In the early 70's, some clever chap programmed a pile of circuits to create a primitive game we all know as Pong. Fast-forward some forty years down the line and we're now battling Orcs in Azeroth and flying spaceships in the far-reaches of another galaxy. An entire games industry has erupted from those first simple arcade systems, with people designing and programming games for kids and adults alike. In the 90's, the first generation of kids that grew up with those early game systems became the ones making them and a virtual renaissance in game design ensued. Those kids that grew up wishing they could make their own games started to realise their dreams and the games industry as we know it came forth. More recently, the people that grew up with early MMOs have begun to hit the games industry and we're seeing a rebirth of the genre.

In this article, I look at the games industry explosion and how it relates to the generations growing up with games. I ask whether the MMO genre is headed for its own great gaming renaissance and take a speculative look ahead at the future for MMOs and the games industry as a whole.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the development budgets of new MMOs. To stay ahead of the technological curve, a large portion of the budget invariably goes toward the graphics department. Studios produce impressive graphics engines and mountains of art assets in an effort to make their game one of the most visually impressive out there. Amidst all the fuss over graphics and gameplay, audio is often overlooked and underfunded. It's been shown that good music and sound effects can have a significant impact on the perceived quality of a game. This is something that some development studios recognise and support but many continue to neglect this vital part of the gaming experience.

In this article, I examine the importance of good audio in an MMO and explain the underlying psychology involved.

From movies and books to computer games, the concept of the sequel is firmly embedded in the entertainment industry. It's usually a much safer bet to make a new part to an existing successful intellectual property than it is to back an untested product. In the games industry, sequels are a great way to make more money from the same game concept but as usual MMOs have proven to be something of a different animal. Subscription MMOs don't conform to the same rules as non-subscription games, favouring recurring orders and longer-term customer commitment over single purchases. While development studios often take sequels for granted, I'm forced to ask whether MMOs should have sequels at all or if a different paradigm is more appropriate.

In this article, I explore the games industry's obsession with repetition as I ask the question "Should MMOs have sequels?"

When EVE Online's Trinity expansion was deployed in 2007, it brought with it a drastic difference in graphical quality, but the Premium Graphics engine initially only rendered ships and space stations. Premium Graphics as of next month's expansion will complete CCP's across-the-board overhaul of the game's look. Among those numerous graphical enhancements coming to EVE Online in the forthcoming Apocrypha expansion is something that will come as good news to players who enjoy mining: new asteroid belts. EVE developer CCP VanishingPoint writes in his "Miners Rejoice!" dev blog, "The asteroids are getting a facelift. Better than that actually, the asteroids are now going to communicate their value through brilliant graphical treatments."

His blog explains how Team Hot Rocks created the new asteroid and ice belts for Apocrypha. The days of seeing round, floating rocks in identical belt after belt are nearly over. The new asteroids will have unique looks for each type of ore they're comprised of. In addition, they'll be in the form of shards with many different meshes, and will typically appear to be shattered fragments of larger objects. If you're an industry-type and spend a fair amount of your EVE time mining, you'll definitely want to see CCP VanishingPoint's dev blog "Miners Rejoice!" and its explanation of what you'll get on March 10th in the Apocrypha expansion.

The starbase exploit has been some big news lately. How does it impact your ability to assess the state of EVE's economy, and are there assumptions you've made in the past that you need to reassess now?

It's a good thing that you mentioned the starbase exploit because we are in the final stages of creating a very thorough dev blog on that, which will hopefully be published very soon. [Note: this interview was conducted just prior to the release of the investigation's findings.]

There are certain things with the POS exploit that made it very difficult to detect. You basically needed to be able to go to that particular starbase and look at it, look at the setup and so on. It was difficult for us to detect it otherwise, except from the code once we knew what we were looking for.

From a market perspective the EVE economy has become so big that in order for you to impact the market you will really have to have large quantities. And as will be shown in this dev blog that will be published, the scale of the exploit really didn't start until late 2008... to the large industrial scale so that it started to impact the market.

