davidryanhunt.com   

I’ve been catching up on my reading, and I came across some interesting articles. Recently, Ryan Shwayder at Nerfbat wrote about MMORPG nostalgia. One line I find particularly intriguing:

“At some point, every MMO designer who ever played EverQuest back in the day has wanted to recreate that experience word for word. Some have even tried and failed.”

It brings up a point that I feel is worth mentioning: I am the exact opposite. After playing MUDs for many years before Everquest came out, I was sorely disappointed. EQ was setup in a way that made players endure horrible things, and I was eager to see the genre evolve. WoW was a big step forward, but I was still disappointed by the beta since so much of EQ was visible in WoW. I hoped they would have taken a few more steps than they did. WoW just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time.

It’s ironic, because I can probably thank EQ for my current job as a game designer. At the time, I had grown completely jaded due to my experiences on MUDs. I reacted so strongly that it helped drive me, and I believed that the design of an MMORPG should respect its players. It was a good game for its time and its audience, and it was definitely an accomplishment to create… yet that didn’t make it feel any less wrong. There’s something unsettling about the way it treated players and their time. Where other people think back on EQ nostalgically, it sparks my memories of a laundry list of things I never want to place in a game. Time is a finite resource, and the thought of designing systems that waste large amounts of people’s time makes me sick to my stomach.

In case you haven’t read Ryan’s post, it’s about how nostalgia is a dangerous source of inspiration in MMO design (which almost contradicts the entire point of my post!).

And it has nothing to do with the gameplay. I can deal with the various flaws and annoyances since I love 4X games, but I ran into something insurmountable. Playing a small game ran fine. Now that I’m deep into a large game, SEV brings my Athlon 4200+ 64 X2 w/ 3GB RAM to its knees unlike any other game I’ve played. Sure, I couldn’t run Crysis on high detail, but even that performs better than late-game SEV. I timed the load times of several common activities:

• Clicking the “Close” button after a battle to return to the map: 16 seconds
• Saving the game: 1 min 38 seconds
• Loading a save: 30 seconds
  • Clicking (NOT LOADING) a savegame in the load game menu: another 14 seconds
• Ending Turn: 4 minutes 3 seconds

My actual turn usually takes less than 2 minutes, and sometimes only 30 seconds.

ION has announced its first round of speakers and their lecture descriptions.

Many years ago, when I first saw an item with +chance to find magic items, I immediately reacted, “Wow, that’s cool!” I never thought through the implications, but hey, I wasn’t even in high school yet. By the time Diablo II rolled around, I had grown to believe it’s a horrible mechanic everywhere I’ve seen it used. By now I’ve played Diablo II to death, and it’s only reinforced that belief. Now, I still think that magic find is a cool stat - it’s just always used improperly. In Diablo II, magic find gear sent me spiraling into the abyss. When I’m playing that style of game, I want to find cool loot… and I want to use the damned loot. Games create a catch-22 situation when they have heavily impactful +magic find gear. If I play using normal gear I’ll miss out on a lot of loot, then I’ll discover I need the +magic find gear to find more new stuff. I’ll find all sorts of cool stuff if I’m wearing full suit of +magic find gear, but I can’t use any of it… unless it has more stats and equal/better +magic find. Otherwise, I’m gimping my future loot gains, and it’s only a matter of time before it completely washes out.

It creates a “screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t” feeling that I don’t want in my games. Magic find isn’t evil on its own, but rather it’s how we use it that’s the problem. Magic find improves the items you get, allowing you to use better gear. Which means it should appear in a place that doesn’t conflict with its bonus. Distribute it through achievements, temporary rewards, difficulty settings, you name it - just don’t put it on my equipment.

This diatribe brought to you by Hellgate: London, even though I haven’t played it in months. I found myself using crappy gear in Hellgate so that I could get more loot, and it hurt my gameplay experience. Switching to powerful gear feel any better, because then I was just screwing over my loot.

I got off my lazy butt and setup a LinkedIn profile.

My lecture proposal for the ION Game Conference (formerly OGDC) just got approved. My design-track session is titled, “Retention Mechanisms in MMORPGs.” Here’s the summary:

“A discussion of over a dozen different systems common to many MMORPGs and how they improve long-term player retention. This covers design elements that are both old and new, with discussion of how they relate to the presenter’s experiences in game design. The areas discussed include task expansion, game balance, rewarding all activities, group gameplay, sustainable content, identifying with your character and more.

Throughout the presentation , there will be examples of what worked and what problems rose to the surface during the development of an independent Multi-User Dungeon. The completed product proved to be exceptionally strong at longer-term player retention.”

 I’ll also be talking about Pirates and how it took a different approach.

I’ve been playing Space Empires V recently, and it’s really fun. It helps quench my thirst for a good 4X space game . I started on the series with Space Empires IV, and I liked it enough that I bought both the regular edition and the gold version when it came out later.

One of the coolest things about SEV is the way it handles data files. Just about everything in the game is in a text format that’s so simple than an idiot can parse it and mod the game. Whenever I’ve found something I don’t like in the game, within five minutes I had it fixed by either A) discovering there’s a preference to change or B) finding the data file and changing the values.

We banned our first gold farmers last night.

Ten Ton Hammer posted an interview with me about Ship Combat on Jan 3. I’ve been so busy that it took me over a week to notice. I did another interview with the same guy awhile back at MMORPG.com.

We opened the servers for pre-order customers on Monday. There were a few fires, but things ran pretty smoothly overall. The real release date is coming up on Jan 22. Joe wrote a more detailed piece on the subject before the transition occurred.