MMO Development Lesson #22
Just because you have a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to implement it. Sometimes a good idea isn’t completely cohesive with the core focus of the game. Sometimes a good idea is very difficult and time-consuming to implement, and that time would be better spent on other things. Sometimes a good idea is cohesive and may not necessarily take forever to implement on its own, but preexisting systems would not mesh very well with it. Whatever the case may be, just because someone has a good idea does not mean it should be or even can be implemented. Remember, when someone who can make calls does not include your good idea in a game, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea or that they simply don’t like it; there are usually other reasons that it doesn’t get implemented.
You could follow that up with “It’s better to do a few things really well than do a lot of things asstastically”. Things take time, and if you try to cram too much in there at once it just won’t work so well.
And for MMO stuff add “ship with all of your major functionality in the box working” and you will have my vote for emperor of Dune, or whatever election is coming up soon.
Is this is a nice way of saying that gamers can have good ideas but they might be bad ideas when you take everything into account?
Ha, I fiat endless budget, developers, and development time. Now we can incorporate full virtual pets in my new MMO, along with farming where the genetic code of every plant is mapped over 256 variables, each with 256 options, all of which are meaningful! We are going to have real-time deformable terrain, and all instances will check the history of every action completed by every player in the instance so that it can correctly generate the right NPC comments from our pool of 60,000 custom messages. Take that, bean-counters!
Man, how can I disagree with you when you post what I said in a previous coment? 👿
It’s all part of my master plan.
Step 1: Get Psychochild to agree with me.
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit