Age of Conan director asks how you like your communication
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Culture
Craig Morrison, the Game Director for Age of Conan, posed an interesting question in his latest blog entry: How do you like your information?
MMOs, whether they are still approaching beta or have been around for years, are constantly changing as developers add improvements here, remove bugs there, work on new content and expansions, and just generally tweak things to keep it all attractive to the players.
The question for development teams is this: How much of the process do you share with the players? Do you say “We are working on stuff, and you’ll know about it when we release it. Just trust us,” do you share every step of the process with your fans along the way, or do you strike one of the hundred compromises in between?
Morrison’s blog entry talks quite a bit about the difficulty of finding that balance, and how it’s often a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. He winds up with an interesting question, though: What do you as a player prefer? Take some time to read his thoughts on the issue, and then give your own.
Age of Conan director asks how you like your communication originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Disguising the grind
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Age of Conan, EverQuest II, Culture, Game mechanics, Lore, MMO industry, Quests, PvE, Opinion, Hands-on, Virtual worlds
Believe it or not, grind is an essential part of an MMO and we might be pretty lost without it. Repetitive content is the cornerstone of the MMO genre but it’s not all just smacking monsters over the head for hours on end or completing yet another “kill ten rats” quest. The repetitive elements in an MMO give us predictable gameplay in a form we can digest. We don’t feel lost when we pick up a quest because it uses similar mechanics to previous quests we’ve done. From a development standpoint, the amount of time it takes to create new and unique gameplay for an MMO is quite large and it’s just not feasible to churn out unique gameplay with every new piece of content. Instead, developers are forced to re-use the same gameplay mechanics over and over again. So if we genuinely appreciate predictable, repetitive gameplay and it’s not feasible to do otherwise, why are we always so up-in-arms about the evils of grinding?
In this probative opinion piece, I look at why we need repetitive gameplay in MMOs and the various ways developers disguise grind to keep the game entertaining.
Update: Link to page 2 fixed. Thanks Brian!
Continue reading Disguising the grind
Disguising the grind originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
