In the same year that "Neverwinter Nights" started its online operation, veteran adventure game developer Sierra On-line launched The Sierra Network (TSN), the world’s first dedicated online game service platform. Hope Make online entertainment more abundant.
TSN can be said to be an unexpected harvest of Xueleshan's attempt to make its master game "Kings Quest" online. In 1989, the founder of Xueleshan, Ken Williams, decided to make an online adventure game based on the game "King's Secret Envoy". However, during the development process, they found that they wanted to use the theme of adventure games. There are many difficult problems in networking, and eventually this project had to be abandoned. But in this process, some board games developed by programmer David Slayback performed very well, so Xueleshan decided to change this project to provide users with online board games, and TSR was born. To some extent, it can be said that this product is the ancestor product of Lianzhong and other chess halls.
Since the market for board and card games is broader than that of simple game players, Ken Williams pays great attention to the ease of use of the product and the design of the user interface. In its words, it is to make her elderly grandmother also It is easy to get started, and after the completion of the TSN platform development, it won the user interface design award. TSN users include many celebrities at the time. Microsoft President Bill Gates and famous investor Warren Buffett were loyal users of the TSN platform. Perhaps a TSN user once won the world's richest man on bridge.
The biggest advantage of TSN is its low cost. Users only need to spend 130 US dollars for a monthly subscription. If timed, it only costs 10 US dollars for 5 hours. Enjoying all the online entertainment services on TSN is more competitive than online games with an average of $10/hour during the same period, and the variety of games is rich, so it attracts a large number of players. At the beginning of the launch, there were only some board and card games on TSN. Later, some heavy games that support online mode were gradually introduced, mainly some war simulation games and RPG. The most influential game is "The Shadow of Yesaibos ( The Shadow of Yserbius" and the air combat simulation game "Red Baron", among which the former is also an important graphic online game in the early development of online games.
"Shadow of Yesebos" is another work of MUD moving towards graphics, but in terms of system complexity, it is also a step backwards from MUD. The reason for this is that the game supports online multiplayer. The version only allows up to 60 people (the game also has a stand-alone mode), and there is no open world. This game is also a game based on the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, but there are only two routes of lawfulness and chaos. Players can choose 6 professions from 8 races to create characters and assign their own attribute points. Each profession has 4 unique skills. After leveling up in the game, you can use skill points to upgrade original skills or learn new skills. As the level increases, the consumption of skill points gradually increases.
The game developed and operated by Xueleshan itself is a 2.5D game. Players can control the angle of view through the arrows on the screen. The screen effect of the game has been greatly improved compared to "Neverwinter Nights". The operation interface and equipment interface have become more intuitive, and a prototype design that can be counted as a cutscene to a certain extent: with monsters When fighting, the main interface on the left side of the game will have a big monster avatar, but the display effect is very rough.
There are very few role-playing elements in the game, and there is no world map. The main way to play is to join a room and team to explore the dungeon. The plot story is very simple: an adventurer responded to the call to destroy the fire element "En-li-Kil" in a volcano. He found several partners in the tavern and embarked on a journey to destroy the monsters. .
In online mode, you need to join a room just like playing chess and card games. The TSN room supports 30 players to join at the same time (support 60 people later). Players can recruit online players in the room to fight together. A team allows up to 4 people. Players join. After entering the dungeon, you can explore some special items or discover hidden areas, but gaining experience through combat to increase the level and obtain loot is the main source of fun in the game. The combat mode of "Shadow of Yecybers" is somewhat similar to a turn-based war chess game. Players operate characters on a grid to attack monsters or use spells, props, skills-or escape from the battle. The length of the dungeon is limited. After all levels are cleared, you can only exit the dungeon and return to the main interface, assign skill points or purchase items, and then start a new battle.
In addition to exploring the dungeon, "Shadow of Yecybes" also has a PVP component, and many players have also joined the guild. Some famous game guilds in European and American online games were born in this game. It is worth mentioning that after the game was launched, plug-ins even appeared. The most famous is a character attribute modification software called VitaminF. Although Xueleshan has also taken precautions against this, it has little effect.
"Shadow of Yesebos" only operated until 1996 and ceased service when TSN was shut down. Although it has 30,000 paying users, TSN did not make a profit due to the high bandwidth cost and low fee model. Instead, it caused Xueleshan to lose millions of dollars every year. The turning point occurred in 1994. It saw the prospect of online games and started. The telephone company giant AT&T, which has entered the network business, acquired half of TSN for $50 million and renamed TSN to ImagiNation Network (INN), which increased the charging price and cleaned up some "indecent" games. In the following year, AT&T purchased the remaining half of Xueleshan's shares for US$50 million. After deducting development costs and several years of operating expenses, Xueleshan not only climbed out of the loss-making quagmire, but even made a profit. At the same time Among the companies that provide online game services in the future, it is already very valuable.
In addition to the shadow of "Shadow of Yesaibos", Xueleshan also launched another graphic online game "The Realm Online" in 1995, but it was not operated on TSN. This is a round-making battle game. The game introduces a death penalty mechanism. Players will randomly drop some items after being killed. This was later used by many early online games. At the same time, "Kingdom" is also the first online game with an economic trading system. Some players have established virtual stores in the game to sell equipment and other items obtained by killing monsters in the game in exchange for currency in the game. There are even players selling accounts or even Mine...
