Empire Avenue

{EAV_BLOG_VER:f1b50a10e39aab17}

Recently, I've been playing a game called Empire Avenue, and they want to munch my blog with their machine code. What a crazy world we live in.

Blizzard - Growing Pains

Recently I guess some guy at GDC or some big game convention let it be known that Bungie the guys behind the Halo franchise was working on a MMO. Having recently been acquired by Activision; the whole world just assumed it was World of Warcraft in space.

Thinking about this for a while just sort of made some dreams come true. My brother is a BIG Halo fan, and while he may not be the right customer for an MMO. He's got a life, it really just spurns my hope of them coming up with a MMO. Although I still hold out hopes for World of Starcraft. I enjoy playing World of Warcraft, but sometimes I just want to do something different.

Turns out later the guy was just yaking our chain, and the MMO and their future plans aren't real. I think its just bungie testing the waters and they didn't like what they heard. What did they expect working for Activision. Anything that is an MMO is just going to be called WoW in whatever. Wether this was really a joke or not remains to be seen.

I think if you were a company like Activision your scared to test the waters again. You don't want to take subs away from your poster child. Yet you don't know how to move forward.

Any game you put foward in a MMO space has potential to take away subs. How you keep those people playing both games without paying twice the fees is the tricky part. You may get some in, but anything that detracts from WOW isn't neccisarly bad. Even a lot of people I know who play WOW are just waiting for Diablo 3 to come out and they are GONE.

Keeping people onboard for a 2nd MMO is the tricky part. I think its rather easy and here is how. It's been done before by Sony and others. You need to branch out into a multi-game mmo company.

You have to consider a one time fee to access multi mmo's. Give people the flexibility to play mutliple of your games and you can raise the fee to probably a good $20 and people even might consider it a deal to play your games.

Then you need to give them the toolts. Battle.net is a great start, however you need to make it connected all the time. Not just in your games, their is so many ways to keep people interested in your products even if they can't be at a physical computer to play them. Include these services in your permium package.

What Bungie desides to do next is really anyones guess. Ultimatley I haven't read anything on the web. However I think it very likely they will play it safe. They can't work on Halo, because Microsoft probably has the rights locked down. A thought that probably should have crossed our minds. Microsoft would have to publish said MMO or give its blessings. It was a mistake to not buy Blizzard they are not going to make a mmo that's not on the Xbox. The fact Final Fantasy has been so succesful really should beef up their interest. In fact cross play with pc/xbox is my primary wish.

Seems I play in different worlds than my brother.

Design – Art or Science

Ghostcrawler you have let me down with your comments, but let me explain.

Design though from my prospective is wondering about the nuances of design. Maybe it might be my Business Degree and how they always talked about business and its process as a scientific process, much as I earned a Bachelor of Science and not a Bachelor of Arts. However to say design is a matter of science would be too limited, creativity as a big part of my design, probably comes more from my artsy self, terrible but still there.

Computer Game Design, like probably a lot of design is as described by Wikipedia. “Game design is the process of designing the content and rules of a game. -- “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Design

Why do I mean you let us down though? It is becoming increasingly clear and alarming so that you rely on the art of game design and tend to lean away from the science of game design.

However a game as massive as WOW, I can’t imagine you ignore the science; for instance strategic planning. However for a more pointed example and our concern, we examine a few words.

“Unfortunately the one really hard encounter in the game is a dragon that does” Ghostcrawler

I of course don’t mean to examine your words, but I am hoping we all can learn from this example. I really do want to learn, I am not putting you down as a game designer. I think you and Paul Barnett are in the top two for the field. However saying unfortunately implies an accident, like you didn’t realize this would be the case. If you say your design goal is to

“If I need to say it again, the goal is that you can have any of the four classes as your MT, so long as that player has sufficient skill and appropriate gear and is backed up by a raid that knows what the blank they are doing.” Ghostcrawler

This goal is to have all 4 tanks being similar, doesn’t help when you yourself say well we didn’t count on the DK being the spell damage tank, and the Druid being the Physical damage tank. Block tanking, on the fast quick hits is great, however we accidently made the content favor two over the others. I hope this accident like an industrial accident isn’t shrugged off as a natural disaster, one in which you as a company can’t contain yourselves.

With the science of design, we must realize our choices and our decisions need to be just that, planned and executed and not just accidently thrown together and hope it works.

I feel that these design ideas are not as laid out and planned for as you seem to think they are.