Month: June 2007

It’s late.  My eyes blur with the monitors haze, and the repetitious attempts have long since morphed me into an automaton.  At my side, my wife Abryn is slumped in her desk chair, posture sagging even as her eyes remain fixed on the life bars of our companions.

Months of attunement, back-flagging, farming, and hour after hour of failure at the same critical juncture in the encounter.    It seems so simple, yet so impossibly complex at the same time, and frustrations abound, as we continue to throw ourselves against the same brick wall.

Continue reading The Thrill of the Kill

Julian from The Better Game is the winner of a signed copy of MMO Evolution. The book was donated by the author, our own Nicodemus aka Robert Rice. The book is on it’s way Julian. For everyone else, we have one more signed copy to give away, the method of which will be announced soon.

Following the jump is Julian’s story.

Continue reading Contest Winner

Just as it seems almost every game has some kind of RPG element included, I envision a future where every game is played out in a virtual world. Before we can get there, however, we have to find the core elements of what makes an MMO and, more importantly, what makes it fun. There are games that have already experimented with this idea. A prime example is Test Drive: Unlimited. From MMO’s, they took the ideas of exploration and community and blended that into a classic racing formula with excellent results. How long will it be before we see Microsoft Flight Simulator allowing you to see other virtual pilots flying about on a real-world map? How long before Command & Conquer is taking place on a truly global scale with never-ending battles?

These kinds of questions are what you can expect from me. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with the community and hearing what you think about the future of MMOGs.

Dave

I kind of like faction grinds. My little digital person makes friends! Look, every time I do something nice, people like me more, and they even quantify exactly how much!
: Zubon

Hi, I’m Joe, and I’ll be writing way too much about game mechanics, design, and world building.

I first stumbled across KTR about 6 or 8 months ago and have been following it closely and commenting regularly ever since. I’ve been playing MMOs since LegendMUD, Raph Koster’s old DikuMUD. From there, I went into the UO beta, then over to Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, and on and on and on, never getting a character past the teens or so. City of Heroes is the first and only game where I’ve ever gotten to the level cap, and only once there, despite having clocked about 35 months subscribed time. I’ve been a supergroup co-leader and the moderator for the city_of_heroes livejournal community. I’ve also played WoW, and, while I liked the first 50 levels or so, once again, I doubt I’ll ever hit the cap in it.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing posts about the pros and cons of combat mechanics in several current games, programatically generating compelling content, my “ideal” MMO, and similar topics. I look forward to discussing these things with you all.

I started reading Kill Ten Rats a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. For me it has since transcended the traditional MMO Blog role, and become more akin to a community center or traffic hub from whence all travel to other new and interesting places in this fine realm we like to call the MMO Blogosphere, begins.

KTR reminds me a bit of the Nexus in Norrath, or perhaps Shattrath City in Azeroth; a place to meet friends, chat, trade ideas, and find portals to zip off to distant lands in search of the next rat listed in your quest log.

Continue reading Setting My Hearthstone

lolcattery is a strong indicator that there has never been a better time in human history to be alive. Sending a message around the world used to take months rather than moments, and being illiterate did not matter much when you might encounter two books in your life. Now information and energy are so cheap that we use a global communications system to circulate captioned pictures of cats with odd grammar and spelling. We have so much free time that this has spawned a lolcode programming language, and serious professors of linguistics consider lolcats.

Your needs are so easily satisfied that you can spend a considerable amount of time pretending to be a digital elf. This blog is effectively a meta-discussion of being digital elves, and it is available to you for free in your home with frequent updates. You can delve into irrelevant crap like fake online lesbians or whether two imaginary spaceships pretended to bump into one another. You cook make-believe food in-game while eating a pizza you had delivered to your home.

Admit it, modern life is a pretty sweet deal. If you get a chance, you might toss a few dollars to folks in countries where information is still rare and expensive.

: Zubon