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Worth a read

Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 2:33 am
by Calix

Re: Worth a read

Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 1:48 pm
by Mercury
yep, good read

Re: Worth a read

Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2014 9:06 am
by Night
Raph on Shardz Online would be epic..

Re: Worth a read

Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2014 7:27 pm
by senji
http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/11/21/te ... more-21631
And the game that was once called, by me and many others, “the least social MMO on the market,” is now the virtual home away from home for millions, as network effects, familiarity, and its ongoing dedication to a great user experience above all makes it makes the place we always return to. It is the genre king, and likely will never be toppled by a game like it, as long as investment in it continues. We likely will not see true reinvention come to the space until there are massive changes in content delivery, such as near-unlimited cloud server power, or virtual reality displays, that both permit and force truly different experiences to be created.

The space it entered as a competitor is largely “dead” in the sense that WoW takes up all the oxygen in the room. Experiments in virtual world design began to dry up, to curtail their ambitions to being nibbles around the edge of WoW’s design. Like toothpaste squeezed out of a tube, the design qualities of sandbox games ended up finding their expression elsewhere, to great success. Their children served as the basis of genres, from Facebook farming games to DayZ-style survival games to the true heir of the MUD tradition: Minecraft, a virtual world based on simulation and crafting, where users run their own worlds and script and build adventures and are basically questless.

It’s just that no one calls them MMOs anymore. That title is reserved for World of Warcraft, and those largely similar games that strive to topple it from its seat.
Its influence is such that it now defines the genre it refined. It is the best Diku ever made; the best combat MMO ever made; the thing to which everything like it will ever after be compared. World of Warcraft effectively made MMOs perfect, and in the process, it killed them.

Re: Worth a read

Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2014 7:48 pm
by Calix
Pretty much everything he writes is spot on.