Zen Of Design

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

Month: September 2006 (Page 2 of 2)

Curt Schilling, EQ Junkie, Realizes He Can Roll His Own

September 14, 2006 /

So what do you do if you’re one of the highest paid, highest profile MMO players of all time? Simple, you get into the business for yourself. And, um, you bring a couple of high-profile friends along.

Schilling knows that, like with baseball, getting a game together is a team effort and has enlisted the help of some other entertainment luminaries. Serving as art director will be Todd McFarlane, creator of the Spawn comic and noted baseball memorabilia junkie. R.A. Salvatore, a fantasy writer who will keynote the upcoming Dark Age of Camelot Roundtable in Las Vegas, will be the publisher’s creative director.

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High (Res) Expectations

September 12, 2006 /

Here’s something I wanted to get into my talk, which fell out for reasons of flow: the expectations that other genres bring to the table.

One reason why it’s easier to make fantasy MMORPGs is that fantasy players really don’t care about teh sh1n3y. We want something that looks pretty, but we don’t obsess over it. Given that MMOs have an enormous number of technical problems to deal with beyond graphics, and given that our graphics have to be dumbed down to deal with — well, let’s just call it the “Ironforge problem” – well, that’s not something that can be ignored. Continue reading

Proof You Don’t Need Combat…

September 12, 2006 /

My power point presentation is now online in the sidebar.

During my talk, I said, “You don’t need combat. You just need something visceral, tactical, repeatable, with potential for co-op play and which is easy to learn, but hard to master.” Some people thought I was speaking tongue-in-cheek, and that I thought that only combat could actually ever fit that bill.

Meanwhile, Kart Rider just announced they hit 700K concurrent users.

Tim Carter Takes Umbrage!

September 11, 2006 /

Who is Tim Carter? I have no idea, but it’s quite possible it might be this guy. Why do we care? Because he said nasty things about my talk, even though from reading his criticisms, it’s pretty obvious he didn’t see it, or understand it.

To be fair, I expected some sour grapes about what I said, since it’s easy to interpret what I said as “Do the status quo”. What I was actually trying to say was, “Please innovate, but if you’re going to innovate, have the courtesy of understanding the status quo. That way, the innovations will be better than what we have now. Which means, they’ll be, in fact, innovative.” Anyway, let’s hear what Tim has to say. Continue reading

More Cool Graphs from PARC

September 11, 2006 /

I love the PlayOn guys. Even though I find myself frequently questioning their methodology, they always ask interesting questions which makes me think about the games I’m building. Here’s a really simple one, based on levelling time in WoW. Take a look.

The shape of the graph is really interesting, with a slight dip at level 39, followed by a huge spike at 40. This, most likely, is caused by mounts. People grind through 39 as fast as they can to get the mount, then afterwards enjoy an emotional release. Perhaps they are relaxing after slavishly grinding, perhaps they’re focusing on earning cash to buy the mount, or possibly they’re just joyously exploring the world with their new speed buff. At any rate, it shows how powerful strong ‘threshold’ rewards can be in motivating players.

Also of interest: a lot of battlegrounds players will choose not to level up once they hit the highest level in a battleground level band (i.e. staying at level 29 so they can rule the 20-29 battleground). As such, you’d expect to see some spikes at the -9s. This doesn’t appear to be evident at all, although I note that their samples are on PvE servers. It would be interesting to see the same graph on a PvP servers, where players might be more likely to min-max for the battleground experience.

Someone Set Second Life Up The Bomb

September 11, 2006 /

Lost amidst all the news from AGC: Slashdot favorite and Wired darling Second Life was hacked last week, resulting in the compromise of customer names and addresses, as well as encrypted passwords and credit card information. Something to, uh, keep in mind if you’ve given them your credit card information.

It’s a PR nightmare – Second Life is forcing everyone to choose new passwords, which means the entire population will know about it, which is undoubtedly going to cause a wave of no-confidence cancellations. It also could end up proving financially disastrous – lawsuits are likely, inevitable if the credit card information ends up decrypted.

Men In Tights Summaries

September 8, 2006 /

My talk was today. It went well. You can find a writeup on gamespot as well as a writeup on Gamasutra. Also, Raph Koster live-blogged the thing.

This was one of the harder talks I’ve ever had to give. My first draft of this talk read almost like “do exactly what’s been done before”, whereas I wanted the message of the talk to really be “Innovate, but stop innovating in stupid ways”. Put another way, if you’re going to come up with a replacement for a class system, be sure your innovation is actually better than a class system. (But please, come up with something better than a class system!)

I may respond more in depth tomorrow. Been drinking tonight (as I’ve been forced to hold off on the conference partying the previous two nights due to working on the presentation).

Update: Here’s the Terranova thread on my talk, which they’ve somewhat merged with Rob Pardo’s talk from Blizzard. Here’s the Slashdot story. Slides coming tonight – and yes, I know I’m a slacker.

Update 2: Here’s the slides (7 MB due to excessively large art).

Original comments thread is here.

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