Free Realms - An E3 Look at Free Realms
At last week's E3, Carolyn Koh sat down with the folks from Sony Online Entertainment to talk about their upcoming children's MMORPG Free Realms.
Free Realms is SoE's entry into the children's MMORPG market. It has a whimsical, modern look that hearkens back to Anime style graphics and is a unique look created by SoE artists, and based on numerous focus tests with age appropriate children. The title reflects the design philosophy behind the game, that children will be free to play the game any way they like. Every game play style is valid and you do not need to level your character in any prescribed way.
So what is there to do in Free Realms? There is combat, mini-games, simulation, such as pets and housing - similar to Animal Crossing play, and social play which involves community participation via a website with an interface similar to Facebook's look.
Two different types of characters can be played, humans and sprites - which are basically winged, smaller humanoids, which hover rather than walk. Players start out as adventurers and gain outfits when they take on tasks for NPCs. Outfits represent the jobs that characters can do and mini-game screens will show which jobs can be used to complete the game. Completion of games and tasks gains gold stars for the character, and these gold stars can be used to improve the abilities associated with the outfit. As players level, they gain better and fancier outfits.
"A character is basically a walking leader board," said Lead Designer Laralyn McWilliams, "however your outfit doesn't affect your skills."
That is to say, you could go into tough challenging combat in newbie armor, because it's your abilities that really count. Weapons though can have different ratings assigned to them, and there will be some non-visible slots such as jewelery slots for those stat enhancing items.
Jobs in game are diverse and include roles such as Explorer, Baker, Warrior, Ninja, Wizard, Knight, Postman, Miner, Blacksmith, Medic and the like. Jobs are also tiered, and advanced jobs may be unlocked. "Perhaps," mused Laralyn, "If you take both Warrior and Blacksmith to level 5, you unlock the Warrior Blacksmith which will be a new job altogether!"
"The world of Free Realms is really like a theme park," said Developer Sebastian Strzalkowski. Combat is always a choice. It is essentially a mini-game that you choose to play, and as you enter a combat scenario through a gate marked dangerous, you'll get the same opening screen as all tasks and mini games which show stats and objectives that you have to accept."
Group games are also available, including soccer and kart racing, which is Mariokart style with exaggerated physics. Players can take these cars home with them and park them in their garage. Cars can be decorated and customized like houses can be. These features however will be in the latter part of the game. At launch, players will receive a single room which to make their own. How houses will be obtained has yet to be finalized, although the car will be provided as it is part of a mini-game.
A trading card game will also be available online and physical cards can also be purchased. Pets have characters and qualities, and you make that choice when you choose the pet. They are autonomous creatures and can be trained. For example, you pick a dog based on it's characteristics and then you train it. a dog could be shy or playful. It make bark a lot or very little, and you can train your pet by praising it and petting it when it performs the actions you want to reinforce, and scold it by telling it "Bad Dog!"
The SoE designers understand that children's time are not their own, and a child could be hauled off to dinner in the middle of a quest. Thusly, all encounters are under 15 minutes, and there are no death penalties, nor do you actually die. Creatures are stunned and stars revolve around their heads. Players simply lose an encounter and get kicked out of it with all the xp and loot they've gained to date. Other child friendly features include the ability to teleport to friends. There are also teleport stones (waypoints) all over the world and once players encounter them, will be able to teleport back to, from other teleport stone.
Inventory is unlimited so you can never lose an item because your inventory is full, or with any other problems related to having a full inventory. Members in a group will receive the same rewards for completing a quest.
The game is free to play and has a two tier paying business model. 60% of their content is available to players for free. Subscriptions are not expensive at $4.99 a month for one account, or $9.99 for five.
The game gets players playing immediately once they register, as character creation is done on the website while content streams in the background. The subscription will also net an amount in the micro-transaction wallet. That amount has not been determined yet, but may as as high as the cost of the subscription itself. Wallet dollars can be spent in the market place where players will find a mixture of cosmetic items and consumables such as potions of health and mana. The manner in which items may be obtained vary greatly. For example. a +5 sword of fire may be a quest reward, but the +5 sword of ice may be player forged, the +5 sword of earth may bought from a vendor.
As we got toward the end of the demo, we passed the park with the performance stage again. "We plan to feature artists in Live Concerts," Laralyn said. But would say no further. So, that is Free Realms from SoE. As with most online games for children, parental controls are available for in-game chat as well as information displayed on the child's profile. Closed beta will be open for application soon and launch planned for early 2009.
