Muckbeast

The supposed solution to the tedium of mob grinding was the implementation of huge numbers of quests. The best example of this, of course, is World of Warcraft. Every new zone or town has one or more “hubs” with merchants and quest givers. The quests then cause you to move about the zone doing this [...]

The video game industry netted over $20 billion dollars in 2008. It continues to expand into new markets and new platforms. The Netbook is the next logical platform for growth.
For detailed analysis, please read this article I wrote and then tell me what you think about the topic:
Netbooks Are the Next Gaming Platform

I’d really [...]

This is a really sore topic for me, as it is something that really pisses me off about how things are evolving in so many online communities. Everyone is trying to turn their site into a “Walled Garden” where you dare not link to any other site lest you be accused of spamming.
Windows Live and [...]

As you may recall, I wrote a review of Age of Conan a few months ago: Age of Conan is a Hot Mess. My review was extremely unfavorable. I have followed the game in the news since then, and while I have read about improvements nothing has really addressed the (imho) core flaws. Then I [...]

Things are going really well with the new Muckbeast. We are averaging about 600 unique visitors per day now, which is better than ever on Today. The downside of popularity is spam! We have started receiving a number of spam comments, so I decided to enable Akismet, which is an intelligent spam filter for comments.
I [...]

At the end of December, my wife’s PC finally died and mine was barely limping along. They were both over 4 years old. I have become disenchanted with pre-builts (read this about Alienware’s decline), so I decided I’d build them myself. I hadn’t done so for 15+ years so i was a little nervous about [...]

I came across this article today, and it was really refreshing to see something new and interesting being discussed: Knocked Up: A Look At Pregnancy In Video Games. The article lists some games that have featured pregnancy, addresses some of the moral issues, and then discusses where games have gone horribly wrong to the point [...]

For any blogger, the quest for more traffic is never ending. Moving Muckbeast has made this quest even harder, as I’ve lost page rank, all sorts of links, etc. But one of the weirdest sources of traffic has been a link to an image in my Hellgate London post. Apparently, my link to a picture [...]

Milawe has written a great article that is a review of Campaign Cartographer 3. If you are looking for a top notch program for creating fantasy, sci-fi, or other types of maps, you definitely want to check this out.
“This review of Campaign Cartographer 3 shares how easily you can make fantasy or science fiction maps [...]

Those of you who visit Muckbeast via entrecard or its main domain name (http://www.muckbeast.com) have already noticed that things look very different. I am now self hosting the blog. At a later date, I will go into more detail as to WHY I made this decision, and what the upsides are for the blog. For [...]

This is a concept I have always believed strongly in, and Raph Koster just wrote an excellent blog article about it: Ways to make your virtual space more social. He makes a lot of great points, but I am going to focus specifically on the concept that game developers must engage in some degree of [...]

I have no idea why this feature is being ignored by the current crop of MMORPGs, but I am going to talk about it anyway because I think it is an important and extremely fun feature. Housing presents one of the best opportunities for players to express their own imagination and it gives them a [...]

I am really getting sick and tired of every MMO turning healers into pseudo-DPS classes. I don’t know who started this trend, but whoever it was needs to be chained up with the guy who invented bind on pickup crafted items, thrown into a pit, and have lotion lowered down to them while being reminded [...]

On June 11, 1996, I brought Threshold RPG fully online for the first time. I generated my first couple characters to make sure everything I had created was working. The game was playable, though it did not have a tremendous amount of content. It had a handful of “zones” and your character class (guild) options [...]

I imagine some of you have read a few of the articles from the last year or so where writers try to draw comparisons between raid leading in a game like WoW, and management in the business world. I seem to recall the Wall Street Journal even wrote about it. I must admit, every time [...]

As promised, I am leaving the Wikipedia topic and moving on to another issue of Threshold’s game design. The religion system is probably one of the most robust and popular role playing features on Threshold. In this post, I am going to talk specifically about how the deities were created. I am assisted in this [...]

This is an abbreviated version of the story designed to get some discussion going. For the full story, with all the details, read my article here: Wikipedia’s War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG .
1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles [...]

People keep asking me to write about how and why I designed things, so I guess it is about time I actually broke down and gave the readers what they want. As I noted in a comment post, when I look back over my 16+ years of computer game design my failures stand out for [...]

Achivements are the new hot feature in MMOs. I’m not sure who had them first, or who does them best, but there is no doubt they are popular as heck. In every game that has them, people seem to really get into collecting them. Even when there is no in-game benefit, just piling them on [...]

It has become standard fare for MMOs to have some kind of special event around holiday time. Most have something at Christmas and all other major holidays, but some will run special events even for minor stuff (including Hallmark Day… oops, I mean Valentine’s Day.) The current trend is to create some kind of faux-In [...]