Comments on TREMBLING HAND: Making MMOs Legendary

We are building an open source MMO which is an odd...

2010-11-13T22:46:50.931-08:00

We are building an open source MMO which is an odd cross between Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and Minecraft. Our game is currently in alpha, but the open beta will start in a few months.

See http://DwarfControl.com for development updates.

I personally think that the game play and mechanism are the most important part of the game (and not the graphics). WoW and FXII are grindfests and the player interactions with the world are superficial.

I think the story telling and world history will be a more important part of future MMOs.

Ah yes, I see what you're saying. That sounds like...

2008-08-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, I see what you're saying. That sounds like quite a re-working of how MMOs work now, and fruitful ground for experimentation.

I agree that creating the content and putting it i...

2008-08-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

I agree that creating the content and putting it into the world is a mammoth task, but that's not really what I'm suggesting. Rather, developers should be figuring out what kinds of information -- from the vast stream of events happening in the world -- are appropriate to be reflected in its history. Combat-heavy MMOs, for example, would want to reflect information about territory disputes, battles, strategic resources, military promotions, and so on. On the other hand, a smaller, intimate social game would probably want to reflect information about relationships, conversations, who-said-what-to-who-where-and-when, and other kinds of granular, nuanced information.

Once you know what kinds of information are appropriate, then the next step is to build mechanisms for the players to interact with it.

Yeah, I think you're onto something. I don't know ...

2008-08-23T17:41:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I think you're onto something. I don't know what the next generation of MMOs will look like, but if they take DF as their cue, they're going to be pretty darn interesting.

I remember playing Asheron's Call and discovering that you could piece together the world's history from various tomes found around the world. I spent quite a bit of time hunting them down. Unfortunately, producing that kind of content is time consuming and expensive under the curretn MMO model. Now if you had a procedurally generated history...

I wholeheartedly agree.

I'm an avid gamer ...

2008-08-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

I wholeheartedly agree.

I'm an avid gamer (it's one of my chief types of recreation, and I hate to see my Steam stats) and also a newspaper editor (not focused on the game industry). I started paying attention to MMOs when WoW was in development.

When I first began to contemplate what it would be like to play in a persistent world, I imagined something inherently organic rather than scripted - a type of world in which you could write a newspaper article headlined "Johnny slays the troll" for the Goblin Press and have it distributed via zeppelin. In other words, I was inherently imgaging the troll would be unique, that creatures would live once and die, events would arise and pass.

But instead, in theme park MMOs, *everyone* slays the same troll, over and over again. Without history, a mallable timeline, a record, there is no heroism, no uniqueness, no distinction, and there's less fulfillment than there could be.

Soon, the only thing left is fighting more and more of the same trolls or defeating them more and more quickly. Even when the monsters are loot-dropping pinatas, the core concept is one guaranteed to lead to repetitiveness and therefore boredom over time.

With a history, I can see how a game could be injected with much more humanity and therefore draw much more of an emotional response from the player. Each player's story becomes important.

And the designers probably would not have to operate from the current mindset, where developing the IP is about dropping in new chunks of land, adding new monsters and new items, always more and more toy soldiers different from the others (content, by the way, that players always burn through faster than it can be programmed and integrated).

Instead, if the tales told in the same game space were rooted in a timeline and could be interactive (not go to x and kill 10 of y monster), a game could have the potential to become more epic, inspire more and more emotional attachment and a more intense desire to keep playing.

Of course, I have no idea how realistic programming a very organic, malleable gamespace would be, I don't know the technical boundaries. But as a player, I can say I'd be very interested in being able to have my actions last.

Comments on TREMBLING HAND: Making MMOs Legendary

We are building an open source MMO which is an odd...

Ah yes, I see what you're saying. That sounds like...

I agree that creating the content and putting it i...

Yeah, I think you're onto something. I don't know ...

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm an avid gamer ...

I wholeheartedly agree.

I'm an avid gamer ...