All Your History: MMOs Part 2 — Expansions

Throughout the Nineteen Eighties, the technology behind networking became more sophisticated.  Slowly, the ability of one computer to communicate with another shifted away from closed-off, proprietary networks, and towards the modern, open internet.  Of course, the introduction of the internet changed business and culture the world over.  Like everything else, gaming adapted to the new opportunities as well.  Early experiments into a single, shared gamespace, like MUD and Neverwinter Nights, had proven that thousands of people around the world wanted to play together.  In Nineteen Ninety-Five, Meridian 59 brought this philosophy into the open internet, and became a phenomenon with twenty-five thousand paying customers.  Since anybody could access the internet, and the internet was rapidly being adopted globally, the style that Meridian kicked off had limitless potential to expand.  As it happened, the Massively Multiplayer Online genre would reach unparalleled heights by a team that had never worked with multiplayer before.

-Expansions-

Starr Long and Ken Demarest were each playing a lot of multiplayer games, from Merdian 59 to The Realm Online to Doom.  They quickly convinced themselves that social experiences were the future of gaming.  The two guys worked for Origin Systems, the studio founded by the legendary Richard Garriott.  Origin developed the long-running and highly popular Ultima series of role-playing games.  Long and Demarest went to Garriott and argued that the next Ultima should be a multiplayer game, which they called: Multima.  Garriott eventually got on board the idea, realizing that Ultima games had always tried to create a living, breathing world with thousands of characters anyway.  In the Multima project, those characters would now be real people playing together from around the world.

But Origin wasn’t independently owned anymore, and even Garriott would need to get permission from his bosses at Electronic Arts.  The EA executives were… skeptical, to say  the least.  Since Meridian 59, the most successful MMO to date, only had twenty-five thousand customers, EA wasn’t convinced that the Multima project would be worth their time.  While twenty-five thousand players in the same game was amazing from a technical standpoint, the sales paled in comparison to the popular single-player Ultima games.  Still, Garriott managed to wrangle a paltry two hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of EA to make a demo.

By the standards of the late-Nineties, a quarter million wasn’t very much money.  Still, the team was excited about the project, and pressed ahead.  In Nineteen Ninety-Six, Origin quietly put up a website asking if anybody wanted to beta test the project, now called: Ultima Online.  Since the MMO userbase was pretty small, Origin and EA only expected a few hundred testers, or maybe a few thousand if they were lucky.  Instead, within days, fifty thousand people had signed up.  In other words, Ultima Online’s beta would be twice the size of the biggest MMO on the market.  As Richard Garriott later said, “That was the day the future changed.”

The beta that the testers would be playing was one of Origin’s proudest achievements.  The world was huge and in many ways was the closest they’d ever gotten to realizing Garriott’s original vision of another world.  To really drive home the realism of the game, Origin spent a lot of their time and money on something no other game had ever attempted at this scale: a dynamic ecosystem.  In other words, wolves ate sheep, and dragons ate wolves.  If too many sheep died, the wolves would travel farther than usual looking for food, and might attack people.  If too many wolves died, then the dragons would come out of their caves and look for human food, and so forth.

The developers couldn’t wait to see how people reacted, and so they didn’t tell gamers about the feature; they wanted them to discover it for themselves.

But, as would become common for MMOs, player actions utterly flabbergasted the developers.  When the beta went live in Nineteen Ninety-Six, the testers killed everything — sheep, wolves, and dragons alike — so fast that the ecosystem literally ceased to exist before the simulation could even start.  In practically no time at all, there were no sheep, wolves, or dragons — anywhere.  Players who started the beta even a few days late had no idea that they were even part of the game.  Crestfallen, Origin was forced to remove the ambitious and expensive feature from the game, and replace it with a more traditional respawn system.  None of the players complained, because literally none of them even knew the feature was there in the first place.

It was the first in a long line of surprises that awaited the Ultima Online development team.  It turned out that putting a lot of people together created a number of different subcultures and playstyles, many of which were completely out of line with what the gamemakers intended.  The worst of these was player-killing.  Like Lucasfilm Games’ Habitat, Ultima Online allowed players to kill one another and steal their hard-earned equipment.  There were absolutely no limits on this at first, so a high-level player could demolish low-level players at will.  This quickly spiraled out of control, and became a turn-off for newcomers.  Eventually, a separate server was set up that disabled player-killing, and became the default location for new players.

