Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If there’s one thing that could possibly lure me back to World of Warcraft, it’s William Shatner talking about throwing lightning bolts from his hands. Read the rest of this entry »

It was inevitable. There’ve been more and more World of Warcraft references on RPS lately, and to a lapsed addict like me, it’s been like someone pumping bacon smell into a vegetarian’s home. Sooner or later, I was going to sink my fangs back into its moreish flesh. Adding to this was my foolish reading of the patch notes for the next update, which seem focused on improving the solo and small group play, rather than pandering to the infuriating large groups of humourless statistic obsessives who currently rule the game. Levelling from 1-60 will be faster, there’ll be more well-specced items in the wild rather than purely in the super-dungeons and there’ll be far fewer Elite beasties rendering sections of the great outdoors inaccessible to anyone not travelling under an all-purple armed guard.

The faster levelling’s the fascinating thing, and what risks me going back in earnest. Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from this thread, some MMO theory gibber.

So here’s the thing: Eve Online is a better model for making an MMO than World Of Warcraft. If someone, right now, was looking for a way to create an interesting MMO they should take Eve as their mechanical gameplay model, and not WoW.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that Eve Online is a better MMO than World Of Warcraft. Eve is messed up and broken in all kinds of outrageous ways, and the PvP-heavy spaceship-centric world design puts most people off the idea completely. What it does mean is that there’s the potential for a better MMO to be built using the principles that Eve has pioneered. So forget what you know, or think you know, about Eve Online and imagine instead what World Of Warcraft would be like if it were designed with the same principles as Eve Online.
Read the rest of this entry »