WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things. The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a l…
is there a place to read more about the development of wow (both history and current pipeline)? fascinating stuff
Ah, those screen shots made me sad. The main reason I played WoW was for exploring, and I left when the only thing left to explore were dungeon raids with huge numbers of prerequisite "keys" to gather, as if it weren't just hard enough to get that many people together for the raid. I wanted to see the dungeon and would have been happy to leave without any loot (because I lacked the keys or whatever) if that was needed to balance the game mechanics. But I left when there was no more land to explore. And now the lands I knew are ghost towns?
God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to…
Interesting, people thought the same thing about EQ expansions. I've heard many people say they wish they could play a server with pre-Luclin
God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to…
I regularly play private servers with friends for the nostalga. They will have 10+ times the XP and gold rates so you don't grind pretty much at all, and it is nice having persistent characters that you can come back to after a while that are not tiers of content behind and obsolete. I think Blizzard is on a path to at least making level 60 the free to play level cap of the game soon, though. It just makes way too mu…
So how do you script the raids (or do you?) When I last looked at private servers all of the scripting for the boss mobs was unavailable so you basically had every boss be a simple spank and kill fight.
I found an old folder with screenshots of multiplayer maps from Team Fortress Classic where I had played many hours with friends. Looking at the pictures, I realized that I had an emotional connection to the virtual places just as if they were real places.
I spent.. a lot.. of my life in dustbowl. I still know dustbowl better than actual houses I've lived in.
The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues. Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense. One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just s…
Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way. Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, an…
Last time I played, Eve had levels.
If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts.
I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that). WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage explorat…
> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activiti…
Totally different genre, but this is one of the things that's great in CS:GO - you level up, but it's not from improving your avatar, it's from improving your own skill level - learning tactics, improving aim etc. Much more engaging than games that reward you for how many hours you sink in. (They do have elements of that in CS but they are entirely cosmetic).
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it... Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describin…
I am astonished that this place isn't drowning under a mile-high pile of lawyers.
Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.) It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp leve…
The whole game cost somewhere between $50 and $60 mil, so individual zones were not quite as pricey. Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression. I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it wa…
Where did you get this cost estimate? Does that include expansion packs and patches?