Global Chat: Game development edition
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat!
With so many high-profile games both in development and recently launched, the development process for MMOs both big and small is a popular topic of conversation among our readers here at Massively.
Follow along after the jump for a look at what a few of our most well-spoken readers had to say this week!
In this week's Free for All, Beau chatted with the creator of Golemizer, Dave Toulouse, who suggested that the expression "to support indie development" made indie game developers sound like charities -- he wanted gamers to support him because they like his games and because he's looking for a niche that isn't WoW: Indie Edition, not because he's indie. This prompted some thoughts on indie games from Massively reader Space Cobra:
"But ultimately, people do this. They support/play games they like or are shown. Actually, a few years ago, Hollywood wasn't getting enough profits and indie films were threatening them, so they started to emulate them. In recent years, this has been a wash, and Hollywood is back to its old tricks because of various reasons (I think they bought out many of the good Indie companies being one reason). Nothing wrong with WoW from time to time as there is nothing wrong with enjoying a mindless action film from time to time, but I don't think big innovation is going to come from bigger AAA titles with investors/venture capitalists attached. Small innovations, probably, and they may be fun, but something really experimental and totally different? Not likely. But really, even if a game is 'different' or innovative, in the game-world, they have to be fun and enjoyable. While we can point and admire many innovations of the past, that doesn't mean that they are fun and the masses would enjoy them. Sometimes even fans need to be 'Indie' in the way that they think and be open-minded. People also fall into norms that can be bad for them and don't try out anything new/different."
Our Daily Grind covering the MMO holy trinity had players rushing to give their thoughts on this long-running gaming staple, including Jondifool:
"What I see as the problems with the holy trinity (or any other fixed-role system): 1) It forces specific group compositions, which can exclude players; with the usual healer, tank, three DPS party, it means two friends who both play as healers or tanks cannot play together. 2) It's a barrier to dungeon-scaling. If the content is based on the existence of the holy trinity, any group size other than multiples of the basic 'cell' become problematic. How to tune a 2-man dungeon? A 3-man? Will the 3-man enforce a tank, healer, DPS composition? And so on. 3) The specific playstyle of the role usually does not become evident before the endgame. It can mean a player might level a character just to find he does not like its play style. 4) Often solo content is better-tuned for one of the roles, leaving players of the other roles with a subpar experience. 5) Multiple roles usually mean specific gear for each role; with random drops, this means plenty of wasted gear, a thing that some players find highly irksome.
"What I would like to see is either: 1) the fixed roles continuing but with characters able to switch roles outside of combat (really liked RIFT's -- where each character can keep up to four 'specs' with different roles and each class can realistically fill most, if not all, roles -- and Guild Wars 2, which is promising all classes being able to fulfill all needed roles and respecs for free outside of combat); or 2) classes with more similar capabilities, and the differentiation being made by encounter-specific tasks.
"A third way is what SWTOR seems to do: Companions are able to partially fulfill any role. So if the group lacks a healer, just have everyone bring out the healing companion; if it lacks a tank, bring a pair of tank companions."
Tune in next week for another edition of Global Chat!
