[MUD-Dev] I Want to Forge Swords. [Another letter to game designers]

[Vincent Archer]

According to Auli:

> easy.  Because the point of these games for most is to go out and
> explore if travel is time consuming and difficult people will not
> 'settle down'.  They become permanent nomads ala Everquest.  That
> would seem to be exactly the opposite of Mr. Ming's argument.
 
> It will always be the case that some games do some things better
> than others.  It was my intent to point this out for this situation,
> not come across as a run of the mill EQ-hater.  I'm about to go log
> in and play now :p

Well, having a large world is a good point when one wants to emphazise
the Explore aspect of the game. It might even be argued it is good
from a Social aspect, since it will probably force you to interact
with more people. But it's also bad for community, because, unless
your entire community migrates, you lose contact with it everytime you
move.

There's no going around it. Once a community of people agglomerate,
they want to keep in touch. If it is hard to do it "in character"
because it takes too long to meet each other face to face, then
they'll resort to OOC methods (guildchat). Makes that too hard too,
and they'll move to web pages/ICQ.

So, usually, the people that want realism in their world (my world is
big, and there's no steenkin' TP) end up sacrifying a different
realism (people are all long-range telepaths, and spend a lot of time
talking across distances).

My own, personal, preference would be that no place in the world must
be more than 20mn from another, once you know your way around. To
emphasise exploration, a system like Diablo II's waypoints, or the
recent EQ's "dragon circle tooths" is nice: you have to go there
once. But you should never be far from "home".

--
Vincent Archer                                         Email: archer at nevrax.com

Nevrax France.                              Off on the yellow brick road we go!
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