Category: MMO Design (Page 22 of 36)

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately. I’ve been on heavy documentation duty at the office, and when that occurs, my desire to write something actually worth reading drops dramatically. It’s a shame, since a lot has gone on lately.

For the time being, go read Scott’s Design Challenge. I was going to post the same thing, only Scott did it first, and to a much higher level of quality than I ever would have.

In a time where every new MMO that’s not named “World of Warcraft” has struggled, it’s kind of heartening to see that Original Gangsta EQ is releasing an expansion pack, which includes the usual new levels, new race, and expansion of the level cap.

The most interesting line of the press release to me, though, is this one.

Content for Levels 1 to 75: Play through every level of the game without ever leaving the Serpent Spine Mountains.

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Slashdot has the story: an SWG emulator has reached the status of vague feasibility. I admit, the movie is quite cool. There are a couple of interesting spins on the story:

The first thing to note is of course the to dance around the fact that there is apparently a market for an SWG emulator where previously there was not. I will decline to comment beyond that.

The second thing that comes to mind is to wonder what the team’s plans for data storage is. I know enough about SWG’s infrastructure to know that pre-NGE made Oracle databases cry like a little girl.

The third thing is that I can’t imagine this not getting shut down by LucasArts and Sony at record speed. To quote one person in the Slashdot thread:

“Execute Order 66. Wipe them out. All of them.”

Once upon a time, I had a co-worker that had 6 Everquest accounts. He was a dedicated fan, in love with every facet of the experience – the raids, the epic loot, etc, and he was continually trying to get the design team of the game I was working on to add more EQ-like aspects to the game I was working on.

Let’s just say that this would have been a significant design shift.

One day, I snapped, and matter of factly asked him, “How many times have you recommended EQ to someone you know in real life?” Continue reading

Every now and then, in design circles, you come across someone who sees the modifiability of WoW’s UI to be the Robot Jesus of game design. Players can finally customize their own UIs! Instead of fearing players, Blizzard embraces them! Somewhere in here, it comes across that, indeed, information does in fact want to be free, yo.

Now, I love the power and flexibility that this provides to the players. What’s more, I’m gratified that the Blizzard team is smart enough to incorporate some of the most popular of those mod changes into the real game. A commitment to doing so is what turns the feature from a niche feature for hardcore users (which incidentally drives the live team nuts to support) into one that benefits all players – eventually. When that happens, its a real validation for the model. But it’s still not what WoW did right. Continue reading

The problem with player-created content can be easily summed up: the number of people who think they have talent vastly outstrips the number of people who actually do. Perhaps for this reason, there were a lot of skeptics when Wish announced, some years ago, that they were thinking of allowing players to contribute quests to their games. According to this article, Horizons is close to implementing something like this.

Using a public copy of the game database, players and writers alike can use existing characters, enemies, and items to add or change their own quests. Tulga’s staff will evaluate these quests for quality before bringing the customized quests into the live game. These customized fan quests should certainly add a homespun dungeonmaster feel to the thousands of Tulga-crafted quests already in the game.

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