development-teams
Latest
WildStar hosts a PvP AMA
Are you ready to fight for your faction in WildStar? Are you eager to feel blood and gore and guts and veins in your teeth? Then you're probably all eager to jump into the game's PvP. We've hosted some previews, but you probably still have questions, and that's why the PvP design team took to Reddit to host a PvP AMA. While the team couldn't answer every question posed by players, you can go on over and find out a lot more about how facing off against your opposite numbers will feel. Some of it is probably expected, like the fact that there will be no cross-factional communication during battlegrounds. Other pieces of information are a bit more interesting. For instance, the developers haven't placed much emphasis on open-world PvP for launch, mostly because they want to see what areas are the most densely populated in terms of PvE content, which will give a good idea of what can be made more interesting with PvP. Take a look at the full AMA for more details on how you can smash faces against your enemies when the game goes live in a couple of months.
MechWarrior Online discusses the state of the game and the road to launch
MechWarrior Online has already gone into open beta with a functional cash shop, but the game still isn't officially launching until September. So how's the road to launch looking so far? According to creative developer Bryan Ekman, it's going quite well. Despite summer traditionally being one of the slowest times for games like MWO, the community has been strong and growing. The development team is also thrilled that response to the game's first charity drive was immensely positive, with Sarah's 'Mech raising over $40,000 for the Canadian Cancer Society on the first day of release. So what comes next? According to Ekman, the development is currently split into two teams, one focused upon major features and the other on content. A revamped UI and the Community Warfare system are the two biggest elements for the feature team, while a new map, Terra Therma, is set to debut next week. Third-person mode is also in testing for those who prefer to see their multi-ton death machines from the outside. Players would be well-served to look at the full letter for more dispatches about the game's future as September creeps closer.
The Soapbox: Somebody should do something about all the problems!
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Bugs. They are the scourge of gaming, crawling and chittering their way through lines of code, turning what would have been a sure win into failure, making otherwise useful abilities worthless, crippling quests and destroying playtime. And so the clarion call goes out every time a new bug emerges that the developers should fix it -- a reasonable request, given that we are paying these people every month. (Or, on several occasions, we would be paying if the game weren't such a mess of bugs that they should be paying us.) Yet months roll by, and despite countless lovingly assembled bug reports, these issues do not get fixed. And it's not just bugs, either -- balance issues go untweaked, content goes unfinished, features get rolled back or sometimes removed altogether. What the heck are we paying for? Why in the world doesn't the development team just fix these problems?
The Daily Grind: When do you get the feeling the developers just aren't trying?
Look, creating a game is hard. No one could credibly argue that it's easy. And while some of us can't help but feel slighted by anything less than perfection, most of us do acknowledge that the developers are really doing their best to make the world feel vital. At least until you walk across something that says that, typo or not, someone just isn't trying to preserve the game's sense of verisimilitude. Of course, it's not just immersion that can fall by the wayside. Some games seem to have ignored PvP for half of an eternity, while others seem to be doing the same thing for the PvE side of the game. Roleplaying might be the last thing on the development team's plate -- or it might be the only thing, leading to everyone else standing around waiting. There are always certain things that just seem to fall off the list, and there's a point when each of us have felt that hard or not, it's possible to do a better job if you just invest a little effort. So when have you felt like the team just stopped trying? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
