sonofableep

so i’m reading this 2009 wrap-up on the “year of shitty MMOs” and surprise surprise, WAR gets a tongue-lashing in the first paragraph.  okay, it’s not a surprise.  i think the guy even called me a moron – okay, not by name, but via the transitive property of moron-by-association – but that’s okay too.  i don’t get the sense that he’s placing the blame for Warhammer’s problems at the feet of Mythic’s audio department.  at least i hope not…

and no lambasting of WAR would be complete without a jab or two at Paul Barnett who, as the most visible face of Warhammer Online, is subject to a ridiculous amount of information superhighway road rage.  in this particular WAR-lambasting, there’s reference to an interview with Paul given in the heady days leading up to launch, wherein Paul makes some rather memorable statements.  one in particular about Mythic devs saying “they hate playing other MMOs because it gives them ideas” is called out as being especially ludicrous.  and it is…because of course Mythic devs play other MMOs – lots of them.  Paul’s point, albeit made in his baiting-controversy-with-a-gleeful-wink style (which sometimes reads wrong when taken out of context, i.e. “literally”), is merely the importance of not being conditioned into a fixed way of thinking by one’s experiences.

but folks, i didn’t come here today to defend WAR, Paul, or jargon like “thinking outside the box”.  it got me thinking *about* the box.  to know only the box is to be doomed to never deviate from it.  to know nothing of the box is to…end up with a pyramid or something, which might result in success but will probably result in failure.  wait…say what?  confucius is confused.  let’s cut away from the failed floral bullshit, shall we?

play only WoW/etc. —> end up making WoW/etc.  play no WoW/etc. —> end up making something totally “new”, and probably totally “rejected outright by the gaming marketplace”.  so the question is, how much Box is too much?  where is the line between standing on the shoulders of giants and standing in their shadows?

guess what.  i don’t have an answer for that.  quelle surprise.

hey man, i’m just thinkin’ about a box, okay?  and how my ignorance or knowledge of it has impacted me specifically as a developer.  see, i started working on MMOs before i really played MMOs.  consequently, for a few years i made decisions about The Way MMO Audio Should Be in a near-vaccuum.  once my gaming hobby started to catch up to my gaming job, i became more aware of how lots of different games used sound.  i started to see (hear) that things like music & ambience were handled in a more-or-less consistent fashion from one title to the next.  i started to see The Box.  at that point i could compare my version of The Way MMO Audio Should Be to The Box.  and the results were pretty interesting.

for one thing, i found that i kinda went way overboard with ambient sound.  i’m all about that shit, and i figured if you’re playing a game for hours and years at a time, ambience has got to be as dynamic and engaging as possible.  deep, deep, deep.  then i come to find that most games weren’t going to nearly the lengths i was to create that level of complexity for what some would argue amounts to aural wallpaper.  some loops here, some random one-shots there…it gets the job done.  well har-RUMPH, i said.  but hey, that’s The Box.  players have certain expectations, and if you meet them, cool.  if you exceed them, well that’s even more lovely.

on the flip side, i found that i wasn’t really getting how music was typically used in-game.  while fond of the music i’d created, i could see that it wasn’t being used in ways that made sense to the average player.  some music was heard too often, and some not enough.  some music was abstract enough to not even be identifiable as such (“hey, there’s no music here…oh you mean those weird tones are the music?  oh, i see.”).  in this, i was off building pyramids when i should’ve been a lot closer to The Box.  ah well.  live and learn.

so i gotta play MMOs just enough to “give me ideas”, but not so much that i start internalizing those ideas as hard-and-fast rules.  and also, i gotta remember to spend 75% less time on ambience, and 300% more time on music.  :)