Neverwinter Nights is the new Unlimited Adventures
Way back in 1993, SSI released a "game" called Unlimited Adventures. For those not familiar, SSI was the company who produced the reknown "Gold Box" Dungeons & Dragons Computer Role-Playing Games. I personally spent many hours with these games and was a big fan. What Unlimited Adventures promised to do was allow you to create your own adventures using the same game engine and a "user-friendly" interface to do it with.
This sounds like a great idea in theory, the problem was that this is 1993, before the Internet was really popular. The idea of creating an adventure and swapping it with others likely meant loading it onto a disc and transporting the physical media to another person. Which means you had to know someone else who actually knew what the Gold Box games were and also had their own copy of Unlimited Adventures. The other problem was that creating an adventure was a serious time investment, so even if people were going to create their own adventures it was going to take more than the usual 30 day shelf life that most games have with a gamer. Since there was nothing substantial to play with the actual game, except for a fairly hollow quest that was thrown together so it could be called a "game", it left little to do for people who were not interested in creating quests themselves. The title quickly tanked and faded into obscurity.
Fast forward to 1995. Windows 95 is being adopted at a rapid pace and the World Wide Web becomes relatively simple to connect to even for the average person with little technical exposure. All of a sudden, people who owned Unlimited Adventures had an audience via the Web! Modules were created and swapped, art was designed, people formed communities on who to create adventures. There were mailing lists and use groups established, quite a few websites popped up. I dusted off my copy and began playing other people's modules. The title finally became worth owning, but it took two years to really mature. Unlimited Adventures is a great example of what the consequences are for being ahead of your time.
How does this compare to Neverwinter Nights? Well, the Internet is in broad use now thanks to easy access to the World Wide Web, so it never had to jump that hurdle, right? The game was highly anticipated, and I believe it was also highly sold if memory serves. Yet there was a great deal of disappointment with the title. The included campaign was considered to be subpar compared to previous Bioware offerings and the creation tools turned out to be too complex for just anyone to start making an adventure. A lot of the promises that were made in regards to the game appeared to be unreachable, and many people, myself included, abandoned the game when it appeared to not live up to its promises.
Neverwinter Nights, released in 2002, is a great example of what can happen when you rely on users to provide the content. What the game really needed was time, and it has had that. Like Unlimited Adventures, Neverwinter Nights eventually enjoyed its own renaissance. The game matured, the community started offering content, and the publisher discovered a new revenue stream. (More on that in a following post). Unfortunately, how do you tell the public "Just wait, this will be a killer game in about a year or so." That is not going to sell a lot of copies. If I knew the game wasn't really going to be worthwhile for another year after I bought it, I would have just waited and picked it up cheap. You can't market a game like that, at least not in any current business model. The potential is there for a great game, but without time to discover its potential, it cannot succeed.
Unfortunately, this is not limited to simply the D&D franchise. Other games have tried this approach and failed. Relying on user content is a dodgy prospect at best, and failure is far more likely. The real down side is that titles like Neverwinter Nights are a great way to jump start community involvement and innovation. It could very well be a training tool for aspiring designers and developers. Without these games, we lose an important aspect of the gaming community. However, if you can't quantify this in a dollar amount, bankrolling such endeavors will be the greatest challenge any of these games will ever face.
This sounds like a great idea in theory, the problem was that this is 1993, before the Internet was really popular. The idea of creating an adventure and swapping it with others likely meant loading it onto a disc and transporting the physical media to another person. Which means you had to know someone else who actually knew what the Gold Box games were and also had their own copy of Unlimited Adventures. The other problem was that creating an adventure was a serious time investment, so even if people were going to create their own adventures it was going to take more than the usual 30 day shelf life that most games have with a gamer. Since there was nothing substantial to play with the actual game, except for a fairly hollow quest that was thrown together so it could be called a "game", it left little to do for people who were not interested in creating quests themselves. The title quickly tanked and faded into obscurity.
Fast forward to 1995. Windows 95 is being adopted at a rapid pace and the World Wide Web becomes relatively simple to connect to even for the average person with little technical exposure. All of a sudden, people who owned Unlimited Adventures had an audience via the Web! Modules were created and swapped, art was designed, people formed communities on who to create adventures. There were mailing lists and use groups established, quite a few websites popped up. I dusted off my copy and began playing other people's modules. The title finally became worth owning, but it took two years to really mature. Unlimited Adventures is a great example of what the consequences are for being ahead of your time.
How does this compare to Neverwinter Nights? Well, the Internet is in broad use now thanks to easy access to the World Wide Web, so it never had to jump that hurdle, right? The game was highly anticipated, and I believe it was also highly sold if memory serves. Yet there was a great deal of disappointment with the title. The included campaign was considered to be subpar compared to previous Bioware offerings and the creation tools turned out to be too complex for just anyone to start making an adventure. A lot of the promises that were made in regards to the game appeared to be unreachable, and many people, myself included, abandoned the game when it appeared to not live up to its promises.
Neverwinter Nights, released in 2002, is a great example of what can happen when you rely on users to provide the content. What the game really needed was time, and it has had that. Like Unlimited Adventures, Neverwinter Nights eventually enjoyed its own renaissance. The game matured, the community started offering content, and the publisher discovered a new revenue stream. (More on that in a following post). Unfortunately, how do you tell the public "Just wait, this will be a killer game in about a year or so." That is not going to sell a lot of copies. If I knew the game wasn't really going to be worthwhile for another year after I bought it, I would have just waited and picked it up cheap. You can't market a game like that, at least not in any current business model. The potential is there for a great game, but without time to discover its potential, it cannot succeed.
Unfortunately, this is not limited to simply the D&D franchise. Other games have tried this approach and failed. Relying on user content is a dodgy prospect at best, and failure is far more likely. The real down side is that titles like Neverwinter Nights are a great way to jump start community involvement and innovation. It could very well be a training tool for aspiring designers and developers. Without these games, we lose an important aspect of the gaming community. However, if you can't quantify this in a dollar amount, bankrolling such endeavors will be the greatest challenge any of these games will ever face.
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