To continue on my line of game design laws for MMOs, I decided to make it easy on myself and just head straight into it and look at Raph’s first law of game design. This rule is actually four in one. I think the point of it was to get under your belt the four…Continue readingThe Online Games of Wide Appeal Law
It has been years since Raph Koster first collected the wisdom of various MMORPG enthusiasts and developers and wrote down a list of Laws of Online World Design. I don’t even think he has touched it for many years, I bet the last edit happened sometime after Dark Age of Camelot was released, given that…Continue readingNew Laws for MMO Design
Of late, I have had an itch to work on my game design. This is great in some respects. I love thinking about how MMOs work and it offers me a good number of posts as I start bringing my thoughts onto my blog. Which obviously this blog is about game design in the first…Continue readingThe Wrong Kind of Itch
I have long been a proponent of death penalties in MMORPGs. Yeah they can sometimes be a harsh penalty that is rather off putting, but there are many reasons why the game design requires the death penalty to be there. Heck I still like the idea of permadeath although I think the time for that…Continue readingDeath Penalties
In one of my previous posts this last week I started delving into MMO design issues that have been changing for the worst in my opinion. In that particular article, I talked about how having instant messaging and global channels have potentially changed how the world of players interacts with each other. Continue readingTravel Times of Yore
I read a recent blog post somewhere recently (sorry I don’t remember where) that talked about the original vision of what MMOs were intended to be and the disappointment of where they are now. At heart of this dilemma are the constant need to do mind-numbing quests, the staticness of the world, and the never-ending…Continue readingOld School Rules for New School Views