Kill Ten Rats

I have mentioned Virtual Villagers a few times lately. The creators also make Plant Tycoon,® “a gardening sim game where you nurture plants and experiment with increasingly rare and valuable species. The object is to breed and cross breed plants until you find the 6 Magic Plants and solve the genetic puzzle.” They also have a virtual fish-breeding game along the same lines.

Of course, these are offline games. If you are looking for online massively multiplayer breeding, you might try Virtual Horse Ranch. (It says right at the top that this is a “strategic” MMO horse sim game.) Google led me to a surprisingly large number of online virtual horse breeding games.

And people say there is no innovation going on.

: Zubon

Seriously, wouldn’t robust animal/plant/whatever breeding be a neat addition to your game’s trade skills? Don’t just give us a “breeding” skill that increments up: throw in some real Mendelian genetics. A Tale in the Desert has some things along these lines.

Metaplace launches today. The overview over at Crunchbase says:

“Areae’s Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce.

Most virtual worlds are walled gardens making it hard to get data in and out of the worlds. Metaplace-created virtual worlds can be embedded into your Facebook page, MySpace page, or your own blog via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.”

I have mixed feelings on this, so I am going to wait to comment until I can get a good look and see what is really here.

There is a lot of potential, considering that Koster is at the lead and calling the shots. I am also a firm believer that the precursor to the “metaverse” (or cyberspace depending on your preference) are MMORPGs. I’ve also said that MMORPGs lack a lot of things and so do virtual worlds (like second life). Will Metaplace be a step in the right direction for a change, or will it miss the boat and eventually fall to the side and struggle for years like badly designed MMORPGs and poorly implemented virtual worlds?

I’m hoping that Koster did it right and it takes off. There is a lot of attention on web 2.0 approaches, as well as pseudo-MMOs like club penguin, laguna beach, etc. Expect to see a lot more of these as the “flavor of the day” with the venture crowd becomes social + virtual world. I predict this is a fad, and the people that look to the long term will be thinking way beyond these shallow experiences.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. More later.

Robert / Nicodemus

I saw the site for Aion today. Guys, no offense, do that one over.

Presenting a major part of your game as “PvPvE” comes across as meaningless crap. It’s not just PvP or PvE — it’s PvPvE! And I saw a video, they can say that with a straight face. The intent is to have a three faction system, which is of course a huge innovation, but one of them is NPC-controlled. Mmhmm. Having the NPCs pick on the winning team is an interesting idea; calling it revolutionary PvPvE means we must discount anything else you say.

If you check that page linked above, you may see my immediate worry in the first sentence. You are leading with “most visually stunning”? You really want the #1 thing people say about your game to be, “It looks pretty”? There are five sections: an overview that says how pretty it is, three tabs of graphics, and “specs: TBD”; you might say something about the game. I suppose we can really test the theory that graphics sell games, but we already have several MMOs with system-cracking graphics. I am also excited about this “true fantasy world,” as I have been playing in fake fantasy worlds this whole time.

You still have time before release. Throw the whole page away and start over, remembering that only gamers are going to bother to visit the site. Or maybe it is targeted to a gaming press that will run with pretty pictures and unsubstantiated claims of revolutionary play… I’m sorry, a massive wave of cynicism has caught me, and I cannot finish.

: Zubon

I do like the idea of focusing on flight to make it real 3-D combat.

Okay. Just shoot from the hip on this one. A simple scenario and a simple question:

“WTF Studios, a leader in the interactive blah blah blah, is proud to announce the development of its flagship MMORPG Title – Grynd : Legends of the Shadows of Fantasy and Ancient Wars with Vampires and More Stuff Online…”

And so on. You go through the usual bulletpoints and see what it’s all about. You check the screens. You may or may not look at beta videos that may or may not have been leaked. Standard Operating Procedure, basically. Some features you like, some others you don’t, some others you’re indifferent about. Until it comes to crafting, which essentially boils down to the following:

“Players can only have one character designated as crafter per account, per game server. There are no limits to the number of alts, however only one character per account and server can be a crafter.”

How does something like that tickle your game bone? Yea? Nay? Doesn’t even tickle? What’s your reaction as a hip-shooter? Utter lunacy, or an effective way to inject a little bit of common sense into an online economy?

If I cannot jump, you do not have a 3-D world. Don’t bother with a Z-axis and the pretty models. Just go 8-bit and get it over with.

: Zubon

Have you ever noticed that Plan A and Plan B look nothing alike? If my wife cannot have cannelloni with spicy chicken soup, her second choice will be a chicken-kabob pita with fries, and #3 is sweet and sour chicken with garlic bread. The only common link here is chicken.

All the points between A and B may be worse than either A or B. You cannot make a Prius from an Escalade by gradual degrees, nor can you stop halfway through making peanut butter cookies and switch to chocolate cake. Well, you can, but it pretty much means throwing everything away and starting over. You cannot build EVE Online out of Auto Assault.

Yesterday’s discussion was about a patch to Everquest 2. If we could have an ideal crafting system, it would probably look something like this crossed with this. That’s Plan A. If you can build that as your system from the start or have the luxury of re-doing your entire crafting system (and figuring out what to do with current crafters), fabulous. Please tell me how I can work for you or play your game.

Plan B involves going to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Given existing problems, doing something silly that moves you further away from Plan A can improve things. If nothing else, it is something you can do right now while working on that complete overhaul in the long run. We can see the duct tape, but it will hold until we can get a replacement.

Is it silly that bikinis cover plate mail? Yes. Do you have a better solution for customizing appearances that does not involve an entirely new system of itemization?

: Zubon