You know Jon, there's this thing called sleep...
cant find this game on the list...
I did just hit my head and feel quite ill tho lol.
Sounds like a nifty little diversion even if your not a kid but where have I heard that word "focus group" before?
Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........
Great, I can get my kid addicted on MMOs as he is entering kindergarten. Not exactly a goal I have for my son.
Sadly, I'm sure there will be a ton of parents who will let their kids become zombies in front of the computer at a tender age of 6.
<p>I like the look and the minigames and diversity. Might be an interesting thing besides my "mature" mmorpgs. :)</p>
lol....i totally agree! I sense failure coming with the $OE tag. $OE now wants to take money from parents cause they know they cant make a decent mainstream mmo.
Actually it sounds like it'll be their best game. Hell, it sounds better than a lot of other new MMO's coming out. All this time spent demanding a sandbox and the one we're getting is aimed at children. How nice.
If they market this thing right I smell a WoW Killer.
Some honest questions:
I played a SOE game where pets were very important. Out of the blue, all pets in the game were rendered completely inaccesible by SOE because they decided to change the game mid-stream to appeal to a different target audience. Adults were devastated as they looked at virtual pets they raised and trained over a two year period. They could still see them in their datapads, but could no longer call or interact with them. Imagine if this was a bunch of little kids. Some of them were, in fact, but the player demographic was generally older. Since John Smedley did this to us adults, in all honesty why would we allow our kids to play one of his games with virtual pets?
I also played a SOE game that advertised an unlockable profession. People got very excited about this, and spent a lot of time and energy achieving this unlock. Then SOE removed most of the exiciting features for this unlockable profession, and made it available to everyone without having to do the unlock quests etc.. If John Smedley did that to us adults, why would I allow my children to play one of his games?
In this SOE game that I played, people felt that they were fed information that led them to pay additional subscription fees for advertised features. After the money was received, these features were removed from the game. If John Smedly did this to us adults, why would we trust that he would not manipulate our children to have them bothering us to give SOE money for the additional content and trading cards? Even after we might pay for the additional content, how could we trust that SOE wouldn't change it out from under our kids, after receiving our cash?
Before my experience with Mr. Smedley and SOE, I would never have thought to ask these questions. Now that I've see how they operate though, I feel they need to be asked.
Well said!
Sounds like Sony found a new cow to milk.
Nintendo won't be please.
eh, let em tap that market. didn't disney try to make an MMO for kids too and it failed in 2-3 years?
What will the PvP be like is what i want to know? Ha.
the ending of the trailer shows pvp LMAO - acorn did some massive dps there
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jloGY75bBo
So by the looks of it SOE seems capable to produce a diverse MMO, but then my question why ain't they really doing this with the more mature MMO's, cause most of them are dumped down, now not in the sense some people try to want to make you believe, but overall most more adult oriented MMORPG have been sort of dumped down to please the instant gratification type of player, yet seeing this child's game it seems to offer more the many of current crop of MMORPG's are offering.............WHY?.
Anyway even thought the possibility in this game afcourse it doesn't appeal to me, but I would like this type of game structure to be seen with more MMORPG for the "adult" community.
lol....i totally agree! I sense failure coming with the $OE tag. $OE now wants to take money from parents cause they know they cant make a decent mainstream mmo.
Typical troll.
Everquest 2 is a decent mainstream... actually rated higher then World of Warcraft... I highly enjoy EQ2... but what do I know, I like SOE. *GASP*
soe saved mxo, saved vanguard, eq2 is good and eq is good. they admitted the mistake with nge so they are OK in my book as well
What are you talking about...this is a WoW clone all the way. Has the same depth of gameplay I'm sure.
What are you talking about...this is a WoW clone all the way. Has the same depth of gameplay I'm sure.
A bunch of kids running around using their parents credit card to get access to the game?
"""What are you talking about...this is a WoW clone all the way. Has the same depth of gameplay I'm sure.
Well I know they are targueting the same oddience.
My initial response when I saw the small advert for this game on the mmorpg.com home page was "Oh a kiddies mmo.....well that will just be a simplified version of any other mmo with bad graphics. Its just gonna be crap".
Then I read more about it and found that actually it offers MORE than any of the other mmos currently out! What the hell is going on?! I'm sick to death of all the brain dead, repetitive & unimaginative crap that currently seems to capture the minds of millions and then along comes another one that has everything all of those games have and........its aimed at young children!!!! Surely you can see the point that SOE is making right?
