Comments for atma:blog http://www.atma-online.com/blog tales of a game's design and development Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:15:31 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 Comment on A dead bird on the carpet by Eric Little http://www.atma-online.com/blog/2009/08/19/a-dead-bird-on-the-carpet/comment-page-1/ Eric Little Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:15:31 +0000 http://www.atma-online.com/blog/?p=312#comment-103 This point combined with the point you made about game developers making games too easy to better suit their "less-than-epic" story lines is exactly why I ended up leaving World of Warcraft. They feel that their new story line is so important and integral to their game that the entire community must be able to experience it first hand. This has resulted in creating content that is too easily beaten and completely retooled and homogenized classes (the only two you really need anymore are the Death Knight and Shaman). Before, when the end content was challenging and the gear upgrades were minute from dungeon to dungeon, a very select few got to experience the end content and supreme gear. This didn't effect the story getting out however. Guilds made videos and Blizzard released story snippets on their website as supplemental material to the game. Also, through player interaction, story gets released and instead of everybody experiencing the story first hand, people hear the stories and dream about the day that THEY'LL get to go in and see it. Working hard for equipment makes it more worthwhile, and the gaming communities at their core understand this even if there are those that will argue my point. The PvP system in WoW was where they took a wrong turn with gear, and the players knew it and gave that epic gear that was coming from PvP a nickname: "well-fare epics". This point combined with the point you made about game developers making games too easy to better suit their “less-than-epic” story lines is exactly why I ended up leaving World of Warcraft. They feel that their new story line is so important and integral to their game that the entire community must be able to experience it first hand. This has resulted in creating content that is too easily beaten and completely retooled and homogenized classes (the only two you really need anymore are the Death Knight and Shaman).

Before, when the end content was challenging and the gear upgrades were minute from dungeon to dungeon, a very select few got to experience the end content and supreme gear. This didn’t effect the story getting out however. Guilds made videos and Blizzard released story snippets on their website as supplemental material to the game. Also, through player interaction, story gets released and instead of everybody experiencing the story first hand, people hear the stories and dream about the day that THEY’LL get to go in and see it. Working hard for equipment makes it more worthwhile, and the gaming communities at their core understand this even if there are those that will argue my point. The PvP system in WoW was where they took a wrong turn with gear, and the players knew it and gave that epic gear that was coming from PvP a nickname: “well-fare epics”.

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