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Developer Retrospective on the MMORPGs of 2004
An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."
I think these articles need to look at the more independent titles as well. While I have found them to be more buggy, I would like some pressure put on the bigger companies to lower prices and/or increase content. Currently i'm fumbling my way through Planshift, and (because i'm a glutton for punishment) Planetside.
i personally like the MMORPG maplestory, yes, it's a silly name. the site is here one thing i like about it, is that it is free, at least to play. at present, it's in public beta for the global version, but if you understand chinese, japanese, or korean, there is a release version of those languages already, which can be found here as i said, the game is free to play, but they have a creative idea on making money off it. in the game, there's something called the cash shop. there, you pay real world cash to be able to get unique items. go ahead and give it a try. you've got nothing to lose, except maybe time, as this game is addictive.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Those are some pretty short interviews considering the body of work those folks have done.
I have cancelled UO, SWG, EQ, and CoH for WoW...as an old fart of MMO I can tell you that WoW is where it is at - I think every person I know online has switched to it and have no plans of going back to any of the above games. Oh wait there is this one guy at the helpdesk playing EQ 2 and is a miserable whiner about it.
If you like MMO then just go buy the darn thing - play on a low population PVE or PVP server as per your fancy...if you pvp just remember there is a more uber player over that next hill so dont cry when you get ganked after picking on some n00bs.
Bladedawn on Blackhand
Gah, FFXI isn't a challenge, it's more of a job. There's really nothing to do in that game that isn't a freaking chore. I played it for a while until I realized I was more stressed out playing it than I was at my job! I would go to work to take a break from playing FFXI. That's just not right.
FFXI has gotten the "waste time" aspect of most MMORPGs down. It's all about doing various things that could only have been designed to "waste time." Here's a good example: getting access to "chocobos," the messed-up chicken that FFXI uses instead of horses. (You'd think that those birds would be scared of the cat-people race, but, nope - everyone rides the same mount. Bland.)
The quest is designed such that it takes, at a minimum, five hours. You cannot do it in any less time, because it's triggered to take at least five hours. Here's how it works: you have to feed a sick "chocobo" an item every in-game day, which lasts about an hour. Due to the brilliant designers at Square, you can "skip" one of the hours you should have to wait because it triggers a "next day" every midnight in-game time. So if you start the quest at 23:59 in-game time, you can shave one in-game day (real life hour) off the six in-game days it requires.
This quest is required to get your mount, which is basically a requirement of doing anything in the game because as mentioned everyone does groups because you have to and in order to go with those groups you must have a chocobo to get to most of the areas in a timely fashion. So that's one quest you must do that is literally a "waste time" quest.
There's a huge difference between "challenge" and "wasting time." FFXI is a waste of time. There's no challenge. Combat consists of saying "Attack" and letting your character auto-attack the target. It's almost as exciting as Progress Quest, only you can't go take a (Bio) (break) while still making progress.
I have cancelled UO, SWG, EQ, and CoH for WoW...
IMO, TLAMMWTSMEIWARF
(Three Letter Acronyms Make Me Want To Stave My Eye In With A Rusty Fork)