Category: General

Ok, you have a reasonable budget and a pretty decent team of programmers and artists. Everything is waiting on YOU to work all the design out.

What I want to know, is what you feel is missing from MMORPGs, or what do you think could have been designed much better in current titles. Does fishing for 36 hours straight to get to level 2 fisher really piss you off? How would you do it differently? Think all magic systems are horrible? (fireball1, fireball2, fireball3 gets old after a while doesn’t it?) How would you do things differently?

I’m not looking for story ideas here, I just want to see what everyone thinks is missing or could be done better from a gameplay and mechanics perspective. Any interesting ideas out there?

Sound off…

[City of Villains] To recover from that last point, let us talk about a time when you can usefully stand there doing nothing. Let us talk about Masterminds and some Defenders.

To put this in other-game terms: don’t you hate it when your healer is running around whacking things with his stick instead of getting back mana to heal you? Don’t you wish he would sit there and do nothing between times when he would be useful? On my DAoC Theurgist, I used to spend every few battles sitting down with my bladeturn chant going, so that I could keep that going, buff everyone, and cast one AE CC spell per pull. Same idea here, only more so.

Continue reading Don’t Just Do Something! Stand There!

[City of Villains] I may have mentioned this before, but you are required to do the basic function of your class. I think I referred to a Mastermind or three who would not summon their pets?

Today, I was on a team with a Stalker who did not use Hide. A Regen Stalker, she also did not use Integration. Or any toggles at all, in fact.

There are two defining powers for a Stalker: Hide and your Assassin Strike. Using the second requires the first, without which you are just a low damage class with caster hit points and no defenses to speak of. Regeneration is about healing yourself. If you do not turn on your healing power, you die; also, it has all of your protection against crowd control.

You may not be surprised to hear that she did not, in fact, die. You can still hide in lowercase, in the sense of running to the back of the group if the enemy looks scary.

If you can see the Stalker on your team, kick her from the group.

: Zubon

[Stay Alive] I can’t believe I’m going to write about this film again, but I’ve been over thinking since I first wrote about it. I really need to fix my computer. Anyways, the more I thought about it, maybe Stay Alive could be the greatest idea for a movie ever! It probably will suck though.

Continue reading Still Alive

[World of Warcraft] My brother and I took a trip out to Arathi Highlands about a week ago to pick up some PvP food for our honor farming at level 49. I want to hit Stoneguard before I hit 50 and have a whole new tier of BGs to play in. We decided to mess around and go look for some Alliance to kill. He wanted to try stealthing through Refuge Point. I sat on the edge of the town putting my Hunter’s Mark on Alliance to annoy them while my brother got beat up by some guards.

Continue reading And I thought bubble + hearth was a myth…

One of my biggest disappointments with MMORPGs has been the lack of actual adventure. Shortly after any MMORPG is released tons of information starts pouring in about the game. Large websites filled with detailed information about the game are set up. You don’t know how to complete a quest? Go look it up on a website, or, if you’re old school and/or your computer can’t handle an alt-tab, ask another player!

Continue reading Brave New World

[Stay Alive] My computer is still acting up so no MMOs for me still. It is kind of funny how I’ve become the cliche MMO player that finds himself with so much extra free time when he can’t play his games. They could make a Penny Arcade about me. I’ve taken this extra time to attend a few games of the World Baseball Classic and to go to the movies for the first time in a while. I saw V for Vendetta which was flawed but still great. Before the film there was a trailer for a horror film called Stay Alive from the producer of Charlie’s Angels and The OC about gamers being killed. It appears we have reached a social milestone: the first MMO film.

Continue reading Stayin’ Alive

[RF Online] One of the more interesting aspects of Rising Force Online is its economy. Rather than forcing the player to find out the best ways to make money, the game supplies the easiest way: Mining. In fact, mining plays a central role in making the game possible and fun. Unfortunately, mining is hardly a fun and interactive activity.

Continue reading Money Is Not A Problem

It is better for a game to have skills than classes. It is better to offer more options rather than fewer.

This is not a non-controversial opinion, especially given that our best-selling games are pretty uniformly class-based. They all try to add some of the flexibility that skills give you, but they are class-based systems. Which won: UO, EQ, or AC?

Continue reading Mad Skills

Good grief. In-game advertising sounds like such a wonderful idea…extra revenues, targeted advertising, dynamic ads, etc. etc. Everybody wins with in-game advertising except for the players.

Continue reading In-Game Advertising