A very interesting and informative article was published at Famitsu.com Wednesday concerning the history of Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe as well as the tumultuous nature of online games from a business standpoint. Click "Read more" below to keep reading!
Takao Miyoshi spoke at Japan's CEDEC 2008 this Tuesday, bringing to light some interesting facts about the development and management of online games, in particular Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe, with his lecture entitled "Network Game Development and Foreign Expansion."
Miyoshi began with a quick history of the birth of PSO. SonicTeam focused on three points when it came to the conception of the game.
- The game should allow players all over the world to interact.
- It should focus on cooperative play and communication.
- It should play a part in the spread of online game popularity in Japan.
Years of planning and research went into PSO to help achieve all of these goals, and inspiration was pulled from numerous sources. For example, Diablo inspired the speech bubble system. Miyoshi notes that while Diablo's chat log was nice, it could be difficult to immediately identify who said what. As a result, the idea of using comic book-like speech bubbles was implemented. As PSO's communications system continued to be developed, symbol chat and word select were created to help remove the language barrier that any normal communications system would face. Panzer Dragoon is another title which played a part in early development. It supplied PSO with a base for the visual morphing system used in creating a your character.
While Phantasy Star Online was a major success, it still fell victim to many flaws which could not be corrected due to the Dreamcast's lack of a hard drive. One of the largest problems with the game was hacking; more specifically item duping, stat modding and character data corrupting.
Miyoshi then showed a graph which displayed PSO's Japanese user population over the game's first two years. Shortly after its release, there was a sharp decline (attributed to widespread hacking and cheating), though with the release of PSO ver.2, the population made a large jump. This rise did not last, however, as the user base took an almost immediate nosedive the following month and continued to decline at a steady rate for the next year and a half. With all of this in mind, the game staff realized the importance of having countermeasures for hacking as well as giving regular content updates.
Moving ahead, many of the advances made with the introduction of Blue Burst carried over to PSU. These included server-side saving and game patching to help combat hacking and cheating. Furthermore, the game was planned to have regular content updates on top of developing a continuing story from offline. Lobbies which would support massive numbers of players were also introduced to the game. Nevertheless, the PSU ran into numerous problems of its own. At launch, the servers were unable to handle the massive influx of players, changes to the billing system caused strife and in general, complaints about the game lit up internet blogs. This of course got the attention of SonicTeam, further reminding the staff of the importance of their involvement and care for the game.
The article ends with a chart some may find surprising. This graph displays the change in population for Phantasy Star Universe over the past two years. Note the massive increase in players on the Japanese PC/PS2 servers (dark blue line) in the first month of service followed by a sharp decline over the next five. Though the player base did grow again over the following nine months, it began to fall once more and has leveled out over the past five months. The Xbox 360 servers (green line) have held relatively steady over the past two years, though the local PC/PS2 servers (purple line) have not fared nearly as well, facing a steady decline, gaining only a small boost around the time when Ambition of the Illuminus was released last fall.
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