After time has entered the 21st century, the online game market in Europe and the United States has formed a situation of "Internet Genesis", "Endless Mission", "Call of Arthur Dragon" and "Three Kingdoms". After seeing the success of these games, more teams have poured into the network. In the field of game development, Funcom from Norway quickly became one of these teams. Their work "Anarchy Online" challenged several online games that dominated the market.
Funcom was born in Oslo, Norway in the spring of 1993. It is a small game development team founded by five young people, Erik Gloersen, Ian Neil, Andre Backen, Gaute Godager, and Olav Mørkrid. The most familiar one is Gaute Godager. The famous game producer was only 23 years old when the company was founded, and he started his own game development road as early as 17 years old. Later, while developing games for the Amiga platform, I met several other young people. Although the game was not completed in the end, several like-minded young people decided to set up their own game company to develop games, and Funcom was born.
Around 1993, during the period of rapid growth in the European and American game markets, as one of the few game development teams in Scandinavia, Funcom, which focuses on the porting and localization of console games as its main business, quickly emerged, and its scale is also It expanded dramatically and grew into a game company with nearly 100 people in less than two years. At that time, the average age of the team was only 24 years old, very young, but they soon were unwilling to be the screw in the game development field and began to undertake more game businesses.
Funcom's early works have successes and failures. Successful works include "Horse Fairy" developed for Interplay and "Pocahontas" developed for Disney. The failed works include games such as "Dragon Heart". However, this is a necessary path for any game company. In this process, Funcom employees have accumulated rich experience in game development and laid the foundation for future success.
However, just when Funcom was about to get on the right track, Funcom encountered a huge setback. Several internal engineers stole Funcom's core technology and founded their own company, and sold their works to publishers that had previously cooperated with Funcom. . This incident became the highest record of technical theft in Norwegian history, and it ended in an out-of-court settlement of 1 million kronor. However, Funcom encountered a huge crisis in the process, and more game companies began to poach their team. Under the predicament, Funcom developed "The Longest Journey", a masterpiece of adventure games, which ignited the torch of hope in the dark. After that, Funcom began to publish its own games and embarked on a more independent path.
Although it is one of the best works in the history of adventure games, the golden age of adventure games has passed. The sales of "The Longest Journey" are not ideal. Funcom realizes the profitability bottleneck of the traditional game market, so it hopes to find a brand new one. Mainland, so they discovered online games.
In fact, the idea of developing online games had already taken shape a few years before the release of "The Longest Journey". Around 1995, Marius Kjeldahl, who served as the vice president of technology at Funcom, proposed the concept of "Chaos Online", but this concept was not immediately implemented. At the end of 1996, programmer Martin Amor began to lead Funcom's R&D department to study the feasibility of this idea, and the development of online games really began.
Different from the birth of many other games, the engine of "Chaos Online" is to create a completely different profit model: relying on the Internet to promote and sell the game and directly obtain income, the development team only needs to make the game and provide The service can make money instead of expecting players to buy their own game discs as before. In the first year and a half of the development, the focus of the R&D team was mainly on server technology. The plot and story of the game had not yet been born, and it was not added until later.
Funcom had a huge ambition from the beginning, that is, to develop a universal online game engine that can be used to develop any online game-not only can develop more RPG games, but also can develop any type of game such as shooting, but This work is difficult to implement, which delays the early development schedule for a long time. In the preparation stage, the database development tools for user-designed game worlds and objects were also a mess at the beginning. The tools designed in the first version were completely unusable. It was not until a group of programmers were redesigned to allow the development work to proceed normally, but several Months have been wasted.
After the preparatory work was completed, the research and development of the game engine entered a substantive stage, but until 1998-1999, the entire research and development work was still in a fragmented state, and many people in the team fought individually and did not form a unified whole. When recalling this stage, Gaute Godager believes that the main reason is that the core developers in the team who are used to developing stand-alone games do not understand why players like online games. A lot of the work of the entire team is done reluctantly. To make matters worse, Marius Kjeldahl, the creator of Chaos Online, left Funcom to create his own company, and the team became even more directionless.
However, compared with the setbacks Funcom had experienced before, this time the crisis did not cause much impact. The stable performance of the technical team led by Martin Amor has allowed the technical development work to approach the goal step by step, but the direction of the game design has never been solved. At this time, Tommy Stand, Tor Andre Wigmostrad and Gaute Godager officially joined the team and became the new helm of the project The author pointed out the direction for "Chaos Online."
