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I’ve made no secret that I’m looking forward to checking out Warhammer Online. I have the game pre-ordered for in-store pickup and I’m a member of a wish-we-were-still-hardcore casual guild called Casualties of WAR. Mythic recently launched a fun little site called Road to WAR in which players acquire real life territories for gold and [...] Read More...
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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 [...] Read More...
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I’ve talked before about recapturing the magic in games and trying to replicate it from a design standpoint, but recently I’ve decided to relive some old games. I picked up all of the Thief and Fallout games, both of which occupy places in my top three or so games of all time. But, I already [...] Read More...
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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 [...] Read More...
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In response to a very short-winded post over at Broken Toys, I decided to dig up a post I made before I was a game developer, way back when Nerfbat wasn’t really a blog. You can see the article in its original form on Archive.org, but I’ll go ahead and copy it here below the [...] Read More...
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I really want to make a questionnaire that determines how much of a griefer you are. Or, put another way, how sociable you are. This would be a series of questions about what you would do in a particular situation, probably in the context of a PvE server then a PvP server. An example question [...] Read More...
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Crave has an article up entitled The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever. I’ve renamed it to something more appropriate, because these are perhaps the 30 awesomest videogame titles ever. Gems like Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals, Ninja Hamster, and Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender. Seriously, those [...] Read More...
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Crave has an article up entitled The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever. I’ve renamed it to something more appropriate, because these are perhaps the 30 awesomest videogame titles ever. Gems like Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals, Ninja Hamster, and Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender. Seriously, those [...] Read More...
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The short answer is, “yes.” It depends on what kind of game you’re making, really, but since I talk about traditional MMORPGs on this blog (EverQuest, World of Warcraft, etc.), I can’t think of a case in which having a great writer would be optional — whether that writer is also a game designer or [...] Read More...
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Prokofy, the reason we hate RMT isn’t because we want to keep our games pure — that’s the reason it leaves a bad taste in our mouth. The reason we hate RMT is because gold farmers dramatically harm gameplay. They grief. They train mobs on others (getting them killed), they kill everything in sight so [...] Read More...
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This is an incoherent rant prompted by posts from Jeff Freeman via Raph Koster and Richard Bartle and by way of Joystiq via The Inquirer. Each of those has something to do with gender bending in massively multiplayer games, which is a frightening epidemic of at least the same proportions as the black plague. Because, [...] Read More...
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As I get older — and I know I’m not very old yet — my personal preferences, as well as my gaming capabilities, have changed. I have less time to play games now that I’m married, and even if I had the time, I’d be less likely to spend the endless hours playing them that [...] Read More...
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Scott Jennings is being bullied by lawyers. It makes me mad, and it makes Matt Mihaly mad too. I’m going to follow his lead by mirroring Lum’s post (which will be down tonight) on Nerfbat for a short period of time. Dear lawyers, I’m going to get rid of this in a few days anyway, [...] Read More...
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Watching one of my favorite modern comedies, “Office Space,” inspired me. What does “PC LOAD LETTER” mean? Well, that’s kinda the point. What DOES it mean? It’s ambiguous and uses a common acronym to mean something other than the accepted and understood meaning. How would I interpret it? “Go back to your personal computer and [...] Read More...
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Yesterday I posted about how old game mechanics often don’t translate to new games in a post called Up Your Butt and Around the Corner. I mentioned that I would talk a little bit more about capturing the magic of a game and replicating it, and this is me fulfilling that promise.
There are really two [...] Read More...
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