ohai… I’m taking MMOs to the next level!

Welcome to our new site. I’m Don Neufeld, chief technical ohai. Before cofounding this company, I helped ship several top MMORPGs, including EverQuest II, PlanetSide, and Star Wars Galaxies. At ohai, however, we’re making a very different kind of game. Basically, we’re making frictionless, lightweight, MMOs that create joy and connection between people in their everyday lives.

But what’s that mean?

Look at the gaming landscape: Very few companies can develop new massively multiplayer online games nowadays, because they cost so much money. A typical MMO has a production schedule that is budgeted for three years, but often ends up taking five. Most of these games are also built as walled gardens, with very little interaction between the game world and where people normally live and socialize online.  That isn’t to say they aren’t fun, but they aren’t built to appeal to a broader audience.

That’s one reason we’re building MMOs to live on the web. That speeds up the development time, a lot.  And rather than assume we know what players want, we iterate immediately based on what they’re actually doing in the game. (Another advantage of deploying on the web.)

Being on the web and within social networks also means our games can reach out to players in interesting ways. We want to make it so that you don’t have to be logged into our games, to know what’s happening in them. These aren’t walled gardens. Characters from our game will send you instant messages, even Tweets. We want to tell an unfolding story in real time, with and for our players.  (More on this in future posts!)

Gamers used to playing MMORPGs with high-end graphics may read this and wonder, So what’s in this for me? To be sure, we’re not going to compete on 3D graphics — we build games that run efficiently in Flash.  But we don’t think 3D graphics is where MMO innovation needs to be.  Instead, we’re trying to provide more compelling social, multiplayer play and take that to the next level. Think short play sessions and episodic fun, games played in bite-sized chunks, not whole novel lengths. But, there’s still enough complexity here that you can easily immerse yourself for hours in our rich worlds.

Essentially, the kind of gaming that people are already enjoying on Facebook, but we’re taking it to the next level.   Translation: an MMO you can play at the office during your lunch break or from the school library between classes. Of course, we’re free to play, and we’ll be monetizing through microtransactions.  We believe in providing a service that is so engaging and compelling that people will want to pay for parts of it.

So there’s the general idea. In future posts, I’ll talk about the code behind our games: the server architecture and the game coding my team has been working on, to make our MMOs a unique and innovative experience. Until then, get some hands-on experience with our gaming philosophy, by giving our first MMO a try: Play our flash game City of Eternals now.