[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Where massive?

[Damion Schubert]

On 9/13/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
>
>
> The bottom line to all this is the question of how much of an MMO really
> needs to be designed to be massive.  The background world wants to be.  In
> that background world are the lightweight actions and experiences that the
> technology can support for thousands of simultaneous players.  But when a
> group of players desires to get together to have some fun, that background
> world can fade away and more weight can be brought to bear to entertain
> that
> group.  If we assume that they are like-minded, the game design can also
> leverage the trust that those players share.


As an interesting data point, Guild Wars shipped with a highly instanced
world view, which they took great advantage of in many of the ways you
describe: fragile experiences in full control of the story writers and game
designers to create carefully balanced and controlled instances.  Guild
Wars was quite successful, selling in the low millions.

All this being said, in developing Guild Wars 2, one of the major changes
that they have talked about making is moving away from instanced content
in many cases, and towards more traditional MMO-style shared servers.
A quote:

"One of the major new additions to *Guild Wars
2<http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/>
* is persistent world areas. The original game was entirely instanced which,
according to the ArenaNet team, did wonders for their ability to tell a
story (there's a major event in the middle of the original game that
completely alters the world forever). "What you lose in an entirely
instanced game is a lot of social opportunities," Mike O'Brian said.
"There's a lot to be said for running into the same people over and over
again. If you run with a pick-up group and you never meet them again, it can
make a completely instanced game a very lonely experience." While *Guild
Wars 2* will contain a lot of instanced mission content, it will also sport
a lot of shared landscape and will also be divided up into different servers
filled with smaller groups of people in the manner of traditional MMOs"
                --  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/784302p2.html

Instancing is an incredibly powerful design tool, but overuse has a
real danger to it - a danger of reducing the most powerful and intriguing
consumer promise of 'massively multiplayer' gameplay - the massively
multiplayer part.

--d