For many players of massively multiplayer online titles, the crafting side of these games is especially appealing. Quite a number of EVE Online's players are drawn to the crafting side of this particular sci-fi MMO, and those in large corporations and alliances have learned how their collective efforts can allow them to produce vast quantities of items and reap equally vast sums of ISK.

EVE's crafting system is also very much the backbone of the game. Almost every ship and module used by players in the game was created by another player. Those who are into the combat aspects of the game are reliant upon the producers to supply their tools of destruction, and that destruction in turn creates demand (and fuels profits) for EVE's industrialists. It's an interesting bit of symbiosis (despite that animosity towards those on the other side of the fence) that keeps New Eden thriving.

One of the long standing traditions of the industry has been to look at MMOs from the perspective of every other game on the market. We treat our online worlds the same as we treat our single-player experiences, which means we seem to forget that the customer still exists after they have picked up the game and are now sitting down to play it.

In a traditional "selling boxes" industry, where people can get away with selling a game and have that be the end of it, MMOs walk the path of a service rather than a product. Getting a user to buy the game isn't the goal, it's the beginning of the process. And to that end, one deparment can make or break a user's experiences with a game when troubles begin to come down the line -- customer service.

Adam over at T=Machine has written an amazingly in-depth piece on why the MMO industry needs to change up their approach to this neglected department and how good customer service is basically an open path to free word-of-mouth marketing. It takes a great analysis of the current approach and remodifies it to better handle the service model of selling a game rather than the box pushing model. It's a long post, but close to mandatory reading if you're interested in the theory of business

EA has made another move in what looks like an overall strategy to ramp up its MMO efforts by acquiring J2M, a South Korean game development studio known for making top notch free-to-play MMOs for the Asian market. The company is 50 employees strong, so it has the potential to crank out some quality products.

Just what will those products be? Your guess is as good as ours. EA Asia president Jon Niermann was quoted saying that the studio will work on both "new properties and powerful EA franchises." This is not the first time EA has set up shop in Korea. Back in January the company announced plans to open a studio there to work on online versions of the NBA Street and Battlefield franchises.

Add that to the big western MMO products from the company (Warhammer Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic), and it looks like EA is pretty keen on the genre these days.

EVE Online's newest expansion, Quantum Rise, has almost arrived. EVE dev CCP Navigator writes: "The EVE Online: Quantum Rise patch will be deployed this Tuesday, 11th November. Tranquility will be down from 02:00 to 20:00 GMT. The downtime will affect the forums which will be unavailable for part of the time." The patch notes are up and are definitely worth taking a look at, as they do spell out some major changes for EVE Online.

The breadth of the changes are, quite frankly, beyond the scope of any post we could make at Massively, and we suggest you head straight to the source. As the post title implies, the Quantum Rise patch notes should have publishing rights associated with them, perhaps released as a trilogy. Sequels to the patch notes will be shown on the Quantum Rise patch notes page in green text, as CCP Games updates or revises what's currently posted. If you're one of EVE's industrialists who are looking forward to this expansion with some degree of fervor, you'll want to settle in with some hot chocolate and your copy of the Quantum Rise patch notes, and perhaps discuss the changes on the related forum thread.

The feature page for the forthcoming EVE Online expansion, Quantum Rise, is now live. The ninth free expansion for EVE will officially launch on November 11th, and brings with it some new features we've been reporting on in recent weeks, such as the long-awaited Orca and industrial ship changes, not to mention the guaranteed-to-spark-forum-rage speed rebalancing, and alchemy -- which is invention applied to minerals used in Tech II manufacturing.

According to the Quantum Rise expansion's feature page, there are also some previously unmentioned features like new additions to the RealX in-game soundtrack, new stargates, a host of improvements for industry players like assembly array upgrades, ammunition cost changes (namely for bombs), and a more flexible user interface. See the new Quantum Rise features page for more on what's in store for EVE Online players in the expansion geared towards the game's industrialists.

