Slashdot Mirror
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."
Although I haven't played EQ2, I have played DAOC and (while I'm waiting for a new HD, f*ing Fedex!!!) I'm watching my wife play (and helping when she leaves the room!!!) WoW.
Here's what I really like about WoW.
1. Just like the previous poster wrote, Dying doesn't ruin your life. In other MMORPG's the death penalties are such that people don't take risks. They won't explore an area until they are reasonably sure they can drop everything in that given realm with ease because if they die, they know they'll have to pay 100 silver and lose a pile of experience. When I played DAOC, all that did was frustrate the hell out of me. It was a game of shoots and ladders... two steps forward, 1 step back, etc. I like that in WoW, live or die, I'm progressing.
2. As for the original posters bitch about leveling too easily, that's just bunk. I think the other games have it the wrong way around. The experience ramp in WoW is right where it should be. Starts off easy and gets progressively harder. Nobody wants to spend 3 hours getting from first level to second. However, people do expect it to take them three hours to get from 8 to 9th. Likewise, when your 20th level, The expectation is that getting to 21 is going to twice as hard as it was to getting to 20. Putting this in the context of the dying aspect, when you combine excessively step experience curves with terrible death penalites, it makes the game only accessible to those people who are willing to spend 10 hours a day pointlessly grinding...
3. WoW is actually quest based. I HATE GRINDING and wandering around without purpose. Even when I'm off going to get some dudes claw so I can make some malajusted Troll feel better about his lack of wear withall as a warrior, I'm doing something. I'm not off in the woods killing bunnies for the sake of killing bunnies. Also the quests force you to actually go out and explore and tackle creatures that will challenge you. Which is exciting since, if you end up dying, you just go back, try a different tactic, etc.
4. Their GUI is great. I'm suspecting that Blizzard put out an email to all their employees that read "If you play an MMORPG, please come to the starcraft conference room at 1pm..." sat them all down and said "What do you HATE about the games your playing and if you had the chance would design better in an MMORPG. They then took all these ideas wrote them down and worked them into the spec for the game. Just stuff like you goto a vendor and if you hover over a weapon in their inventory it'll pop up a little window next to it containing your currently equipped weapon so you can easily compare them.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.