Gaute Godager and Tommy Stand undertook the design of the core game system, while Tor Andre Wigmostrad played the role of project manager to supervise the entire work, allowing game development to proceed in an orderly manner. With the cooperation of all the programmers, various systems including the item system, the interpolation adding system and the classification system have been long-lost, solving most of the technical problems, and then the game has entered the stage of adding content.
The first is the appearance of the game. Since the 3D technology was not mature at the beginning of the game’s design, the development team plans to make the game a 2D game with a top-down view similar to UO. However, with the long development of 2D graphics, the graphic designer hopes to make the game characters change. It has to be three-dimensional, and the development team wasted a lot of time on this issue. In the beginning, the team spent 4 months using a very weird technique called "Spheroids" (a series of ellipsoid spheres stacked together) to draw the characters of the game, but in the end they found that the speed is far It was slower than using a polygonal model. It happened that 3D graphics accelerator cards appeared at that time, which made the "ellipsoid" technology completely obsolete, but the lost 4 months have been irreparable.
The R&D team hopes that "Chaos Online" is more real than the MMORPG on the market-at least it seems so. Tommy Stand believes that it can be achieved with the help of a motion capture system. For this reason, Funcom specially purchased MOCAP (Motion Capture) equipment, and Stand alone completed the design of motion capture animation: from setting up the stage to equipping with calculations and equipment and even acting as an actor. Do all kinds of actions-he is the prototype of all male characters in the game.
In order to make each player's image look less the same, Funcom also attaches great importance to the customization of game characters. There are about 20 facial makeups in "Chaos Online", and each facial model has a different skin color. Players can also choose their own height and physique, plus gender elements. (It is worth mentioning that there are A race of hermaphrodite named atrox), each player can easily create a character with their favorite distinctive features in the game.
With the help of the animation system brought by motion capture and other elements, the smoothness of the game is guaranteed to a certain extent, but for a long time the control of the game is in an indirect way, which is mainly affected by the combat system. At the beginning of the development, the battle of the game was just a simple "simulation" action. The server played the corresponding animation after receiving the data. The developer believed that the direct control effect would not match this combat system. The team’s technology is still unable to change the game into a direct combat system technology, which makes the control of the game very unsmooth. The emergence of EQ in 1999 made the team realize that even with indirect combat methods, direct control systems are feasible, but such modifications are difficult, and it was not completely changed until the second version of the Btea test.
With the help of 3D graphics technology and graphics engine, the art team created an amazing environment for the game-the beautiful Rubi-Ka planet (Rubi-Ka). The story that happened on this planet was designed by Ragnar Tornquist, the designer who wrote the plot for "Endless Journey". Funcom hopes that the story can give players the connotation of the game, and let the players know the meaning of their games, rather than simply constantly upgrading. For this reason, Tornquist has established a huge world with a science fiction background. However, due to development cost issues, many of Tornquist's plot ideas were not realized in the end. The storytelling was simplified by history, background and miracles, and it did not give players enough connotation as originally expected.
At that time, online games with sci-fi backgrounds were rare, mainly because the audience of works of this type of theme was relatively small, and more players liked fantasy-themed games. However, the setting of the sci-fi background also attracted some specific groups of people for "Chaos Online", such as players of FPS games such as "Quaker".
A feature of "Chaos Online" in the content is the random mission system, and the key to this is the Auto Content Generator used by the game mission system. At any time in the game, players can accept randomly generated tasks from any task booths all over the world. The original intention of this design is to prevent players from being bored by doing nothing in the game. In the realization stage of random tasks, if a new task is started, such as the task of finding items, the task system will connect a bunch of rooms together to form a maze, and then the designer will use the classification system in the game tool and the interpolation system to add It can be easily realized by inserting props such as monsters, treasure chests, traps, and quest items in the room. In addition to random tasks, players in "Chaos Online" can also customize their own tasks-just purchase a task key duplicator in the game to customize the difficulty, enemy type, and reward form for any task, and Choose to fight alone or complete tasks with your companions. When the task is set to complete, the player can encounter strong or weak enemies according to the difficulty of the choice.
After several years of development, by 2001, "Chaos Online" had basically been developed, and the beta test of the game was also going very smoothly, so Funcom began to prepare for the game's online work. But in the first period of time, it was not flowers and applause that brought the game, but the disaster that followed.
