Games
Tired of online RPGs? So are these guys, so they’re letting you make your own.
Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games [MMOs or MMORPGs] are decades old, but despite new names, players and graphics, the concept hasn't changed much in that time. Most of the big names (World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2) still dump you in the middle of a fantasy world and expect you to team up to hunt for loot, until you max out your level cap.
Citadel Studios want to change that with an unusual twist on the genre: their new game, Shards Online, is an MMO with a difference. Instead of relying on studio-made quests, they're planning on letting players build their own stories instead, as well as run their own world on their own servers, with a player acting as dungeon master who can change the world around them on the fly.
The Washington DC indie studio also has an unusual story. After failing to reach a lofty Kickstarter goal earlier in the year, the team changed their pitch, their approach and tried again, easily cruising through their new target of $50,000, with one more day still to go. To find out more about how Citadel plan to bring Shards Online to life we caught up with the studio’s founder and CEO Derek Brinkmann to find out more.
Hi Derek. How did you get your start in games development?
Brinkmann: I got started 11 years ago: I had an internship with EA to work on Madden. I was a computer science student in upstate New York and that was a really cool opportunity, it got me in the door. After I graduated, I had the chance to come back and so I did. I worked at Tiburon for about two years, on NFL Street 2 and then Madden NFL 06. I enjoy sports games but it wasn’t really my core passion. I've always been an RPG gamer.
I started looking around at other studios in EA to transfer. Ultima Online was hiring so I flew out to San Francisco and had an awesome interview with the guys there. I just fell in love with the team immediately. I worked as a lead UI programmer out there for about a year and a half. We were working on the Kingdom Reborn client, a reboot of the graphics for the game.
It was a fun project with a good group of people, but there was a shuffle. EA had just purchased Mythic Entertainment, the people who had just purchased Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and so they decided to move the entire UO team to the DC area. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse, I had the opportunity to go out there and become a lead engineer. I moved out there with Tom Cotton who’s our creative director, and he became the lead designer on the team. And so that’s where we hit our stride. We worked on the Stygian Abyss expansion, we built it, it’s kind of our baby. That was a nod to the previous Ultima games. That was a lot of fun.
What made you want to go solo?
I always planned to make my own game company, launch my own. The 10 or so years I spent at EA was always training for me to go off and do my own thing. So the timing was right, so that’s when I founded Citadel. Tim had already left Mythic Entertainment previously to when I left, and we had a lot of crazy discussions. One was the concept of giving the players the freedom that the designers had on Ultima Online, giving them the power to create dynamic content.
That was where the core of our idea came from. It was also one of those things where we knew we wanted to make an MMO because we’re really into that kind of game. But we can’t really make a AAA MMO, we just don’t have that kind of funding or resources. We decided, if we leveraged this player run aspect, where the players are running the servers, it takes a lot of the weight off of us as a studio.
Tell us where the idea came from for this game, of the Shards acting as worlds.
It goes back to giving the players the power. There are a lot of MMO emulators out there that allow people to run online games [2002's Final Fantasy XI, for instance, or the Sega Dreamcast's ancient but beloved Phantasy Star Online]. A lot of them are in a legal grey area so to speak, but people really enjoy doing it. A lot of those emulators are for older games too, because it takes a lot of power to emulate an MMO server. What we want to do is bring that to a modern day game that has that freedom built into it and from its very core is made to be run by players. That was one of the driving forces for it.
You failed to reach your first funding target on Kickstarter earlier this year. What do you think you did wrong?
When we launched our first Kickstarter campaign I had never done a single bit of marketing in my life. We’re game devs. We don’t really know how to market it. It’s a very different way to approach getting your message out. As a game developer you’re used to communicating with people who are already excited or already into the idea. That’s very different to talking to someone who’s never heard of it before. It’s a completely different approach. It wasn’t the message that was wrong in the first campaign, it was our approach to the message.
This time round you set a smaller target, and unusually pledged to match the sum raised with your own money. How’s that going to work?
In that introspective phase after the first campaign, one of the things we had to figure out was what do we need to do to get to alpha [The state where the feedback on the actual stability of the game is more key than actual content]. Once the product hits alpha, that’s the point where it’s playable, people can buy a game.
Our first goal, that $320,000, was more like 'This is what we need to finish the game', and that’s not necessarily what you need anymore. Nowadays especially with smaller teams and projects people are really excited about.
You mean that Minecraft or DayZ model where you charge less for alpha access to build up the hype?
