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My wife wrote an excellent guide to healing a few weeks ago and I forgot to bring it up for discussion! She plays the healer type character on every MMO or RPG we play. Over the years, she has definitely become a highly skilled expert on the subject (and play) of healers. Check out her [...] Regular readers here know I am a huge fan of mini-games in MMOs. I think MMOs utterly fail to make appropriate use of this type of entertainment. One notable exception is fishing. Fishing is a very common feature in MMOs, and it tends to be extremely popular. In Threshold RPG, fishing is an extremely popular [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] What is a nerf? In most of the world, it is a soft, spongy toy like the eponymous Nerf Football. In the world of gaming, a nerf is a reduction in power, utility, or usefulness of a character class, race, realm, zone, item, etc. Nerfs are very controversial because people do not enjoy being nerfed. [...] 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 had so much fun trashing raiding as it exists in current graphical MUDs over here, I might as well take another hack at it. I will explain how raiding as it is generally implemented in graphical MMOs provides a false, deceptive, and personally damaging sense of accomplishment. False Sense of Accomplishment from Raiding [...] One of my new mantras as a game developer is the belief that players are content. Developers who ignore this do so not only at their own peril, but to the disappointment of their own customers. What do I mean by saying players are content? I mean they provide at least as much (and probably [...] 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 [...] This well known saying is true for many situations, but it is especially true (in most cases) for people who make or run MMOs. Sadly, this doesn’t stop developers from frequently tinkering with aspects of their game that people already like the way it is. This kind of nervous, pointless, busy-body meddling is rarely a [...] |
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