OK, this is old news to regular Gamasutra readers, but it’s germane to the recent discussions around here:
Jonathan Blow, Braid’s Designer, on Games
He’s also quoted in this news article, and there’s a follow up of sorts here:
Long story short, he’s not a fan of MMO design, or of much of game design as a whole. He believes in the power of games, and that they are great tools, but laments what he calls the “unethical” design of a treadmill-based reward structure. I like this guy.
Too bad Braid isn’t on the PC. Yet.
Thanks for the links, he sounds right up my alley
This is a good addition to the conversation as well:
Podcast with Braid’s Blow and others
I would like to compare game companies, games and gamers to the movie industry, movies and their audience.
Actually, this is a bad analogy. Let’s pick television instead.
Why waste a lot of effort on a highly sophisticated series/film if you can achieve the same by adding tons of boobs and animal excrements? Why trying to re-invent the daily late night talk? It works beautifully, and it does not cost much, little risk involved.
This is what we get served as constant stream, DIKU-MUD descendants like WoW.
But there are other models, Guild Wars, Atlantica Online, Wizard 101, Puzzle Pirates that are also successful.
As long as developers do net get rid of the birdman/copycat approach to game design, still believing their MMO will be special despite this, we are not going to see that next step in mmo game design.
This is why ArenaNet and GW2 are my only hope for “that new MMO that delivers!!!” They have the ideas, and at least somewhat the cash for enough polish. Gamers are demanding nowadays, and this is good.
I also fear a bit that it is hard to convince a lot of gamers to a new system. Someone linked the article here that gamers are pretty fast (~10 minutes) to decide if they like a game or not.
And today’s gamers now often next to nothing than WoW, they did not know EverQuest, they grew up with WoW’s system being synonymous to the term MMORPG.
On the other hand, Arena.net is making me rather nervous that they’re going to turn GW2 into Yet Another DikuMMO, the only difference being selling content instead of monthly subscriptions. More and more it’s sounding like GW2 will strip away everything that made GW special and turn it into “WoW For Free” (which ironically is the type of headlines back in the GW day that made people think GW is an MMORPG).
Has Jonathan Blow actually bothered to suggest ways he would “fix” MMOGs or how he would design one? Or is he just whining like we bloggers do without presenting his solution?
As near as I can tell, Blow isn’t interested in MMO design. His projects are smaller and more focused in scope. It would be interesting to hear if he thinks MMOs can be “fixed”, but I’ve not seen anything on that. I’ll keep looking.
I’m concerned that GW2 will go the DIKU path as well. I guess we’ll just have to see.
I am afraid that you are both right, Scott & Tesh. Everything they do, from adding races and maybe even classes, the idea of unlimited level progression and so on sounds more like that they will make another standard MMO than what Jeff Strain was preaching, doing “their own thing, and being good at it”.
We will have to wait and see, but I am really concerned, too.