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

Category: MMO Design (Page 15 of 36)

Sexy Sprites

Feeling insecure about your real life appearance? Well, click on over to Sexy Sprites, and you can feel insecure about your avatar’s appearance as well!

Interesting side note: If you’re playing MMOs for the hotsexxy women, maybe Second Life isn’t actually the game for you –the top 10 rated women are all in Guild Wars.

On the other hand, if you want to impress the women, head on over to Second Life and get a piercing or a tribal tattoo. Also, own a business – the top two vote-getters are described as CEOs and business owners.

As an aside, the top vote getting female is averaging an 8.5, whereas the men top out at six and a half. Meaning that either women are a lot pickier, or the voters are all men who haven’t found the ‘female only’ pulldown.

Orcs! In! Space!

This morning, the news is that yet another MMO company has started in Austin, and it will be working on the Warhammer 40K license. Vigil Studios was founded by the guy who developed Exarch for NCSoft – a game that never shipped but provided the codebase for another NCSoft property. The game is being published by THQ – a company that just last year poo-poohed the idea that anyone could compete with WoW. Since then, they hired Kelly Flock, formerly of Sony. Interviews with Kelly are here and here.

“We realized this is one of those few properties that has a high level of interest from the hardcore gaming community, which could be a great launching point to turning it into a great mainstream mass-market MMO.”

It takes a great deal of finesse to pull it off, but I actually love the idea of 40K in space. I think that most futuristic MMOs have a real problem finding resonance with their fanbase, and while everyone scoffs at elves and orcs, leveraging them is one shortcut that helps you get there.

On Massive Power Upgrades and Content Obsolescence

What do you do for the guy that has everything? Well, if you’re Blizzard, you invalidate all his stuff.

Even despite some of the discussion on the boards, I was surprised when, upon the completion of my first quest in the new expansion area, I got this staff as a drop: The Staff of Twin Worlds. Previously, I’d been using a pretty craptastic dagger. I just didn’t run across another weapon that complemented my shadow priest the way I wanted, so I stuck with the Hypnotic Blade that I think I got in Scarlet Monastery (the last place I did a lot of instancing before my adventuring guild collapsed beneath the shadow of “drama”). So to say I was happy about getting something that was, objectively, about 5 times better in every way that actually matters to a priest is a vast understatement. Continue reading

Grumpy Warren Ellis Wants Kids, Bondage Gear off Second Lawn

Warren Ellis has been day-tripping into Second Life, and god bless him, he seems to honestly making an effort to scratch beyond the surface. This doesn’t change him from having to solve some problems unique to Second Life.

I went in-world on Sunday evening to pick up messages and to look for some music to stream while I worked. Materialising on my new land, I immediately noticed two pings on the “minimap” radar screen that’s placed in the top left of the Second Life viewer. There were two people on my land….

The first thing I saw in the blockhouse was the avatar of a naked man strapped face-down over a piece of sexual apparatus that presented his backside. I then realised that the blockhouse had been filled with dungeon toys. A couple of dozen of them. And, sitting on a chair I didn’t recognise, was a dominatrix with long dark hair, idly waving a riding crop.

“Please be quiet,” she said. “We are busy.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I typed.

“Go away,” typed the slave.

“I not tell you to talk,” the dominatrix tapped out.

I resisted the urge to pull a weapon and blow them off my land like an enraged farmer. Instead, I used the Land tools in the menu. You can select every object on your land that doesn’t belong to you and send it back to the inventories of the owners. Therefore, Slave Bill flopped on to the floor as his wooden sex horse vanished from under him. The Land tools also let you ban individuals from entering your space. If they’re already on your land, it takes a moment; and then they quite satisfyingly fly through the roof and are dumped on the nearest available adjacent parcel.

Continue reading

Blizzard Puts Foot Down on Unattended Macroing

According to this random post on Markee Dragon, WoW has filed legal action against WoW Glider, the 3rd party app that allows players to grind unattended.

Blizzard and Vivendi ( www.blizzard.com ) today filed against MDY Industries ( www.wowglider.com ) and Michael Donnelly in the state of Arizona USA. Blizzard is seeking injunctive relief and money damages against MDY. What that means is they want him to stop the production of WoW Glider and they want him to pay them damages. Blizzard believes that Glider infringes on their intellectual property. They believe Glider allows players to cheat, giving them an unfair advantage and that they believe Glider encourages Blizzard customers to breach their contracts for playing the game. Last they claim that Glider is designed to circumvent copyright protections.

Continue reading

My First Vanguard Impressions

4 frames per second. In character creation.

I gotta give them a whole “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, though. It feels like I bought what was at the time a fairly hotshit Alienware gaming rig just yesterday, but I note that my video card is a 5700 GeForce when the boys at nVidia are up to the 8800s, so maybe it HAS been 3 years since I bought the thing. Looks like I’ll spend President’s Day doing some targetted upgrades.

Original comments thread is here.

Puzzle Pirates Provides a Second Data Point

In a Red Herring article, Daniel James gives some pretty hard numbers about Three Rings, which are interesting, especially in light of the recent Second Life hysteria.

As silly as it may sound, Puzzle Pirates has been a surprise hit with 2 million registered users, 30,000 of whom have signed up as subscribers—worth a tidy $3.3 million in revenue last year for Three Rings. “There’s a huge audience and they are keen to devour content,” says Mr. James.

Continue reading

The Station Exchange White Paper

I found the Station Exchange paper to be of great interest. I remember first thinking that somebody should do something like the Exchange back when I was working on UO2 nearly ten years ago, but even so, I’m glad that someone else took the slings and bullets for the idea.

Sara and Raph both have good commentary. My own thoughts: I’m surprised the revenue earned was so low. Less than $300K in revenue earned in a year is a significant amount of cash if you’re a small company, but it risks being mistaken for a financial error in an organization with the revenue streams of Sony (and SOE in particular). After all, a game that has 100K subscribers and charges 10 bucks a month brings in a million bucks a month in revenue, and both EQ and EQ2 are higher on both counts. Continue reading

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