Category: Guest Posts

The Necessity of End Game

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Honor’s Code.

Let me put on my armchair Game Designer hat for a moment. Put yours on as well and join me as we think about AAA MMOs.

I think we can agree on the goal. All of us, from the bean counters at production houses, to the developers, the QA Testers, to the players themselves, want a great game. What we want to create is a great ride, an experience if you will. We want an experience that can be picked up and enjoyed and shared with a wide variety of people. This is necessary to create a reliable and sustainable fan base which in turn brings in enough revenue, with whatever business model is used, to keep the servers running and keep us and our employees gainfully employed.

While we can all agree on the goal, how to get there is the topic of vigorous debate. At a high level, we want an immersive world with many fun activities to engage in. We know that different people find different activities fun, so we will need a wide range of activities. We don’t want to force any players to do things they find ‘unfun’ so many of those activities will need to be optional.

Continue reading “The Necessity of End Game”

Reminiscing Isn’t What It Used To Be

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Bordy.

Patch 4.3 in WoW will introduce the long-heralded art of Transmogrification; the ability (at a cost)to convert the look (but not the stats) of your current kit to match that of other kit that you own.

Why though is this welcomed by so many?

Is it because of some hankering for the ‘good old days’ ™? Do we long for the days of Vanilla WoW, 40-man Molten Core raiding, Onyxia victory parades into Stormwind, Necropolii hanging in the air above our capitals and a truly barren Barrens?

If so, do we gloss over the lack of well-thought out quest hubs, running the length of zones repeatedly to do and hand in quests, no achievements, no battlegrounds,no arenas and no flying mounts?

Is it maybe due to a reaction to the look of kit sets nowadays? Vanilla dungeon/raidsets were distinctive (whether you liked it or not). This was followed by the Burning Crusade when we were obliged to change that kit to the most garish kitstyle/colour combinations that were truly out of this world. The outcry maybe led us to kit and sets that are arguably (in some cases) more dull, but more homogenised and easier on the eye when combined. Do we long for the old days of distinctive kit in a bold, but tasteful fashion?

Continue reading “Reminiscing Isn’t What It Used To Be”

Mages & PvP – Fun, Lethal, or Both?

Posted on by Gazimoff

This guest post is from Bordy, a veteran player of games and dealer in lethal puns. You can find his unique brand of humour on Twitter @snuffleorc

I have played WoW since the retail release. Gazimoff is the one to blame for getting me into it. It was by no means though my first MMO. That honour goes to Ultima Online. Playing with a dial up connection and (in current terms) an incredibly slow PC, I both loved that game and hated it.

My recollections of the game now are vague, so my apologies for anyone who knows better, but to me the world was pretty standard fantasy fayre, although gameplay was fun. Unlike WoW, the game was classless and you picked and chose skills from across a range, meaning that the ultimate combination became so widespread that the bulk of characters were effectively (as far as I could tell) fighter-mages.

Continue reading “Mages & PvP – Fun, Lethal, or Both?”

What Cataclysm Means to World PVP

Posted on by moguestposter

This guest post is from Bordy, a longtime friend who doesn’t have a blog of his own and so decided to use mine. You can find him on Twitter @snuffleorc.

Who among us Vanilla Veterans does not look fondly back to the mass battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill? Cataclysm wasn’t what ended these, but it certainly prevented it ever recurring, with the loss of Southshore as an Alliance town.

Southshore and Tarren Mill were roughly equidistant from faction cities (Ironforge and Undercity respectively). The geography of the land was suitable to mass PvP too: No town walls, roughly flat (albeit with a small slope), mostly open ground with minor cover/obstacles and a small tower in the middle. Designers of battlegrounds should take note!

Of course what actually put an end to the SS vs. TM battles was the creation of battlegrounds. These could be instanced and thus enabled Blizzard to spread the server load of all those wanting to participate. The old SS/TM battles could get very laggy, as fun as they were. Battlegrounds though do not, for the most part, offer mass PvP in open ground. Warsong Gulch is just too small (in as far as combatants go), Arathi Basin has a few more combatants and of very uneven terrain. Eye of the Storm again splits forces up. Alterac Valley comes close at times, but is spread out and more recently simply involves a chase to kill NPCs. Strand of the Ancients, Wintergrasp, and Tol Barad all involve assaulting and defending.

Continue reading “What Cataclysm Means to World PVP”