[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #255 - 27 msgs

[John Buehler]

Dr. Cat writes:

> I think if you have combat and monsters and getting gold and that
> kind of stuff it's going to be really hard to get a lot of the
> casual gamers in there, as they're likely to see "that game has
> fighting", lump it together with Everquest and Quake 3 because of
> that, and never try it.

Presenting the game as being primarily a crafting and exploration game
would be my starting point.  That, combined with a nice presentation
of the environment should begin the process of indocrination of
'casual players'.  If that simple recipe fails, then going near any
sort of swords and magic addition would seem doomed.  To make no
mention of PvP actions.

> And lastly to say that while some of your goals sound laudable, a
> lot of what you say sounds like "biting off more than you (or
> anyone) can chew".

Oh, it's a huge morass of problems.  The question for me is one of
theory.  How do we make a game for casual gamers?  What are the checks
and balances that actually make online entertainment interesting to
the point of being a money-making enterprise?

In the meantime, I'll develop proof of concept vehicles for the
individual systems involved.  I don't even worry about the realtime
practicality of the systems I work on.  I use all available CPU and
memory and see what I can do.

> All in all, a game as good as you envision might come about many
> years from now, though perhaps different in some of the particulars.
> I don't personally think computer games are going to get that good
> any time in the next few years.

I agree.

> I know that Furcadia has goals as ambitious or more so than most of
> the games out there.  But I'm always focused on a very specific,
> very acheivable subset of my long-term plans, one that I think will
> be fun by itself and competitive with the best of what else is out
> there.  So far I'm relatively pleased with the results.

I'm no businessman.  Never have been.  So I work on technology and
theory.

JB


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