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Carbine's Chad Moore on WildStar's fresh focus on lore
There's a big focus on WildStar's lore recently. Aside from the big lore drops, dubbed "Loremageddon" by Carbine Studios, the game's official site has begun releasing a series of short stories detailing important moments in the game's history, from the first space voyage of the Cassian people to dealing with the Genesis Prime now. That's a lot of storytelling, the sort that should be continuing on well into next year. We had a chance to sit down and ask a few questions of creative director Chad Moore regarding what we've seen thus far for the game and what the goals are with this renewed focus on the game's setting and story. If you'd like to know a little more about the setting and what players can expect from the ongoing history lesson, check out the interview just past the break. There's also a new story available today detailing the first contact between the Cassians and the Eldan.
Raph Koster on Origin's Privateer Online
Raph Koster's thrown up a fairly fascinating blog post detailing one of his Origin projects that never saw the light of day. It was originally codenamed Star Settlers and it featured procedurally generated planets, exploration, resource management, and more. Koster's executive bosses "blew up a huge portion of the design" in favor of fitting the fledgling game into Origin's Wing Commander IP, several online versions of which were already in the works. "Some of them had gotten pretty far -- piles of artwork, design work, and even some tech," Koster writes. Finally a Privateer Online team was assembled, and it cranked out a prototype featuring "radically different" procedural planets, multiplayer space dogfighting, fractal ship customization, modular planetary settlement capabilities, and "a huge pile of lore" written by Wing Commander vets. Though Privateer Online was cancelled in favor of Earth & Beyond and its design docs were burned in a bonfire at Origin's shut-down party, Koster says that many of the developers went on to make Star Wars Galaxies which contained some of the same ideas.
Tracing the history of the MOBA
You hear the kids talking about League of Legends and Infinite Crisis and Heroes of Newerth and you don't understand. You aren't clear on what stuff like jungling and lanes are all about. Are you getting old? Well, yes, if you're referring to a group of people as "the kids" you almost certainly are. But you also might just not understand the history of MOBAs as a genre, a history helpfully outlined in an article on the genre from inception to the present. The article traces the genre's genesis back to the earliest form of gameplay found in StarCraft's Aeon of Strife map, which paved the way for a Warcraft III map that expanded the same basic concept. The genre's core conceits -- two bases on either side of the map, players working to push to the other side -- have remained fairly fixed through the various permutations, but there's still room for expansion. So if you want to find out more about what this new-fangled genre is all about, sit down for some reading.
Massively Exclusive: Eligium's world history, chapter 1
Maybe you've been following Eligium since it was first announced. Maybe you've been interested after reading our impressions of the title from GDC. Maybe you're only just now hearing about it. Whatever camp you fall into, the game is continuing along with its testing and nearing an official release. And while some players might be interested only in leveling particularly involved mounts and enjoying some wide-open exploration, others want to know a little more about the world the game inhabits. We've seen snippets of the game's lore from the various racial reveals, but the team at Frogster is putting together a series on the game world's history in more detail. The first installment gives a quick and broad overview of the pre-history of the game's setting; it's just after the cut. If you're interested in the game, enjoy, and keep your eyes peeled for future installments in the history updates.
The Daily Grind: Do you want elaborate lore?
Most games have lore. Sometimes the lore is exceptionally simple, but then you have games such as Lord of the Rings Online, in which the lore is thick enough to fill several books with artificial languages. Sometimes the lore is that thick even when you don't have a series of books to base the game on, such as Final Fantasy XI's expecting you to read up on the history of the Crystal War and the three nations and the conflict against the beastmen long before you start getting into more obscure pieces of information like Altana and the Hydra Corps and so forth. The question is, is it actually a benefit? Certainly, it's nice to have a sense of why you're doing something in a game world, but in the immediate sense, you usually just need to know that you kill that guy with ice magic because he's immune to fire. Giving you a huge amount of lore for every part of the game does wonders for immersion, but it also can shackle you with either required reading to follow what's going on or huge blocks of quest text just to go kill 10 rats. How detailed do you really want your game's lore to be? Do you prefer something detailed and robust, or just something that gives you the vaguest necessary reasons for why you should kill a guy immune to fire? 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!
