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Achaea on MMORPG.com
Short blurb about us there today. http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/9434/Four-of-My-Favorite-MUDs-of-All-Time.html
Beau, the writer, used to write for Massively.com and is probably the only member of the games media that writes about MUDs more than once. I believe he's going to be doing some more coverage on Achaea soon too, including possibly some streaming (though we'll see how successful that is....reading and narrating at the same time is not that easy!).
Beau, the writer, used to write for Massively.com and is probably the only member of the games media that writes about MUDs more than once. I believe he's going to be doing some more coverage on Achaea soon too, including possibly some streaming (though we'll see how successful that is....reading and narrating at the same time is not that easy!).
29
Comments
- Most MUD experiences are based around personal interactivity, and there's not going to be a constant pace of action. Playing a MUD, specifically Achaea, is more about living in a world than playing a game. It's not really a spectator sport.
- The MUD community is so small that virtually nobody would be tuning into any theoretical streams. A small fraction of a games community typically watches streams of that game. For MUDs, the community is already microscopic.
Sites like Twitch usually follow the 80/20 rule. 20% of the games get 80% of the views. The only exception is when people follow the personality rather than the game. The only time I see obscure games getting decent views is when a prominent streamer is streaming them.
Still, it could happen. Achaea is small enough that a prominent streamer with thousands of viewers randomly deciding stream, and a tiny fraction of them checking the game out, would have a relatively large impact on Achaea's playerbase. They'd probs all be chased away by name requirements, the difficulty wall, and utility bill-sized macrotransactions, but still.
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
On the other hand, streaming MUDs is unlikely to be particularly compelling to watch, and any streamer with a decent-sized audience is not cheap. For instance, I have a couple friends paying PewDiePie (totally unsuitable for Achaea obviously) $20k/month right now to do some streaming for them.
Livestreaming Achaea wouldn't be bad, just some minor tweaks would need to be made. I think most of us play with size 12 or smaller font, to squeeze more action onto the screen - that would be horrendous in a Livestream, you'd need to bump it up to at least 16+ during a cast, and probably gag out a bunch of stuff, so people could actually follow along.
Ideally, the person streaming would also be a great narrator. Someone who can actually make the on-screen text sound exciting. Morgan Freeman could probably do it.
I think streaming could go either way, really, but it's only really going to have a niche audience I imagine. That being said, I enjoy when people post logs or stream, because a lot of the times it helps me to understand different aspects of the game. That, along with seeing how certain things they've added for gagging and subbing to make fast paced, rather spammy instances like raids easy to keep up with without losing vital information.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
I don't know what in particular would be most effective, but I do think a scripted thing would do the trick. Sticking the viewer straight into a raid would probably be disorienting, but if you set a contrast between normal activity and PK while showing the positives of both it would work. A lot of the conversation in Achaea is interesting, and then you got the total chaos of combat where 60 things are happening at once and the viewer can still see people orienting themselves, and that's interesting too.
Just my two cents.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
Quite a few ideas really what could do for a live stream as not to scare away people away. Give them glimpse of various aspects of the game. Show them the endless possibilities Achaea has in store with them. Just food for thought.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
The fastest ever to do it was a month and a half-ish I think?
I wasted a lot of time.
If you look on youtube at people like WoodenPotatoes - he's a very popular video maker for Guild Wars 2 and most of his videos are about the lore of the world, speculation about upcoming features/narrative, etc. Many of his videos show gameplay, but it's just backdrop for him to speak about totally unrelated things - a lot of his videos are just slideshows.
The gameplay of Achaea is exciting, but it requires a lot of pre-existing knowledge to parse and I suspect it's a lot more exciting to play than to watch. It's not a great candidate for advertising.
The lore, however, could be a huge draw. Videos exploring the different organisations, history, lore, areas, exploration, etc. could be very entertaining if done well and could, I think, attract a lot more people than gameplay streams. Right now, Achaea doesn't really have anything like that - the video on the front page for instance doesn't even scratch the surface of the game, watching it doesn't give you any sense of how deep everything goes (especially compared to a lot of other MUDs and especially compared to graphical MMOs).
Videos that get at the depth rather than breadth seem more likely to attract attention.
On top of the lore, regular videos or podcasts or similar (Every week? Plenty of things happen every week to warrant a video.) that discuss current events and offer informed speculation about what is to come similar to WoodenPotatoes would really drive home how dynamic the game's landscape can be and how interesting all of the different interlocking narratives are. The forums are always filled with oldbies pointing out that the world is ultimately pretty static (Targossas can't really make some big push and "win" the fight against Mhaldor, at least not without admin sanction and intervention), but the overall narrative and sense of permanancy is staggering compared to most graphical games. Heck, I bet you could even get a rotating stable of players together and do a Google Hangouts-style podcast.
I think one of the big points is that probably the hottest thing in MMOs right now is developers attempting to add ongoing narrative with clear effects on the world - narrative that doesn't just progress the story by progressively releasing static zones. There is endless discussion on this in almost every MMO right now and the general consensus is that no game has figured it out. Compared to those other MMOs, Achaea has. On top of that, Achaea figured out very early on (maybe from the beginning), that the most interesting, deep, and renewable "content" in an MMO is other players.
Achaea is the sandbox MMO with incredibly deep lore, persistence, narrative, and player-centric design that everyone seems to want. But I don't think just telling people that is going to get their attention (MMOs tell them that all the time and fail to deliver), I think you probably need to make videos/podcasts/whatever that actually offer clear examples. A video that explains in detail the history and philosophy and current situation of the Virtuosi is going to prove a lot more to the viewer than a video that simply says "We have X player-driven organisations, each with their own rich history".