Although Xueleshan did not lose much in the online game business, AT&T, which was once ambitious to rely on TSN to develop online online services and game markets, had to swallow this bitter pill. After 2 years of operation, AT&T finally understood that this platform was not as promising as it had imagined, and decided to sell this part of the assets, and finally sold it to AOL for $15 million. Since AOL has its own network service platform, after the acquisition, the server of ImagiNation Network was shut down, and those games operating on the platform also stopped operating services.
A legacy during AT&T's operation is "AD&D Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands" (AD&D Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands), which is also an important early graphic online game. At the time of the acquisition of TSN, AT&T had hoped to have an ace work like AOL's "Neverwinter Night" on its own platform in order to attract users to compete with it, so in the summer of 1994, it negotiated with SSI, the developer of the Golden Box series. They cooperated and reached an agreement in October for the latter to develop an online game based on the influential "Dark Sun" series in the Golden Box series.
"Hall of the Sun" can be regarded as a setting that is slightly less influential than the "Forgotten Kingdom" used in "Dragon Spear" and "Neverwinter Nights" in many settings of Dungeons and Dragons. The stage of this setting is a The arid world of Athas, Athas was originally a rich blue ocean planet, but the out-of-control magic robbed it of its vitality, turning it into a scorching sun that was abandoned by the gods and lacked water and hope. SSI authorized two companies to develop two games "Dark Sun: Shattered Lands" and "Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager" in 1993 and 1994. The novel works of this series also have great influence.
After the cooperation began, Andre Vrignaud (Andre Vrignaud) began the team formation work. At that time, SSI's internal resources for Frignard were really limited: the art design work for the entire project was only a part-time art designer, and the sound effect engineer was seconded to "World of Aden: Thunderscape (Taiwan translation: Thor Heroes)" 》In order to ensure progress, the project team had to extract some image materials and sound effect materials from the two previous games in the series and some similar games in the company (such as "Aladdin" with a desert background) and reuse them (it seems It's worse than today's flood of skin-changing in the domestic online game industry).
The members of the project team re-developed "Heroic Sun: Broken Earth" based on the engine code of "Heroic Sun: Broken Earth", but encountered another problem at this time: because SSI has no experience in online game development, the internal programmers of the company Therefore, the online code programming of the game had to be outsourced to an external work team, and many problems also appeared in the cooperation between internal and external companies.
The progress of the game is also continuously delayed due to various problems. First, the senior management of the network security company required a UNIX server for the game. The project team took several weeks from applying for hardware to configuring the network. Afterwards, more serious problems came; when the project was first established, the Windows 95 system had not yet begun to be sold, so at the beginning "Havoc Online" was developed for the DOS system, but with the release and popularization of the Window 95 system, the company requested games The new Windows system must be supported, and the project team changed it after months of trying.
Regarding the online "Heroes of the Sun Online", the tragic events are far from over. In November 1995, just as the game's development was coming to an end, Frignard learned from his supervisor that AT&T was planning to withdraw from the network business, and all network services would be cancelled by then, including the game they developed. However, this does not mean that this project is over. The game is nearing completion and SSI can sell it to other online operators. Therefore, the project team did not disband, but continued the unfinished development work.
SSI sold the game to another online game operator Total Entertainment Network (referred to as TEN). In the process, the development team discovered a huge loophole, which is crucial to the online service of the game. Ricky, who is responsible for repairing the game · It took Rich Donnelly a month to close this loophole.
In 1996, after a lot of hardships, the "Walking Sun Online" started to prepare for the Beta test. There were too many players applying for the test. The project team only selected 500 players to send the test CD, and the rest of the players need to download a 30M file from the Internet. Archive. After the beta test started, players found a large number of problems in the game, and due to the previous poor coordination of internal and external programming, the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology used by the game network service is extremely easy to be cracked by hackers. After a long and painful revision of a series of issues, "Hall of the Sun Online" officially landed on the TEN platform at the end of 1996.
From the perspective of system settings, "Hall of the Sun Online" has many common functional designs in today's online games, such as guilds, occupations, chat windows, team formation, levels, death penalty, etc. In the game, PVP is still the main content. The designer did not restrict PVP too much. Instead, death penalty was introduced to encourage this behavior among players-when the player dies, some equipment and even attribute experience will be lost. Fortunately, the game The highest character is only 15th level. Finding more teammates to form a team can better protect your own safety.
There are some simple random tasks in the game, but they are almost unattractive to players. The biggest attraction of the game to players is its sociality: this game has an extremely powerful chat system. The developer strongly encourages interaction between players and role-playing through language, and realizes online and offline interactions between players through the community. Praised by later developers.
However, due to the limited number of users on the TEN platform, the operating conditions of "Halcor Online" were not ideal, and the service eventually ceased in 1998. One year later, because Blizzard built http://Battle.net to provide online services for its games, the business of TEN, which originally provided online business support for Blizzard Games, was greatly affected, and the TEN platform was also shut down by the company. However, this online game service platform, which was built almost at the same time as TSN, did not die out. Later, TE Networ saw the prospect of Internet advertising and began to focus on browsers that are easier to play games. It was built to provide browsers. The website http://Pogo.com , whose main business is online mini games , was later acquired by EA for US$40 million in 2001 and became an important game brand under EA.
History is always surprisingly repeated. We have seen a lot of failed acquisition cases like AT&T's acquisition of TSN when emerging markets emerged. TEN's immediate transformation and self-help can also bring people a lot of enlightenment. From the early days of the Chinese online game market to today, various stories of failure or success in investment or acquisition have been unfolding every day. Some people only saw the broad prospects of the game market, but rushed into battle and withdrew without understanding the industry. Most of them ended up like AT&T. They can have a deep understanding of the industry and see the future development trend. In fact, there are not many companies.