[Via Winterblink]

While the official EVE Online forums have always been very active, there are other options out there. For those who like how busy the official forums are, but not the rules that govern it, there's Scrapheap Challenge. SH-C is a forum which is chiefly dedicated to discussing EVE Online, but not moderated by CCP Games themselves. Recent months, however, have seen a large number of EVE players striking out on their own, with their own blogs that focus on a particular aspect of the game linked to that blogger's playstyle. Industry, finance, piracy, 0.0 alliance warfare, and now even boosters (drugs) are being written about on a daily basis.

While over 100 of these blogs are out there, the more prolific among them have joined under the banner of CrazyKinux's Blog Pack. By all accounts, it's been a successful community effort by EVE players, and now CrazyKinux is adding another dimension to the Blog Pack: conversation topics that are collectively tackled by the various bloggers, called "Blog Banter." The first Blog Banter got underway this past week, and the first issue up for discussion has been a timely one: EVE's Walking in Stations expansion, formerly known as Ambulation, which Fanfest attendees will get to try out firsthand in just a few more days. The question itself was proposed by PsycheDiver, who asked, "Ambulation: What are your hopes for your avatar and new functionality of stations?"

Much of what's written about EVE Online focuses on the darker aspects of the game. It's not surprising, as those topics are often the ones most interesting to players and non-players alike, but EVE has a very deep industrial side to it as well. It's a side that gets much less fanfare; R&D (invention), manufacturing, trading, and investment are all possible within the game and occur in tandem with EVE's more violent pursuits. Most every ship, after all, has been manufactured and sold (or re-sold) by another player. Those who engage in EVE's industry on a serious level often come into conflict with rival corporations and alliances in wars played out on the market, which sometimes spill into formal war declarations and combat. But if you're not interested in or inept at PvP, what are EVE's industrialists to do?

While an industrialist may not be well-versed in the art of war, he or she can play to their own strength: financial influence. EVE has a number of merc corps who are willing to solve problems, be it through armed escorts in hostile space or simply obliterating your opposition... assuming you can meet their price. Benilopax, of Warp Drive Active: Industry podcast fame and an E-ON contributor, relates his experience with contracting mercenaries to solve such problems, in what he refers to as 'the dark side of industrialism'. "There is a growing use of mercenaries by industrial entities to either take out the competition or keep them from easily making a profit," Benilopax writes for EVE Tribune. If you're interested in knowing a bit more about this side of the game, start with Benilopax's article (and A-Team reference) to see what it's like to deal with mercenaries in EVE Online.

New additions to EVE Online through the Quantum Rise expansion are on the way, some of which are already on the Singularity test server. CCP Chronotis followed up his announcement of the Orca by outlining some big changes to ships that are some of the mainstays of industry in EVE. "Much has changed in EVE since many of the hauler of mining class ships were introduced. With Quantum Rise we felt the time was right to review these ships and make changes where necessary to refocus their roles and ensure they can still perform in the age of New Eden's Great War," he said.

The changes outlined aren't finalized, and will go through testing on Singularity before any of this goes live. Chronotis addressed how CCP Games would like to change three categories of ships: blockade runners, deep space transports, and mining vessels.

CCP Games generally takes a hands-off approach to EVE Online's economy, letting the collective actions of players determine what happens. But at times there are bottlenecks in terms of supply. CCP Greyscale cites the example of how the limited number of T2 blueprint originals (BPOs) decreased availability of items while driving up prices. CCP stepped in by introducing 'invention', where players can attempt to create higher-end items via R&D, eliminating the issue of supply and normalizing prices.

CCP Greyscale's latest dev blog is called "Alchemy" and looks at the newest issue they've identified with EVE's economy, the inflated price of rare moon minerals. Greyscale says, "In particular, two rare moon minerals - dysprosium and (to a lesser extent) promethium - are becoming ever-more expensive as increased demand puts pressure on a limited supply. This is likely to become an increasingly large issue as time goes on, with prices for these minerals continuing to rise due to demand, and the increased price being passed on to the consumer of the final product." As we've mentioned in the past, these rare minerals in New Eden are something that the largest, most powerful alliances have sought to control and thus has been one of the drivers of conflict in lawless 0.0 space.