Personally, I think he is one talented individual who would absolutely shine in a less, shall we say, strangling environment?
I think this is largely true. I think that Koster is a very gifted and visionary designer who's talents and interests make him terribly unsuited to be the lead designer on 'the Star Wars MMORPG'. SoE made a terrible error in employing him in this capacity, and I suppose he made a terrible mistake in accepting the job (though I can understand why he might).
I've long said that the game that SWG was would have been much much better divorced from being 'the Star Wars MMORPG' and with a dev team focused on what the game did well, rather than what it did poorly (in the latter case, specifically 'being Star Wars'). While it seems unlikely that Koster will be given a chance to make another MMORPG any time soon, I kinda wish he would be given that chance, without the baggage and limits of making what was, at the time, supposed to be the Next Generation Of MMO Gameplay, With The Biggest Licenced Property Ever(tm).
Huh? The Elder Scrolls series 'gets so little attention'? Morrowind and Oblivion couldn't have been/be more hyped. Multiple covers on major gaming magazines? Slashdot posts? Multiple Penny Arcade mentions? And, frankly, everybody's played them at this point, unless they're some mouth-breathing frat boy who thinks all the X-Box is good for is Madden and Need For Speed. And nearly everybody that's played them worships the ground they tread on.
That said... I hated Daggerfall, hated Morrowind, and am anticipating, if I am ever given the chance to play for free, hating Oblivion. Bethesda doesn't have a single good idea in their head; Morrowind managed to be visually dull, took a hatchet to its good rendering with ugly, muddy, disjointed mobiles, you stopped seeing new monsters halfway through the game, the game systems were broken and unbalanced beyond belief... I could go on and on. The critical and commerical success of their series more or less assures me that Oblivion will be more of the same; Bethesda certainly has no reason to re-evaluate their game design paradigm, fatally flawed though I feel it to be.
That "WHOOSH" was the jobs left in the US catching the express to China and India. Maybe what we REALLY need is a union for the unemployed, which is what we ALL will be with your logic.
Oh, yes. Clearly, the solution is that US workers need to be more like Chinese and Indian workers in terms of wages, benefits, hours, and employee/employer relationship, so that we can stop losing jobs. I'm sure US workers will thank you for that.
Strangely, slaves have never been grateful to slaveholders for the effort the slaveholder goes to to find the slave productive work.
You chose to have a distance between you and your job, so why should the employer pay for your time commuting? They dont get anything productive out of it, so whats their money going toward? Want to spend less unpaid time commuting? Move closer, or get a job closer to home.
The employer chose to have a distance between itself and centers of population that would provide its source of labor, so why should I waste my time commuting without being paid for it?
I've had employers move from convenient, accessible downtown locations out to suburban work parks in the middle of nowhere in the sprawl. Why? Well, you see, the company felt it could save on rent, so it decided to shift that cost from itself to the employees. My commute tripled, but somehow my wages and hours stayed the same....
The live to work rather than work to live attitude on/. sometimes baffles me. I'm not here to provide you with a tame little drone you can stuff into mass transit or some Goddess-awful metal box on wheels for two hours (or more!) of my day, unpaid, and expect me to be grateful for the privilege of commuting to your no doubt fine job. Every decision is a trade off between costs to the worker and costs to the business; pretending that somehow the employer is entitled to unpaid commute times is, well, precisely how employers would like you to view the situation.
It's long been an absurd kabuki that the time you spend in commute is somehow 'your' time and, thus, unpaid. But, of course, who would sit in traffic in their true free time? Employers now show that they understand this dicotomy, this theft, perfectly well; they'll try to extert control over your unpaid time as if they somehow had bargained with you for it.
If employers are organized, so must employees be. Unions are the only solution.
Blizzard says, 'We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they'll get rewarded for it.' when asked why only raiders get the best rewards.
The problem is that Blizzard's idea of what constitutes 'difficult' is 90% number of people involved and 10% technical difficulty of the content and fight organization. If you need 40 people to kill something, you get epics. If you only need 20, you get blues. That's all there is to their system.
If 'the caliber of the items dropped from any given boss are directly related to the difficulty of said boss', explain the disparity of gear quality between ZG and MC?
Spend five hours in ZG, get 3 epics. 4 if you're lucky.
Spend five hours in MC, get 17+ epics.
