Category: MMO Design (Page 26 of 36)

A SWG Dev Speaks

November 5, 2005 / Damion Schubert

There’s another point of view on the entire SWG revamp up over here, and it’s a lot more relevant than mine as it’s written by one of the guys at Ground Zero. Jeff, a senior designer on the team, offers a refreshingly frank behind-the-scenes look at the development process and the reasoning behind these changes.

There’s no way we can do that.

There’s no way we should do that.

Man that’s fun.

The Man will never let us get away with doing that.

We can’t do it.

We shouldn’t do it.

Oh man that is fun.

When an executive producer sees something that is impossible to do, but which is too fun not to do, he makes a noise like “Hoooooooooph”.

Go read it.

Thoughts on Star Wars Changes

November 4, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I actually have no value judgments to offer about where SWG’s design is going now, nor where it was before. I’m more intrigued by the larger picture.

When you invite players into your online world, you make a compact with them, that compact being that you won’t change things all too much. They have a reasonable expectation that the apple cart won’t be tossed too drastically. Sometimes, you have to. Sometimes, you make changes bigger than people were expecting. Sometimes, you add things which fundamentally change the social calculus of an online world, as the Honor System did with WoW. But in most cases, the game doesn’t change that much. For better or for worse. Continue reading

Rebuilding the Plane in Mid-Air

November 2, 2005 / Damion Schubert

SOE and LucasArts have just announced massive changes to Galaxies. The game is becoming class-based and centering on twitchier combat. The crafting professions will be consolidated into one class.

Why is this of interest here? Simply put, it’s the largest set of proposed changes to an existing MMO that I’ve ever seen. If successful, it could change the rules as to how much designers can mess with the formula of a live MMO.

Original comments thread is here.

The Economics of Village Games

November 2, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Lost Garden has a great article on what he calls ‘Village Games’, which is to say, small-scale MMOs in the vein of Puzzle Pirates and Achaea.

Retail games can make over a billion dollars with a single title. That is rather exciting. However, as a developer, you are going to see approximately none of it…A successful village game will produce a steady profit, but the money never becomes astronomical. Instead, you’ll be able to provide above average salaries and many years of job security. This is far better than most games can promise.

AGD Summary Part 4: My Casino Talk

October 30, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I gave an AGD talk late Thursday on Casino Design, and how it can inform MMO design. I think more than a few people were surprised that I didn’t talk about the games at the casinos at all, and talked instead more about interior design of these spaces. I’ve put the Power Point presentation up for download here.

A quick and dirty bibliography: Continue reading

AC2 Quotefile

October 5, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Nothing I could say today would amuse you as much as the Asheron’s Call 2 Quote File. Search for ‘OVERHEARD ON THE LIVE TEAM’.

Secret: almost every game has one. They don’t get published nearly as often as they used to, though. Kudos to Turbine for letting it out the door. Ultima Online 2 had one, and a programmer had the guts to post it for a day after we got cancelled, then it was retracted. Ahhhh, good times. (Link found on Corpnews)

Chinese Gamers Protest MMO Limitations

October 4, 2005 / Damion Schubert

You can take my civil rights, you can take my freedoms, you can take my privacy, but take my ability to take part in an 8 hour raid on Molten Core, and it’sTiananmen all over again!

As of August 29, more than 1,000 Chinese gamers had signed the petition opposing implementation of the new time limits. Chinese authorities said last week they planned to implement a new system that would deduct from the ability levels of online game characters after an individual had played a game for more than three consecutive hours. The system was designed to prevent online game addiction. The online petition is currently on http://bbs.wowchina.com.

Yeah, we’ve discussed this before, and it’s probably too optimistic to hope that our future history books will have to acknowledge MMO addiction as the tipping point that brought down the last communist superpower, but there were a couple parts of the article I found interesting. First was this:

“The new system has real potential to adversely impact online games in China, because the system will probably reduce total playing time, which is directly proportional to income for operators,” Huang said.

Interesting. This seems to directly contradict this:

In addition to the petition, gamers have also begun discussing counter measures to circumvent the impact of the new time limits. The most popular countermeasure suggested has been to open several accounts, so when the new timing system kicks-in for one account, players can then switch to another account and continue play. In fact, such a tactic would be beneficial for online game operators, an official with a leading Chinese online gaming firm, who asked to remain anonymous, told Interfax.

Based on how we play here in the states, at least, that second scenario seems a lot more likely. Of course, what’s interesting to me as a game designer is how these limitations will actually end up affecting gameplay. Huge WoW raids can take a lot longer than 3 hours to complete (which is, of course, certainly not unique to their game), and you can spend an enormous amount of your time waiting in queue to get into battlegrounds. Given how much money WoW gets from China, the interesting question is whether or not Blizzard makes changes to accomodate these new restrictions, and ultimately, whether or not other markets will get to benefit from them as well.

It’s Time for Real MMO Combat

October 2, 2005 / Damion Schubert

A lot of people have complained that there isn’t enough ’skill’ to MMO combat, and it’s too stat and advancement-heavy. There are a lot of reasons why, but one that isn’t mentioned enough is that skill-based games are usually twitchy, and twitchy requires a better Internet connection. A dial-up connection automatically adds at least 200 ms to your latency. And no one wants to be a repeatedly on the losing end due to lag times.

For ages and ages, broadband was a mark of the tech-savvy elite. As recently as a couple of years ago, we were told that only 30% of Internet users had broadband in their homes. Thus, it was too soon to make a game that was broadband-only, which has the possibility to unleash a whole host of new game design concepts that involved quicker responses and more skill. Continue reading

The WoW Plague

September 23, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Now, I’ve screwed up in the past. Many times. In the MMO space, screwing up is almost inevitable, and the real question is how you respond. But I haven’t yet screwed up enough to get the attention of the mainstream media. In this case, BBC reports on the WoW plague, in an article that’s made more amusing as the BBC reporter grapples with how to explain the wierdness that is already inherent to MMOs to an audience that wouldn’t know them from a game of Q-Bert.

The Challenges of Guilds Design

September 18, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The other reason I haven’t been blogging: I wrote a long article about the next generation of Guild Design for Escapist Magazine. They wanted an article about guilds from the designer’s perspective, so I tried to come up with the top 5 challenges for designers to think about. Unfortunately, they trimmed out my german cannibal references. At any rate, feel free to let me know what you think.

The original comments thread is here.