ohai — Announcing City of Eternals, Our Modern Vampire MMO!

This week I’m proud to announce City of Eternals, the first full-featured online game (often called an MMO) set in a world with modern vampires. Request a private alpha invitation here, we’re giving them out as quickly as we can.

We’ve been building out the core technology for about a year now. City of Eternals went into production about 9 months ago, incorporating a few design elements from our early social games from 2007, and from our even earlier work developing the world’s very first MMOs back in the 1990s. I’m proud to say that ohai team members were leading innovators and developers of text-based MUDs and large scale game franchises such as Everquest, Everquest 2, PlanetSide, Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Second Life and Free Realms. I’m honored to be working with this fantastic team.

With City of Eternals, we’re taking social games and MMOs to their next stage of evolution: An action-filled, web-based experience with 3D graphics playable not just within Facebook, but anywhere on the web, starting with CityofEternals.com, and soon, anywhere you can host the game’s Flash client, such as blogs and social network pages.

In New Valencia, your vampire will battle powerful monsters, uncover mysteries and secrets, and earn a place among many rival vampire Houses fighting to control this secret society of Immortals. But that’s just the start: Fall in love with a fellow Vampire, lead your own personal coven (which we call your “House”), customize your home and avatar look, and much more. Choose the way you want to play a Vampire! Over the next few months, we’ll continue adding features and new content, so our world can better reflect the big diverse culture of the bloodthirsty undead.

Our game is still growing and improving, and we’d love your feedback to make it better. Meantime, look for me in New Valencia — my avatar is also named Susan, a Vampire dressed in hot red boots (I wish I had these in real life!) If you spot me, please say hello.

This is just ohai’s first MMO, by the way, with many more of all varieties to come. Meanwhile, see you in the City of Eternals!

- Susan, chief ohai

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.