Zen Of Design

The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Month: January 2005 (Page 1 of 2)

Pattern Breaking

January 28, 2005 /

A lot of talk has been happening about World of Warcraft, and what they did so right to enjoy such success. The general consensus amongst most observers is that, well, there just isn’t a lot new there. And so, unsatisfied with the response that people came because the game was simpler and dumbed down from standard RPG fare, people have been asking what is it about WoW that the hardcore gamers have decided is better? The same answers keeping coming up: the quests and the lack of a grind. Continue reading

Fighting Fire with Warcraft

January 26, 2005 /

Jamie Fristrom, whose been known to pontificate himself from time to time (when his blog is up and running, that is), had this to say:

But didn’t WoW itself fight fire with fire by taking the best features of the best MMO’s and combining them?

An excellent question. The copout answer is that, inside the games industry, Blizzard is a law onto themselves. But I’m not satisfied with that, of course. The books I’m distilling this line of philosophy from (Positioning and the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by the esteemed Al Reis) are full of examples about how unbeatable titans like Coca-Cola, Xerox and Volkswagen screw up because they extended into new territory with a me-too product. So let’s dig further.

Continue reading

First, We Ban All the Whiners

January 21, 2005 /

For companies running an online game, one of the strangest concepts to learn is that Not All Customers Are Created Equal. In an MMO. one customer’s ten bucks is not equivalent to another’s 10 bucks, if the first is actually driving people away. This seems like common sense to anyone who has played an MMO for more than a week.

But it runs contrary to all business logic. Your first instincts is to think that The Customer is Always Right. Learning otherwise is almost impossible to do until an organization has a game running – until you experience the problems for a while, your first instinct is to Try To Save Them All. Some aren’t worth saving. 3DO went through that learning process. When I moved to Origin, the UO management team was in the middle of learning it as well. Then I came here, I found that both Wolfpack and Ubi were still getting a handle on the concept – despite having many other games come before them.

It’s just a lesson an organization has to learn the hard way.

The interesting thing is that the concept that maybe, just maybe, the customers AREN’T always right is starting to bleed into other businesses. Continue reading

Playing It Safe Means Playing to Lose

January 20, 2005 /

Here we are talking about how playing it safe in the world of design is a loser of a philosophy. To prove that I can link any disparate topics, here is a similar discussion about football. The esteemed Dr. Z (probably the best technical football columnist) writes about how some teams get so scared of taking a huge chance and instead lose quietly.

There are coaches who are always looking for ways to beat you, who will go for the throat. Give us 40 seconds and one time out and we’ll put points on the board, is their philosophy. These coaches have Super Bowl rings.

There are coaches whose playbooks are filled with things that can go wrong. They have a fine working knowledge of the terrors of the game. They coach not to lose. Yet they lose, maybe not over the course of a season, or a career, but they lose the big ones. Let me tell you about this latter breed.

The article was spurred by two incidents, in two seperate weeks, where fraidy-cat coaches were so terrified of an unlikely scenario (interception, fumble, sack) that they gave their kickers long, unlikely field goals in very hostile, pressure cooked circumstances, rather than try to throw a couple passes to get a little bit closer and make the kick a little bit easier

Continue reading

The Joy of Not Being Everquest

January 19, 2005 /

At first glance, you would have sworn that Earth and Beyond would crush Eve. Earth and Beyond had a huge team, an enormous budget, a spiffy marketing plan and a head start. It had a supremely talented team, including many responsible for various Command and Conquer licenses and others with MMO pedigrees (a rarity at the time). It had a winning idea – a modernization of classic games like Netrek and Elite with a massively multiplayer component. And, of course, most of all, it had the Electronic Arts label. And nobody beats EA, right?

A funny thing happened on the way, though. Somehow, on the way, E&B became “Everquest with Spaceships”, first in the mind of its execs and design team, and after that, in the mind of it’s fans. It’s as if, whenever facing a design crossroads, they asked themselves, WWEQD. “What would Everquest do?” Continue reading

Making the Funny Pages Funny Again

January 18, 2005 /

When I was a kid, I faithfully read the comic strips every day. Somehow, somewhere I outgrew comics (and given I design friggin’ video games for a living, that’s quite an indictment). I suspect it’s partially because I no longer have a tangible newspaper anymore, prefering to use online sources for my news.

As such, I only read good comics that are available online: Dilbert (which is a lot funnier, once you’ve worked at 3DO), Penny Arcade (which is pretty funny whenever they’re not writing in-jokes that only they get) and Sinfest (which is pretty funny as long as he stays away from the cute pets).

Anyway, now I can keep track of the rest of those comics that I don’t read anymore with “I read the comics so you don’t have to” (edit: now the “Comics Curmudgeon”). Reading his insightful summaries on the strangeness in the comics is like getting in touch with old friends, while at the same time reminding me how happy I am that I don’t read these on a daily basis.

Redefining ‘Unconventional Weaponry’

January 16, 2005 /

I won’t be happy until we see some of these in Command & Conquer: apparently in the mid-90’s the US military was contemplating a ‘Gay Bomb’:

The plan for a so-called “love bomb” envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale.

Others up for consideration include a ‘Who? Me?’ bomb which would mimic flatulence, a swarm bomb that would draw swarms of insects on the opponent, a vampire bomb that makes enemy skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight, and a halitosis bomb which gives all the bad guys bad breath. Really, most Magic cards are more plausible than the ideas in this article.

Found via Ludology.

Fight Fire With Water

January 15, 2005 /

“You don’t fight fire with fire. That’s silly. You fight fire with water.”
— quote by Howard Gossage, Marketing Guru

The entry of WoW into the marketplace has, naturally, forced everyone else to react to some degree – totally expected, given that they are clearly now the online frontrunners, at least in North America. This has created a lot of discussion as to what their competition should do. The matter isn’t helped by the fact that we have a unique place in the industry. Most games are consumable, and as such, a fan of First Person Shooters might well buy Doom, Quake AND Halflife. Even if they choose only one for their online play, the makers of the game will get the full box price from those who chose to experiment. By contrast, those of us in the MMO space depend on that sweet, sweet monthly income. Most marketing and management departments at established game companies have trouble with this paradigm shift. Continue reading

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