ULTIMA ONLINE, STAR WARS GALAXIES, @PlayableWorlds. THEORY OF FUN, POSTMORTEMS, SUNDAY POEMS. AFTER THE FLOOD. @raphkoster@mastodon.gamedev.place
San Diego CA
Joined February 2009
- Tweets30.6K
- Following296
- Followers20.1K
- Likes480
Any @pgmuscat game is worth playing :)
A pile of articles recently about this including several quoting my “we need shitty graphics”… and I see lots of opinionated players in the comment threads. The full piece is out now, has a lot of smart people in it & I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the games biz.
Here's Edge Magazine's long-form interview with many developers on the state of the game industry. Lots of quotes have circulated, so read the full thing here:
knowledge.edge-online.com/p/…
Nah, you’re just missing context. What I was saying is that big companies will continue to spend similarly because outspending others, even with more efficient tools, is still a competitive advantage.
I have an article on this! gamedeveloper.com/design/a-b…
This is where the term griefing came from! “Grief player.” And it started instantly. On the first day newbies were walking out of the inn and getting shot in the back from the windows.
Raph Koster retweeted
Day one fixes, upcoming weekend updates, and a thank you note from Raph! 💫 Check out what’s already gone live and what we’re working on next as Early Access continues. Read it here: store.steampowered.com/news/…
Raph Koster retweeted
I played Stars Reach yesterday, an Early Access Sandbox MMO featuring civilization building/mayors/jobs and more. It's plenty janky being in EA, but I've had a blast so far.
It's also made by @raphkoster who brought us Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, so that's a bonus too
Raph Koster retweeted
NEW: I was enthralled by Stars Reach, an MMO with simulated, malleable worlds
"If you tunnel through this rock, it could cave in on you, because there is over a dozen kinds of soil with different pH”
“The forests propagate. The forests burn down"
Etc.
gamefile.news/p/stars-reach-…
I definitely agree on sandblasting too much away: “Every inconvenience is a challenge, and games are made of challenges. This means that every inconvenience in your design is potentially someone’s game.” raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do…
I am on a bit of a hair trigger in this myself because I see people calling Classic a sandbox (!) sometimes. Or talking about how social it was (it was widely considered the least social MMO ever made, at launch time). Enough time has passed people forget what came before…
I strongly agree with the IP, visuals and other points. No disagreement there.
I wouldn’t frame this just as “removing friction” though. A lot of it was about *adding.* Something enabled by their huge budget. No one else could afford quests everywhere, for example.
Focusing on whether there were quest helpers in the map is missing the forest for the trees. The revisionist history here is actually not giving WoW nearly enough credit for the truly massive change it made in player guidance.
You are comparing WoW at launch to today. I am saying that WoW at launch to what came before was a far far bigger gap. The trend you are describing was basically started by WoW.
MMOs prior to WoW basically didn’t have quests AT ALL.
Sure, today it may have even more handholding, but it was *by far* the most “on rails” MMO to ever exist when it came out. That focus on guidance and accessibility is a huge part of why it was so successful.
I was disagreeing with “it largely exhibited the same qualities as the Minecraft example” bit. Classic WoW was ALL about guided gameplay and accessibility. You were absolutely not “thrown in a vast world and left to figure it out on your own.”
In Classic WoW at release you were instantly given a quest to kill five wolves. Then you were led from quest to quest through the entire newbie zone. Then you could level all the way to max by just following quests. That’s why it was successful: it held your hand the whole way.
