[MUD-Dev] Focus vs. Scope (WAS: Homogeneity and choice)

[cruise]

HRose wrote:

> But it's the main design point. Crafting isn't a world by itself,
> all in WoW is extremely focused. The game is pulverized into
> thousands of mini-goals. You choose what you want to achieve and
> you can choose to focus on something or something else.

> It's not "forced" into one dimension. It's "built" into one
> dimension. You may choose to craft or not but you'll never choose
> to not gain levels. If you don't "agree" with this type of design
> you probably will choose another game to play.

> WoW doesn't try to do everything, to fill all the spaces. Instead
> it's an extremely focused game where this same focus makes its
> success.

> The tradeskills are a cohesive part of the treadmill, like the
> mounts, the items etc... The game doesn't even try to 'broaden'
> the gameplay (Ubiq wrote about this on his blog). What it does is
> about adding more different goals that will help the fun through a
> variation.

Both WoW and CoH seem to have chosen to focus on one particular play
style and make sure that is as polished as possible, in contrast to
the "do anything" style games of earlier generations of
MMORPG's. Guild Wars has distilled the core combat even further.

Predictably, some people hate the apparent restrictiveness and
one-dimensionality, while others enjoy the accessability and
efficiency. Arguably it is a "dumbing-down" to appeal to the
mass-market, but it seems to work :P

It is just as fair to say, however, that combat is the primary
gameplay element of pretty much all CRPG's anyway, so all they've
done is strip the unnecessary elements and retained the core game.

This is presumably a deliberate choice, and it certainly seems to be
a good decision in the current market. Is it possible that gradually
we'll return to the broader, deeper games as the gaming proles get
used to this style of game? Or are we on a never-ending spiral of
reductionism?

--
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / transference.org ]
   "quantam sufficit"
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