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WoW, EQ2, SWG Content Updates

Posted by Zonk on from the elves-and-mon-cal-can-come-together dept.

Several of the larger commercial MMOGs are gearing up for updates in the next few weeks. The Everquest 2 Producer's Letter details more quests and PvP news, SWG's Patch 19 has smuggler updates and animation fixes, and World of Warcraft lead producer Shane Dabiri offers up a Battleplan for your perusal. (N3rfed has some leaked patch notes, if you're so inclined.) From the WoW Battleplan: "Some of our upcoming plans have already been mentioned on our community site. For example, in our next major update, we will be releasing Blackwing Lair, a 40-person raid dungeon, where you will be able to battle against the epic dragon Nefarian and his minions. We are also working on a 20-person dungeon called Zul'Gurub, and the mysterious lands of Ahn'Qiraj in Silithus. Outside of dungeons, we want to continue adding new world events, such as a carnival that will take place in Mulgore and Elwynn forest."

2 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Re:MMORPGs by Chyeld · · Score: 4, Insightful
    They tried that, it was called Sims Online. Honestly, I wasn't sure how many S&M Brothels could be fit into one town was really a question that needed to be investigated, but TSO certainly made a good effort to try to answer the question.

    I hear Second Life is something of a better setup, but given I've only heard of it via /. I can't say it's been that successful.

    Or in a less glib manner, because allowing players to create content causes three issues.

    1. Who owns the content?
    2. Is the content suitable (both in quality and context)?
    3. And how do you facilitate content creation when most of the MMORPG's are based on systems that even the developers have to take multiple go's at a project before it's ready to even become public beta?
  2. Re:Need to expand? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's a limit to how many programmers you can throw at a problem and receive any benefit. If you throw the optimal(or at least near-optimal) number of programmers at the current issues, why shouldn't you have a second separate team working on new unrelated code. With a sensible design so that new development can be kept sufficiently non-intertwined with the existing code, nothing short of a full scale design change due to a fundamental architecture bug would prove problematic, and you'd get the current bugs fixed at the soonest possible point in time plus have new content delivered earlier. Seems win-win to me. Admittedly, skimping on work on the current stuff to work on the future stuff is stupid, but that's not a necessity...