Muckbeast

Bill Roper is out at Cryptic Studios. Whether it was truly a departure due to his “entrepreneurial spirit” becoming “restless”, or Cryptic coming to their senses, we may not know for quite some time. If anyone knows an insider, a little bit of inside info would be very welcome.
Anyone who has played any game he [...]

Apparently, trashing Farmville was the trendy thing to do at the recent GDC (Game Developers Conference). The discussion and trashing have continued on various game developer blogs as well. The common arguments include: “these aren’t games”, “these games suck”, “this is a fad”, “these companies are scammers”, etc. The common fears include: “this is the [...]

This story has been reported in a few places, and of course EA makes it sound like they just parted ways, but the ugly truth is pretty obvious. Warhammer grossly underperformed, and as a result Mark Jacobs has been sacked. While I feel he and EA/Mythic did a horrible job overall with Warhammer (despite it [...]

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 [...]

Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have [...]

I love MUDs, MMOs, virtual worlds, (insert your favorite term). I love making them. I love playing them. I love talking about them. I hate raiding. I hate the current obsessive focus on a MUD’s “end game.” There shouldn’t be an end game. The draw of open ended, online multiplayer worlds is that they don’t [...]