This weekend, I finally decided that I would buy myself an X-box 360. I have not had the console anywhere near enough time to write a review, but it led me to thinking about something else, as a consequence of the game I purchased — Mass Effect. Now, I already have a review of Mass [...]
Archive for the ‘Games’ Category
An open letter to Cryptic Studios
Posted in Game Design, tagged Champions, Champions Online, City of Heroes, Hero Games, Launch, MMORPG on Sunday, August 23, 2009 | 13 Comments »
In a few days, Cryptic Studios, the creators of City of Heroes, will be launching their new game, Champions Online, which is loosely (and I mean, very loosely) based on my favorite pencil-and-paper RPG of all time, Champions (by Hero Games). This weekend I downloaded the open beta to take a look at it, and [...]
The price of failure
Posted in Game Design, tagged Death Penalty, Dungeons and Dragons, Experience, Lord of the Rings Online, LOTRO, RPGs on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 | 2 Comments »
(Note: The above was originally posted on my LOTRO blog, but since I quit that game, I wanted to move it here, because it is a general commentary on game design.)
Today I’m going to discuss a fundamental flaw in the design of most MMORPGs (including LOTRO, which I recently canceled), which is that they frequently [...]
Risk vs. Reward… or Risk without Reward?
Posted in Game Design, tagged Experience, LOTRO, Reward, Risk, Theory on Thursday, May 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’m going to continue musing today on a topic that I touched on in my LOTRO review: the concept of Risk vs. Reward, and how, in my view, the scale is so completely broken as to be meaningless in LOTRO. First, I will begin with the game design theory, and then I will describe how [...]