Oct 20th 2010 at 6:00PMFiled under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, MMO industry, News items, Opinion
Armchair designers of the world, take note. If you've ever wanted a peek inside the mind of an MMORPG developer, Craig Morrison's latest personal blog entry might be right up your alley. The Funcom executive and current Age of Conan boss has posted a lengthy look at his thoughts on massive design, and more specifically, progression. Morrison examines progression versus entertainment, and goes on to contrast the need for the former with the desire for storytelling. He also touches on the vast array of player motivations, ultimately concluding that while "progression, and the need for it, is a bedrock of the expected player experience," future MMO designers should be mindful of the differences between what they want the player to do and what the player wants to do.
Clearly, there is no easy answer to the question of how does one design a good MMORPG. After all, one gamer's soul-sucking grind of death and despair is another's relaxing evening at home. That said, Morrison's perspective illuminates at least one line of developer thinking and is worthy of a read-through whether you're a dev, a player, or both.
Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, blog, craig-morrison, design, funcom, leveling, mmo-design, mmo-development, opinion, personal-blog, progression, silirrion
Age of Conan's Craig Morrison is back with his latest monthly development update. The October edition is very tech-heavy, with a lot of emphasis on the tweaks and additions that Funcom engineers have been making to the game's Dreamworld engine. While a lot of the details may go unnoticed to your average player, the goal is to continue improving the game's performance as well as add tools to further content creation down the road. 
Ah, the numbers game. It's often quite comical when it comes to MMORPGs and their die-hard fans (or detractors, as the case may be). Aside from Blizzard, very few MMO development houses release real numbers relating to their playerbases, and forum jousters are thus relegated to citing guesstimates and, in most cases, pure supposition sprung from the likes of wildly inaccurate measuring tools such as Xfire or the late MMOGchart. 