Pathfinder Online is likely to be an extraordinarily special game environment. My confidence in this is based upon some of the following elements of the Goblinworks narrative:
• Principals: Lisa, Ryan, Mark. These principals bring a proven record of leadership, success, and experience with some of the greatest outfits in gaming history – White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, CCP, Cryptic Studios, Paizo Publishing, and others. Although they are smart business people, more importantly they are committed to quality in their game products. We recognize them as gamers that care like you and me. Their integrity resonates with us. Unlike the faceless corporate entities such as Hasbro and EA, we want these people to succeed.
• Partnership: The Goblinworks partnership with the booming Paizo Publishing provides the new team an incubator for establishing their venture on solid footing and a license to vast volumes of quality content and the intellectual inheritance of decades of D&D game development.
• Community: There is an established customer base in the Pathfinder product line and the fans of the prior works of the principal goblins - Lisa, Ryan and Mark. Pathfinder has captured the hearts and minds of the Dungeons & Dragons community. The zeal and loyalty of the customers provide Goblinworks a built-in set of raving fans.
• Strategy: The plans to grow this game in a measured manner will help contain the development, managed costs, and rise of the game in a profitable manner similar to the amazing history of CCP’s Eve Online which is one of the first, best, and continuously successful MMO’s since 2003. This strategy will help maintain the game’s design integrity by avoiding the financial pressures of having to provide return on investment to equity partners eager for short-term gain. Game design is art. Game communities are people. The Goblinworks growth strategy provides the maximum opportunity to care about their art and their people while still providing financial success for a more intimate group of investors.
• Outsourcing: The plans to license middleware and a base of established code on which this new game will be built is immensely sensible. There is no cause to recreate the wheel. This buy-over-build strategy enables Goblinworks to accelerate their development efforts and focus on the code that is strategic to Pathfinder Online.
• Design: Although, I’ve listed this point last. It is the most significant component to the Goblinworks secret sauce. They are distilling the best elements of other modern MMO design. In some cases these design concepts have been highly refined in existing games. There are strengths and weaknesses to games such as Pathfinder, World of Warcraft, and EVE Online. Goblinworks is bringing the best elements and fresh thought to avoiding the weaknesses of these systems. Some of the key design concepts include:
o hybrid sandbox/theme park-style MMO
o robust trading ecosystem and player driven world economy
o scaling social organizations scale from small groups to player nations
o persistence and immersion
o grief intolerance and philosophy of fun
o sophisticated progression and real time skill development
o PvE and PvP with meaning – fighting for your player controlled territory and for the protection and development of your player built resources brings an amazing dynamism to PvP conflict
I have a one question that I’d like to put forward to this community in support of Pathfinder Online. How do we avoid developing the worst of the social behaviors found in some other games?
For example, I love the sophistication and player driven content of the EVE Online game. In the EVE sandbox, we develop coalitions of thousands of players internationally in the pursuit of empires. In EVE, a player makes their own mark in a manner that can have lasting impact on the game. Individual players can become global celebrities for their in-game influence.
On the other hand, EVE also has attracted or developed a player community that manifests some of the worst of human behavior. The game’s gender imbalance is extreme. Racism, sexism, homophobia, pornography, viscous online bullying, manipulation, fraud, metagaming, cheating, boting, and unsanctioned real money trading are common. It is impossible to find any significant alliance in the game where you are not consistently exposed to these behaviors. In some of the game’s most influential alliances, player credibility is established on the quantity of tears you have caused for other players. All of the game’s major alliances routinely cheat through the use of vast bot mining operations. This cultural phenomenon has become endemic in the game’s player community.
Some of this culture is fostered by the dark future and space pirate aesthetic of the game. Some of this culture seems to be derived from CCP’s failure to control the game’s security and police policy abuse. Some of the game’s designs such as the margin trading mechanics contribute to the problem by enabling in-game fraud.
I’m hoping that Pathfinder Online will grow a player community that is less regressive on the scale of social progressiveness, gender balanced, and definitively less corrupt than what we see in EVE.
What are your thoughts on this?