The only thing that determines gear quality in WoW is how many people are in the raid. 5 to 15, you get blue. 20, you get some purples and a lot of blues. 40 man? You're the chosen people and epics rain from the skies.
Oh, puh-leeze. The publishers are 'warning us' 'for our own good' than secondhand game sales are 'hurting development'.
Note: it's not crappy ass games that are hurting you, it's not mindless sequelitis, it's not buggy games that need 15 patches before they arrive in stores, and it's not the fact that Blizzard is eating all your lunches, no, it's those awful secondhand games.
Suuuuuuuuuuure.
I buy a lot of used games, since I like not spending huge amounts of cash on new titles. And you know what? I can buy 15 copies of trashy games I know I don't want, but it's often a pain in the ass to find a good used copy of something I actually care about playing, because people don't often sell good games. The secondary market is flooded with older versions of sports games, obsoleted by the industry's own revenue model for sports games, and crap. Cry me a river, EA.
My fault, I suppose, for being less than thrilled with an under-designed griefer-fest that nevertheless has an amazingly dedicated and active fanbase. EVE certainly inspires a degree of advocacy and identification amongst its playerbase that puts larger and more mainstream games like EQ or WoW to shame.
That said, it's still an under-designed griefer-fest with hours-long travel between locations. I'm sure that there are some people who find it to be their dream game, but it's a niche product at best. I don't actually have a problem with niche products, and such that fill their niche elegantly and perfectly are excellent case studies. But EVE is not the best MMORPG, and it's mindless fanboyism to assert that it is.
Guild Wars is pretty quick to get started in, compared to other multiplayer games. You have the ability to create a max-level PvP character immediately at account creation. At first, you can only make the pre-designed characters, and none of them are amazingly well set-up, but you can unlock new skills through the course of normal PvP play. I've sometimes been surprised at the amount of faction (the coin you buy access to new skills and items with) I've earned just by PvPing for an hour or so.
The notable part of this for me is the weirdly narrow trademark. It dosesn't appear that this trademark, as worded, applies to a non-networked, single-player game, but rather only to 'an online computer game accessed and played via mobile and cellular phones and other wireless devices.' So, considering only this trademark, somebody is quite free to make System Shock 3 as a single-player game. It's not like EA to underreach, I wonder what the other shoe is.
Death to creative vision! Design by polling the userbase! What do these so-called 'designers' know? Power to the playerbase! Content design by committee! Make sure that Gokuu, Drizzizzttzz, Lagoles, and Pokeumaam have the same vote that you and I do!
The bizzare fondness some people retain for D&D's core mechanics is a continual source of bafflement in my life. 3.0 and 3.5 represented a massive improvement over the honestly hallucinatory AD&D, but, really, you can't think of better systems?
I'm interested in some of what I've heard about D&DO, but for me, the less slavishly adherant to a ruleset designed to make table-top play easier and more fun the game is, the more I'm inclined to give it a chance.
Shades of Mickey Mantle trash-talking Pete Rose there. I'd be offended by your base perpetuation of gamer stereotypes if I weren't finding it authentically funny.
I very much agree. I was always impressed by the audacity of the attempt to weld together Star Wars' mass (and middle-brow at best) appeal and a high-concept designer's game design. And I think the failure of that marriage is (and there's an extent to which this is brutally obvious) the major reason for SWG's lack of success. In hindsight, marrying Star Wars' mass appeal to a mass-appeal game structure (something more like what Blizzard has done with WoW, but possibly even more casual friendly) would have worked out better.
I remain convinced that had SWG's fundamental game design structures been tied to original content IP (either fantasy or SF), with a much smaller budget and a correspondingly low threshold of 'success', it could have been very much better recieved and much more successful in reaching its ambitions. The people that liked SWG's design liked it a lot, and given time and patience, a game with that design and without the overhead of 'being the Star Wars MMORPG' could have gathered to itself the same small, passionate fanbase that SWG, in fact, has for itself. But for 'the Star Wars MMORPG', a small, passionate subscriber base isn't cutting it.
To put it another way, it's not just that SWG's design failed (though it did in many ways). It's also that it failed in ways that broken the Star Wars-iness of the experience for many people. Without the burden of being Star Wars, the game, I think, could have rested more strongly and comfortably on the good parts of its design and, in the long run, done better.
Without wanting to disagree too explicitly with you, I will say....
A lot of people don't play Nethack. It's very appealing to a certain kind of person, and a very impressive feat of both game design and social engineering. It's a wonderful piece of work that anybody would be proud of.
