfire-is-not-accurate

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