- Another vote for the "Syncaine was right" camp. Wired Game Life's Andrew Groen has an article up today titled "Star Wars’ Stumble Points to Free, Open Future for Online Worlds."
- Modern MMOs are broken and there is nothing to convince me that this line of thinking is wrong. Everyone has taken the wrong lessons from World of Warcraft. Yes, accessibility is a good thing for MMOs. But it needs to be the on ramp to something bigger, not the MMO itself. What worked about WoW is that Blizzard made a big, hard game, then let everyone else play anyway. And I know that the elites don't want to hear it, but EVE Online works because anyone can play, even if a bunch of them play in Empire space.
- There is no core to SWTOR or any number of failed experiments. I'm the biggest care bear there is, but I still want to be where the action is. Without that hardcore center, without that major challenge to strive for, there is no action. There are no stories to tell. Why play a mediocre RPG when there are plenty of better single player games on the market.
- The verdict is still out on Guild Wars 2. The systems are all kinds of decent, but I'm not hearing any stories yet.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
My personal take is that lots of incremental upgrades have gone into the leveling games of MMOs, SWTOR and GW II perhaps representing endpoints of those design efforts, while we are still playing the endgames pioneered by EQ, UO, and DAoC. Dang, I think that's a blog post...
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm waiting....
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