But the reasons that Nethack hasn't conquered the gaming world go beyond anti-ASCII bias. It's not the game people want to play. Most of the reasons you list as good things about Nethack are precisely themselves the reasons that those people who don't like Nethack don't like Nethack.
I certainly believe that there's a market for a restrained-budget MMORPG structured more like Nethack in the ways you describe. But there's no way in Hades that such a game would ever compete with World of Warcraft or even Star Wars: Galaxies (and there's setting the bar low for you) in terms of raw population numbers or market share.
I believe strongly in small, niche games that appeal strongly to a more limited set of people, and in them over larger, more vanilla games that appeal to many people but invoke passionate adoration in few. But saying that future MMORPGs need to be more like Nethack (especially in the ways you describe) in order to succeed and thrive is 180 from the truth, IMHO.
Is there an Intel Twain-class chip in the 360 that'll offer hardware acceleration to game storylines? I hadn't heard about that feature, the one that offers support for a full megaGaiman's worth of plot processing with integrated character development support.
Or maybe the 360 won't do one single damn thing to help developers offer us better plotlines or story. Or gameplay, for that matter; feel free to count all the games that took the move to true physics engines and gave us truly novel gameplay experiences with them. Don't worry, I'll wait.
Any game designer that really wants to be Neil Gaiman when they grow up, or Sid Meier or Peter Molyneux for that matter, has already noticed that there's no place for them on the cutting edge of console development. That area is well and truly the domain of the very large, the very rich, and the very branded.
There's good gameplay and good story on consoles, but it's nothing the console makers are doing. And the 360 isn't doing anything except escalating the price of doing business on a console, pushing more creative thinkers onto other platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think he is one talented individual who would absolutely shine in a less, shall we say, strangling environment?
I think this is largely true. I think that Koster is a very gifted and visionary designer who's talents and interests make him terribly unsuited to be the lead designer on 'the Star Wars MMORPG'. SoE made a terrible error in employing him in this capacity, and I suppose he made a terrible mistake in accepting the job (though I can understand why he might).
I've long said that the game that SWG was would have been much much better divorced from being 'the Star Wars MMORPG' and with a dev team focused on what the game did well, rather than what it did poorly (in the latter case, specifically 'being Star Wars'). While it seems unlikely that Koster will be given a chance to make another MMORPG any time soon, I kinda wish he would be given that chance, without the baggage and limits of making what was, at the time, supposed to be the Next Generation Of MMO Gameplay, With The Biggest Licenced Property Ever(tm).
Huh? The Elder Scrolls series 'gets so little attention'? Morrowind and Oblivion couldn't have been/be more hyped. Multiple covers on major gaming magazines? Slashdot posts? Multiple Penny Arcade mentions? And, frankly, everybody's played them at this point, unless they're some mouth-breathing frat boy who thinks all the X-Box is good for is Madden and Need For Speed. And nearly everybody that's played them worships the ground they tread on.
That said... I hated Daggerfall, hated Morrowind, and am anticipating, if I am ever given the chance to play for free, hating Oblivion. Bethesda doesn't have a single good idea in their head; Morrowind managed to be visually dull, took a hatchet to its good rendering with ugly, muddy, disjointed mobiles, you stopped seeing new monsters halfway through the game, the game systems were broken and unbalanced beyond belief... I could go on and on. The critical and commerical success of their series more or less assures me that Oblivion will be more of the same; Bethesda certainly has no reason to re-evaluate their game design paradigm, fatally flawed though I feel it to be.
I have very very fond memories of Earth and Beyond, actually. I wish they'd managed to do more with it beyond having another level grind.
Your link to the Athas Reborn forums is broken, which is a shame, since I'm sure I'm not the only person that remembers Dark Sun with great fondness.
That "WHOOSH" was the jobs left in the US catching the express to China and India. Maybe what we REALLY need is a union for the unemployed, which is what we ALL will be with your logic.
Oh, yes. Clearly, the solution is that US workers need to be more like Chinese and Indian workers in terms of wages, benefits, hours, and employee/employer relationship, so that we can stop losing jobs. I'm sure US workers will thank you for that.
Strangely, slaves have never been grateful to slaveholders for the effort the slaveholder goes to to find the slave productive work.
You chose to have a distance between you and your job, so why should the employer pay for your time commuting? They dont get anything productive out of it, so whats their money going toward? Want to spend less unpaid time commuting? Move closer, or get a job closer to home.
