senior-designer
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Anarchy Online beats the heat with nano spreadsheets
We may be in the dog days of summer, but that doesn't mean that MMO factories close up shop. On the contrary, the team at Anarchy Online is faithfully hacking away at upcoming changes and additions to the game. Senior Designer Brad L. McAtee (no, he doesn't do virus checking) recently made the rounds to see what the staff was working on, and report back to us. The biggest news is that the keeper class is getting a host of new nano changes. This announcement is so vast that it took the power of a spreadsheet to contain it. Seriously, McAtee includes an Excel spreadsheet at the bottom of the article for number-crunchers to enjoy. The Anarchy Online team is juggling a number of other projects, including a new AI dungeon and a fresh PvP playfield. Daily missions are also slated for an upgrade, with mission scaling, new content and other adjustments heading our way. You can read the full team report over at Anarchy Online's site.
Discover the wizardry of game design with WAR's Brian Wheeler
Gather around folks, get comfortable; we've got a tale of fantasy, kings and wizards to share with you. As seems to be the norm with our friendly neighborhood Mythic developers, Brian Wheeler has done his best to avoid bringing us a boring and straightforward Dev Diary, instead opting to explain his role of Senior Designer for Warhammer Online through a short story.It turns out that game designers are not unlike the great wizards Merlin and Gandalf (coincidentally, these two exist in the same space in Wheeler's fantasy world, and often enjoy a pint together) in that they come up with multiple ideas and solutions for a single problem, and present them all to the king to decide which will be used. They aren't necessarily ideas that the king couldn't figure out on his own, but the wizards can afford to spend all their time researching every possible strategy, giving the king the freedom to attend to other business. That's the short version -- to read Wheeler's longer and much more entertaining take, visit the latest WAR dev diary.
