Blog - More on live teams...
Friday, February 8, 2008As an addendum to my entry from early this morning:
Checking back on the Writer's SIG's mailing list, the discussion on live teams in MMOs rages on. Not only has someone who has written for The Matrix Online's live team posted on the email thread, but now someone who was part of Shadowbane's live team as well (also since disbanded.) That person then mentioned that live teams who run events in such a way are an expensive cost that's hard to justify if they're worth it.
And for MMOs, maybe it is. It requires your MMO stay small, and even a small MMO is too big for it to be practical, as is perhaps indicated with the fact that the Matrix Online and Shadowbane's live teams didn't last. (Although as to the note of if it's worth justifying the cost, it was when the Matrix Online was bought out when the live team was disbanded, and coincidentally the same time most of their player base dropped out, from what I understand...)
However, I'd be interested to see the type of game Urban Interactive runs put into virtual 3d space, rather than MMOs. Their game worlds are not persistent, but rather run large amounts of smaller player groups through a smaller game experience. When I did my gig with Urban Interactive, I only saw groups of maybe up to 10 players at a time, but If I remember correctly I saw 400 players overall over the course of that one day. Again, this is still a tiny player base compared to, say, WoW. But Urban Interactive seems to be doing pretty well with the player base they get for their games... games don't all have to be WoW-huge.
In any case, the use of trained improv actors to help players control an interactive story is one that interests me. It allows for a tabletop RPG kind of experience where a real person can help work with the players to control the flow of a game and its story. That which is often lacking in digital games. The main problem really is those major scaling issues...
Labels: improv
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:58 AM
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