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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 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