It was all part of UO’s free-form, make-your-own-fun style.  There were no directed quests or specific objectives to achieve; players were just given an open world where they could do whatever they felt like.  And while some people might have liked more structure and direction, in the end, Ultima Online attracted a staggering two hundred and fifty thousand players — ten times as large as Meridian 59.  The massive success of the Massively Multiplayer game took the world by surprise, and the media coverage around it brought the genre as a whole into the mainstream.  And of course, the game ended up hugely profitable for EA.

While developers across North America and Europe took notice, Ultima Online’s best student came from a country that was only just getting online: South Korea.  While home computers were not common in Korea, internet cafes were booming.  These cafes put a bunch of people together in the same room, all with computers.  Not surprisingly, heavily social games soon became very popular in internet cafes around the country.  Korean-made MMOs like Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds quickly took off.  But even with all that in mind, Nineteen Ninety-Eight’s Lineage from local developer NCSoft was totally unexpected.

Despite being made by Koreans for Koreans, Lineage chose to use medieval Europe as its setting.  Gameplay-wise, it was considerably simpler than Ultima Online, which also made it more accessible.  On top of this, it strongly encouraged group play: one of its signature features was sieging a castle, which could only be done with a large group of friends.  In an internet cafe setting, this was incredibly powerful.  If one person needed help, he could ask his friends sitting right next to him.  Soon enough, they’d all be playing, and they’d all be hooked.  And it spread from one cafe to the next.

As later MMOs would learn, popularity in this genre was an exponential thing.  Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds was popoular in Korea, but Lineage became dramatically bigger and sold phenomenal numbers that blew everything else out of the water.  At its peak, having spread throughout Asia and into the US, Lineage topped three million players.

This was absolutely astonishing, so much so that many Western publishers simply thought that NCSoft must be lying about their numbers.  It hurt that Lineage never gained a large following in the West, and its US servers were eventually shut down.  Still, in terms of raw numbers, nothing came close to Lineage for years.

But from a Western perspective, the next juggernaut of the genre came in Nineteen Ninety-Nine with the release of EverQuest from Sony Interactive Studios America, released under their Verant Interactive brand.  On the surface of it, EverQuest seemed just like any other MMORPG: it was set in a sword-and-sorcery world, and it was built around fighting monsters and gathering loot.  However, its developers made the daring decision to require a dedicated 3D graphics card to play it.  At the time, only a few, high-end PCs had dedicated graphics cards.  The fear was that the graphics card requirement would limit the potential market, but the developers believed that it would set their game apart.  Where other games had to rely on stale 2D sprites, EverQuest would look a generation more advanced.

Also, EverQuest had quests.  Go figure.  Unlike the reigning Western champion, Ultima Online, EQ would offer players some more specific objectives to accomplish.  This made for a more directed experience.  That being said, the number of quests was always fairly low, and generally it was still up to players to make their own fun.  But the game as a whole was considered easier and more accessible than Ultima, and coupled with the fact that players could join a server without player-killing, EverQuest was a much more newcomer-friendly experience.

Altogether, EverQuest surpassed Ultima’s subscriber base within a year, and doubled it at its peak.  If Western publishers had feared that Ultima was a fluke, EverQuest’s five hundered thousand players proved beyond the shadow of a doubt the power, and profitability, of the social experience.  That same year, Asheron’s Call released, and while it wasn’t quite as big as EverQuest, it was more than big enough to leave an impact on the market.  With the release and success of Two Thousand One’s Dark Age of Camelot from Mythic Entertainment, the Western MMO market had established itself as one of the most exciting genres in PC gaming.  Its potential seemed limitless.  And of course, in Asia, the future looked even brighter.

Sure enough, in the decade to come the MMO space would see dramatic changes from where Ultima and Lineage had led.  And while other studios would take their basic formula and redefine what was possible with it, a whole new business model would also emerge that would prove forever how much money there is in free.

Tune in next time to see MMOs grow up

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