[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 02 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:
>Designers may have blinders on when it comes to the idea of adding depth.
	They have blinders on when it comes to lots of things...

>If gamers get used to markedly increased depth of experience in single
player
>games, they may come to expect it in multiplayer games.
	This certainly happened with graphics, and although I don't expect the
effect to be as pronounced with virtual worlds, it could still make a
difference.
	Some differences may remain, though. Few single-player games allow you
to walk through NPCs, for example, but graphical virtual worlds do because
otherwise you may find yourself unable to get somewhere because a crowd
is blocking you (and if player characters can get in the way, too, then it
becomes even more of a potential problem).

>Ultima Online had depth, while EverQuest had 3D.  EverQuest won.
	UO also had unrestricted PvP, money dupe bugs and a customer service
disaster. If it hadn't, it could perhaps have held on against EQ. 3D would
eventually have won, though. In the Far East, 1 1/2D held on for much
longer,
but they're moving to 3D worlds now.

>Lots of the silly inconsistencies in games are probably there
>because addressing them would interfere with the existing vision of
>gameplay.  Some is pure sloppiness, of course.
	And some is repeating old mistakes.
	Let's say you /bow in a graphical virtual world. It generates a bow
animation and a message. What does the message say? Well it ought to say
"You bow."; what it actually says is, in WoW's case, "You bow down
graciously.". Uh? I didn't want to bow down graciously: if I wanted to bow
down graciously I would have typed "/bow down graciously". I just wanted to
bow. Or maybe I wanted to /bow sarcastically, or /bow awkwardly, or /bow
down in a rather confused manner. Why can't I do any of those things? It
would take someone half a day to implement it. Why do I have my character
taken away from me and made to bow in a fashion I didn't want to bow? We
learned this lesson years ago in textual worlds; why do we get it in
graphical worlds? Did the designers deliberately ignore the precedent, or
were they simply unaware of it?

		Richard