[MUD-Dev] CoH (was: MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?)

[Damion Schubert]

From: Koster, Raph
> From: Scott Macmillan

>> But I think there is a good takeaway here - focus your game down
>> to a number of elements that you can do well with the time and
>> money you have, and then polish them until it hurts.  Then build
>> more features on top.

> The interesting challenge that I see with online worlds in
> particular is that this may not be entirely possible. Build a
> system that relies on the game being solely shades of blue, and
> polish it to a fare-thee-well, and you may do great. But it's
> going to be damn hard to add red later, since it breaks the blue.

> Now, nobody is begging for a great city-building game to be added
> to Crash Bandicoot. The dilemma with online worlds is that there
> ARE people begging for that to be added to perfectly good games of
> Diablo. And what's more, it may often make sense. On top of that,
> making just the blue parts may be all that you can do.

> I think a very important question for designers of these things to
> ask themselves, be they hobbyists or commercial, is "where are we
> trying to go?" Because without awareness of that, you may well
> build the wrong foundation.

On the UO2 design team, we'd often have talks about EQ's design
philosophy vs UO's.  EQ had a much narrower design - it focused on
doing one thing reasonably well (PvE adventuring).  Everything
outside of that focus was done haphazardly, if at all (craft skills
and the initial PvP experience, for example).  UO, by comparison,
did hundreds of little things, but didn't really nail many of them
out of the park.  No single feature in UO was done as well as
adventuring was done in EQ.  The amazing thing about UO was rather
how these smaller, shallower features interacted with each other.

Of course, many of these interactions were 'unintended', but they
were often wildly entertaining nonetheless.  Playing UO in the early
days was kind of like paying $10 to play a Dali painting.  But the
chances you'd see something incredibly creative, wierd, cool or
twisted was always higher in UO.

--d
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