design-concepts
Latest
Revival talks about death, decoration, and defenses
You remember Revival, right? You know, the game funding its development by selling in-game houses? That one. The developers haven't been quiet over the holiday season, with several recent blog posts detailing the high-end concepts behind several of the game's key mechanics -- for example, dying, which doesn't simply leave you to run back to your corpse but forces you to traverse the spirit realm, fighting off malicious spirits and seeking the Mortality Gate to drag yourself back from the dead. Of course, you can stay alive longer by making use of combat mechanics like the shield wall to defend yourself from dying. You can also use your continued "being alive" status to take advantage of the decoration kits available for housing, which allow you to convert existing rooms with certain fixtures to more functional equivalents. It's all interesting stuff and worth considering if you're sorely tempted to drop a bunch of money on the promise of virtual real estate.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 3
In parts one and two of this Soapbox miniseries, I tackled four of the reasons the MMO genre should abandon raiding as a central gameplay element, but one key argument has been left out until now: The social aspect of raiding. Whatever else is true of raiding, it is definitely social. Communities spring up and keep going largely based on that raiding community, to the point that it's easy to assume that everyone in a game's population raids. There are lengthy discussions about raiding, about how to raid, about tips and tricks for clearing raids. The social aspect of raids is what I think has kept them around so long; it's easy for a designer to look at that sort of engagement and see it as vital. Yet there's more to the story than might be available at a glance, and the social aspect is not without steep costs. Those social elements do not carry the weight of everything else... mostly because they aren't as strong as they appear.
Gloria Victis releases its first pre-alpha trailer
Gloria Victis has been slowly unveiling new bits of information to fans, mostly focusing on screenshots. But screenshots don't show the world in motion, which is kind of a big deal -- a game can look wonderful in stills but move stiffly, or it can look nice in motion and be boring in static pictures. So fans should be quite happy to see the first trailer from the game showing off four minutes of gameplay, UI, and animations. If you haven't been interested in Gloria Victis before now, you still might want to take a look at the trailer, since it's narrated with an explanation of the game's design principles and overall goals. It's definitely meant to be more on the low fantasy end of the scale, focusing on freeform attacks and player skill over gear progression and the like. If that sounds like your thing, take a look past the break and check out the full trailer. [Thanks to Liting for the tip!]
Red 5's Mark Kern discusses wasted space in MMO development
A recent article by Mark Kern of Red 5 Studios is all about the idea that most of an MMO is wasted space. Not travel space that doesn't need to be there; no, Kern is talking about the huge amount of low-level content that gets played and discarded at a dizzying pace as players move past it. According to Kern, anywhere between 80-90% of the content in a given MMO is both expensive to craft and more or less irrelevant to the game after six months. Kern stresses that the primary problem is that the cost of developing an MMO is raising while the time spent on content doesn't change, resulting in a neverending rush to produce more high-level content at a rate that's simply not realistic. He advocates more dynamic content, more scaling, and more flexibility in progression to help make development costs feel less like money flung into a pit for low-level content. If you're interested in the industry as a whole, it's worth a read. [Thanks to Dengar for the tip!]
Windows Phone 7 Series' cutting room floor is an extravaganza of bright colors and chunky fonts
It's hard to argue that Windows Phone 7 Series' Metro UI concept isn't utterly unique in the mobile world, but it was wasn't the only option Microsoft considered -- far from it, in fact. The company has published a bunch a design concepts it churned through on its wild, wacky journey to finalizing Metro as we know it today, and one thing's for certain: they'd clearly planned on simple, square lines, partially-obscured typography, and in-your-face colors pretty much from day one. After careful consideration of everything they've got here, we still think we like the production design best, but that's kind of besides the point -- why, pray tell, couldn't these have just been user-selectable themes?