/. sometimes baffles me. I'm not here to provide you with a tame little drone you can stuff into mass transit or some Goddess-awful metal box on wheels for two hours (or more!) of my day, unpaid, and expect me to be grateful for the privilege of commuting to your no doubt fine job. Every decision is a trade off between costs to the worker and costs to the business; pretending that somehow the employer is entitled to unpaid commute times is, well, precisely how employers would like you to view the situation.
The employer chose to have a distance between itself and centers of population that would provide its source of labor, so why should I waste my time commuting without being paid for it?
I've had employers move from convenient, accessible downtown locations out to suburban work parks in the middle of nowhere in the sprawl. Why? Well, you see, the company felt it could save on rent, so it decided to shift that cost from itself to the employees. My commute tripled, but somehow my wages and hours stayed the same....
The live to work rather than work to live attitude on
Ha.
It's long been an absurd kabuki that the time you spend in commute is somehow 'your' time and, thus, unpaid. But, of course, who would sit in traffic in their true free time? Employers now show that they understand this dicotomy, this theft, perfectly well; they'll try to extert control over your unpaid time as if they somehow had bargained with you for it.
If employers are organized, so must employees be. Unions are the only solution.
Blizzard says, 'We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they'll get rewarded for it.' when asked why only raiders get the best rewards.
The problem is that Blizzard's idea of what constitutes 'difficult' is 90% number of people involved and 10% technical difficulty of the content and fight organization. If you need 40 people to kill something, you get epics. If you only need 20, you get blues. That's all there is to their system.
If 'the caliber of the items dropped from any given boss are directly related to the difficulty of said boss', explain the disparity of gear quality between ZG and MC?
Spend five hours in ZG, get 3 epics. 4 if you're lucky.
Spend five hours in MC, get 17+ epics.
The only thing that determines gear quality in WoW is how many people are in the raid. 5 to 15, you get blue. 20, you get some purples and a lot of blues. 40 man? You're the chosen people and epics rain from the skies.
Oh, puh-leeze. The publishers are 'warning us' 'for our own good' than secondhand game sales are 'hurting development'.
Note: it's not crappy ass games that are hurting you, it's not mindless sequelitis, it's not buggy games that need 15 patches before they arrive in stores, and it's not the fact that Blizzard is eating all your lunches, no, it's those awful secondhand games.
Suuuuuuuuuuure.
I buy a lot of used games, since I like not spending huge amounts of cash on new titles. And you know what? I can buy 15 copies of trashy games I know I don't want, but it's often a pain in the ass to find a good used copy of something I actually care about playing, because people don't often sell good games. The secondary market is flooded with older versions of sports games, obsoleted by the industry's own revenue model for sports games, and crap. Cry me a river, EA.
-1 Troll?
My fault, I suppose, for being less than thrilled with an under-designed griefer-fest that nevertheless has an amazingly dedicated and active fanbase. EVE certainly inspires a degree of advocacy and identification amongst its playerbase that puts larger and more mainstream games like EQ or WoW to shame.
That said, it's still an under-designed griefer-fest with hours-long travel between locations. I'm sure that there are some people who find it to be their dream game, but it's a niche product at best. I don't actually have a problem with niche products, and such that fill their niche elegantly and perfectly are excellent case studies. But EVE is not the best MMORPG, and it's mindless fanboyism to assert that it is.
Guild Wars is pretty quick to get started in, compared to other multiplayer games. You have the ability to create a max-level PvP character immediately at account creation. At first, you can only make the pre-designed characters, and none of them are amazingly well set-up, but you can unlock new skills through the course of normal PvP play. I've sometimes been surprised at the amount of faction (the coin you buy access to new skills and items with) I've earned just by PvPing for an hour or so.
EVE may not have the most subscribers or revenue base, but they clearly lead all MMOs in ballot box stuffing.
The notable part of this for me is the weirdly narrow trademark. It dosesn't appear that this trademark, as worded, applies to a non-networked, single-player game, but rather only to 'an online computer game accessed and played via mobile and cellular phones and other wireless devices.' So, considering only this trademark, somebody is quite free to make System Shock 3 as a single-player game. It's not like EA to underreach, I wonder what the other shoe is.
