[MUD-Dev] LTM article

[Adam Martin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "J Todd Coleman" <coleman at wolfpackstudios.com>

> My main question, though, was "Why PvP?"

> Forget Shadowbane for the moment.  If you take the MUD community
> as a model, there are hundreds of muds that differentiate
> themselves through feature concentration (beyond, of course, the
> theme-based differentiators liks WoT muds, Vampire muds, SW,
> ST:TNG, etc) in one are or another : chatting, adventuring,
> quests, pvp, race/class combinations, multiclassing, tradeskills,
> economy, etc etc etc.  Yet lately it seems that many of the games
> coming that are being announced play up PvP as one of their main
> strengths/feature sets, when there are so other areas that are
> being (comparitively speaking) glossed over.

> If I were to announce a game today, I'd probably concentrate my
> feature set on another area entire; something that everyone else
> is overlooking.  Yet almost all of the games coming out in the
> next few years have included PvP as an integral part of their
> overall game vision (AO, DaoC, SB, SW:G, Atriarch, Darkfall,
> Jumpgate, Eve.. and a boat load of others.)  >

We're developing a game to showcase our technology, and its PvP
focussed for very simple reasons: it provides us with an
ever-changing set of quests, better-than-artificial AI, and a
consistently changing world (since we allow players to affect large
changes upon the game world).

I would imagine that similar reasons are equally very powerful in
convincing other developers to concentrate on PvP and reduce their
games' dependence upon once-a-quarter expansion packs to supplement
the content of the gameplay. There have been quite a few references
on the list recently to Everquest, and the way the design forces the
designers/owners to keep adding new content because the game has no
in-built mechanism of its own to provide enough variety over time.

It seems that what may have happened is that people have looked at
the use of PvP to solve the "elder game problem", and come to the
obvious conclusion that it can work equally well to supplement
content throughout the game (or, in our case, completely replace
content that we do not have the resources to generate since ours is
not a commercial game).

Adam M
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev