[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Hook <bwh at wksoftware.com>
>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.

>> 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?!"

Substitute "What the hell is a 'bwca'?"  We've got monsters from
lesser-known legends in there, using the original spellings (w, for
example, is literally double-U [uu], pronounced like oo, and c is
always hard, so that would be pronounced "booka".  The familiar *and*
the strange, but when people find the story behind the strange they go
"Oh, that makes sense."

> 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.

"Game design is a craft", that was exactly what we were looking at.
Are you innovating, or reinventing the wheel?  Are you building square
wheels just to be different?  Purely online games have typically had a
high hurdle for new users.  We wanted to avoid that, and just because
online and single-player are fundamentally different, doesn't mean
that in some ways they aren't fundamentally the same.

>> 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.

Some problems *are* nails.  When the problem you're facing is a desire
to remain approachable to new players, but also appeal to veterans who
have "been there, done that", your options are limited.

--Dave Rickey

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