Comment the sound of $20million down the toilet (Score 1) 302
FTA:
GSW: When you're talking about "a shared world", to clarify, are you talking about what most MMO players think of when they think of a server? IE: a space with a few thousand players inhabiting it? Or something smaller?
Dave: We don't have any firm numbers as far as how big our servers would be, but we are definitely talking about a shared world with many, many, many players.
GSW: It's worth belaboring, because this is something that players have definitely been looking for â" for some time. It's worth clearing this up so as to avoid any vagueness here.
DW: We are not playing word games with you.
You can't say whether you're building a game world for either more than 1000 or less than 1000 players? You don't know that yet? Fail.
Continuing, on scope:
ES: We've all seen it. No matter how vast or big an MMO world is, players consume the content way faster than the design teams can get it out there.
Hmm, that's funny, we're still only about half through Black Temple 18 months after it was released. Number of folks that have really finished WoW is low. I don't have figures, but I'm not exactly seeing too many full T6 sets out there, you? Right, starting to get the impression you haven't actually played Warcraft much.
On guilds:
ES: One thing I will say, though, is that we want these small groups - two, three, four players that you'd traditionally think of as a party â" we want them to have a really fun game experience. We want them be able to go out and affect the world, even on a small level. We're also looking at what other games have done for guilds, and
You shouldn't. That's almost nothing. Guilds are the backbones of MMO communities; you have to give these people tools to make them feel special. There should be actual game incentives to be part of a group.
Like the ability to challenge the 10 and 25 man content that represents a huge portion of the gameplay experience? You've never tried to pug kz have you?
On grouping:
ES: Let's face it, most games have content that is "great for groups", or "great for soloing" or "great for guilds". That's not always true. We're not going to try to say we're all things to all people. You do that and you end up being the middle of the road, nothing for no one.
DW: Unfortunately, yeah, any answer we gave on that would probably sound like what everybody else says. It all starts to run together and sound kind of pathetic.
Pretty much everything you're saying already sounds pathetic--stick to tabletop gaming, a genre you understand. Look, encounters either scale with the number of people in your group (dynamic), or you must scale your group up to handle the difficulty of the encounter (static). Give details, or wait to be interviewed until you have more than a few napkin scribbles of a design.
