Global Chat: Mostly meta edition

Massively has some of the best writers who cover MMOs. The blog-style posts here are significantly better written than "articles" from most other sites. Prose is cleaner and actually progresses in a logical manner. Congratulations to the person who ends up joining the team.

I managed to talk several of my friends into trying this, and we now have our own small settlement. To my friends who played Minecraft and play/tried EVE, I told them it was basically the sandbox-ness of Minecraft with the complexity of EVE but with a dash more fantasy/medieval.

Yes, it takes a lot longer to make things than in Minecraft, but even a small structure takes a lot of effort, and thus the feeling of accomplishment for such tasks becomes greater. I love the fact that hitting the H key brings up a search box for the wiki, as there is so much you can do in this game that it seems like I spend half the time there learning how to do something I haven't tried before.

Excellent article, Shawn. I can't wait to hear more of your journeys!

You know how Cataclysm came about? They wanted to let people fly in Azeroth. Just one problem -- the world had originally been designed on a sphere and that made the mechanics of flying extremely problematic. (Flying in a straight line eventually whacks your head against the ceiling.) Outland and Northrend didn't have this problem because they were designed for flight and so are flat.

So to allow flying in Azeroth, they were going to have to rebuild the world. Since they were going to have to do that, they figured they might as well incorporate it into the theme, which led to the expansion.

This is what happens when there's no overarching plan, and I think it has a lot to do with why each of WoW's expansions has been less and less satisfying. Sure, they keep tacking on new mechanics and features, but at the end of the day, it just doesn't feel all that well thought through.

When Funcom says they have seven years of content planned, that doesn't mean they've spent time designing all the quests and other content. It means that the game (which is very much built on story) has a real direction that it's going to be moving in.

How much of a good thing this will prove to be remains to be seen. The exact same thing can be said about LotRO since they essentially had years' worth of content planned ahead of time as well. We've all known the story would take us to Moria, Lothlorien, Isengard, Rohan and beyond. Yet even with that preconceived plan, the game has still managed to languish. Maybe the same will happen with Secret World. But the chance that it could be great is to my thinking more than sufficient to make the plans having spent time on.