[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Brian Hook]

At 03:37 PM 3/13/01 -0500, Dave Rickey wrote:

> In DAoC, we deliberately made the Albion realm comfortable and
> "generic fantasy".  People come in, and there's no confusion.

[snip]

> And so on, complexity is introduced *slowly*, so that the player is
> not confronted with the whole feature-set of the game at once.  And
> the background is so instantly familiar it's almost cliche.

It IS cliche, and that's why people will be able to relate.  One of
the more common complaints I heard about AC was "What the hell is a
drudge?!"

But what you describe is basically "Hey, let's make the game the
tutorial", an approach almost every major single player game has taken
for the past several years.  Some multiplayer games are doing this
now, e.g. PSO.  Everything is introduced to you a bit at a time so
that you're slowly pulled into the game without being overwhelmed by
complexity at the outset.  This isn't anything particularly
innovative, it's just that the MMORPG genre is so nascent that it
hasn't reached the level of refinement of single player games.

> Compare this to EQ, where it took me (a pretty veteran player of
> both online and single-player games) an hour and a freaking half to
> find my way out of South Qeynos.  To this day, Kelethin (tree city)
> rains newbies.  I've talked to players in their teens and 20's that
> didn't know where to find their Guildmaster, or that they even would
> want to.

Or, even more common, are players that don't understand that they need
to learn skills.  Meeting warriors in their teens that never learned
Taunt.  Or meeting warriors (including myself) that managed to
outlevel their skills, e.g. 2HS which kills so quickly you don't get
enough swings for your skill to climb.

> Anyway, the point of all this is that it is possible to be *both*
> familiar *and* innovative, if you finesse it.

It sounds like you're approaching things with more of a brute force
approach than a finesse approach, i.e. you're making several different
games instead of one.  Not that that's a bad thing, mind you.

Brian Hook

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