Very good Iron Realms interview
Text isn’t dead, dammit. And proving it is Iron Realms, makers of Achaea and other games. PlayNoEvil has posted a great interview with principal Matt Mihaly that explains how these games work.
Sarapis, the Logos: Here’s how the economy in our games work: A player purchases 100 credits from our website. She now has 100 ‘unbound’ credits. Unbound credits can be transferred to other people freely. They can also be put for sale on the credit market.
Tsaris brings up the current credit market report by entering :
Credits currently available for purchase:
10 credits at 5574 gold per credit.
29 credits at 5575 gold per credit.
16 credits at 5580 gold per credit.
4 credits at 5599 gold per credit.
450 credits at 5600 gold per credit.
17 credits at 5700 gold per credit.
6 credits at 5797 gold per credit.
63 credits at 5799 gold per credit.
7 credits at 5800 gold per credit.
3 credits at 5900 gold per credit.
Total credits for sale: 605 shown (2648 total) (Average sale price: 5540)Use CREDITS BUY AT to purchase.
So, the player now has 100 unbound credits. In order to use them, the player converts them to bound credits. These credits, and the items purchased with them, are forever bound to that character. Bound credits can be used for a bunch of things. They can be used for Lessons to raise skills, purchase artifacts (the generic name for our virtual items), build custom housing, and they can be used to purchase a ‘licenses’. A tailor’s license, for example, which lets you create custom clothing.
The graphical MMO industry still has much to learn from the text games.
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Very good Iron Realms interview
mention emphasizes their virtual goods/ RMT / business model – that apparently inspired the Puzzle Pirates Doubloon system. My question for here is a little different. Are text worlds virtual worlds? More specifically, I wonder about the representation of
[…] Comments […]
It sounds awfully like the Doubloons system that Puzzle Pirates has been using for sometime now… It is a graphical MMO, just not a part of the major industry, I guess.
It is exactly like the Doubloons system that Puzzle Pirates uses. Dan James looked at what we had done and used it essentially verbatim (and there’s nothing wrong with doing that, to forestall any objections).
–matt
[…] Steven Davis posted an interview with Matt ("Iron Realms") Mihaly that provides good insight into one of the oddly surviving niches of the virtual world ecosystem: text mediated worlds. Raph’s mention emphasizes their virtual goods/ RMT / business model – that apparently inspired the Puzzle Pirates Doubloon system. […]
Matt, I’ve been in and out of Achaea (sp?) over the past few months (mostly out, I’m sorry to say), and while it is such a rich and interesting world, and has probably the best social environment that I’ve seen in a MMO, I just can’t stay engaged for some reason. It’s probably because I’ve been so spoiled by graphics-based games (MMO or otherwise) and simply can’t get by without eye candy any more. Strange, because as a kid in the late 70’s all that was available on computers were text adventures which I loved to no end.
It’s a shame because Achaea is (as I’m sure the other IR titles are) such a tremendously broad canvas on which to paint your own adventure. I really wish I could dismiss the visual crutch I seem to need in order to enjoy games these days, but apparently I cannoot. And I think that is what spoils, for me, the idea of virtual property in a text-based world. How sad that my imagination has become so handicapped.
I really hope, though, that people who have never seen the Iron Realms give one of them a try. Especially the younger among us who may not have been around when text was the way you played computer games.
Something that really stood out for me when talking to Matt was the way we went from text-based MMOs to graphic ones so quickly. What would our literature look like if movies or radio or television had come out within 10 years of the printing press?
There are some quirks – most graphical MMOs use a text-based communication interface because the bandwidth was not available to have voice early on… and still do. Graphical MMOs would also be very different if voice had been integrated in faster. They would probably have gone to PvP almost immediately.
I, for one, have become very intrigued with the creative possibilities of text. Check out Achaea’s communication and combat and other systems – there is no economical way to create such interesting game mechanics if you have to draw everything (much less in 3D).
Having never played a graphical RPG, I never quite got into an IRE game, either, though I’ve recommended it a few times to others. For me, it’s the fact that I’m not interested in combat, and a game driven so primarily by combat isn’t easy for me to handle. =P To each his own.
If I had not spent 4.5 years on Shadowdale MUD prior to picking up Ultima Online and EverQuest all those years ago, I would not be nearly as good of a player (or a typist!) as I am today.
Text-based games, in my opinion, do a better job of including problem-solving, especially in non-combat situations, than graphical games do. They teach players to look for the little details that help them get through a room or set of rooms, and to pay attention to their environment and the things that make that environment up.