I provide citations in conversations. If I could speak in hypertext, I would. Most people find this odd.
I once read of a language (possibly fictional) where the grammatical structure demanded that you state the source of your claim. For example, every declarative sentence would start with something like “I once read of…” or “I was thinking…” If this is a fictional language, we need to make it.
: Zubon
There are still many misconceptions to the unreleased Guild Wars 2. Blogger-in-arms, Hunter, tackled many of these (especially the ones that irritated him) over at Hunter’s Insight. I’ve had this post in draft mode for awhile, and Hunter’s article finally pushed me to complete it.
So, you’ve heard about that Guild Wars game, and you’ve noticed that Guild Wars 2 is one of the most anticipated MMOs to launch. However, your digital home is World of Warcraft. Then this guide is for you!
Continue reading World of Warcraft Player’s Guide to Guild Wars 2
Cognitive Surplus circles back around to that first video, ending on the story of the little girl looking for the mouse to interact with Dora. “Here’s something four-year-olds know: … media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.” The lure of interactivity is what makes our MMO world so compelling. The gameplay rarely beats what you can get in most single-player games. We are here for the shared world, for each other, and in some cases for the chance to help build that world we share. I hope that we are building a world full of people used to changing the world, although I fear that we are instead conditioning people to expect incremental personal achievement in a world that reverts back the moment you stop paying attention.
: Zubon
I was listening to Massively Speaking yesterday where they interviewed Scott Hartsman, head honcho at Trion Worlds. It’s a great MMO podcast to even begin with, but it was also a great interview. One of my big concerns with Rift, coming off of a lot of play time during Beta 4, was the mushiness of the invasion system. Players need focus and sense, and the middle portion of the dynamic content system seemed to lose both. Hartsman eased my fears in the interview because he talked about how we were seeing the early use of tools in their dynamic content system, and there was a lot more to come.
If you enjoyed Viricide, how about its companion text adventure, which is run by ABOMI from the first game. Because too few of your games explicitly hate you.
: Zubon
Projects that will work only if they grow large generally won’t grow large; people who are fixated on creating large-scale future success can actually reduce the possibility of creating the small-scale here-and-now successes needed to get there. A veritable natural law in social media is that to get to a system that is large and good, it is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
EVE Online is a good example of the former. I have about a dozen MMO examples of the latter.
: Zubon
This morning I logged in quick to see if the much awaited patch had dropped and was disappointed to see it hadn’t. Going to the main page, there’s an article about a new area that will be introduced in “a few weeks”. Even more disappointing is that it says that you will have to learn a new form of combat as what you know is not good enough.
So despite not even being completely finished releasing the first version of its combat/gear system, LU is revamping it. For some reason, I’m remembering Star Wars Online’s famous NGE event. Also, the fact that since launch (October) there has only been 3 very small content additions, one of which was created by fans, not Lego staff, and one was a revision of an existing zone. So besides a zone that you can walk across in under 30 seconds (the holiday Frostbluff zone), there’s nothing truly new from the company since launch. For a subscription-based game, one that promised weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly content updates, this has to be a big red flag.
GM-run events in MMOs do not scale well, and their compromises mean they pretty much have to be lousy.
MMO PvE content is designed to scale well, in whatever way it scales in your game. If you make a good quest or instance, you can have it running on hundreds of servers at very little additional cost. Having 10,000,000 people play WoW takes far less developer time than having 100,000 people play each of 100 MMOs. This is mass-production, with increasing returns to scale. Computers are good at copying the same thing for more people.
Developer-piloted NPCs do not scale well. They can be in only one place. If you want that NPC to appear in more than one zone or on more than one server, you need multiple humans to pilot them. Programmed and scripted events can be copied, but the human interaction portion cannot. If you want to give every server an equal experience, you are going to need a script, reducing the human element; you are going to need either staggered starts or a large team; and if you have staggered starts, you need some way to cope with people from the fifth server knowing the script already. Sadly, the end point must always be the same, because you cannot support divergent servers. Any human interaction affects only the storytelling, not the plot.
If the developers of EVE Online, Darkfall, or A Tale in the Desert (all sandbox-y games in increasing order of PvP hardcore-ness) want an event, they can go do it. There is a server or two. They do not need to worry about divergence or repeat performances. Single-server architecture is a grand thing. Similarly, players can run their own events and affect the world. Even if most of the “events” are from people who want to watch the world burn, you have a much larger upside potential.
: Zubon
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Tonight a fairly high-expected patch to Lego Universe (LU) will be loaded, bringing with it the missing-at-launch class for all of the factions, along with a new area and a new racetrack. There’s also a great amount of hope that a bank or storage solution will be put in, as there has been a lot of official comments that “something” is coming for a while now. Some of these were promised, but not delivered, at launch, so seeing them come out relatively quickly is good. However, LU launching with such limited content is causing a lot of dissatisfaction among the user base. Nowhere is this more evident as in the zone called Gnarled Forest, in an area called Brig Rock. It is this area that really shows that the “MM” of “MMORPG” was not thought through completely.
Continue reading Lego Universe: Teaching Camping, Grinding, Kill-Stealing, and Griefing to the Next Generation
This last weekend I played a ton of RIFT in their Beta #4 weekend. I saw the light, but I also so darkness within. Impressions after the break. Warning: very long.