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Dev Watercooler: Pruning the Gardens of War
We've been waiting for it forever and it's finally here -- Blizzard released the first in a series of Dev Watercoolers discussing Warlords of Draenor. This particular post is about systems changes and the reasons behind them. So what did they reveal this time? The upcoming item squish is detailed, both in terms of the reasoning behind it and the effects it will have. In order to ensure old content will still be soloable, you'll even see a buff implemented when higher level characters clear older content to make them even more powerful by comparison. Base damage on player spells and abilities is being removed - all abilities and damage will scale with spell or attack power. Racial traits are being adjusted - high outliers (like, perhaps, Every Man For Himself) will be reduced in power, while obsolete abilities will be removed entirely. In terms of the ability purge (called 'pruning' here), one big target is Cooldowns. Various classes with multiple cooldowns will see them removed or combined. Crowd Control is seeing a significant overhaul and reduction, with a complete list on the blog post - examples include interrupts no longer having added silences, certain CC's like Cyclone now being dispellable, and all stuns now sharing the same DR.
Giving up on conquering WoW
Backhand of Justice has an interesting post up about something we've considered for a long time: who will overtake World of Warcraft. Way back before this year started, game developers were challenged to come up with an MMO that could take on WoW's influence and popularity, and while there have certainly been some interesting MMOs announced and released (Star Wars: The Old Republic, which isn't out yet, and Aion, which is, are probably most in the forefront at the moment), it just hasn't happened. WoW is still the juggernaut it's been for almost the full five years, and with Cataclysm coming in 2010, that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. So now, two months from the end of 2009, let's just say it: it's not possible. World of Warcraft is an aberration, an extremely well-made game that happened to be in just the right time and place (the casual game explosion, the adoption of MMOs and subscription model gaming, the "mainstreaming" of fantasy/sci-fi geekiness) to become an uber megahit. In short, game developers simply can't recreate WoW, at least not on purpose. As BoJ says, that doesn't mean they can't try -- there are certainly lots of original and interesting games and MMOs out there, and it's completely possible to be an MMO that isn't WoW-sized and be successful. But as for the actual question of beating WoW and its worldwide audience, game developers have pretty much moved on.
Koster: MMOs removed more features from MUDs than they added
Areae president, MetaPlace developer, and all-around-MMO-authority Raph Koster wrote up a blog post about the influence of MUDs on today's graphical MMOs. The post is part of the broader, cross-blog discussion that began with our interview with Richard Bartle last week. You can read Koster's post in that context if you really want to, but it's interesting on its own.He started out by saying which MUDs influenced the developers of which early MMOs. For example, LP MUDs had an impact on Ultima Online. Then he named a handful of the best innovations of the modern MMO -- "advanced raiding," instances, improvements to combat via spaciality, etc. After saying all those positive things though, he dropped a bit of a bomb, saying that despite all that, "MMOs have removed more features from MUD gameplay than they have added, when you look at the games in aggregate."Oh noes! Are the Warhammer Online fans fuming yet? Well, they shouldn't be. "Failure to evolve more radically isn't a flaw," said Koster. He finished up by positing that all the current MMOs "are already Old Guard," and that "the mudder crew is already the Older Guard. So in a sense this is kind of like an argument between art rockers and disco musicians."
