It's 'E3' time, by all counts, and I don't know what to say. I'm not a game company. I'm not a game company investor. I'm not one of the rather more obsessive gamers whose holidays generally coincide with trade shows. I'm not important enough a pundit to have been invited along to see what I rant about firsthand, and I'm not an out of work actress in an Antonia Bayle Bikini. I'm not even entirely sure what 'E3' actually means! 'Extremely Exciting Eggs'? 'Enevitable Entropic Exhaustion'?
All I do know is that it's something to do with computer games (and by extension, MMOs, my chosen field of expertise), and that it's pretty much all anyone in gaming punditry is going to be talking about for weeks. It's hard to blame them really, since all the 'shock and awe' gaming news has all been preciously hoarded up purely to spam out during this one event, leaving hapless comentators like me almost drowning in rantable post material.
[Show] SOE shouts, 'WTS New EQ2 Expansion! Has pokemon!!1!'
[Show]Mythic shouts, 'WTS Game About Sci-Fi Roman Legions!'
[Show]Blizzard shouts, 'i pwn u all'
I told myself I'd leave it alone, spend two weeks going on about amusing things that happened to me in Planetside instead, but it's pretty difficult to ignore the sheer torrent of New! New! New! attention-seeking coming out of...er...wherever the hell it is that 'E3' is being held. A few days in though, and on the whole it does rather seem to be the usual 'Bigger, Better, Faster, More!' nonsense, mostly relating to games and rumours we've already got the general gist of. This one caught me off guard a bit though:
Ryzom Ring
Clearly it's too early to tell anything concrete about it yet, but on the face of it, this seems to be nothing less than a MMORPG Dev Kit, for players. Players can create their own zones, somehow tack them on to the main game world, and let other players come and have a go. A million questions spring to mind; How do you stop exploiting and greifing? How do you limit the number of these add-ons? Do you even need to? How will this affect player-density? Who will police and vet the new player-made content? Who? What? Where? When? Whaaaa...?
Personally, I think it'll end up a lot like the Neverwinter Nights Module scene - full of a million well-meaning but over-ambitious and unfinished projects, a thousand complete but uninspired and very short projects, and maybe ten that are interesting, professional and finished. There is a reason it takes thirty people working full-time two years to make even the basic engine for these games; frankly, hobbyists aren't going to cut it.
Personal reservations aside, this certainly qualifies for 'Most Remarkable Thing at E3 So Far'. The only other thing that comes near is 'Mythic to make Warhammer Online', which I'm personally pleased to see. Warhammer Online was missing, presumed dead, some months ago, which made me sad, as the background material there has the potential to make one of the better MMOs. I'd still prefer to see a Warhammer 40k MMO though.
Still, much as 'Big Industry News' makes me cringe, I suspect that 'E3' is something I can't ignore, much as I want to, so it's still all to play for yet. Stay tuned and just maybe I'll talk about Other Things!