In most of the opinions about Warhammer Online I’ve seen so far, people have commented about how amazing Public Quests (PQs) are. They talk about how every traditional MMO from here on needs them because they are so ridiculously fun in WAR. What I haven’t seen mentioned is how incredibly unfun they are going to be shortly after release. Continue Reading »

There’s a raid in Final Fantasy XI that is intended to take 18 hours to defeat. It’s called Absolute Virtue. This is, at best, a very ill-informed design flaw, but I believe it to actually cross the line into being truly unethical and outright dangerous. If that wasn’t enough, there is also a more difficult raid involving the Pandemonium Warden that takes even longer. Continue Reading »

Paul Barnett discouraged developers from playing WoW? The thought is that playing other games, especially market leaders like World of Warcraft, can corrupt a designer into copying them to some degree. I agree that the game is a work of flawed genius, but I don’t really agree with not playing other massively multiplayer games for your own purity. Continue Reading »

More than 50% of Age of Conan subscribers are on PvP servers, as noted by Funcom themselves. If WoW Census is accurate, more than 40% of World of Warcraft subscribers are on PvP servers. And yet, Player-versus-Player is sometimes neglected even in modern MMOs. What’s with the stigma? Continue Reading »

Finish your game before launch. If the launch date can’t be pushed back, remove the unfinished portion of the game and get it done right. For example, if the last 20-30 level chunk of your game has (basically) no quests, and quests were previously the method to gain levels, change the level cap to end when the quests end. If the content can’t fill out as many levels as the mechanics, you pretty much have to go with the weakest link and temporarily lower the level cap.