MMO Gaming

I said I would take a few minutes to point out some things I found especially interesting from the Highlight of the Week, and here they are.

the user interfaces have come up to… well not quite the same sort of level, but they’re getting there where the ease of play is better.

I liked this quote because it is so distinctly true. Interfaces in MMOs tend to be…decent or acceptable at best, though they are getting better. That would perhaps be a good topic for discussion later.

The new games all have a characteristic that I like to describe as one where you come into the game, you’re given a quest, you go out on a quest, you are not killed, you come back and get a pat on the back and get told what a great person you are and you’re given another quest. All of that has to happen in about 15 to 20 minutes, and if it doesn’t happen in the first 15 to 20 minutes, it’s a design flaw and if you die during that time it’s a design flaw. And so, those are the same sort of things people expect and want to see in console games: ease of use, quickly being able to get into them and have fun.

Interestingly enough this is incredibly true of my own time after picking up World of Warcraft. The very first character I started, not knowing anything, was a Human Priest. I managed to suck and die several times and ended up just deleting the character entirely and rolling a Dwarf Hunter that I played for quite a while. No one wants to start off the game and “lose” immediately. On the other hand though, with time, the inverse should be true, as players learn the nuances of the game the difficulty should scale up so that there is the need for skillful playing.

but basically it’ll be an account where, for one price, you can play absolutely everything that NCsoft has to offer.

This is really interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go from here. He also mentions a launcher, which I assume is the PlayNC launcher that is currently used with Dungeon Runners (possibly some of the other new games coming out as well, but I haven’t gotten a chance to play most of them yet.)

What we love is other good games, because we think if there’s another good game in the market, people come in, play that game and have a good time. Then they go, “You know what, I want to check out other good online games.” What hurts our business is bad games. If there’s a bad game, people come in and play it and they go, “That really sucked, I don’t want to play these MMP games.”

I don’t understand the obsession with people believing that the success of one person means other people are unable to succeed as well. Good games are good for the market, bad games are bad for the market (as a whole) this isn’t earth-shattering news so why the desire to make it seem like there has to always be a hatred between developers? It just seems a bit ridiculous to me to push the idea that there should be a split of who is successful and not. I’m glad to see him come out and say it, there is not going to be a “WoW-killer” nor is there going to be an “any other game-killer” they will exist together and appeal to various individuals but all will have or continue to have success.

Anyway, those were my highlights, anyone else catch anything interesting?