Death to creative vision! Design by polling the userbase! What do these so-called 'designers' know? Power to the playerbase! Content design by committee! Make sure that Gokuu, Drizzizzttzz, Lagoles, and Pokeumaam have the same vote that you and I do!
The bizzare fondness some people retain for D&D's core mechanics is a continual source of bafflement in my life. 3.0 and 3.5 represented a massive improvement over the honestly hallucinatory AD&D, but, really, you can't think of better systems?
I'm interested in some of what I've heard about D&DO, but for me, the less slavishly adherant to a ruleset designed to make table-top play easier and more fun the game is, the more I'm inclined to give it a chance.
Shades of Mickey Mantle trash-talking Pete Rose there. I'd be offended by your base perpetuation of gamer stereotypes if I weren't finding it authentically funny.
Governments, Not paying attention to things until something bad happens; See also September 11, 2001
Putting "unreal tournament" thief into Google yielded http://www.thieveryut.com/
I very much agree. I was always impressed by the audacity of the attempt to weld together Star Wars' mass (and middle-brow at best) appeal and a high-concept designer's game design. And I think the failure of that marriage is (and there's an extent to which this is brutally obvious) the major reason for SWG's lack of success. In hindsight, marrying Star Wars' mass appeal to a mass-appeal game structure (something more like what Blizzard has done with WoW, but possibly even more casual friendly) would have worked out better.
I remain convinced that had SWG's fundamental game design structures been tied to original content IP (either fantasy or SF), with a much smaller budget and a correspondingly low threshold of 'success', it could have been very much better recieved and much more successful in reaching its ambitions. The people that liked SWG's design liked it a lot, and given time and patience, a game with that design and without the overhead of 'being the Star Wars MMORPG' could have gathered to itself the same small, passionate fanbase that SWG, in fact, has for itself. But for 'the Star Wars MMORPG', a small, passionate subscriber base isn't cutting it.
To put it another way, it's not just that SWG's design failed (though it did in many ways). It's also that it failed in ways that broken the Star Wars-iness of the experience for many people. Without the burden of being Star Wars, the game, I think, could have rested more strongly and comfortably on the good parts of its design and, in the long run, done better.
Without wanting to disagree too explicitly with you, I will say....
A lot of people don't play Nethack. It's very appealing to a certain kind of person, and a very impressive feat of both game design and social engineering. It's a wonderful piece of work that anybody would be proud of.
But the reasons that Nethack hasn't conquered the gaming world go beyond anti-ASCII bias. It's not the game people want to play. Most of the reasons you list as good things about Nethack are precisely themselves the reasons that those people who don't like Nethack don't like Nethack.
I certainly believe that there's a market for a restrained-budget MMORPG structured more like Nethack in the ways you describe. But there's no way in Hades that such a game would ever compete with World of Warcraft or even Star Wars: Galaxies (and there's setting the bar low for you) in terms of raw population numbers or market share.
I believe strongly in small, niche games that appeal strongly to a more limited set of people, and in them over larger, more vanilla games that appeal to many people but invoke passionate adoration in few. But saying that future MMORPGs need to be more like Nethack (especially in the ways you describe) in order to succeed and thrive is 180 from the truth, IMHO.
Blah blah blah better graphics blah blah.
Is there an Intel Twain-class chip in the 360 that'll offer hardware acceleration to game storylines? I hadn't heard about that feature, the one that offers support for a full megaGaiman's worth of plot processing with integrated character development support.
Or maybe the 360 won't do one single damn thing to help developers offer us better plotlines or story. Or gameplay, for that matter; feel free to count all the games that took the move to true physics engines and gave us truly novel gameplay experiences with them. Don't worry, I'll wait.
Any game designer that really wants to be Neil Gaiman when they grow up, or Sid Meier or Peter Molyneux for that matter, has already noticed that there's no place for them on the cutting edge of console development. That area is well and truly the domain of the very large, the very rich, and the very branded.
There's good gameplay and good story on consoles, but it's nothing the console makers are doing. And the 360 isn't doing anything except escalating the price of doing business on a console, pushing more creative thinkers onto other platforms.
ludomancer moderated -1, Trolled
Even the alien classes don't break from the basic archetype of scout, builder, flyer, skirmisher, and tank
Give me an example of another game that conforms to this 'archetype'?
I feel pretty bad for this kid. After all, he will never have a normal life
Lucky kid never needs to worry about getting stuck with a 'normal life'. He'll have the smarts and standing to choose the life he wants.