Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Richard Garriot Argues Against Stagnant MMOG Design

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the kill-ten-rats dept.

The creator of Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa and well-known designer Richard Garriot spoke at the Develop Conference in Brighton, England on the subjects of stagnating MMOG design and the NCSoft deal with Sony. His commentary on Massive game design is fairly direct: "If you look at the vast majority of MMOs that has come out since Ultima Online and Everquest, you can look at the features and they are almost exactly the same. Even though the graphics have got better and the interface is much slicker, fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged. Worse yet, there are many things that have become standard that I look at and even though they are powerful enough to encourage the behavior of people obsessed with playing these games, I don't think they are the right way of building the future."

1 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. UO=innovative and no one has gotten it right since by Xlipse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He's totally right and he doesn't need to offer suggestions -- he's just stating the obvious because that's apparently what all the MMOG developers have forgotten since the UO/EQ days. Now, it's mostly about keeping players on the hamster wheel (grind) and paying the monthly fee to make your parent company/publisher happy.

    For example: WoW is a terrible GRIND when you compare it to a game like UO, which had a much more robust setting to play in. Uo had crafting, gathering, hunting, quests, treasure hunting, boating in the seas, dungeons, role playing, houses, player cities and PVP (and that's just from 1996 to 2000 when I played) Those were all *MAJOR* aspects of the game. In WOW, the only major aspects are: PVP and Gear Grinding.

    BOOORRRINNNGGG

    Games like UO were designed to be open ended and non-linear, unlike WoW (which I played for 2 years, BTW). The UO developers might not have thought players would create an innovative city (such as Oasis on the Sonoma server) or build Fish Tanks in their towers using scraps of cloth left over from crafting and the fish you could catch from the sea... but due to the open ended design of the game, you COULD do creative things like this -- ALL over the place in UO.

    That's what he is saying and I agree with him.