The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
There are two ways to treat a license, once you find yourself holding one that is loved and respected.
One is to treat it like it’s gold, only release quality product, to ensure that the brand continues to hold it’s value. Licenses like Doom, Unreal, and Mario are licenses about which bad games are rarely, if ever, made. Because why on earth would you kill the goose that lays the golden egg? Continue reading
Rumor has it that the Blu-Ray is a core reason why PS3 is running late – you don’t want to run half-assed into a major tech war against a heavily funded opponent. They aren’t apologetic – they are, in fact, trying to spin it as a major boon to developers.
There’s this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost. That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent.
See, here the message is how microtransactions provide better and more gameplay to the customer.
Guitar Hero II is going to be rocking a new stage! RedOctane announced today that the Guitar Hero crew will bring their award-winning tour to the Xbox 360 “The tour will continue the rockin’ gameplay Guitar Hero fans have come to enjoy, and will now include expanded Xbox 360 capabilities,” said Kai Huang, president of RedOctane. “With Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 rock rhythm, lead, or bass guitar tracks with downloadable content and the new X-Plorer controller, designed specifically for the Xbox 360.”
It seems like just yesterday, Cryptic was getting their hineys sued off by Marvel. Now, they are officially bedfellows.
What this means to existing City of Heroes players waiting for the next expansion is not known, but I suspect it’s not good. Meanwhile, congratulations, Cryptic, and good luck solving the BatmanSpiderman problem. That being said, I think Marvel is a much better potential MMO universe than DC, but then that’s just me.
So last week I discussed the importance of running on a minimum spec machine. Sure, this expands the market for people who might buy the game, but I think for an MMO, it may be even more vital for one obvious reason: the hand-me-down effect.
Simply put, your average household does not have two top-of-the-line, tricked out, Alienware boxes. They might have one. But if you are a game that depends heavily on Coupleplay (playing with someone you know in real life), this suddenly catapults in importance. Nick Yee things Coupleplay is vastly important. And while I tend to question Daedalus’ data methodology in general, I tend to agree. Continue reading
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
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).
Thomas Mortensen at MMORPG wrote up an article discussing classes in MMOs. He immediately gets off on a wrong foot.
The MMORPG genre has changed a lot since the early days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, but the games still relies on the basic classes introduced back then.
Pssst. Neither UO nor Meridian 59 HAD classes. Both were tankmagalicious. Continue reading
Raph pointed out this article regarding how hard it is for non-gamers to play games. I’d recommend any developer to read it. It rings true to me – for the life of me, I can’t play Halo. An FPS without mouselook eludes me. Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve added a term to the zen lexicon, but a co-worker coined one today: Fantasia Frenzy.
He used it to describe a massive amount of overdesign on a particular part of the game. As in, “I was asked to design a level, and my lead wasn’t there, so I sort of went into a Fantasia Frenzy. Next thing I know, I’ve got a level half the size of Belgium, and my boss is tapping on my shoulder. Looking kind of grumpy.”
Ah well, it made me giggle. Him, he’s in the process of cutting the baby in half. Maybe into thirds.
© 2024 Zen Of Design
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments