My thoughts exactly: "The players should generate the story as they go...This means breaking down some of the mechanics we are used to and allowing players to actually change the worlds they inhabit, instead of being forced to spin their wheels by fighting monsters that will simply respawn in five minutes or an hour. Some may object to this as being a “niche” feeling, but this niche has room for everyone. If executed properly, a player-generated story-based MMORPG solves a lot of the problems we have today with much less developer, writer, and designer time needed."
- Rob Shillingsburg
The emphasis on quests, items, and character development, as opposed to dynamic story generation, seems to come from computer RPGs, not new to MMORPGs, and I think it's because it's impractical to have much story development from a small number of people. So the story is written in advance and everyone experiences roughly the same story. MMORPGs do open up the possibility of having...
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- Amit Patel
Killed in a Smiling Accident. » Blog Archive » A yawn may not be polite, but at least it is an honest opinion. - http://www.kiasa.org/2009...
"Book Ten suffers from Yet Another Wandering Narrative Safari – a condition not uncommon in MMO design and certainly not exclusive to LotRO – it is categorised by large amounts of exposition with little-to-no action or adventure until the very end, and possibly occurs because the content designer spent the night before overdosing on re-runs of the X-Files."
- Rob Shillingsburg
"Devs, if you really want to combat bots, just make the gameplay fun. Don't make crafting and harvesting a simple matter of clicking on a button and waiting."
- Rob Shillingsburg
"No one should ever be left behind or forced to sit out because the group or raid is full. No player should ever be prevented from completing a dungeon crawl because not enough players are online."
- Rob Shillingsburg
"The purpose of this blog is to keep my dream of that ultimate MMO where even the smallest person can change the world by some act of kindness or bravery; the realization of a truly dynamic, living breathing virtual world where one person can make a difference."
- Rob Shillingsburg
"The sobering reality is that only a handful of people in the world have the power and resources to make a MMO."
- Rob Shillingsburg
This article sums up a lot of things I've realized about software development recently: don't worry about the future; focus on what you need now; deliver frequently; a lot of what you learned in school is just wrong.
- Rob Shillingsburg
"I experienced a great resurgence of the sheer fun of programming, and I think that is very much due to me consciously letting go of my need to control the design of the software." I'm with you dude!
- Rob Shillingsburg
"Becoming overly enamored with the potential for reuse gets you thinking about systems and frameworks, things that are general, flexible, pluggable, and generic, as opposed to creating real value and functionality in your program, which are things that are specific, to the point, and concrete. On top of that, game designers and gamers always want special cases, things you had not anticipated -- things that make you angry, since they don't fit into your grand software design!"
- Karl Rosaen
I was this way before college (except for the testing), and college ruined it for me. I thought too hard; I planned too far ahead; I tried to do everything “right”. And I was far less productive and had much less fun. For the past few years I've been trying to get back to a more iterative and concrete style of development.
- Amit Patel
"... Quality assurance should be under the guidance of a small professional testing team. The testing team has the responsibility of monitoring testing quality and advising developers on how to apply different testing techniques. ... Also, when hiring for your QA department, you should be wary of people viewing QA as a stepping stone towards some other career." Good luck with that. Anyway, isn't this just "some game developers discover Agile"?
- ⓞnor
I think my problem with this Agile/XP stuff is that it gives more weight to fire-fighting than fire prevention. You don't necessarily easily see the crises that were avoided due to proper planning; you do see the crises that are hard to get out of due to unwieldy frameworks. So then you blame planning, but planning doesn't get its due credit when things go well.
- Andrew C
Also, how are you going to have a smooth, fast, problem-free build process and art pipeline just by ad hoc implementation?
- Andrew C
Me to my five year old Steam gamer son: "...and another kind of store they have at the mall is a computer game store." 5-year-old: "Silly dad, how can you buy a computer game at a store??!?!?"
"We play fantasy MMORPGs because we wanted to be in Lord of the Rings. Why does it so often feel as if we ended up in Lord of the Flies instead?"
- Rob Shillingsburg
Ok, so I'm an indie game developer, I'll be at GDC Austin, I discussed indie games back at GDC 2009, and I own a Williams Attack From Mars, prequel to the first Pinball 2000 machine, Revenge From Mars. This looks interesting, to me.
- Rob Shillingsburg