Tag: game-design

In the struggle to save City of Heroes from extinction, activists (masktivists?) are faced with two challenges: convince NCsoft to keep or sell rather than sunset the game and convince the greater gaming community that it’s worth fighting for. There is already a team working on the first, so I’d like to tackle the second. The first step is to…

When I look over some of my past Daily Grind posts on Massively, I notice a recurring theme: I’m apparently subconsciously interested in the ways people try to influence the design of the games they play. I’ve asked about the efficacy of exit surveys, the dangers of player representatives, what sort of sub fee we’d pony up for an awesome…

Ultima Online wasn’t the greatest game of all time, and it’s not even my favorite, but because it was first, and because it’s so old, it’s had a long period of time to make mistakes and learn from them (or not). And because it’s a sandbox, it’s made those mistakes across a broad spectrum of MMO design, rather than being…

Earlier today, I posted to Massively an article titled Ten things to do in Star Wars Galaxies before it’s gone. Truthfully, I had a lot more than ten, but space is an issue in this new tl;dr age. Instead, I held back a few of the more niche suggestions for this very post. I promise the title makes sense later….

Guild Wars owns a permanent position in my top three MMOs of all time. It’s group-friendly and solo-friendly; it’s all about lateral advancement; and it’s one of a few MMOs employing my favorite pay model. So of course I’m watching Guild Wars 2’s development with great interest. And yet nearly every GW2 announcement from “high level cap” to “open world”…

EVE Online is one of those sandboxes I wish I could love. It’s in space. It’s pretty. It’s got partly open PvP. It has neat races and backstory. It has crafting. It has harvesting. It has an awesome trading system, and distance matters. You can make money from players just by moving products across the galaxy. In short, it theoretically…