what we're, i'm, describing has nothing to do with nostalgia. that's an excuse made to cover up what i mentioned previous: the whoring out and marketing to every audience demographic, rather than a specific one. ultima online and everquest were made without marketing or usage data, without even a real audience outside of gamers to begin with. and that's why they were so good.
it's fine to try and grow your customer base, but you don't grow by trying toappeal to everyone. you don't make everything in your game 'accessible' to everyone. your design is then all over the place. look at wow as it is today. it has no sense of itself. the world, the massively part of the mmo acronym, doesn't exist. the reason i got banned from foh was because i called the black hand on his bullshit of a 'world' in world of warcraft - there isn't one. you sit in town and queue up for randoms and raids. the only time to ever venture forth is for dailies, which is just another single-player experience. you don't interact with ANYBODY on your server outside of your guild except for retired content like achievement runs.
a great mmo game designer is a world designer. he must design a system with interacting parts, a world, that allows players the freedom to bend but don't break the rules that govern that system in different massive social interactions. the single most important thing is to make those rules as coherent and consistent as possible, with limiting outside influence as much as possible. by outside influence i mean shit like badges or tokens or LFR queues. a world doesn't 'reward' you with badges or tokens - it rewards you with what you can manage to scrounge up inside of it. there are no 'points' in a living, breathing, world, only what you can do within it. all of these 'features' completely destroy any immersion because they are abstractions that destroy the experience of being someone inside a world.
a lot of what made uo and eq great were mistakes by the designers, and that's perfectly okay. it doesn't matter how we get there, as long as we get there. we need to return to designers making mistakes apparently, because the sum of those mistakes is better design than the whole formulaic design of everything in wow.
they need a more rubber-band type design philosophy with a focus on world design as the prime driver that underlies everything else. it doesn't make immersive sense that i can pop up a window and join a queue for a raid. it doesn't make immersive sense that i acquire points to spend on items after i killed a copy of a dragon in a dungeon that i was instantly teleported to when i was at the front of that same queue. all of this provides easy access to the tiny timmys and sally soccer moms, but it kills the immersive world experience. and people treating that as secondary should not, as this is the only medium that allows that type of experience. if timmy or sally only has a few hours in the evening, they can login to facebook or play pokemon.
if you try to target all audiences with your mmo design, your design is a failure.
it's fine to try and grow your customer base, but you don't grow by trying toappeal to everyone. you don't make everything in your game 'accessible' to everyone. your design is then all over the place. look at wow as it is today. it has no sense of itself. the world, the massively part of the mmo acronym, doesn't exist. the reason i got banned from foh was because i called the black hand on his bullshit of a 'world' in world of warcraft - there isn't one. you sit in town and queue up for randoms and raids. the only time to ever venture forth is for dailies, which is just another single-player experience. you don't interact with ANYBODY on your server outside of your guild except for retired content like achievement runs.
a great mmo game designer is a world designer. he must design a system with interacting parts, a world, that allows players the freedom to bend but don't break the rules that govern that system in different massive social interactions. the single most important thing is to make those rules as coherent and consistent as possible, with limiting outside influence as much as possible. by outside influence i mean shit like badges or tokens or LFR queues. a world doesn't 'reward' you with badges or tokens - it rewards you with what you can manage to scrounge up inside of it. there are no 'points' in a living, breathing, world, only what you can do within it. all of these 'features' completely destroy any immersion because they are abstractions that destroy the experience of being someone inside a world.
a lot of what made uo and eq great were mistakes by the designers, and that's perfectly okay. it doesn't matter how we get there, as long as we get there. we need to return to designers making mistakes apparently, because the sum of those mistakes is better design than the whole formulaic design of everything in wow.
they need a more rubber-band type design philosophy with a focus on world design as the prime driver that underlies everything else. it doesn't make immersive sense that i can pop up a window and join a queue for a raid. it doesn't make immersive sense that i acquire points to spend on items after i killed a copy of a dragon in a dungeon that i was instantly teleported to when i was at the front of that same queue. all of this provides easy access to the tiny timmys and sally soccer moms, but it kills the immersive world experience. and people treating that as secondary should not, as this is the only medium that allows that type of experience. if timmy or sally only has a few hours in the evening, they can login to facebook or play pokemon.
if you try to target all audiences with your mmo design, your design is a failure.
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