Exactly. We tailored this campaign around getting to alpha rather than the final version. The number we came up with was around $100,000 give or take. Basically we said 'Okay, how can we definitely raise this money?' We started out by reaching out to our personal network, literally friends and family. We know they’re going to be behind us and not try and change the direction of the game. And so we were able to secure about $50,000 from them. But we don’t want to ask for their money until we know we have all the money we need to get to alpha.
Unusually for an MMO you're not going to charge a monthly subscription.
We did change the business model quite a bit. One of the things we discovered from the first campaign is that a lot of people are wary of the $15 a month subscription. We were thinking around $8-$10 per month but we couldn't tell people what we wanted to charge because we weren't ready to commit to it yet. We just figured we’d clean up the message and say there is no subscription. If you want to play the game, you buy it, you got it. The first question that pops up is 'How do you pay for your servers?' and so we have a plan for delivering additional content packs. It's a strategy that worked very well for the original Guild Wars, where they sold the game and pretty regularly released expansion packs.
You say the game is a cross between Ultima Online and Neverwinter Nights. What elements does it draw from each?
Ultima Online had the persistent world nailed down to the letter. What they did was create a world simulation and just let things happen in that.
Like the assassination of Lord British? [A legendary moment in MMO history when players found out how to kill the game's most powerful non-player character or NPC. He was supposed to be unkillable. He was not.]
Yeah, so that's pretty famous. It’s part of that whole world as a simulation thing. They just forgot to flag something and it caused that to happen. That kind of stuff happens all the time. If you go and you talk to people who have fond memories of Ultima Online almost all the time their fond memories come from something the developers had no intention of happening in the game. That kind of emergent gameplay is absolutely awesome, that’s the stuff that makes memories. Doing quest X and going to fetch 10 batwings is not going to give you a memorable experience.
We’re going after that kind of game that creates these memories. In recent days DayZ and Rust are two examples of games that have managed to pull it off. I have a lot of respect for those games, that’s kind of the direction we’re going. Not just the permadeath side, though we will have an option to play permadeath rules.
Neverwinter Nights meanwhile had unparalleled customisability for an RPG. Being able to create your own servers, acting as dungeon master where you can affect player experiences in real time. That's the part we’re really going for. We have this really crazy system that admins can use to empower other users to not only moderate the servers but also create content on the fly.
The easiest example of that is our possession ability. It’s going to be absolutely awesome. Say for example a bunch of players are in town and you see them. You jump into one of the local NPCs in town and run up to them and say 'Help, help my house is under siege by wolves!'. You can actually take them to your house and you show them these wolves. You’ve created this whole thing on the fly, it’s a one time experience that only those players ever got to experience. Someone could jump into a dragon, all of a sudden this AI controlled dragon just got really smart. Possession power alone opens up so many doors for this concept of live content.
Are there any plans to expand from PC? Could we ever see it on consoles?
I think it would be a really interesting console game. Our decision to go with one platform is based on our resources. We really want to expand onto Mac and Linux. The reason why we can’t commit to those right now is our server is built for the PC platform. Consoles would be really cool and I think that’s something way down the line – Minecraft is a good example... I’d love to see that.
You've already smashed your target this time round. What will extra Kickstarter funds be used for?
We’ve decided this $50,000 will get us alpha. Anything extra will get you more stuff in alpha. We’re just going to cram more good stuff into our alpha build. We’ve started with the most requested things, which is kind of funny as they’re not what you’d expect. Our first stretch goal is emotes and animations, extra actions that you can do like clap, bow or cheer.
Two others that might seem obvious for roleplayers but not for everyone else, are sitting in chairs and laying down on beds. Almost every single player RPG gives you those abilities but very few MMO games do. Roleplayers hate it. So our first goal was really squarely targeting those roleplayers.
The second one which was our $70k goal was fishing and cooking. It’s one of those things that seem silly but we constantly got that question – will you be able to fish? People just love fishing in online games.
In a way, it sounds like the game could play out a lot like Second Life.
Second Life is a strange beast. There’s such a range of people who play that I’d say it’s hard to call it a game, it’s a virtual world. There’s a lot of roleplayers in Second Life and it’s because they have a lot of freedom. So for those people, for sure. One of our rewards is the Founders Only shard. Everyone who pledges $5 and up is considered a founder and has access to a special shard, or zone, a floating piece of land. One of them is like a VIP club and it’s a crystal floating in space, inspired by Douglas Adams’ restaurant at the end of universe. It’s a place really only for social purposes to talk to other people. There’s much more to the game than hunting monsters. The Shards Online Kickstarter campaign ends tomorrow.
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