Piercing the Veil On Bioware's MMOG

Ziff Davis' newly rebranded computer-games magazines, Games for Windows, is showing off some of its new content on the 1up hub site. They've got a fantastic interview with James Ohlen, the creative director at Bioware Austin, Rich Vogel, and Gordon Walton, co-studio directors. For the first time, they reveal some new details on Bioware's upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online Game. They don't talk about the game's setting, unsurprisingly, but they do go into some depth on the thinking behind their game. From the article: "GFW: One of the big problems with MMO gameplay is repeating the same content, or same instance if you're specifically talking about WoW, over and over again ... JO: That's something we don't want to encourage. We want to encourage players to continue to make progress in their story, to do new quests, consume new content, constantly move forward. The grind is not attractive in any way. Going and killing the same dragon over and over again is not something I want to do. There are lots of different ways to encourage players to move forward. Simply putting more weight on storytelling experience points is a good way to do that."

Comments

Article Summary

[Flame0001]

Article summary: Our game will be good. WoW was good, but ours will be better.

Re:Call me a pessimist, I guess

[Reason58]

This idea is exactly how WoW was originally planned. Once players got wind of this there was so much outcry that Blizzard changed the system to one of positive reinforcement with an experience bonus for not playing as much, as opposed to a penalty for playing too much.

Re:Call me a pessimist, I guess

[NeutronCowboy]

Not quite true. What happened was that initially, Blizzard set the rested to 100% exp, and had a "tired" state, in which people would only gain 50% of the exp gained in the normal state. Massive outcry followed from what were indeed hardcore players. "No fair - people who play less are almost as high level as me with no life!" What did Blizzard do? It renamed the normal state to rested, and the tired state to normal. It also said that the rested state would gain twice as much experience as as the normal state. In essence, they changed two words in their system. The entire underlying system stayed absolutely the same. What happened next? There was peace. Amazing what a mere two words can do to the perception of fairness of hardcore grinders. Personally, I find WoW to be quite the grind as well - but at least you get enough exp from quests to make questing a better value than straight-up monster grinding. Other than that, I find it a fairly average RPG.