Mike Rozak recently announced on MUD-Dev that he’d posted a new article on a new gameplay landscape theory he was throwing around, which he called the Player Pyramid. It got me thinking about things – and getting me to think about something other than football on Superbowl Sunday is no easy feat. Yeah, this article has been brewing for a while, and be warned, this is a long one… Continue reading
Category: MMO Design (Page 31 of 36)
The most remarkable and innovative part of the World of Warcraft experience wasn’t coded by someone at Blizzard – it’s Thottbot, as in “Dammit, which god damn tower does this quest say I’m looking for? I’m paging out to Thottbot.” Now, of course, quest info sites are nothing new, but the twist for Thottbot is that instead of being built by a dedicated staff of people with no lives, it’s built by anyone who happens to run a popular UI mod for the game (and yes, it’s optional) – the data is collected from that player’s play experience, and forwarded to the Thottbot service, which then compiles it for all to see. Continue reading
On Terranova, Matt Mihaly has, in a sentence, summed up my opinion on EQ2’s new /pizza command.
This is such a non-story. “Game lets you bring up external web browser.” Exciting stuff.
Indeed. The most shocking part of the story is that some people think it’s a shocking story, that a /pizza command will somehow disrupt the feel of the game (despite the fact that, if you never type it, you’ll never even notice the functionality exists).
What this feature does is acknowledge what many players already know, and that is that they don’t tend to stay locked inside the ‘magic circle’ of the game. They tend to do other things: talk on ICQ, surf the web, check their mail, buy stuff on Amazon by paging out. The more grindalicious your game is, the more they HAVE to in order to have any semblance of a life.
Brian seems to ask this question a lot, so I thought I’d answer it:
I do have a minor quibble with this. Why focus on the “top 5″ games?
There are two answer to this: the dreamy answer and the business reality. The latter first. When you work for a large organization (as both Jeff and I do), you find that they really aren’t geared to think small. The PC and Console business is incredibly hit driven, and as such, publishers build all aspects of their organization towards their numbers. Continue reading
Cosmik at N3rfed challenged my off-hand assertion that Jeff Freeman is wrong about us being doomed to make fantasy games for all eternity. (Oh, and Jeff, I’m jealous that you can start a blogosphere episode with a paragraph-and-a-half-long update). One of Cosmik’s reasoning: we’re steeped in fantasy from the momma’s teat. Continue reading
But there’s another reason why Fantasy games keep coming bubbling to the top. It’s the Corner Bar theory – people want to spend their time in a space that feels inviting. Sure, you want your adventures to take you to the pits of Mordor, but you want to come home to your Hobbit Hole.
A lot of this has to do with familiarity – of a different sort. PCGamer gave Alpha Centauri a 98%, tied for the best score of all time. Yet, when I want to play a game like that, I reach for one of the Civs. It just feels more satisfying to discover the Wheel than some vague NanoTechnobabble Gizmo. Continue reading
For years and years, the only kinds of shooters were unrealistic, future fantasy games with completely unrealistic physics, and deathmatch was the only flavor. The games that tried to do realism all crashed and burned. “No one wants to die in one shot,” claimed many a designer. Now it’s impossible to imagine a shooter without a sniper rifle. Continue reading
Regarding our recent discussion on fluff, here’s a good list of cultural references hidden inside of World of Warcraft.
I applaud their team’s devoted and obviously systematic approach to populating the world with nods to the real world, as opposed to do what most games do and get totally enamored with their own backstory. That being said, I’m curious how much legal care they had to do to ensure they didn’t cross any lines. You never know when someone will sue you for being even marginally close to their own intellectual property.
I’ve often said ‘Story in games, especially MMOs, are over-rated’. To be fair, sometimes I just say things to throw a grenade into the status quo, and it’s fun to bash story just to rile up Lee. Still, you can imagine my amusement when Ron Gilbert, a key designer on some of the great LucasArts adventure games of our time, essentially agreed with me. Continue reading
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