On June 27, 2001, "Chaos Online" was officially released, but players encountered a series of serious problems after entering the game. The first is a series of server problems: the game uses a monthly card fee system, but at the beginning it is impossible to even use a credit card to register on the secure server; many players encounter problems when activating the CD Key of the game, and some cannot log in to the game after activation. In addition, due to the absence of a stress test on the number of concurrent users during the Beta test, the game's login server could not respond to the player's login needs, resulting in players unable to enter the game, even players who entered the game must download the patch... Almost all the server problems encountered in the operation of online games, Chaos Online, have been encountered.
Fortunately, Funcom responded quickly and solved most of the problems after 2 days. However, due to insufficient server bandwidth preparation, players who were able to enter the game normally often encountered serious delay problems, and fluency was greatly affected. The game hardware optimization test is not comprehensive, and ATI chip video card players will encounter the problem of not being able to play the game for a long time. After entering the game, there were even users who lost characters and items, and the game’s customer service was insufficient. The endless problems caused the game to encounter major setbacks immediately after its release. Some game media called it the worst in history. Online game issuance. In addition, for the game itself, due to the lack of novice guidelines and a steep learning curve, many players cannot easily get started. In addition, there are too many features and lack of focus, and the media and players have mixed praise and criticism.
But surprisingly, in the face of such a major setback, Funcom persisted. The technicians found and solved the problems that occurred during the operation one by one. At the same time, they aimed at the design problems and players discovered during the operation. The problems raised were fixed, which greatly improved the appearance of the game.
But it is not an easy task to restore the reputation of the game, and Funcom has done a lot of work for this. The first is the media aspect. After repairing the game, Funcom invited all the media to re-evaluate the game, hoping to restore its reputation in the media. Although the score of the game cannot be changed at this time, the media let players know what improvements the game has made. Later, during GDC 2002, Funcon sent a free trial version of the game to attendees, hoping to regain support in the industry. By the end of 2002, "Chaos Online" gradually got out of its predicament after the game was released, and the number of paying users reached 150,000. It even won the "Best Online Game of the Year" by PC Gamer.
In this way, through unremitting efforts, Funcom transformed a failed online game into a successful work, which became a rare case of turning defeat into victory in the game industry. At the same time, the development team of "Chaos Online" successively launched two expansions, "Shadowlands" and "Alien Invasion", which enriched the content of the game and brought more Players. By the end of 2004, Chaos Online had 700,000 paying users, which was a huge success in the market.
On December 25, 2004, "Chaos Online" changed its operating strategy and became one of the first games to introduce a free-to-play mode. Players can enter the game for free for an unlimited time, but the price is that they will see a lot of placed ads and are willing to continue to pay Users can block these ads. Despite this, this free mode has attracted a large number of new players for the game. Funcom counts that there are as many as 400,000 new users in 10 months, far exceeding the previous user growth rate. By 2006, the total number of users of the game has exceeded 1 million, the advertising revenue brought by free users has reached 1 million US dollars.
In 2008, Funcom added a micro-transaction system to the free version of the game. Free-to-play game players can use micro-transactions to pay for the content they want in the game, mainly for items that do not affect the balance of the game. However, at this time, the number of online users of this game that has been in operation for 7 years has begun to decline. To this end, Funcom has also updated the game engine and content, and even introduced player designs to add content to the game to maintain the vitality of the game. After that, although "Chaos Online" barely maintained operations, it never returned to its former glory.
After "Chaos Online", Funcom began the design of another online game in 2002, which was later "The Secret World", but at that time this online game only existed in the concept stage. "The Longest Journey" development sequel "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (Dreamfall: The Longest Journey)" was temporarily shelved. After the launch and success of "Dream Fall: Endless Journey" in 2006, Funcom started the development of another online game "Age of Conan". Although "Mystery World" was officially announced, the development progress has been Stagnation.
After the launch of "The Age of Conan" in 2008, it did not achieve ideal results. Funcom concentrated all its energy and began to regain "Mysterious World". However, at this time, Gaute Godager, as Funcom's game development director, left the company that he had been fighting for for 16 years, and his position was replaced by a rising star in the company's planning, Craig Morrison. After a long and difficult development and repeated ticket skipping, "Mystery World" was finally officially released on July 3, 2012, becoming a new force in the online game market in 2012-but its ending, not as " "Chaos Online" is so painful.