[MUD-Dev] MMORPG: where to start for making and running a game

[Lee Sheldon]

ceo wrote:

> Being superficial, the relative failure of EA MMO games appears to
> indicate yes to the first question. The stale state of commercial
> MMOG's (c.f. Daniel's recent comment that he was bored of the
> same-old same-old) would suggest to me that the answer is no to
> the second :).

Another EA game, Earth & Beyond, is still somewhat alive, if not
exactly thriving. Most of the creatives there seemed to be
single-player people. URU and Matrix Online will be interesting to
watch. Here we have two smaller, more focused developers (Cyan and
Monolith respectively), responsible for high-quality, successful
single-player games whose MMO staffs appear to be all single-player
people, too.

> Although... I've no particular knowledge of MCO, Majestic, TSO
> etc, other than having played them and spotted similar repeated
> problems where the gameplay just wasn't remotely suited to the
> "medium" (is there a more appropriate word to describe MMO as a
> transport for gameplay? I fear I'm mis-appropriating that word...)

Dunno. "Medium" seems borderline, usually used to differentiate
between books, movies, plays, computer entertainment etc. We don't
call collections of short stories a different medium from
novels. The word "genre" is also bandied about. If an action game is
a different genre than an RTS, what would you call a fantasy action
game compared to a science fiction action game as the word would
traditionally be used? I use "type," but it doesn't have much
flavor, does it?

Lee
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