March 2007
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Morris Cox
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Michael Hartman
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Michael Hartman
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Mike Rozak
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Damion Schubert
- [ANNOUNCE] Midgard Online Andreas Weidenhaupt
- [NEWS] Trident Games Prepares New Online Game Using Skotos Engine Shannon Appelcline
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Weston Fryatt
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Lachek Butalek
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Adam Martin
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Mike Rozak
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Weston Fryatt
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Hyrup, Darrin
- [TECH] MMOG Design List Morgan Ramsay
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work mud-dev-list@jaruzel.com
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Lachek Butalek
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Sean Howard
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work David Johansson
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Lachek Butalek
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work David Johansson
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Keith Dunwoody
- [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work Sean Howard
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Morris Cox
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Caliban Darklock
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rantagainst Vanguard reviews and rants) Craig Huber
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Morris Cox
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Damion Schubert
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Tess Snider
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Adam Martin
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Mike Rozak
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Acius
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Mike Rozak
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Chris Richards
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Ling Lo
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
- [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study John Buehler
- [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study Mike Sellers
- [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study John Buehler
- [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study John Buehler
- [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names cruise
- [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names John Buehler
- [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names Johnicholas Hines
- [TECH] Randomly-generated Faction Names Lachek Butalek
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Adam Martin
- [DESIGN] Ray traced environments Jon Leonard
- [DESIGN] Homogenized MMORPG Engines (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Sean Howard
- [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Michael Hartman
cruise wrote:
> Thus spake Jeffrey Kesselman...
>
>> The big issues I have with CoH are reliance on combat and leveling as
>> the only "game supported" form of gameplay and the boredom of the
>> level treadmill.
>
>
> Criticisms of CoH's treadmill gameplay always confused me. Yes, combat
> is all there is to do - but most mainstream MMOG's up until that point
> had relied heavily on combat anyway. All CoH did was strip out many of
> the "downtime" elements and concentrate on making the combat as good as
> possible.
They stripped out more than that. They stripped out EVERYTHING.
Honestly, once you've done a couple of missions, you have pretty much
done everything there is to do. The "trials" are very, very, very minor
variations on the theme - and that includes everything up to their
newest SHOE (Synthetic Hamidon Origin Enhancement) trial.
No crafting. No loot gathering. No dungeons. No quests. No mini-games.
Nothing.
You just grind the same mission over and over and the environment
doesn't even change. You navigate the same office complex/warehouse/etc.
over and over and over. It uses the same graphical skin and the same
handful of map layouts from level 1 to 50.
CoX is fun, and their exemplar/sidekick system should be copied by more
games. But it really shouldn't be a subscription based game. There isn't
anywhere NEAR enough content, and it is far too heavily instanced. It
feels and plays more like a peer-to-peer non-subscription game where you
find friends to play with in some kind of online lobby (the
non-instanced portion of the game is little more than a lobby, after
all, since virtually nothing happens there).
I venture the opinion that it would have sold at least 10-100 times as
many copies, and made more money in the process, as a non-subscription
based game that simply sold periodic expansions (at nearly the rate that
they release their "issues"). As an added bonus, by doing it that way
they could avoid the silly time sinks and let people focus on making
tens if not hundreds of different characters (which is the best part of
the game anyway) instead of the MMO-standard hundreds of hours of
grinding. - [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jean, Yannick
- [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Michael Hartman
- [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Damion Schubert
- [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jeffrey Kesselman
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] cruise
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] John Buehler
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Sean Howard
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Michael Hartman
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Jeffrey Kesselman
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] cruise
- Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent] Jeffrey Kesselman
- [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity) Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Turn Around Time On Experimentation (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Adam Martin
- [ANNOUNCE] What Makes A Next-Gen Game? Morgan Ramsay
- [ANNOUNCE] What Makes A Next-Gen Game? Lachek Butalek
- [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction Mike Rozak
- [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction Paolo Piselli
- [DESIGN] Multiplayer interactive fiction Mike Rozak
- [BIZ] Austin Game Conference Contacts? Jeffrey Kesselman
- [BIZ] Austin Game Conference Contacts? Daniel James
- [MEDIA] A good, hour-long news segment about Second Life Mike Rozak
- Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Adam Martin
- Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Adam Martin
- Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Hudson, Thomas C.
- Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Jeffrey Kesselman
- Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Kerry Fraser-Robinson
- Combat Systems (was: Reasons for Play) Jeffrey Kesselman
- [Announce] CircumReality - A grahical MUD (kind of) develoment toolkit Mike Rozak
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Hudson, Thomas C.
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Shannon Sullivan
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Dana V. Baldwin
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Jeffrey Kesselman
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants) Tess Snider
- Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguardreviews and rants) Richard A. Bartle