I’ve been a bit quiet recently for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I went home to England for a lovely long vacation.
And secondly, I got asked to write a column over at MMORPG.com. They wanted me to start almost immediately, which required writing a bunch of articles to use in reserve over the Christmas break.
One of the bonuses at MMORPG.com is that you do get your own spiffy cartoon head.
The first article, Why Some MMOS Suck seemed to go over quite well, but I did notice a murky undercurrent in the comments … a kind of disgruntledness with an appetite that can never be sated. The article itself wasn’t really very incendiary. It contained some observations I’ve picked up over the past few years, all of which I believe in 100%. Check it out – it’s the closest you’ll get to a WAR post mortem from me.
The second article was about how Twilight is a perfect IP for MMO development. Again something I believe to be 100% true. However, most of the posters in the forums seem to think that I was comparing how “good” Twilight vampires are compared to other types of vampires … which I wasn’t. Instead, I was commenting on the opportunity of developing for an untapped genre-based IP with a massive fan base with disposable income.
One poster also made a facetious comment about whether I thought High School Musical would make a good MMO. I actually do (and have market research and trend data to prove it), and I will cover this in a future article. Many others made fact-based statements about what a vampire “is”; should they be stakeable, would they be nice to humans, etc. For the record, it doesn’t matter. They are fictional.
The end result was that the forums exploded. This is probably a combination of bad writing on my part and low reading comprehension on the forum-dwellers part. There seems to be a resounding sentiment in MMORPG.com’s forums that a game has to be western-fantasy and DIKU-MUD-based to be classified as an MMO, and that the only demographic deserving of an MMO is theirs: i.e. young American adult males. Again, this is a subject I will also tackle in a future article.
Anyways, that’s what I’ve been up to.
I liked your first article a lot, but I disagree with your comment about scoping being a sign that the game will suck.
When approached correctly, scoping is a *good* thing. It means your team is realistic about what it can accomplish and implement well. Scoping is a healthy process so long as quality is maintained and–this is key–you’re cutting things that don’t fit the core pillars of what your game is.
That said, if scoping is done in a hack-n-slash manner (where money or time are the sole driving factors on what gets cut), it can absolutely be detrimental. I believe this is the kind of scoping you were referring to.
By: Steve Danuser on January 1, 2010
at 11:09 pm