Its pretty funny that adults take games like WoW, EQ2, Vanguard and others seriously when Free Realms has pretty much the same level of complexity. It says everything about the average online gamer really doesnt it.
The existence of Free Realms simply confirms the extremely low standards that mmos have reached. Also I think the way that SOE is grooming young children to become brain dead level grinders is disgusting. They are setting them up so that later in life they have more customers to play their level grinding garbage games.
The terrible thing is that it will work.
Why they've decided on a free to play/pay to play model was addressed by Mr. Smedley in a recent interview. If I remember correctly, he was impressed with the success of Runescape.
So, it looks like once again he has seen another company's success with a particular model, and he intends to emulate it with the hope of achieving similar results.
He also talked about free to play games with cash options like RMT loot or trading cards. I believe he said that people would pay you more money for these things than you might expect. He seemed to think that RMT and optional content subscriptions could gain more revenue in the long run than a standard monthly subscription fee model.
The impression I got from his comments was that again this is all about finding the magic target audience and the magic business model to maximize revenue. I'm sure that makes sense to him. It also makes sense to me, but it's a very two dimensional plan.
The missing dimensions include things like excellent quality assurance. Simply speaking, the game should work well. It should also include excellent customer service. On the rare occasion that something goes wrong, the service provider should be courteous, respond quickly and help the customer find a solution to the problem. This is not what SOE is known for in my experience. Next, communication about the service should be absolutely honest and accurate. No games, no deception, no manipulation, no bait and switch etc. Once again, SOE doesn't seem to have a good reputation for these things.
My advice to Mr. Smedley would be to change his focus. If he really wants to be successful, he needs to put his customers' experience much higher on his list of priorities. Once he has done this, I think he'll find a way to address QA issues, customer service and marketting. As long as he keeps searching for the magic business formula with the ideal target audience (to the exclusion of more important factors), he's going to miss the whole point of an MMO, an entertaining experience for the customer.
For example, wouldn't it be cool if he just thought one day, "What kind of gaming experience would really be fun and exciting for kids? Let's build that. Of course if we do a good job, we'll be duly compensated with an excellent revenue source, but this is really about kids having fun." Really that would be fantasitic wouldn't it? When I read his responses in interviews, however, this really just doesn't seem to be where he's coming from.
My advice to SOE at this point would be to ensure their management team has priorities and strategies that lend themselves to customer satisfaction and long term success. If this doesn't seem to be the case, well something needs to change.
Smedlys job isn't to make games, it's to make money. Money which keep the 100's of employee's at SOE from having to be out of work. While making games is fun and creative, it takes millions of dollars and investors want the song and dance, reassurance their money, time and patience will be rewarded after the 3-4+ years it takes to make an MMO. Smed doesn’t decide what’s in the game, the developers do. If the game is tanking it's not Smeds fault it's the developers and Smedly does what he can to salvage the game so it continues to make a revenue and support future projects.
why make mmorpg for kids i mean kids don't really care what they playing as long is colorfull and easy to play and have some toon they like or something heck they can play flash games and enjoy it the same way they whould enjoy mmorpg
And what do you define as kids? 6year olds? o.o
I know for facts that my younger brother loved games like Halo, Wow and GTA before he turned ten. So meh.. It's all relative what the younger generations like.
Smed is in charge so it is his fault for bad leadership.
All their games stink and they have the worst rep in the mmorpg genre, which is quite a hard achievement to get seeing as there are games like DnL around.
The trailer actually looked exactly like wow at times. Text that looked like Austin Powers credits and an acorn flying like a missile very similar to mario kart.
$OE are reminding me of a cheap market clothes stall that blatantly copies designers to the last button. Oh wait, they dont try to sell it off as original, you know you're buying a fake.
Actually, what I wanted to say here was - you know what will happen in the best case scenario for $OE: The game becomes very popular for children and $OE in all their wisdom and taken by surprise thinks they have a winner here but are only appealing to one part of the market so they change the game so adults can play too, ruining all the hard work the kids put into it to chase more $$.
Does this game have a warning on it that says
"Warning: May turn your child islamic"?
Kinda am wondering why a game should refure to a religion, or are you one of those people who for some reason thinks Islamics is equel to terrorist cause the media tells it sort of that way?