|
 Features
Postmortem:
Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot
What Went Right
1. Community
management/ beta program. From the beginning of the project, we knew
we had precious few dollars available for marketing, and that our best
chance to capture public attention would be to have a big presence on
the various role-playing fan sites around the Internet. One, the Vault
Network, provided us with some message board space, a news page, and a
couple of moderators, and we were off and running.
We devoted
a lot of time over the year and a half that Dark Age of Camelot
was in development to interacting with the future fans of the game. We
hired a community relations manager whose sole job was to read different
message boards and report back to us what was happening in the community.
From the beginning, we took our fans seriously and made many tweaks and
additions to the game based on their commentary and ideas.
2. No bureaucracy. Since the founding of Mythic, we have striven
to have little bureaucracy. We have no levels, no directors, and few managers.
We have a president, a vice president, and a producer. That's it for management,
although for Camelot we did have to assign a lead world developer and
art co-leads, just to streamline the day-to-day processes of the project.
Because of this simple command chain, we experienced no power struggles.
We feel this is the best way to make a solid, cohesive game - a small
group controls what the game is and how it is presented to the user. Because
of this approach, decisions are made quickly, and features can be implemented
without an endless line of approvals and politics.
3. Smart business decisions. Our close relationship with Abandon
Entertainment was a critical factor in the success of the game. Abandon's
purchase of a minority interest in Mythic ensured that we had enough money
to fund the game from start to completion. Abandon's management was smart
enough to realize that we knew more about game development than they,
so they largely left us to make game-related decisions ourselves. They
were involved in the project, of course - some Abandon employees even
became avid beta players of the game, even though most had never played
an RPG before. Abandon's investment meant that we did not have to rely
on any outside influence in designing or creating the game, which means
that Camelot is wholly ours.
With Abandon teaming with us, Mark Jacobs, our president, decided to take
a big chance and wait until the game was almost complete before looking
for a distributor. In most cases, game companies seek out publishers,
which typically have a hand in the design and production of the game and
then distribute the game to the retail chain. With Mark's gamble, we produced
the game ourselves (with critical financial help from Abandon and business
advice from our business development person, Eugene Evans) and then looked
only for a retail distributor. This gamble could have placed us at the
end of the project with a great game but no way to get it into the hands
of our customers. It all worked out in the end, of course, with Vivendi
Universal stepping in and distributing - but on our terms.
4. Sweet serendipity. The Camelot project was helped immensely
by factors completely out of our control - in other words, blind luck.
Several high-profile online RPGs that were slated to launch at about the
same time as Camelot were either pushed off (Shadowbane) or canceled
outright (Dark Zion, Fallen Age). Also, the week we launched was
originally scheduled to be the same week as the launch of Warcraft III,
which will almost certainly be a huge seller. That project was also delayed,
which ensured that Camelot launched as the only large-scale game, and
the only online RPG, when it debuted on October 9, 2001. This little bit
of good fortune gave the game a big initial boost, as there was little
direct competition from other new products.
5. The joys of open source software and stability. Long ago, during
the development of our early titles, we decided to use Linux wherever
possible as our server back-end OS, and we kept to this same practice
when creating Dark Age of Camelot. We have extensive Linux experience
in-house, and it made sense for us to stay with a platform that we knew
could handle the task and also was, well, free.
Because running Camelot would require a considerable amount of data management,
we initially planned on using Oracle to store account and character information.
However, Oracle's quoted license fee of more than $900,000 quickly removed
them from contention. Once we got over our shock and amusement at Oracle's
pricing, we turned to a Linux-based freeware solution, MySQL, to manage
Camelot's data storage, which so far has worked admirably.
Everyone developing games should at least investigate open source solutions
for their servers. It's saved us a pile of money and has been stable and
reliable. In fact, prior to Camelot's launch, it was axiomatic that MMORPGs
were unstable and prone to crashing during their first month or so. From
the outset, we were determined to buck this trend. We co-located our servers
directly at UUNET, on the network backbone, which ensured a wide network
pipe to the Internet. With this Internet connection, we can increase our
band-
width with just a few hours' notice to UUNET.
With the combination of reliable server code and a stable Internet connection-
all running on open source software - Camelot went live on October 9,
2001, with virtually no problems. That first night, the game went down
for about an hour and a half due to a database configuration problem,
but since then, the game has been remarkably solid and stable. As of this
writing, it hasn't been down due to server error for more than a few minutes
ever since the first night.
______________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
