At first glance, you would have sworn that Earth and Beyond would crush Eve. Earth and Beyond had a huge team, an enormous budget, a spiffy marketing plan and a head start. It had a supremely talented team, including many responsible for various Command and Conquer licenses and others with MMO pedigrees (a rarity at the time). It had a winning idea – a modernization of classic games like Netrek and Elite with a massively multiplayer component. And, of course, most of all, it had the Electronic Arts label. And nobody beats EA, right?
A funny thing happened on the way, though. Somehow, on the way, E&B became “Everquest with Spaceships”, first in the mind of its execs and design team, and after that, in the mind of it’s fans. It’s as if, whenever facing a design crossroads, they asked themselves, WWEQD. “What would Everquest do?”
In retrospect, it seems obvious that a game based on hybrid, convergent gameplay would struggle.
It’s easy to see why the guys with pursestrings fall into the convergence trap. Producers and executives don’t like to think that games are a risky business, a hit and miss enterprise where sometimes something ‘clicks’ and sometimes it doesn’t. So they try to mitigate the risk by making it something predictable. “It’s like Elite meets Everquest! How can it go wrong?!?” (Note how similar this logic sounds to what Brad Bird said about the film industry).
But game fans don’t see “Everquest with Spaceships” and think about the positive part of the Everquest gameplay (which is, admit it, more fun than most people would care to admit). Instead, the Everquest fans said, ‘hmmm, this seems inferior to the TRUE Everquest experience. Why would I want to be a spaceship?’ And the space trader fans said “Everquest? Isn’t that the men in tights game that makes you play a thousand hours to get to level 20?”
On the other hand, Eve made a game that ISN’T described by everyone who plays it as ‘Everquest in Space’. Instead, they targetted a genre, and tried to reach the expectations of that genre. They tried to make a game that felt internally consistent with what you’d expect from a space trading MMO.
Today, Eve Online proudly boasts a subscriber base of 50k. Earth and Beyond had strong initial sales, but has since shut its doors. Turns out that Electronic Arts can, in fact, be beaten.
Don’t believe me? Imagine that a hypothetical company was trying to sell a Western massively multiplayer game. Now imagine that their sales pitch was “A Western-themed Virtual World”. What would your response be?
“Ooooh, cool! It’s like Deadwood! I can rustle cattle, I can pan for gold, hold up stagecoaches, rob banks, or maybe just try to earn a tin star! The possibilities are endless!”
Now imagine that the pitch was, “It’s a Western-themed Everquest!” This is surely how your money guys would pitch it. EQ was a success. Surely being half-Everquest reduces risk.
But the buyers don’t think about the positives first. They think of the friction points between the design. “Do you camp the indian spawn? That seems wierd. How many black hats do I have to kill to get to level 50? Are level 50 monsters just guys with bigger hats?” Suddenly, the designers spend all their time on boards trying to defend themselves – they’re only taking the appropriate parts of EQ – instead of talking about the game’s true innovations.
The first pitch is wide open. The second smacks of compromise the moment you hear it. And who has time to devote their gaming attention to a compromise?
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